I have several rifles with button type rifling, and a couple with chrome-lined CHF barrels. The two with CHF barrels are an FN SCAR 17, and a WASR-10/63 AK47. The FN has been extremely accurate from day one - putting 10 rounds into 3/4” at 100 yards with remanufactured ammo, on the very first time I fired it. The AK, not so much. It’s acceptably accurate for what it is, but it’s no precision rifle. Not even close.cyphertext wrote: ↑Fri Nov 09, 2018 11:00 am I have not heard that hammer forged barrels provides greater accuracy over button cut barrels. Actually have heard the opposite. Match grade barrels are not typically hammer forged.
Hammer forged barrels are said to last longer, but I wouldn't stress over it. The barrel on your Colt is a consumable... meant to be used and easily replaced. As stated above, I wouldn't stress over this at all. Shoot up your current barrel and then replace with the hammer forged if the life of your barrel was unsatisfactory.
My other rifles are, for the most part, more accurate than the AK, but only a couple are as or more accurate than the SCAR. I don’t think you can reasonably deduce that one type or the other has greater inherent accuracy. What you can say is that a chrome-lined CHF barrel will likely last thousands of rounds longer than one that is not CHF. If I recall correctly, the M249 SAW has a chrome-lined CHF barrel - for that exact reason.
As far as free floating goes, there is a certain truth to the notion that free-floating will generally increase rifle accuracy. But..... it will not make the rifle accurate beyond the inherent capabilities of the barrel or the type of action. And for practical purposes on most AR15s, it probably doesn’t matter as much as on say a bolt action hunting rifle. That doesn’t mean that I don’t free float my AR barrels....all of one of them ARE free floated. But, you’ve got things happening on an AR barrel that will offset some of the gains from free floating it. Both of my bolt guns have free floated barrels, but they are not encumbered with gas blocks, delta rings, A2 front sight posts, etc., which are all things that can affect barrel harmonics. The whole idea of free floating is to remove contact between the barrel and any other part of the rifle, which might affect the barrel harmonics. One of my ARs is a M16/A4 replica, with an actual M16 20” 1:7 gov’t profile barrel (chrome-lined) from BCM, and a KAC M5 RAS handguard, which is NOT free floating. Despite not being free floated, and despite having a gas block and an A2 front sight post on it, it is at the better end of mil-spec accuracy and will fairly reliably shoot 1.5 MOA with Lake City M855 or Lake City M193 ball. At 600 yards (if I had the eyes for it), that would be a 9” group .... or pretty easily minute of man at 600 yards. That’s not as accurate as my .308 precision rifle, but it is plenty accurate for what it was designed to do. How accurate does your AR have to be? BTW, I have ARs in 10.5”, 16”, 18”, and this 20” gun; but if I had to get rid of all the rest and could only keep just one, I’d keep the 20” A4.
So those are the kinds of things I think about when putting together an AR. First and foremost, what’s the intended use, and then build it for that. But don’t try to put lipstick on a pig, so to speak. The requirements for an AR-based varmint rifle are quite a bit different from those for an AR-based personal defense weapon.