It's actually quite amusing that people refuse to use gauges. Only the initial fire forming is controlled by the headspace which is done with dead soft brass. After firing, the headspace and all body dimensions are controlled entirely by the resizing dies. No matter how tight you make the headspace, only the delta measurement will be to zero on an unfired case, or close to zero spec. Even that is highly speculative as usually the shoulder on unfired brass is not sharp and defined. As a rule, the shoulder angle will always be a slightly shallower angle than that of the shoulder in the chamber. All other dimensions are still at least .002 inch per side larger than the unfired case. The reality is that case life and accuracy is not really increased at all with tight headspace. Case life is increased simply by neck sizing the cases only which slows the work hardening process down and keeping pressures to a respectable level to keep the brass from flowing and work hardening. Peek accuracy is generally only accomplish after the case has been fully fire formed and then the necks trued, trued and neck sized only. This will (hypothetically) create a case which matches the chamber exactly and holds the bullet perfectly true, both lineally and axially to the bore for a perfect start into the lands and grooves.

Keeping the delta measurement, or one tiny ring on it to absolute zero on fire forming really accomplishes very little other than creating a wildcat which is .004 inch shorter than the parent case. It also sounds really cool after a few drinks at the bar with your buddies. LOL

As an anecdotal story to go along with the question, I have an amusing rifle that I acquired a while back.

It's a Hopkins and Allen 922 or Junior. It has a schuetzen buttstock on it, off of a zimmerstutzen. A lot of wood putty or epoxy putty went into making it fit. The barrel is an anschutz barrel. Ugly profile, and adapted to this action so it doesn't look particularly good on the rifle. It had a homemade scope mount clamped to the barrel with homemade fittings. Obviously designed by someone in a vacuum, without looking at how the rest of the world does things. It had a classic external adjustment scope on it that I sold to pay for what I bought the rifle for. The H&A is a slip fit action, no barrel threads. I took it apart, and found that the barrel had been hand fit to the action, using a file instead of a lathe. In addition, the action had not been originally .22 rf (probably .32 rf). Instead of moving the firing pin or alterning the link on the block, the person that had done the work had filed the barrel tenon off-center, so that the firing pin hit the .22 rf in the correct location. I fired the rifle, and it works correctly and has no operations problems.

The rifle fits me extremely well, and is amazingly well balanced and put together right for an offhand rifle. The materials/workmanship is not particularly nice, but as about as good as you could do with makeshift materials, putty and hand work. I'm going to duplicate the stock using the putty one in the duplicator to trace from. I'm also going to rebarrel it.

I refused to fire the rifle for accuracy tests, just fired it for operation verfication, took off the scope, threw away the mounts and put it in my to do pile. I would have been disgusted if it had superior accuracy, because I don't want to use it in it's current ugly condition!

Although it has nothing to do with installing a barrel, here's a blog dedicated in large part to fixing things other peopled "fixed".

http://vicknairgunsmithing.blogspot.com/

Lee