Forgive me if this is the wrong section. I have a general question about barrel life of these revolvers and would like the poll the collective knowledge / user experience.

What sort of barrel life can we expect out of these fine pieces?

Ive seen range reports from century old revolvers that still seem to shoot the lights out. I would guess it is caliber dependent, which magnums eating up their barrels a bit faster. However, handgun rounds are so much lower pressure than their rifle brethren, I wonder if there even is much accumulated wear on the barrels at all if cared for?

Elmer Keith wrote that M-1917 .45 revolvers using 1920's made FMJ corrosive ammo would wear out a barrel in some 5,000 rounds. He pointed out the replacement cost and trouble of fitting a new barrel, vs. the Colt .45 auto, which had barrels that were easily changed.

He handloaded for these guns with a hard cast bullet, which he liked much better.

I can say that I've very seldom seen a S&W revolver with serious bore wear, using modern ammo and shot in moderation.

While I was a gun writer, I had access to factory personnel at ammo companies. They told me that they test ammo in Rugers, which hold up much better than do S&Ws when pounded daily with vast quantities of fired ammo. But I didn't ask specifically about bore erosion.

I've seen reports of Beretta and Star 9mm autos that have exceeded 100,000 rounds. But I have no way to know if any barrels were changed, or just which ammo was used.

Generally, revolver bores last much longer when lead bullets are used. But don't let lead deposits build up in the barrel.

My model 14 bullseye gun is fine after tens of thousands of rounds in 40 years of shooting soft lead .38 WC over HP38.
Similarly, my Model 66 was literally shot with IDPA loads using hard cast and plated bullets until the action was out of spec , then overhauled with springs, end shake shims, cylinder stop, reworked cylinder notches, etc. Then it returned to service with the same barrel, frame, and hammer. Not quite as accurate as the Model 14 at 50yd, but plenty good for IDPA.
It is possible to shoot out a revolver barrel with jacketed bullets in hot magnum loads, but most "shot out" barrels I've seen were seriously copper fouled. "Shooting out the lead fouling" with jacketed bullets is one way to get such serious "plated on" copper fouling.

__________________
Science plus Art

With appropriate lead bullet loads, you're probably not going to wear out a S&W revolver barrel.
However, if you shoot a lot of magnum loads (especially with jacketed bullets), you will get forcing cone erosion. This can be fixed once or twice with a barrel setback and recut forcing cone.
My observation is that H-110 and WW-296 can be pretty hard on the ol' forcing cone.
But, if you shoot lots of the magnum stuff, you're gonna get other problems as well.
Be aware that many of the S&Ws from latter part of the era in question (1961-1980) often shipped from the factory with poorly cut forcing cones and timing issues that need some minor tuning if you want to get the most out of them. They're still nice firearms, just not adjusted to their full potential.

I'm trying to remember how many rounds Ed McGivern had through his 22 Outdoorsman....125,000?
He has a picture in "Fast & Fancy Revolver Shooting" of some machine rest groups after that many rounds and it was still a tight shooting piece!!

Jim

I think corrosive primers and overzealous and incorrectly performed cleaning damaged more barrels than actual use.

"Ever", (you left that last part out )

I have a fair collection of revolvers, and have used mostly lead bullets, both cast and swaged in most of them. The wear from lead bullets over decades is undetectable. Thousands and thousands of rounds, even in my .44 and .357 Magnums. Not sure about jacketed bullets with really hot loads, but the number is big, and it costs way more than the best handgun to even show any wear. My 70's era 10" SBH has seen about half a pickup truck bed of 265gr Hornady RN bullets, and the most visible indication of wear is the bluing on the trigger guard and frame. The bore appears new.

Revolvers all have a life in terms of number of rounds, and the rate of wear, like most "force" type issues is exponential with increasing pressure. The magnum handguns, .357, .41, .44+ are generally designed to sustain a certain amount of use before things loosen up. If you run nothing but full on loads, the life of the revolver before requiring repairs will be between 5000, (maybe less), and 20000, (maybe more), rounds, A S&W .357 J frame is not going to last as long as a .357 N frame with the same ammo. The barrels will be fine, but the innards will rattle like a baby's toy, and the cylinder may not stay closed.

