Here is a passage from an e-mail I sent to "Chris" at Pac-Nor barrels. I have ordered five barrels from them and 4 have been sent back for some problem or another. I really don't want to hear a bunch of accolades for these guys; you won't convince me to change my mind. I only want to inform you out there of my experiences. Apparently ther are others who have had the same bad experiences


Chris. The "copy to" address above is for a Mr. Tim Crowton, a client of mine. Please explain to him what you tried to convince me of. This is the 4th barrel of five I have ordered from you that have been returned! I consider this and unacceptable condition, especially since you accused me of "gouging" the bore on the barrel.

This barrel showed evidence of impurities in the steel base metal in the form of carbon deposits or some such and exhibited small cracks throughout the exterior. It was returned by the client after he discovered it.

Jim

Jim, who are you going to buy from if Pac-Nor is not on the list?

I guess I will have to quote Chris at PacNor: "I guess you'll have to buy your barrels from them then" after I told him I have never had to return a barrel to Krieger, Lilja, Shilen, Hart, Schneider or Lothar-Walther. Sounds like a good customer service policy to me!

they always do me good.. but screws happen.. but then again, 4 out of 5 sucks

jeffe

You dont have to convince me Jim!
I've told my story on pac-nor, wont bother repeating it.

Jim give Woody at Lothar Walter a call.you will not be dissapointed.

Well, OK, here goes. The first was this 280 barrel a year ago. Put it on and shipped it out, no problem, until now. The client calls me up and says there are "cracks" in the barrel, OK, I sent it back and this is the one I'm talking about. Next it was a 30 cal for my own Browning FN. I fit it up and went to break it in. While at the range and in a shooting position, I noticed a "bulge" in the barrel on the exterior about 2 inces from the end. It had not had a round through it yet. I sent it back, Chris calls and says it is from the steady rest when they polished it and then he sent it back. I got it back, put it on and took it out to shoot it. When I went to clean after the first shot, I felt a "slip" when the patch hit that suspect spot. Sent it back again and got a repalcement (that was good). Took the new one out and could not get the barel to shoot. Bought a shilen for a replacement. End of story on that one. Ordered a .224 in a Ruger #1 profile and received it while in the debacle with the .30 cal. Went to the range to break it in, first round, a "slip" in the barrel. Had another fella who was there test it and he said if felt like a loose spot. Sent it back to Chris, he calls and says he can't find nothing wrong. I get it back and the next four guys in the shop get to run a patch down the bore, slow. I did not tell them what to look for but all four guys said there was someting wrong there. This one was going back also, but now I am not sure I want to waste the money on the shipping. 'nuff said. OY! the pressure.

Man, I have heard nothing but good things about those Lothar Walther barrels! If only they had a distributor of them in Canada...

Hmmm... I was considering Pac-Nor for a .458 Lott Barrel for my P14 project. might have to investgate a little more.

Bad Batch of blanks maybe? (don;t know dick about barrel Making)

P17 - you on Gunnutz?

I've used the Pac-Nors on the last 7 or 8 rifles and have nothing but high praise for them. My gunsmith and rifle builder has been using them exclusively for the last 6 or 7 years with nary a problem. Without any details on the problems here experienced and hearing only a generalized complaint without specifics, it would be hard to condemn them on only one man's say. This experience is certainly not typical of Chris and Pac-Nor. There has to be something more to the story than the one side which appears here. What exactly were the problems in 4 out of 5 barrels?

I've just reinspected the latest Pac-Nor barrel going on a MRC short action for a 338WSM. Its quality and interior finish leaves nothing to be desired and I expect it to shoot as well as the others, which have all been outstanding. My experience over several years have all been great and I'll continue to use them.

In regards to the Peruvian Mauser that Jim re-barreled for me with the PacNor 280 barrel. The barrreled action sat in my safe for the past year until I got around to building a stock for it.

When I started to inlet the stock my son looked at it & said he saw cracks & porosity on the exterior of the barrel.
When I wiped off the inletting black, sure enough there were cracks that you could catch your fingernail in & small pin holes that were in a area of about a 1/8" cluster.

I hate to imagine what could of happened when I had taken it to the range to test fire it. It just boggles my mind that a barrel manufacturer could let something as unsafe as this to get through their system & then not even care that it did !!

If I had taken it to the range & had a accident PacNor barrels would have a lawsuit that I would hope put them out of business !! I'm not that forgiving.

For PacNor to take a stance that a customer put these in there & take a attitude that we can basically go to hell if we didn't like it....... says all I need to know !!!

The one thing I will do..... is convince everyone I know to NEVER think to buy a PacNor barrel. There's just to many other barrel manufacturer's who do care about turning out a quality product & holding on to customers.

