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Ferritic Nitrocarburizing Nitride

John A.

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OK, the laymen term is nitride. It started gaining popularity in the form of barrels and slides many years ago and trade names have occasionally had other knicknames for it, but has since expanded to a lot of other parts.

For a long time, I kept up with product reviews and long term tests and I have came to the conclusion that nitriding is better than chroming a part, or barrel or whatever.

Chroming is applied after the part is made and coincidentally, is a wear surface.

Nitriding is different in that nitrogen and carbon are absorbed by and diffused into the surface of the metal and becomes part of the metal and doesn't change manufacturing specifications or tolerances.

For barrels and wear parts, it is pretty easy to tell that nitriding reduces long term fouling and protects the parts from corrosion better than even chroming. It has also been well noted that one of the attributes of nitriding is an increase in velocity as much as 200 fps in some tests due to the better lubricity of nitriding.

Since nitriding fuses with the metal, does nothing to degrade the accuracy of the physical barrel itself. While chroming adds material to the surface parts, it can be in clumps, not completely fill machining cracks, and wears off after a while, thus changing the barrels characteristics over time.

And furthermore, as a characteristic of chrome lined barrels, they are generally avoided for long range precision shooters. And including many military sniper weapon systems for just that reason.

That is pretty much the end of my conclusion why I think nitriding is a better alternative to chroming parts and while chrome lined stuff has been historically adequate, but I think that nitriding is the future of weapon system advancements.

And for anyone who is interested in seeing how it is made:

 
I think you covered that pretty good. Have you had many parts treated?
 
I have not.

I have purchased 2 barrels that had been treated, and they exceeded my expectations.

I have watched this process with reservations about it though subsequently grow in popularity since around 2003 when I first heard about it because of Olympic Arms "max-hard" barrel and at first, I thought it was just another product with a different name.

But as for barrel treatments, between chrome and nitride, while I believe either are decent, I think the nitride process is better in all the aspects that I mentioned above.

Corrosion resistance, and longevity especially.
 
Is it something that has to be done at factory? Or can a used barrel be coated? This is new, but very interesting to me.
 
Is it something that has to be done at factory? Or can a used barrel be coated? This is new, but very interesting to me.

Yes, it has to be done at a factory.

A used barrel could be done, IF the factory accepts an individual order to put in a batch.
 
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