If you want to keep your magnum forever, load your own, and back things down a bit for regular use. Modest reductions in load intensity often exhibit a surprising reduction in pressure, but not so much in KE and velocity.

I can't speak for revolvers but the SGC had a Ruger 10-22 rental that had been in use since Day 1 and that had a documented 1,000,000 + rounds thru it. It was still shooting fine but they decided to retire it.
Jim

A friend managed to wear out a .38 barrel. It took him 150,000 wadcutters to do it in PPC competition and practice.

An old Gun Digest described the .44 Magnum that went 20,000 rounds before overhaul, but the barrel was salvaged by setting it back and recutting the forcing cone.

I remembered that when I wrote an article on Ruger's .22 auto pistols (see, American Handgunner, Nov-Dec, 1980), I found that pistol clubs in South Africa had guns that had been fired a great many times. The late Steve Vogel, then Ruger's Export Director, told me that some Euro clubs had MK I's fired in excess of 1,000,000 times.

Of course, a .22 has little powder or bullet weight to erode a gun barrel.

Yes, in his book "Fast and Fancy Revolver Shooting" (1936), Ed McGivern has pictures of one hole bench rest groups fired out of S&W K-22s with over 200,000 rounds through them.
Sort of a good argument for a Dan Wesson, no ?

I've got revolvers that I have shot continuously since the late 1970's and they still group better than I can hold.
More likely barrels loose their accuracy from over zealous cleaning without a rod guide.

A barrel considered "worn out" by a top PPC competitor would probably still be more accurate than most of us.

How true.
Another friend is an avid long range rifle shooter. He considers .308 barrel life to be about 4500 rounds with sling, but only 2500 when shot from a bipod in F class.
An old report from the Norwegian army rated their FNs as good enough for military use to 30,000.

Just handled a 629-3 with severe erosion on the cylinder face and the forcing cone. Don't know the round count, but it's burnt up.

Interesting experiences all around. All my revolvers ever see is Cast bullets and my magnum loads aren't burning the barn down. So from what I gather, I've got nothing to worry about for a long time

I shot the NRA Bullseye matches routinely in the 1970s and 80s. This combined with lots of practice meant my K-22 and Ruger Security Six were shot a lot. I didn't keep records but I am confident that the Ruger would outlast me if I mostly used 148 grain target loads. My K-22 has a bit of blueing wear from riding in the gun box but otherwise is very solid. Note that I carefully maintain my guns.

Changeable factors, "variables" as most prefer to call them, account for so much here that an estimate of bore life becomes nearly impossible. Some shooters may really record of number of rounds fired through a particular gun, but it seems that extremely few would undertake such an endeavor. To further diminish credibility in coming up with usable figures, some "documented" numbers may have not always been recorded with uniform attention to detail. Regardless, such estimates would be close enough for most of us. The major reason for not logging numbers is that it's bookkeeping work that takes away from the enjoyment derived from shooting. Benchrest shooters and perhaps some other competitors are probably the biggest exceptions to "sloppy" or the "no record keeping" norm adhered to by most of us.

Many estimates of rounds fired are likely on the high side and probably not even close to actual numbers, like the hunter who has "killed a trainload of deer". Controlled testing in this area will likely never be done because of cost, time, effort, etc., so bore life questions will always remain pretty much unanswered.

I have a small variety of S&W and Colt double-action revolvers that I've fired at least several times a year for many years. These guns have been fired almost exclusively with moderate to magnum cast bullet loads. All have held up well. Whether each has had 5,000 rounds through it or ten times that, I have no idea.

I do know that it was owned by a reloader that ran max velocity magnums.

I read somewhere the barrels are good for approximately one million billion bajillion rounds.

Since that's not a real number.. fake news..

Depends on how you use it.

