Welcome back to the 7th installment of my blog, in which I don’t claim to be an expert, in fact the very opposite. I’m a new user to the AR platform and want to share my findings and experiences as I go through and build rifles as well as being the Operations Manager at Tyrant Designs.

 

First off I wanted to apologize for no blog post last week, I was out with the flu, but was happy to see a bunch of emails from fans inquiring about by next post (and by fans, I mean my boss, and by inquiring, he meant “requiring”) So I told him no sweat, I got this, and lets post it Thursday instead of Friday because we do what we want! So here it goes.

 

I was cruising around some AR 15 forums while my fiance watched the Oscars this past Sunday, when I came across a very common post which seems to deeply divide people. Basically all the posts go something like this “I found a really good deal on some steel cased ammo by bla bla bla and I was wondering what people’s experiences are shooting steel cased ammo.” And then comes the divide, half the people say they shoot thousands of steel rounds with no malfunctions and the other half says it’s dirty and will damage your gun. But who do we believe and is it worth taking the risk?

 

Through much research of other people shooting thousands of rounds and through my own research shooting both (steel and brass) I’ve come to a few conclusions.

 

Blue steel, for all you Zoolander fans out there

blue steel ammo

1. The number 1 benefit and the only really good thing I could say about steel ammo is it’s a lot cheaper than brass cased ammo. I found most steel cased ammo on wikiarms for almost .20 a round which was half the price of most of the brass.

 

2. Supposedly people run into some extraction issues when shooting steel. Since steel is harder than brass it doesn’t expand very much in comparison. Sometimes the friction of the casing can cause it to jam. BUT I read studies where guys put 10,000 rounds of steel through their rifle and had less than a few malfunctions.

 

3. Steel has also been known to be harder on barrels over time. BUT other studies have shown it takes multiple thousands of rounds for that to become noticeable.

 

Have we solved anything? Absolutely not. Just wanted to give a quick side to both stories. In my opinion shooting steel cased ammo at the range can be a cost effective method to shooting more ammo BUT if it came down to home defense, I would want to make sure I have the highest quality most reliable ammo out there, and I don’t think that steel cased falls in this category.