Barrel life of 17 HMR

wizbanger

A friend recently purchased a Cooper in 17 HMR here on GunBroker and after receiving it couldn't get better than a 6 inch group no matter what ammo he used. He called Cooper and they told him the barrels were shot out after 2000 rounds. They offered to replace it for $400. Is the barrel life of all 17 HMR's that short?

bpost

First I would try a VERY good cleaning with Montana Extreme, making sure the bore is spotless. I would also suspect the scope and switch it out with a different high quality scope. Third, look at the muzzle crown with a magnifying glass to see if there is any damage to the muzzle.

After he does that get back to us.

charliemeyer007

That seems like an awfully short barrel life for a 2600 fps. 220 Swift, 264 Win Mag I would believe. Even the 17-223 is 4000 fps range.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.17_HMR

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.17-223

Mobuck

I doubt this. What I've found is certain lots of ammo produce widely varying levels of accuracy. When I got my first 17 HMR(Ruger 17/22), I bought the only ammo on the local dealer's shelf which was Hornady V-Max. I was getting 100 yard cloverleafs so started buying the same ammo by the 500 round carton. Later I was having accuracy problems and did some deep cleaning, changed scopes, had a mental butt-kicking session, and nothing helped. Opened a different lot of ammo and the problem went away(well sort of-the cloverleafs haven't returned but it's "good enough"). In this case, different ammo lots increased group size by 5-6X.