Krieger barrel put in AR yesterday. Sticky situation. Advice?

[Danattherock]

My buddy and I got wind of some USMC 20" 223 barrels with 500 rounds through them available. We went up and got them put in our Barnes precision AR-15's yesterday. Our factory 16" 223 Wylde Montana barrel were shooting 0.8" eight shot groups, but we jumped at the chance for a longer and beefier Krieger. Never had a high end barrel before. These were from some Marine shooting team, that decided on another barrel. That's all I know. Well, that, and it was the dirtiest barrel I've ever seen. If truly 500 rounds through them as told, they were never cleaned. Took a lot of elbow grease to get it clean.

Loaded 30 rounds last night. 10 to sight in and four 5 shot groups of Varget in half grain increments between 22.5-24 gr. 77 SMK moly bullets. About 25% of the rounds are sticky to eject, some requiring a good deal of force pulling charging handle back in order to eject. I'm using once fired Lapua brass at 1.750-1.753". Untrimmed but uniform, weight sorted within a grain. Full length sized on Redding Deluxe dies with die 1/8 (at most) off the shell holder. Not sure why only 75% ran through smoothly. By my standards, these are very uniform cartridges. COAL 2.270-2.275".

Anyway, I just finished loading 10 more. A back up for shooting tomm in case the first 30 don't feed. At least I will be able to sight scope in to new barrel if nothing else. A Burris Black Diamond 8-32 I just yanked off my 50 BMG. These 10 were exactly the same as the first 30 from last night. Only difference is I bottomed the die out on the shell holder. Carefully watching and guesstimating, 1/8 turn is most I had before bottoming out on shell holder. At any rate, these 10 rounds fed through the gun fine. Loaded 10 round mag twice and 20 times had same result. Smooth as hot butter.

What's confusing to me is that slight 1/8 turn making that much difference. Bumping shoulder back 0.002-0.004", is that the difference in sticky rounds and hot butter? I just started reloading last year and this is my first non factory barrel. More naive than I realize perhaps. Just curious if I'm overlooking something here. Is this normal for higher quality barrels? Is it common to have to bottom out die on shell holder? What if problem continued after that 1/8 turn, when metal hit metal? Then what? Seems a bit fickle, even for an apparently tight chambered barrel. Or is this normal?

Thanks for any input you may offer.

Dan

[Danattherock]

[mlmiller1]

I bottom out with slight camover on all my dies. On my 233, i actually ground a little off the bottom of my die to get enough shoulder setback.

[Danattherock]

Forgot to mention, I took the 10 rounds that were sticking last night and ran through gun afterwards. Trying to isolate the cleaning of the gun versus the slight shoulder set back achieved by bottoming out die on shell holder with the 1/8 turn. The previously sticky rounds are still, well, sticky.

[pyrrhic3gun]

Yes, everything you do (or don't do) makes a difference when reloading.

I suggest that you either take a class in reloading or get a comprehensive reloading manual.

[Danattherock]

I bottom out with slight camover on all my dies. On my 233, i actually ground a little off the bottom of my die to get enough shoulder setback.

Thanks for your thoughts man. I read on Kriegers website where folks were sometimes getting their shell holder thinned by 0.005". It appears I may not need to go that route, as bottomed out seems to be enough. Just barely. Interesting stuff though, that till now, I didn't have to think about.

Dan

[pmclaine]

If they were match guns they may have tight match chambers which could give you your bit of sticky.

[mlmiller1]

Thinning shell holder on a 650 isnt much of an option for me! Lol. Was easier to take a bit off the die.

[dauntedfuture]

Size your brass more.

"Thanks for your thoughts man. I read on Kriegers website where folks were sometimes getting their shell holder thinned by 0.005". It appears I may not need to go that route, as bottomed out seems to be enough. Just barely. Interesting stuff though, that till now, I didn't have to think about."

- Ok folks, the fact this is a Krieger barrel has NOTHING to do with possible sizing, chambering or possible pressure issues unless these barrels were CHAMBERED by Krieger.

- I am a little confused by some of the information but... If loaded rounds are "sticky to eject" then the brass has not been sized enough. If the charging handle "requires a good deal of force to eject" and this is loaded ammo, then defiantly need more sizing. I am assuming this is the case for the rest of the comments.

I believe that some of the live ammo chambers and allows the bolt to fully go into battery and some does not. I suspect that the fired brass you have was shot in at least two different rifles and that those rifles have different chamber dimensions. By this I don't mean that one is .223 and the other is Wylde etc, but that two different reamers were used to chamber the barrels. If this is the case, one of those rifles that generated the fired brass has a tighter chamber then the other one does so when you size the brass from rifle A, it is enough to chamber in your new barrel. Brass fired in rifle B is not getting sized enough for the new barrel.

You can and I have neck sized .223 for an AR, you just have to put that ammo back into the rifle that fired it. the AR system closes the bolt with quite a bit of force and you can, and I have sized cases while closing the bolt on some ammo I did not size enough. In many cases, the fired case will stay in the chamber and the extractor will rip the rim off or just ride over the case rim.

In a perfect world you keep one set of brass and dies for one rifle. As I have many AR rifles, this is impractical for everything but my NRA service rifles. Most of my brass gets shot out of several rifles and put back into one bucket. Knowing this, when I set up my dies, I size 10 different cases from the "mix brass" bucket and measure them all to make sure that all the brass is sized enough to drop in a chamber gauge. I also can measure the cases with a RCBS case mic. the result is that I am excessively sizing my brass for some of my rifles, in reality there is no practical downside other then it takes a little more force to size and my brass wears out a little. The result, I believe, is that using mix-rifle fired brass, is that I get more consistently sized ammo.

On another topic, if you are having a hard time cleaning the barrels, use some JP bore paste sparingly. If your not getting blue and your getting lots of black gunk, that's sealant fowling and its hard to get out.

I am suspect of used barrels as a general rule. If the barrels came from the XXXX shooting team some how.... they likely needed to shoot 3" at 300M and possibly did not do so.

[mike4540]

You could try using a small base die and see if the rounds feed better with that. Had the same type of problem with my 260, had some rounds that were fired out of one gun, I had resized them and used them in my other 260 and had issues of fired rounds not extracting(bolt guns), ended up using small base die to resize them and had no further issues.

[238shooter]

I see measurements for brass lengths and C.O.L., but I do not see anything on re-sizing dimensions. Believe me, from going from a standard AR barrel to a match grade barrel, this matters. I re-size to no larger than 1.461". The Wilson case gauge is a good reference but not good enough when you need a measurement. Now I measure each brass for long range 3gun matches but then over re-size (1.458") for paper punchers which the Wilson gauge works well for as you will be well lower in the highest point on the gauge but not lower than the too lower point.