Like they say it's hard to get customers, but so easy to lose them. Once you lose them they NEVER come back !!!

I have noticed the little bulge near the muzzle of every Pac-nor I've used but found it to always be external only. I usually figure on having to drawfile and polish all barrels anyway. The Pac-nors I've installed have been uniformly good performers. By the way, I've felt tight and loose spots in Barrels from most manufacturers with the exception of the BR barrels like Hart, Krieger, and Shilen. Even had one Lilga which had a definite loose place in the middle. Accuracy wasn't great with that one either.
Occasionally I think the barrel makers have the misfortune of getting a length of steel which perhaps contains too much sulphur. The barrels from this piece will wear prematurely. This is the only complaint I have heard on a Pac-Nor barrel. Pac-Nor's response to the customer in this case was less than I would have expected.
Today we have so many barrels to choose from it's hard to make a choice sometimes. I have used Shilens in the hundreds and have been happy with them. I've used many from Douglas as well as from Canadian maker, Ron Smith. I've used BR barrels from Hart and Shilen and some lesser known makers. I've used hammer forged barrels from Swiss Arms. Right now, my first choice for a sporting rifle is Shilen or Douglas in chromoly, Smith in stainless. I've used some MRCs recently as well. For match rifles, Hart, Krieger, Shilen and Smiths are on various rifles I own and I like them all. If I don't like a maker's contours I recontour them. I frequently buy full blanks. If I think the barrel will benefit from lapping I do so. It's all part of gunsmithing IMO. Regards, Bill.

Well, I have used a lot of Pac Nor barrels. Have not had any "real problems" with one yet, but have had a few that acted funny when chambering. Heard a rumor that Pac Nor was using import steel from Europe, so I called Chris and asked. His reply was "yes, we use steel from Germany when our US suppliers are having delivery problems."



I did not like this type of steel, as it took about 4 times as long to chamber as the "old stuff". And yes, I use a muzzle flush system, good reamers, and know a few tricks about chamberring difficult barrels. Having to fuss with a barrel when chambering will force me to no longer use the barrel maker, there is no reason for this foolishness.



Soooo, although I still use Pac Nor barrels, I am leaning towards Lothar Walther, especially for the big bore barrels. I would use a lot more Krieger barrels if the delivery time was not so long.



Interesting thing about Pac Nor delivery, not too long ago it took 6 to 8 weeks to receive a barrel. Now about 2 to 3 weeks. I received a 30 cal. Pac Nor last week, think I will run the bore scope down and take a look, plus check the bore size with some gauges I made up.



Where is this bulge you gents are talking about? If it is within an inch or so of the end, you gotta cut off this portion anyway to take care of the rifling "pull out" taper. And I have not noticed any "cracks" in the exterior, I guess it is time to pull out the magnifiers and take a close look.

P-17

Milarm in edmonton is the canadian destributor for Lothar Walther. Give them a call and they should be able to oblige you!

I have used many Pac Nor barrels and never had a problem other than a few would not shoot but about 1.5 and thats borderline IMO.....

I used a Lothar Walther about 5 years ago, and that is all I have used since that enlightening experience and I doubt that I will ever use another barrel....I have never had a LW barrel that would not shoot an honest inch most of the time..

Gentlemen



Given the choice I would get Krieger or any other good cut rifle barrel. Favorite in delivery time and quality is BORDER, perfect every time...



I had my share of Walther Lothar, no thanks and never again



/ JOHAN

Why dont you like LW barrels?
I dont have eny experience on them (or eny other after market barrel) just curios

/Smygaren

Krieger... 'Nuff said.

My gunsmith won't mount a PacNor barrel and when I asked him why his answer is that the barrels are too inconsistent. He has had the same experience as you have getting too many "bad" barrels. He says that the good ones are good, but he gets too many that won't shoot. To guaranty the best quality gun for his customers he won't use PacNor. Just opinion and secondhand at that, so take it for what it's worth.

John,
The "bulge" I have seen is not really a bulge at all but just an external bump about 1 inch long and about .004 larger than the barrel on either side of it. It's not a big deal and is easily removed by filing prior to finish polishing. I really can't say I've had any bad experiences with them. I hasten to add I've probably only fitted a dozen Pac-nors compared to hundreds of Shilens. When I started out Pac-nor didn't exist! Shilen, Douglas, and Hart did and I've mostly stayed with them because there has been no reason not to. Regards, Bill.

I sent them one to rebarrel, sent it back twice. The first time they left the trigger off, the second time the gun kote was falling off when I received it to get the trigger put back on. It never would shoot better than 1.5. The gal I spoke with was very polite and helpfull. I did have enough and sent it to Kreiger and it turned out well. Pac Nor did gratis me a barrel, my local Smith installed for me and it shoots very well. It's just too much a roll of the dice and I use others now.

