I count around 500 or so without any malfs. If it does malfunction, the count starts over. I use only quality ammo and make sure it is past the break in period.
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I count around 500 or so without any malfs. If it does malfunction, the count starts over. I use only quality ammo and make sure it is past the break in period.
Is it more of the 'spray carbon killer, wipe, lube, done' methodology?
I learned that I don't particularly care for the 'fire x rounds before considering reliable' method, namely because when I did this with my 1911 it malfunctioned one round after meeting my 'benchmark'. I think what Dana described might be the only way to test a weapon's generic reliability (using a bunch of different mags, different spring tensions, loaded both with the slide/bolt forward and locked back).
-B
RIP, Jeff Dorr: 1964 - July 17, 2009
"When young men seek to be like you, when lazy men resent you, when powerful men look over their shoulder at you, when cowardly men plot behind your back, when corrupt men wish you were gone and evil men want you dead . . . Only then will you have done your share." - Phil Messina
"One hundred billion rounds!"
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G.K. Chesterton
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I think is is more intuition than anything else. It doesn't take a lot of rounds to get a feel for how the weapon is operating. Someone could shoot 2,000 rounds through a weapon and still not consider it flawlees the first time a bad round/magazine causes a failure to send a round down range. We could easily talk ourselves into 100-3000 rounds being the magical number. Just as soon as we determine the 'number' someone can come and convince us that our thought pattern is all screwed up.
If you have a solid weapon, and you are familiar with not only how but why it works......you gut check should give you the warm & fuzzy.
If you're running an AR-platform then practice clearing malfunctions...too often an overlooked, under-trained skill. Any weapon can malfunction, regardless of how many or how few rounds have been fired. IMHO, you really should be asking how many rounds until you should be able to feel confident in your weapon.
This is a question that can be answered by engineering studies, reliability engineering it is called. A lot of data is needed to do such a thing, data on failure mechanisms and frequency by part. The numbers are crunched and analyzed and results in a curve that predicts failure rate over the life of the system. The analysis is done by the part then by the assembly then by the sub-system then by the system then by the vehicle, if it is an aircraft, spacecraft or the like. In a machine as simple as a rifle the analysis would proceed from the part level directly to the complete rifle. In a complex machine like an aircraft there are many failure mechanisms and modes. For example a structure may fail due to manufacturing defect, material defect, buckling, corrosion, design flaw, fracture, fatigue, improper maintenance or a combination of factors like stress corrosion cracking. Taking a SWAG, a scientific wild ass guess here, I am going to say that you can discount many of these possible causes, such as design flaw, corrosion, improper maintenance, and so on, leaving you with three possible failure modes, manufacturing or material defect and fatigue. Fatigue appears after many shots, bolts break after thousands of shots and the failure becomes more likely as the round count increases but I think is unlikely to be a factor under maybe 5K rounds, 10K to 15K is where this problem seems to appear, correct me if that is wrong. Given a new gun you are left with a material or manufacturing defect. These usually manifest themselves in the so called "infant mortality" failures which occur early on. Another SWAG here, early on means about 100 rounds. Bear in mind that in many failures a cause cannot be ascertained. The cause may be the gun or may be the ammunition and the cartridge, being spent cannot be analyzed. I am pretty certain that you don't have to run thousands of shots through an AR demonstrate that the rifle is reliable.
Harsher firing schedule bring out flaws and weaknesses.
I believe a rifle needs to be able of firing 200 rounds quickly with zero stoppages.
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