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No, it’s not the same. Nitride has a key feature- Hardness. It functionally locks in whatever surface finish exists in the freshly machined surface. This eliminates its ability to break in or smooth out any imperfections.
Dave Tooley talks about this on the hide in the context of nitrided precision rifle barrels in that the shooter needs to slightly break in the barrel prior to nitride or the barrel will strip copper off the bullets badly. Specifically, he notes that chambering produces small burrs on the trailing edge of the rifling leade and they need to be polished away before nitride or they will never go away.
Carriers are the same…imperfections become permanent and eat rings.
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i've been seeing comments lately saying that nitrided barrels cannot be 'broken in' unlike chrome lined or stainless barrels because of the added hardness
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I can kinda confirm this. I don’t know much about metallurgy, but I have destroyed a few barrels by use. I’ve noticed that when I borescope barrels, the nitrided ones often appear to be poorly made by that purely visual metric. And the railroad tracks don’t go away after 5 digit round counts, no matter how much firecracking is shown near the chamber or how far forward the rifling has been pushed. A couple inches forward of the chamber, and the imperfections seem untouched. But it may be that that speaks more about the underlying quality than the coating/conversion.
I’ll let the rest of y’all argue a while longer about why that may be, or why I’m wrong or have an insignificant sample size.
“Milspec” doesn’t mean the same thing in the commercial market as the equivalent-ish terms in the military market. I often avoid commercial products that use that word in the description because of that. The translation is “this is the cheapest garbage we can turn out, and it in no way meets acceptance standards for any military organization, nor is it made in the same way or using the same processes, but it IS black”.