I had Pac-Nor rebarrel my old 700 270 this summer. Main reason was throat was worn too much, and the 30 year old barrel was quite a pain to clean. Copper fouling was terrible on the old barrel. Got the new one after 3 months, and get about 1.25" groups. The old barrel would still break 1". To top it off, this hand lapped match grade barrel copper fouls worse than my factory Savage and Ruger rifles. Doubt they will get any more of my money!
Steve

I'm no gunsmith, but I have had dozens of barrel job done over the years, including a half dozen or so by pac-nor. They have all proved to be very accurate, even those is very slim contours. My complaint about their install method is that they do not test fire their own work. My local gunsmith finds this to be very odd and he didn't think much of the practice. I also have some complaints about how tight they chamber stuff. 2 of the 6 barrel jobs were so tightly headspaced that factory ammo chambered only with great difficulty. In both cases, I had my local smith fix this problem, and then they shot great. I also had a barrel job come back from pac-nor with a scarred extractor, bad enough that it that the bolt would only close with excessive force; that, too, needed to be fixed by my local smith.

I am hesitant to step into this knee high thread, but I feel PAC-NOR is getting a bad rap for something they are not really guilty of. It has become their problem however, since some people have gone on a smear campaign.
I have worked for PAC-NOR in the past. I use PAC-NOR barrels every day. They make great barrels. My saying so is not really important since most people posting here have their minds made up on what they think. However, I feel it necessary to address some things that do raise some questions.

1--If you put a chrome-moly barrel in a safe without the proper finishing or oiling, you will get rust. Stainless will rust also. Are you sure the "inclusions" you saw are really disruptions in the homogeny of the alloy and not just rust? The cracks you saw, are you sure they are cracks? Sounds like rust to me. I have some old PAC-NOR blanks here that were not cared for and guess what, there are spots of rust on them, and even little linear crack-like lines of rust spreading in non-geometric directions. A quick polish, and they're gone. If they where inclusions, wouldn't they have been noticed by the gunsmith when the barrel was installed? And if the barrel was going to blow up because of them, don't you think it would have done so during the button rifling process which puts an estimated 200,000 psi in the barrel? (pre-stress relieving) A rifle round is about a quarter that. A cracked barrel would not hardly be able to be chambered or contoured. I have seen thousands of PAC-NOR barrels, and have NEVER a problem with the chrome-moly being used. On a side note, the German Saber stainless is being phased out. They are returning to Carpenter stainless which they have been using for years.

2--The gouge in the bore. I'm assuming it is near the muzzle since not everyone has a borescope. If so, is it about 1/2" to 5/8" from the crown? Sounds like the pilot on the crowning or center cutting tool to me. What are the odds that the only gouge in the bore would be right where the end of the crowning tool or centering tool is? A mistake made by some. And was the barrel left at full length as received by PAC-NOR, or was it cut off to finish length by the gunsmith? All barrels should have at least the last 1" cut off by the gunsmith, so I doubt the gouge was made by PAC-NORs 60 degree cutting tool as part of the barrel making process. The only other possibilty would be the bore reamer, (pre-rifling). Now if the gouge was part of the blank as received by PAC-NOR, it should have been culled. The barrels are borescoped from end to end twice at different operations during the barrel making process by two different inspectors who know what to look for. For both of them to miss a gouge visible to the naked eye is possible, but I doubt it. And if so, I woud expect them to replace it, which I know they would if they felt it was their fault. I think they are the experts who know how to diagnose such a problem.

PAC-NOR, and any other barrel maker, gets put in a hard spot in a case like this. PAC-NOR really does care a great deal about the quality of the barrels they put out. They also care a great deal about their customer's satisfaction. The hard spot is, should they replace a good barrel that was neglected and installed incorrectly? I am not making any direct accusations here since I do not have the rifle mentioned in my hands. But you get the point. When does a company draw the line on what they warrant and what must be let go? The danger is that if you do not warrant a product that is damaged outside of the shop, you run the risk of the frustrated customer mouthing off with illegitimate complaints. I think there are more to the bad experiences than is being said. The barrel blank is only part of the complete rifle. The bigger challenge is to find a gunsmith who knows how to put it on correctly, and a shooter who knows how care for the rifle he has. The quarterback always gets the praise or the blame.
It is simply my desire for things to be fair and well understood in this public forum. I can pick and choose my battles. I probably shouldn't have jumped into this one, but it seemed a bit unbalanced. There are always two sides.

Forgot to add that the "bulge" in the barrel is a result of the steady rest on the carriage of the CNC contouring lathe. It has nothing to do with the bore. It is only a few thousanths larger and easily removed as stated by other gunsmiths. The barrels are contoured on centers. The stabilizer cannot grasp the barrel until the cutting tool has traveled about 2" from the muzzle. Not a big deal.

