Sport Science
By Eley
Barrel Wear Myths Shot Down: The Eley Perspective
Barrel pitting and corro- sion is something that hap- pens when you fi re a large amount of rounds through any fi rearm, but does it af- fect performance? ELEY is committed to
making the best .22LR rim- fi re ammunition in the world, so when we heard that some people are talking about our ammunition corroding bar- rels and needing to replace them often, we wanted to test the theory: Do well-used barrels have
poor performance? In over 20 years, our primer and propellant con- fi guration has not changed. What has changed is that we are making more and more consistent ammunition than ever before. The dimen- sional properties, primer, propellant loading and bul- let weight are all tightly con- trolled, giving us rounds that are as accurate and uniform as possible. Due to this dimensional
consistency, we have found that some rifl e barrel manu- facturers are now able to chamber rifl es tighter for ELEY tenex than ever before, to get even higher perfor- mance for shooters globally. There are so many vari-
ables to take into account when shooting, from the material used in barrel man- ufacture, to cleaning solu- tions and end user. At ELEY, we work tirelessly to ensure
that our ammunition is not a variable that shooters need to worry about, especially when they’ve had a large amount of rounds through them.
Figure A is a list of some of the current proof range test barrels used on our range. These barrels
test new
batches of ELEY tenex and have had a varying amount of shots fi red through them (See Figure A). We then tested this bar- rel again to see if changing the batch made a difference and got an expected score of 639.1 with ELEY tenex lot 1015-01068 - a result even better than the fi rst one! (See Figure B). The result from one bar-
rel wasn’t enough evidence for us, so we decided to look at other rifl e data from bar- rels tested across our three customer test ranges (UK, USA and Germany). Figure C results from the last 6 to 12 months show the number of rounds fi red through each barrel, expected scores and group sizes. (Figure D) The amount of ammu-
nition fi red through these barrels varies between cus- tomers A, B, C and D, but all are performing exceptionally well and getting excellent ex- pected scores. While barrels do change during their life, we have proved that our ammunition does not destroy the accu-
52 USA Shooting News | July 2015
Eley Barrel ID 15522 19893 19891 24688
B.
Shot Count 338,316 323,735 180,724 95,845
C.
A.
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