I have couple of new barrels which need to be profiled. Both are 26" straight cylinders right now. Both are already fitted and chambered to actions, but I can easily remove and ship them. Both barrels are SS, if it makes any difference to anyone.

One is one of the last .458"-bore barrels made by Bill Atkinson when he was still part of A&M in Prescott. Naturally I don't want it fubar-ed.

Any suggestions as to who will do good quality, PROMPT work?

I'd call Pacnor in Brookings. Not sure if they will profile/contour outside barrels, but I can't hurt to ask.

JIm Dubell Delta Gun Shop
Colville WA

(509) 684-5855

jim@deltagunshop.com

Are they button drawn or cut rifle? Have been told by many that button drawn can be a disaster when profiled. I'm sure they will tell you that.

Delta Gun Shop when making their own barrels uses the cut rifle method.

Here are some pics of metal work done by then for me.

http://picasaweb.google.com/hu...ylerSMatchingRifles#

Lloyd,
I think Jim Dubell would be a good choice.
Rae59,
A properly stress relieved, buttoned barrel, will turn as well as any other. An improperly stress relieved cut-rifled barrel will warp when turned just like any non-stress relieved piece of material.
Manufacturers of button rifled barrels produce different contours by turning them down. Regards, Bill

Thanks Bill, and everyone else who mentioned Delta Gun Shop. I'll try them first. I must have been living on another planet the last few years...for some reason I had never heard of Delta.....

Is it Spring yet up there Bill? Well, not too long until the Queen's Birthday. I never used to plant anything 'til after that. Funny how the older I get, the less attractive 8 months of winter looks every year. Still wonderful country back home up there, just needs to have 10-month summers every year (Grin). Best wishes to you and thanks again.

I was just at Jim Dubel's shop this weekend. He is in the process of installing a tracer lathe and will be able to make short work of profiling jobs. His work is flawless.

Howard

What I you feeding that son of yours? He looks like he has grown a foot since the last time I saw him.

That project pair looks to be a right nice set. I'll be anxious to see them when they are finished.

quote:

Originally posted by Bill Leeper:
Lloyd,
I think Jim Dubell would be a good choice.
Rae59,
A properly stress relieved, buttoned barrel, will turn as well as any other. An improperly stress relieved cut-rifled barrel will warp when turned just like any non-stress relieved piece of material.
Manufacturers of button rifled barrels produce different contours by turning them down. Regards, Bill

That is not what I was told. It is not warping that I am referring to. It is the barrel opening up and the I.D. changing internally at specific locations. Yes, if the barrel is heat treated/stress relieved, I can see it relaxing and staying the same. But again, I have talked to several and they tell me that is not always the case. I have never had the need to have a barrel turned and so have no personal experience with it but I do know some who have and this what they told me.

My intent was to possibly save A-Canuck some grief down the road.

Dennis Olson

Rae59 -

Thank you for your kind intent. I appreciate that.

I believe that Bill Leeper is correct in what he said. Most barrel makers do not profile their barrels before deep hole boring, reaming, and rifling them.

The usual sequence among the ones I know personally is to first heat treat the metal, then rough turn it if needed, then deep hole bore it, then ream it, then rifle it, then lap it, and then turn the final profile. Some of them save the lapping until after the profiling, sometimes.

In theory, you are correct. Whenever one removes metal from the exterior after the barrel is made, he runs the risk of the bore expanding. And, again in theory, it will expand in exactly the worst way. That is, it will expand the most where the most exterior metal is removed...at the muzzle.

But, in actual fact, it normally doesn't seem to happen significantly enough to harm barrels for either hunting or target applications.

Whatever the "offsets" are I don't really know, but there must be some because carefully made barrels produced by skilled workman seem normally to work outstandingly well in my experience.

In this particular instance, I have no other choice than to profile it last. It is already bored, rifled, chambered, and fitted to the rifle action. For the purpose intended (shooting deer by shooting through trees which they are standing behind at short ranges), I think it will likely be fine. It's a chance I have to take as I cannot un-bore and un-rifle it now.

Thanks again for your consideration. I appreciate it.

AC

A tapered blank cannot be button rifled as the bore will indeed end up larger at the muzzle end. Mike Walker mentioned this happening when he buttoned some pre-tapered Springfield barrels at the request of the Armory.
The steel, as used, is usually ordered as stress relieved (but not always. After drilling and reaming, some makers straighten the barrel if necessary. Some makers will straighten after drilling and before reaming which would be the best way to do it if straightening was to be done IMO. After rifling, the blank may or may not be stress relieved. This step is all but mandatory with a button rifled barrel. That is to say, the step may be omitted but an inferior barrel would result. Usually, lapping is done after profiling. The idea here is that any dimensional changes from the profiling operation can be address. In reality, most barrelmakers lap only to achieve the desired internal finish and not to change dimensions in any way.
I have had barrels manufactured by both methods which were plainly not stress relieved. The barrels by Les Bauska (cut) and Bevan King (buttoned) were warping SOB's .
FWIW, I have always found hammer forged barrels to be relatively stress free and have had no problems arise from re-contouring them. Regards, Bill

Bill and A-canuck, I am quite sure both of you gentleman know what you are talking about, and I am not trying to start a arguement here.
I have a article that I recieved from HCR co. on barrel making. As I recall it stated that button rifle barrel makers contoured their barrels prior too rifling. I will see if I can find the article and post it here.
A friend of mine, who is a stock maker-retired, and I were just talking about this same subject 2 weeks ago. He said he had a barrel he wanted turned down. He spoke to some barrel guru he knows in (I believe) Ohio and said this gentleman told him that it was not a sure thing on many custom barrels and especially Remington factory barrels. This surprised me since I was under the impression that Remington's were hammer forged.

