Re: Bolt face erosion?
William: Barring excessive pressures (whatever that might be), the biggest single thing you can do to minimize gas leakage is to have as much of the case as possible completely in the chamber. That's why the coned bolt actions with a sliding plate extractor (Panda/Kodiak, etc.) work so well. A 700 style setup simply cannot offer this level of control....the pressures get up there, the unsupported back end moves around a bit, the primer pockets get a bit bigger during the high pressure 'peak', gas leaks out, bolt face gets etched. And the primer pockets will still seem tight....'cuz they are....when the case isn't being fired.
The majority of actions out there are limited in how well they support the back end, simply because of their design. With a coned bolt/sliding plate setup and a proper fit between the sized case and the back end of the chamber, case head expansion is at an absolute minimum during firing.
100-300 BR shooters routinely operate in the 75,000+ range, can open the bolt on a fired case with an index finger, and the bolt faces look like new even after many thousands of rounds.
Billy Bob the Neighborhood Pipe Threader can slop together a bunch of crap with a Rent-All reamer, use range pick up brass, size it with a $2 used Lee die set bought from a Mall Ninja convention...and have the primers fall out of factory rounds.
Savvy 'smiths like yourself, DocEd and Randy know how to do stuff the right way, but there's a lot of 'gunsmiths' out there that shouldn't be allowed to thread galvanized pipe.
Not that I have an opinion about such stuff.....