Take two 2019 Jeep Rubicon's, Start in Los Angeles with one and jump on I-5 and drive to Seattle,WA..1100 miles. The other run the Baja 1000.."YMMV"

If you’re even remotley concerned about wearing out your revolver, just do what I did and so many others. Acquire so many of them that no one gun can ever get an excessive wear round count in your life time

Smith and Wesson's metallurgy has changed more than once over the last 150 years

Without knowing the caliber of the firearm, the era the firearm was manufactured in and what kind of ammunition you plan on shooting in it. I would have to speculate that barrel life is between 5,000 rounds and infinity

A 22LR in a modern Model 17/617 probably can't be worn out
A 38/44 HD with lead loads probably will exceed 100,000 rounds
A 460 S&W Magnum might only go a few thousand rounds before it needs a new barrel

Totally untrue.

Many of the top end handgun cartridges are comparable to the top end of rifle cartridges when we are talking about SAAMI max pressure

Some popular handgun cartridges

22 LR operates at 24,000 PSI
41 Magnum operates at 36,000 PSI
44 Magnujm operates at 36,000 PSI
38 Super operates at 36,500 PSI
10MM Auto operates at 37,500 PSI
22 Jet operates at 40,000 PSI
357 Magnum operates at 40,000 PSI
356TSW operates at 50,000 PSI
9x23 Winchester operates at 55,000 PSI
500 Magnum operates at 60,000 PSI
454 Casull operates at 65,000 PSI
460 Magnum operates at 65,000 PSI

Some popular rifle cartridges

45-70 operates at 28,000 PSI
35 Rem operates at 33,500 PSI
7.62x39 operates at 42,000 PSI
444 operates at 44,000 PSI
30-30 operates at 52,000 PSI
458 Win Mag operates at 53,000 PSI
223 operates at 55,000 PSI
300 blackout operates at 55,000 PSI
30-06 operates at 60,000 PSI
7MM Magnum operates at 61,000 PSI
308 operates at 62,000 PSI
300 Win Mag operates at 64,000 PSI
7MM Weatherby operates at 65,000 PSI

The odds are the for the vast majority of us, the number of rounds required to show real wear on a handgun barrel is far beyond the amount of shooting we will do; in most calibers cost many times the cost of a replacement firearm, and in the heaviest calibers that are mostly likely to cause real wear, wear out our bodies before the barrels. I cannot even begin to calculate or expect a level of use that would cause me concern.

__________________
NHI, 10-8.

Before we switched to Glock, my issued 66 2 1/2” probably had 50,000 rounds of 147 grain .38 S&W Special +P+ Hydrashock thru it. Man I wish they woulda let me buy that pistol . . .

Edit: After, my Glock 23 probably had 100,000 thru it before I retired. We started to use practice ammo with the Glocks, so it was a little easier on the barrel than all +P+ all the time with the revolver . . .

__________________
Wisdom comes thru fear . . .

[QUOTE=colt_saa;140398354]

Totally untrue.

Many of the top end handgun cartridges are comparable to the top end of rifle cartridges when we are talking about SAAMI max pressure

Regarding bore wear... or more appropriately throat wear / ball seat wear in rifles and forcing cone or ball seat in revolvers and semi-automatic handguns, pressure is not really the primary deciding factor. Overbore capacity cartridges, loaded to their potential, wear out out a throat very quickly. A good example is a .257 Weatherby Magnum, but even a 7mm Remington Magnum may wash out a throat enough to show a serious degradation in accuracy in a thousand rounds.

I'm not sure any of the handgun cartridges listed by colt saa would be overbore capacity; maybe some are. Not being overbore capacity should give good bore life, maybe not as good as a .38 Special with a lifetime diet of low-powered wadcutter ammo, but still decent bore life.

I've never owned an S&W .460 Magnum or anything similar, so my perception may be way off, but it would seem that these guns would loosen up long before any appreciable bore wear would become a factor.

[quote=rockquarry;140398440]So would the joints in your hands and arms, probably.