Has anybody used these?

Brownells pillars

I'm wondering if they are a drop in fit, or should I just make my own from some ss tubing that we have an abundance of where I work. The angled front piece has me worried...if these require much fitting, I'll just grind my own. If they are a drop in, (and the aluminum will hold up) it is $12 well spent!

I have a new rifle on order (blued/walnut M77MKII obviously) and I figure a piller bedding job will be first on the list of projects to tinker with it...

I made mine from steel hydraulic tubing. It was free, and worked great.

Most tubing has a pretty thin wall that won’t give you much bearing surface, doesn’t it?

Use the 5000psi stuff. It looks just like the Brownells offering but it's steel.

Notice the other thing common to most commercially made pillars... they are knurled on the outside to aid the epoxy in sticking to them by providing a crosshatched surface

For the usual price of $15-20 for premade pillars I don't see the savings in making your own.

AllanD

I always wondered what I was going to do with all those pieces of gun barrels I've cut off over the years, and so I use them to make pillars, and since I have drawers full of them, I have been thinking lately of throwing them at the big brown delivery trucks that speed up and down the road.

quote:

Originally posted by Allan DeGroot:
Notice the other thing common to most commercially made pillars... they are knurled on the outside to aid the epoxy in sticking to them by providing a crosshatched surface

For the usual price of $15-20 for premade pillars I don't see the savings in making your own.

AllanD

AllanD,

I make my own because I got tired of having to square up the ones you buy and then cut them to proper length... and its hard to find them in stainless steel sometimes.

The ones you buy are not knurled, they have grooves turned into them. I knurl and groove the ones I make, and a 12 inch piece of â…†stainless round stock is pretty cheap.

My 2 concerns in no particular order are:

First, the Brownells units are aluminum. I'm not fond of aluminum under moderate torque. Steel would be better, stainless steel much better.

Second, machining them by hand would be interesting. I do have access to a small lathe, but am not very good with it. Cupping/dishing one end for the screw head to make good contact would be trial and error, and the angles cut for the front pillar would have to be done by hand with a file. Tedious, for sure, but I think I can get that done.

In a perfect world the Brownells pillar I linked to would be stainless steel and perfect, but I know better. In a perfecet world I owuld go throw some $$$ at a gunsmith and it would come back perfect, but if I had that $$$ laying around I would not be buying a factory Ruger! Besides, this is just the sort of project I enjoy doing myself!

How would brass hold up? I have a bunch of it that I could drill and turn to size...and it is easy to work...

quote:

Originally posted by CDH:
How would brass hold up? I have a bunch of it that I could drill and turn to size...and it is easy to work...

Yes it will work. All it has to do is be less compressible than the stock material...

Hell, if I limited myself to only doing things on my lathe I was good at the sucker would never get used! If you have the skill to turn and bore brass why wouldn’t you have the skill to do the same with aluminum or steel?

Let me get this right, you’re worried about aluminum not being strong enough so you’re gonna use brass? What am I missing here? Not that brass wouldn’t work, but 6061 aluminum is a hell of allot stronger and less compressible than brass is. You can buy 6061 T6 aluminum round stock for less than $2.00 a pound and its one of the easiest materials to machine you can find.

All the aluminum I have ever turned was much softer than the brass I have used. I'm not a metallurgist...quote t-xyz all you want and it means the same to me. I know stainless and carbon steel alloys a bit from dabbling in knife making and working in an industry that uses a lot of tubing and bolts...but the only aluminum we use is cast enclosures for electrical parts. That crap is much softer than brass and distorts easily under screw pressure.

Oh, I deal with a few beverage containers too. They're also very soft.

Any of the 60 or 70 series aluminum is extremely tough stuff. M16 receivers are made from that material, and most all of the aluminum pillars, aluminum scope bases, scope rings, etc. you see for sale are made from the same stuff. It’s REALLY tough, but easily machined as it doesn’t tend to tear like brass or other soft metals.

Just as an added note...a â…â€x12 inch long round piece of stainless steel or 6061 aluminum cost me about $2 bucks. I can easily get four pairs of pillars out of that so you do the math.

The pillars were discussed some time ago and a good tip then that I have tried and like is to go to Lowes in the light department and get some of those steel tubes for lamps with the external threads. They are the perfect size and all you do is cut to fit. The threads work great when glassing them in place.
Also real cheap.

As they say...Necessity is mother of invention!

I love roaming through harware stores looking for that “thing.†You know, the one that when you see it you say: Ah-Ha...that will work perfect for........?

Rick, you and I are kindred spirits. I do the same thing. And I love flea markets, never know what goodie I might find.

CDH, the 60xx and 70xx aluminums are wrought which means basically that they have been rolled and stretched and heated and rolled until the grain structure is more or less uniform and they are toughened and heat treated to a known spec.
The cast Al you mentioned will be soft with unorganized grain structure and voids and a lot of silicon which takes up space and takes away from strength.
I would be like comparing bowling ball to a sponge, they are both plastic, but totally different structures.

Now that we’ve hashed over all the attributes of steel, aluminum and brass...back to CDH’s original question as the the drop-in nature of the Brownell’s pillars. If they are anything like all the radiused types sold for round bottomed receivers I would say that they will require some fitting in order to perfectly match an individual rifle.

Many thanks guys! Always something new to learn, even from simple questions like this...