Up until now, I have heard of engines and firearms being "blueprinted". What does that mean?

H.C.

Go to www.bryantcustom and you can see the steps used to blue-print an action and fit a barrel. Basically it is an effort to get an action "square" to the barrel as it was designed and not as it was mass-produced. Includes lapping the lugs for 100% contact and also single-pointing the action treads for better contact and alignment. Some will also go to the extreme of reboring the action itself and then sleeving the bolt to keep everyting in alignment. As you can see from the web-site you can expect to pay anywhere from $100 to $200 for a straight forward blueprinting job to another $150 to $200 for having the bolt sleeved. Some will also sleeve the whole action to make it stiffer but this is basically for varmint and benchrest shooters as it will turn your action into a single shot. There is an excellent article in a recent Precision Shooting magazine about the method used by Gre-Tan (top-flight accuracy gunsmith). You might want to go to www.benchrest.com and look at the list of gunsmiths on the left for a discussion of their work and prices.

Ran across the Gre-Tan web site...very interesting www.gtrtooling.com

Thanks for the info DB Bill,

H.C.