I am going to reload some tracers for my .223 and i heard they are bad on the bbl. Is this true? If so, what does it do and why?
any help will be greatly appreciated,
Bkmastr

I would like to know as well being the fact that I own a Stainless Steel barrel, I was told that it's hard on stainless barrel but not chrome-moly.

Any experts out there or chemist's?

FM 23-9 states:

"Soldiers should avoid long-term use of 100-percent tracer rounds. This could cause deposits of incendiary material/chemical compounds that could cause damage to the barrel. Therefore, when tracer rounds are fired, they are mixed with ball ammunition in a ratio no greater than one-to-one with a preferred ratio of three or four ball rounds to one tracer round."

M196 tracers use strontium nitrate, strontium peroxide, barium peroxide, lead peroxide, magnesium powder, calcium resinate, and PVC for their tracer compound. The ignition primer is barium peroxide, magnesium, antimony trisulfide, and graphite. M196 tracer composition doesn't have much of a shelf life and it gets spotty after enough years. M856 tracers are much more impressive.

When fired, small fragments of tracer composition are likely to be dislodged and left behind in the barrel, sometimes lit, sometimes not. As tracer composition burns slowly (compared to powder) and hot (2000 degrees F) you really don't want it in the barrel in any great quantity for long.

Apparently the compounds can leave traces of ammonia, though not necessarily enough to be a problem.

Given this, it's probably a bad idea to have tracers in the last slots of your magazine also. "Tracer goo" could sit there awhile if you shoot your last mag and take your weapon home before cleaning.

quote:

i heard they are bad on the bbl.

You can hear absolutely anything on the internet.

If I wanted to shoot tracers I wouldn't give it a second thought.....shoot them!

I have seen places that they are not legel due to the possibility of starting a fire.

I have no .223 tracers but all of the .308 tracers that I have used have a metal disc that seals the tracing compound. The heat of the burning powder ingites the trace compound behind the disc but it takes a substantial pressure build-up to pop the disc out.

All of this delay is engineered to allow the round to be down-range before the trace begings; for two reasons. One, so that white-hot metal discs don't blow back in the shooter's face and two, so that the trace lasts for specific ranges. For example, some heavy machine gun tracers light up 150-175 yds out while a lot of 7.65 x 51 stuff lights up at about 50-75 yds. Likewise, 50 cal API tracers pop at a different range than plain 50 cal tracers belted with ball. That was especially the case with aircraft 50 cal because the ranges were greater and the pilot needed to see the trace way out there.

All that means is that it is almost never the case that the tracers mentioned above ever burn inside the barrel and therefore can't contaminate it.

I have seen 30 carbine tracers that had a softer asphalt-type sealer instaed of the metal disc which makes sense as the 30 M1 carbine was such a short range weapon the tracers probably lit-off very early and there could be no schrapnel exiting the rear of the projectile close tothe barrel..