I came across 1000 .223 tracer rounds from a local guy going out of business. A co-worker told me that firing a lot of tracer rounds through my shorty (LMT10.5in) barrel will cause damage. He said that tracer’s fire hotter than regular rounds. I have no idea about this and i’m looking for some input. I bought the rounds for $100.00 but I don’t want to screw up the barrel for cheap ammo.
Tracers generally ignite once outside of the barrel, so they do not harm a weapon in any way. They usually aren’t very accurate, though.
Have fun!
Derek
In Arizona they are typically verbotten, start fires and such, though that can be a
good thing if you are on the two way firing range, and wind is uprange of your
adversary.
Depending on age, they may not be reliable lighters.
I ran across some tracers (m856?) at a gun show in white box, not remanufactured, and while I don’t know about barrel wear, I can tell you from experience that those bastards will set stuff on fire. It was my first experience as a “first responder” to a potential forrest fire. If you do shoot them, for god’s sake, make sure of your backdrop. The “incident” occured during dry conditions a year or so ago on a friend’s boss’s prvate land and we should have known better. Our range won’t let us shoot them so since we were on private land, we got stupid and almost burned the damn woods down. From a bystanders point of veiw it was probably pretty funny watching us drive a jeep grand cherokee like we were rally racing, cutting turns totally sideways to get downrange on the very curvy and bumpy road going down the wide powerline we were shooting down 200 yds out and then trying to stomp it out before it actually reached to woodline. If we hand’t of used the target board (4’x4’ plywood) to cover/smother the main fire and stomped out the rest, we would have probably made the news that night. I don’t think either of us has hair on our legs after that for a while. Luckily we weren’t burned badly, ruined the shoes we were wearing though. Me and my buddy can laugh about it now but it sure as hell wasn’t funny at the time.
Be safe.
My experience was not as exciting as Stik’s, but it is amazing how well they will start fires.
Ohio gets extremely soggy from Nov through March, so I figured it would be ok to fire some tracers off. It was pretty neat watching them go down range out of a M16, but it was shocking to see a couple piles of pretty wet leaves smoldering from the tracers. Luckily the leaves had piled up at the front of our back stop and we just had to walk down and stomp them into the mud. I am quite certain if we had done that shooting this time of year, it would make the news:eek: