Rebarrel?

[knight0334]

Wow, I guess when "ol' painless'" gets shot out I'll just buy another rifle. I had read that belted magnums have short barrel lives and was considering my long term options.

They have no lesser or longer of a life than other cartridges. The magnums run in the same operating pressures as the standard cartridges, and their velocities are only marginally faster. Its not like the 7mmRem is a 220 Swift with 30gr varmint grenades at 4500fps.

Unless you're going to shoot several rounds in a sitting without letting the barrel cool quite often, or just "countless" rounds over a lifetime - the barrel may out last you.

[Tomcat088]

Wow, I guess when "ol' painless'" gets shot out I'll just buy another rifle. I had read that belted magnums have short barrel lives and was considering my long term options.

It all depends on what you consider "short barrel lives". I disagree with Knight just a little bit in this respect, but what he's saying is correct. Although they operator at similar pressures and velocities, they operate at different temperatures. The magnums require more powder to be burned to get those velocities, which does generate more heat. It takes a great deal more powder in the magnums to get the velocities that they do because the cartridges suffer from overbore. This means that those last 200 extra fps that you're getting from the magnums take quite a bit more powder to get those 200 fps than it took in the lower velocities. Overbore does cause a loss in barrel life compared to say a .223 or .308, but it's still probably longer than what most people think or will ever shoot.

With a 7mm magnum, you're looking at probably at least 1,500-1,700 MINIMUM before the groups will start to change much. If you're not a very good shooter, you probably won't even notice at that point. It's not uncommon with factory ammunition, or rifles that aren't being pushed really hard to shoot 2,500 rounds before groups start to open up. Most people will NEVER shoot that many rounds of a magnum caliber, unless they are competing, or getting data for LR shooting. To be honest, most people can't stand to shoot that many rounds, they go to flinching, marksmanship goes out the window and there's no more point in wasting ammo. When you run the numbers that even the ammunition costs over $1 ($1.25 or more) a round for the cheap stuff, you're going to spend around $2,000 before the barrel starts to loose some accuracy, even then it won't be "shot out". That enough money to have paid for several factory rifles, so just keep that in mind.

I've seen lots of "shot out" barrels that people said would never group. I could throw them on the bench with factory ammo and usually shoot 1-1.25" groups at 100 yards; which is what you have to expect from most of these rifles. It was operator error that was causing the rifle to not group; meaning they were flinching and didn't know it, or just didn't want to accept it. Shooting magnums is not most people's cut of tea, and it requires thousands of rounds down range to really do right all the time. People with 500 rounds of magnums will still flinch, and have to be conscious about dry fire practice so that they don't go to flinching. That's my experience anyway. There's a difference between shooting 2 or 3 rounds from a magnum and saying "oh I shoot so and so groups at 100 yards" from sitting down and sending 20-30 rounds of 7mm mag down range. I personally think that the latter isn't the way you should practice, but most people don't hav access to go to the range every single day and shoot only 2-4 rounds and call it a day. It's expensive, impractical, and just not what most people can do. Since that's the case, most people will go to flinching when they try to finish that box of shells.