John,
Al said you talked to him, so you know the story straight from him. Dont you think Pac-nor should have at least replaced the barrel that split and opened up his hand?

"BULGE"? Just what the hell would a good barrel maker do to his barrels to leave a "BULGE" on the end. How in the hell can he sleep leaving something like that on the barrel. Furthermore, I don't crown using a piloted tool. The only pilot in that barrel was the chamber reamer. I single point all my crowns and do not put a lathe center in the bore. The spots on the barrel were not rust. They were inclusions of some type in the base metal. I simply did not notice them; in fact they were only noticed by the customer after he put inletting black on the barrel for inletting. I believe they were noticed by his son after he wiped the stuff off and this stuff made them stand out. I understand there can be problems with a product when obtaining it from an outside source,ie his steel supplier, what I cannot fathom is his refusal to even consider a refund. I merely forwarded my client's request for no more Pac-Nor barrels. This business practice leads me to believe there is more than one bad barrel that was shipped out and he is trying to cover it up. NO RUST on the barrel, NO PILOTED CROWNING CUTTER. There ain't no way that I could have put a gouge in that barrel.

I have bought tons of steel. We unloaded up to twenty truck loads a day and I have also bought many exotic alloys including vacumn melted. I have toured most of the mills in the USA including Carpenter. But I don't know everything by a long shot.

Inclusions or stress corrosion can show up later in the finished product. As a buyer I was up against the entire plant on keeping the machinery going including customer service. There was always a lot of rejected metal. Rejections happened every week and back it went. We sampled much of the SS in our lab but all we got from that work was an idea of what the grain size was and what temper ranges were best. That was worth it I suppose but the modern manufacturing systems like ISO that key on making something right in the first place is how to get the best metal.

I feel sorry for some small company who is at the mercy of the big mills and then maybe distributors that muddy the water as well.

My suggestion is that everything be certified by modern QA proceedures.

TSJ,

I talked to AL. He seemed upset as one could imagine. The barrel was a 7mm STW I believe, with a barrel diameter of .865" around the chamber, correct? It was a single shot rotary breech pistol. I asked him if he sent the barrel in to be inspected. He wouldn't send it in for them to look at. I know of no company, except for Dillon, who sends out replecement items without the ability to inspect what needs to be replaced. I offered my services as a middle man to handle the barrel so he didn't loose it. I never heard back from him. It was about 5 years ago or so, and I imagine he is tring to look forward in life.

John,
Al said when he gets around to it he'll send you a piece of the barrel, but not the whole thing, as then he could easyly be left with nothing if it was "lost" in the mail.

Apparently, Pac-Nor has received the barrel and posted a reply: PacNor response

George

I have gotten excellent results with both Pac-Nor and LW barrels. Sometimes you have to wait while LW receives barrels from Deutschland, but in a custom rifle project, what's the rush? As I understand it, LW barrels have a lower sulfur content and therefore are more resistant to throat erosion, but I am no metallurgist so perhaps someone else can shed some more light on this.

My most recent LW project is a 6.5 mm that shot a 5/8" group at 200 yards before I even broke in the barrel. To be honest I haven't really broken in the barrel - that load shot so well that I just went hunting. At the same time, I have a pac-nor barrel that shoots 3 shots touching at 100 yards.

One thing that is important to keep in mind is that no barrel maker makes his product from scratch. All of them buy steel from a steel mill. If the steel has a defect, no amount of magic by the barrel maker can make it right - kind of like trying to bake a cake with sand instead of flour. So if a barrel turns out bad, it is not necessarily the fault of the barrel maker, although of course I would expect him to warrant his product.

Several years ago a gentleman experienced a split barrel on an A-Square rifle. The barrel split about halfway down the barrel, but the action was unharmed and the case extracted fine. The load was not over-pressure. Instead, there was a defect in the steel of the barrel which did not make itself apparent until the rifle had been fired repeatedly. A2 replaced the barrel for the customer and all was well.

I guess what this alll really boils down to is what kind of customer relations does PacNor have in their business dealings. I resent being stonewalled on this request mostly because it was a request from my client to be forwarded to the company. I did not inspect the barrel when I got it from him and only packed it up and shipped it to them as I was instructed to do. I am sure it may have had some rust on the outside as swell as the chamber as Chris stated, this was not the issue. The client stated he thought it had inclusions and cracks in it and wanted it sent back for a refund. Do't shoot the messenger? My problem lies in the fact that PacNor would not stand up to a simple request for a refund.

This is pretty neat stuff

http://www.pac-nor.com/extruder/


I hate all of this has happened though.

"Come on people now smile on your brother........everybody in the gun world should love one another .... wright now "