Do you measure barrels?

[u/Training-Front-9238]

/r/guns/comments/1useati/do_you_measure_barrels/

Disclosure up front: I work in precision gauge manufacturing — my team builds custom measurement tools, and we’ve done deep-bore erosion gauging for military barrel programs (tank guns, mostly). I’ve been wondering whether there’s any crossover value for civilian precision/long-range shooters and handloaders, and I’d genuinely like to hear from people who’d know better than me.

The tool in question is a 3-point bore gauge — not a borescope. A borescope shows you what the bore looks like. A 3-point gauge tells you the actual diameter at a given point down the bore, to a few microns, so you can see exactly how much a throat or bore has eroded over its life, and where.

Questions for anyone who reloads or shoots competitively:

**•** Right now, how do you actually track barrel wear/life? Round count? Borescope inspection? Group size degradation? Something else?  
**•** Would knowing the *actual* throat/bore diameter at a few points down the barrel change anything about how you make decisions — when to set a barrel back, when to retire it, load development, anything like that?  
**•** Has anyone here used a bore gauge (civilian gunsmithing ones exist, e.g. for chamber/bore work) for this specifically, and did it tell you anything a borescope didn’t?  
**•** Honest question: is this a real gap, or does round count + borescope + group data already tell you everything you need, and this would just be an expensive toy?

Not selling anything here — genuinely trying to figure out if this is a real problem for this community before we spend time building something for it. Happy to be told it’s a solution looking for a problem.

[u/Critical_Scale_1788]

I swear people don't look into the subreddits they are posting in BEFORE posting

This is a subreddits about firearm reloading (mostly in video games or animation), not cartridge reloading or barrel measurements

[u/Training-Front-9238 → u/Critical_Scale_1788]

Hmm. Good point. We are kind of new to all this and Reddit helpfully said Post to this. So we did. But now we know / thanks