Handgun Longevity Question

5.56blaster said:

Working the range with the military I can't tell you how many thousands of rounds are fired from the M9 each year but it's more then most people will ever fire. On an annual inspection I have never found an M9 that didn't pass. Ive seen broken locking blocks but that's an easy fix and that's about it. Shoot it, clean it and repeat often.

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A little of this, but go read Mr.GunsandGear M9 review or real talk or whatever on YouTube. He was a company (battalion?) armorer for a few years. His take is most of the bitching about the M9 was that there was never sufficient maintenance on them. Mostly things like springs were not replaced, even though they had tens of thousands of rounds through them, leading to some reliability issues.

Reading up on the Glock 17, you get in to replacing little things as mentioned like the recoil spring, maybe trigger spring or striker spring, etc. about every 5000-10000 rounds. Maybe a ejector at about twice that.

Velocity and pressures on non-magnum handguns is generally low enough you aren’t going to shoot out a barrel (not in your life) and so long as you do things like replace the recoil spring at vaguely reasonable intervals the thing isn’t going to batter itself in to falling apart.

Look at many C&R ex-military handguns. Many of them probably saw a few thousand rounds per year down their throat for rather worn examples and probably didn’t get things like springs replaced (well, not until they had real issues and in a lot of cases NEVER). With rare occasions the biggest issues you see are worn magazine springs, occasionally worn recoil springs and a lesser degree trigger and hammer springs or extractor springs.

Rifles will absolutely burn out a barrel in a few thousand rounds and might crack a bolt in 2-4x that. The receiver may never die for a steel one. An aluminum would probably will wear out eventually, but even then it might live tens to hundreds of thousands of rounds with proper lubrication and cleaning.

My 2 cents even if I was going to wear out a barrel I wouldn’t worry about it unless it took specialist tools to replace. A Glock, 1911, etc. meh. It takes 60 seconds to replace a barrel and they are a tiny fraction of the cost of the ammo you’d run through it. An AR platform I don’t worry too much about it either as it is user replaceable with just a couple of tools and not much skill. And they are also often pretty cheap (I’ve never spent more than $130 on an AR barrel and the scoped ones I own can also do MOA or less than MOA with the right load).

alucard0822 said:

Lead fouling is really the only thing that can build up enough to cause problems inside the bore of an auto, usually from cheap reloads. The bore also makes a difference, a rough cut rifling bore will collect dirt much faster than a polished or lapped barrel, polygonal rifled barrels are hammered over a mandrel, and lack the machine marks of cut rifling, so they really don't get fouled. Copper fouling never builds up enough, and powder fouling tends to break up before it builds up enough to cause issues. In a quality combat pistol using jacketed bullets you can probably just wipe the cosmetic dirt off inside and out with cloth and oil, use a boresnake, nylon brush or patch to break up and sweep out loose fouling, you are just basically taking a minute to keep it looking nice while lubing.

Tightly fitted target pistols, revolvers shooting dirty ammo(especially fouling from shorter cartridges like 38 in a 357) and a handful of designs that don't use a short-recoil action can require more attention to cleaning, but it's a problem well addressed in modern autos. The pistol would probably run for several thousands of rounds without cleaning as long as it is lubed, and not overheated or abused. The old practice of scrubbing out the barrel with brushes, solvent and dozens of patches is outdated and pointless with modern pistol and ammo technology in a combat pistol. There really is no need to clean a barrel spotless, and while a brass brush probably doesn't give much appreciable wear, the small nics or scrapes from contacting the muzzle and throat with rods and adapters probably shorten a barrel's life far more than simply shooting it and leaving the bore alone.

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Also why I try to use aluminum rods even though I’ve snapped 2 in 3 1/2 years. They aren’t that expensive and massively less wear if you do happen to contact the bore, throat or mouth with the rod.

MaxV02 either had very refined accuracy expectations , or a semi-Lemon of a bbl.

Back when glocks were still new-ish , Chuck Taylor set about putting whole buncha rounds thru G17 to see how it held up . ( Not mag dumping "torture tests" which create their own variables, but he had active teaching schedule at the time, would shoot a hundred or two rounds a day himself, and use it as loaner pistol .)

After 10k holster draws the plastic factory sights were worn to point of interfering with sight pictures.

Mag bodies were good for 10k rounds . Downloading 2rds to 15 doubled the life .

Over 100k rounds, still original bbl . Group size had increased , but was still 4in @ 25yd or better .

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But on the sorta origonal topic ;

Other than a few deliberate exceptions , the default for non-junk pistols is at least 5k , and probably 10k plus . Speaking of important components, excluding springs , and extractors will randomly commit suicide on anything .