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Warthog30 it has been a long time since I worked on the GAU-8/A but here goes the way we did it in the early days. Back then the barrels had constant twist to the rifling. Barrels where replaced at the 25K inspection , best I remember. We also had a "lead the force" gun at RAF Bentwaters. This aircraft was to fire on every mission. They fired the crap out of that gun. You see maintenance schedules were still fluid then. Procedures were changing on a regular basis. Anyway later on came the continous gain barrels. Instead of the rifling remaining constant, like your average gun barrel these barrels had a continous increase in the rate of twist starting at the breach end and increasing to the muzzle end. These barrels had a life much longer than the originals. I cant really remember but I believe 60K or there abouts.
When a gun was suspected of having bad barrels, IE bad despersion, we would bore scope them. The TO had photos of all kinds of damage to the lands. We would evaluate the allowable wear, damage and determine if the barrels needed to be replaced or not. Sometimes only one barrel would be replaced. We used to could replace up to three without changing the whole set.
As far as overused I am not sure what you mean. I never had a pilot come back and say I overused the gun. I had plenty come back and say the dispersion was unacceptable. Even had one at Bentwaters that had a round fall short and hit a FAC vehicle, no injuries.
MD cycles were determined by two factors in those days. 18 Months intervals and K (rounds fired) intervals.
Fender
"A woman drove me to drink
and I hadn't even the courtesy to thank her".
W.C. Fields
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