Also, I spoke in error on not having any experience with a barrel being turned down. Some 25 years ago, when 209 shotgun primers on muzzleloaders were getting under way, several guys in the area were buying .50 cal. black powder barrels from Shiloh-Sharps in Montana. I purchased one of these barrels and had a friend turn the barrel down. These barrels were button drawn. Anyways, after the barrel was turned, I could almost drop a .50 cal. bullet down the barrel appox. 6" before it became snug to the riflings. (not quite but almost) I spoke to a G-smith friend and he said that was to be expected from a button rifle barrel. I went ahead and mounted the barrel to a Stevens break-open shotgun action and used it to take some game in Co. It actually shot great in a muzzleloader situation.

Anyways, best of luck in your endeavor.

Rae59,
I appreciate that your are not trying to be argumentative and am looking at this as a discussion and one which, I hope, offers the opportunity for some mental stimulation (I need it).
The possibility exists that some barrel making companies have produced barrels which were buttoned after tapering but this would be because they didn't know any better! Indeed, I have seen some low cost barrels which seemed to ilustrate this. One was a 30 caliber which was almost .0015 smaller at the breech than it was at the muzzle!
Many gunsmiths are a bit timid when it comes to re-contouring of barrels. In some cases it may well be that they have had some experience with some of those early custom barrels which were not properly stress relieved (Like Bauska or Ackley) but mostly it seems to be perpetuation of what is almost folklore.
I'm not able to comment on the 50 cal. barrels from Shiloh because I did not see the barrels and don't know what the source might have been. I do know that, early on, Shiloh used various barrels and occasionally, the choice seemed based solely on cost. This does not always result in the best quality.
A large number of the barrels I install are barrels which I buy as full blanks and contour as required. The majority of these barrels are button rifled. I have a considerable amount of experience in this regard.
Just recently, I took a Shilen chromoly blank (button rifled) and made it into a tapered half-octagon with a quarter rib. This requires some fairly complex and extensive machining yet, there was no significant movement or dimensional change.
Now, anyone who has done much machining is aware the potential for distortion due to stresses in the material always exists. In fact, with some cold formed products, it is almost certain. However, most modern barrel makers take steps to minimize the risk and they are mostly successful in this.
As an example of the efficacy of stress relieving I'll recount an experience of mine. I was tasked with the making of some bushing inserts for a piece of mining equipment. These were six inches outside and 5.510 inside. I made these bushings from DOM (drawn on mandrel)tubing. This stuff was a mild steel which had to be machined to size then carburized and hardened. The method of manufacture of the material induced a lot of strees into the material. If one turned the outside to size then bored the inside, the outside would shrink by about six to eight thousandths. Bore the inside to size then turn the outside, the inside would grow by about the same amount. So it was necessary to bore the inside to about .050 under, then turn the outside to about .010 over, then bore the inside to size, then turn the outside to final size and hope for the best. In addition to the growth of the piece as material was removed, the piece would also distort so it was no longer round and the wall was no longer consistent in thickness. After fighting with this for a while I started putting the pieces in the oven and heating them to about 1150 degrees for a couple of hours then allowing them to cool in the oven overnight. After this, dimensional change and distortion from machining was virtually nil. I still had the problem of distortion from heat treating but at least the machining portion of the job was now easy thanks to stress relieving of the material prior to machining.
By the way, machining does not usually induce stresses but only removes them with the material removed. An exception would be where a cutter was dull and tended to displace material rather than cutting it cleanly. Regards, Bill.

Bill-

Thanks for the more detailed explanation. That would explain (and justify) why my old elk hunting friend Paul Marquart always stress relieved his raw barrel material in his own furnace after receiving it, but before drilling, reaming, rifling, or profiling.

He told me that he always ordered them from the steel companies relieved in advance, but also said that they never were done consistently to his satisfaction regardless which mill or vendor they came from. So he did his own stress relief work before beginning to cut, just to be certain he was working with the best possible material and not wasting his (or the customer's) time.

I suspect a lot of other barrel makers do the same thing, which would explain in part why their products turn out so free of ill effects from final profiling.

Shilen contours after pulling the button. They do their lapping at this time trying to achieve a .0002-.0003 choke.
Most of the barrel makers stress relieve in house with heat and some use cryo along with it to make machining easier.
I can only check bore sizes with Deltronic pins. I have them in .0001 increments for each bore size that I chamber. The better grade barrels are not larger at the muzzle unless you try to use all of the blank. They can be a little larger at the very end of the blank from lapping. I cut off at least 2" of the muzzle. Bill Leeper knows what is happening.
Butch