Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters Query for borescope guys.

Mostly anecdotal 'evidence' but over the years, I've come to the opinion that hammer forged sporting weight rifle barrels, when properly bedded on a decent action seem to shoot above average, require less cleaning, and maintain lower velocity spreads...clean to dirty. Just my half baked opinion. Winchester started way back with the post 64 push feeds, Tikka, Zastava, Sauer etc.
I was curious, do you guys with borescopes see any visible differences between hammer forged, button rifled, cut rifled? Do you think it makes much difference?

With factory barrels, if the chamber and throat are in there straight...they can shoot very well.

But with equal good chambers, I'll take a hammer forged 'vintage' Big Green over anything from Savage, etc. -Al

I thought Savage barrels were button rifled.

Within Remington barrels I've found the stainless ones to be smoother, but I don't have a large enough sample size to make a projection.

I think bad barrels can be produced by any method if you try hard enough.

But as a rule, those that cut rifle barrels take better care because the process is more expensive from the get-go.

A good barrel is a good barrel.

Whoa, don't want this to turn argumentive, but even without a borescope, surely you have seen or felt either with a lap or a tight dry patch, boring toolmarks and cutter chatter or waves on the pre 64 cut rifled barrels? As a matter of fact I have measured bore slugs with different groove depths...which is an accuracy disaster. That's with pre 64, but modern cut rifle bbl makers do MUCH better I'm sure, but old mass produced cut rifling was no guarantee of accuracy. OTOH, I have never seen or heard of a bad barrel on the Win. model 54's or Rem. 1917's and their civilian children, the 30 Expresses.

Like I said, you can turn out bad barrels with any method. But back in pre-64, cut rifling was still economically competitive, or at least they hadn't made the investment in other technologies to phase it out yet.

Today nobody would even look twice at installing cut rifling machinery if they wanted to make lots of barrels cheap. On the other hand, if someone was interested in making great barrels in lots of different configurations, the economics are a little different.

So, I don't think there is an argument.

If hammer-forged was all that, why aren't they setting benchrest records? Cut-rifled barrels are. Cut-rifled barrels of today have a very "machined" look about them under borescope while button and hammer forged seem a little more rough.

I took the O.P. to be talking about factory barrels. -Al

OK, That's what I was wondering...how they compared by visual magnified inspection, and you say they appear to have more imperfections?

I don't know anything about hammer forging other than YouTube video's which don't treat the subject in any depth, but I'll throw out another half baked opinion. I'd guess that heavy contoured target barrels that are hammer forged are non existent for one main reason..... it can't be easy to hammer a 1 inch plus piece of steel down onto say a 6mm mandrell. Think of the wall thickness, think of the additional stresses involved on the forming machine, above and beyond a sporter contour.
Anschutz is pretty close mouthed about their barrel making tech, they do provide some pretty heavy contours, but for years rumors suggest that they use a unique process of rolling the barrels onto a mandrel under extreme pressure. True or not, who knows, but it would explain how they achieve the legendary choked bore.
As usual, more questions than answers.

flintlocke,

Yes, the very best barrels are still made by cut-rifling.

But the best mass-produced barrels these days are often made by hammer-forging. The technique has improved considerably since WWII, and among others I would rate the present Ruger and Sako/Tikka barrels among the very best mass-produced made for factory rifles. Both are hammer-forged in the same factory--which when I visited it in 2015 (along with several other gun writers) was still in Riihimaki, Finland. Haven't heard about it being moved since.

That said, the head of production at Ruger told me around a decade ago that even hammer-forging can improve with experience. Ruger bought hammer-forging equipment around 1990 (when Bill was still in charge) and there was an immediate improvement in consistency over the barrels they bought from outside sources before then. But Ruger barrels have continued to improve since then--one reason the often criticized Americans shoot so well. In fact in a bore-scope they look just as good as many "custom" hand-lapped barrels.

Thanks for the answer, JB, I'm not just being a cheapskate by not indulging in a borescope...but in reviewing the pedigree of my rifles, I find the newest keeper rifle I own is 58 years old, and it goes downhill after that...to actually know what those bores would look like? It would be an invitation to profound depression, alcoholism...it's better not to know.

Yep! One of the things I've often mentioned in the articles I've done on borescopes over the years if how they cannot help predict how a particular barrel will shoot.

Charlie Sisk has barreled more rifles for me than any other gunsmith, and tends to use one particular brand of barrel. They are button-rifled and hand-lapped to meticulous standards--which I know due to knowing the barrel-maker and visiting his shop. But Charlie also uses them because they're generally available, at least far more so than other brands he used--but the barrel-maker will also replace one if it turns out to be one of those mystery barrels that look (and measure) great, but simply will not shoot as well as Charlie's customers like.

John, I've had a lot of barrels from that barrel maker.

Good shootin' -Al

A friend of mine has some sort of super-duper Euro prone rifle in 6mm Something. He doesn't hold the range record at 600 yds, but he has tied it non-sanctioned competitions. The rifle has a hammer forged barrel on it. Now whether or not those barrels could compete in BR, I don't know. I doubt it. But it sure does shoot nice for a position gun. I'm sure it will do 1/2 MOA or/and better. It's at least the 2nd best barrel/shooter combination to ever hit that range.


Read a great article about the Ruger HF barrels. This is going back at least 10 years. The guy somehow got hold of some blanks and chambered and fit them. They shot decent, like, IIRC, 3/4-7/8" for 10 shots. Always wanted to get hold of a Ruger blank and have it done into an AR barrel. I asked Ruger; they refused to sell me any.

I have owned a Hawkeye borescope for many years and have probably barreled well over 100 rifles since I started in the 80's. Many of these, though later "talked out of", were for my own personal use. I really bought the scope to look for flaws or problems in the barrels of rifles I worked on. I've probably had the scope itself for over 20 years now.
One of the first things I noticed was just how not clean a previously believed to be clean barrel can be. It always amazed me how guys would swear by some cleaner or method to others and how quickly they would fade away when I asked them what kind of borescope they owned.
The next thing I came to realize was that you cannot simply look into a bore and know whether or not it will shoot one ragged hole at 100 yards. Some barrels that looked "perfect" were unable to group as well as those with light tool marks. Likewise, a perfectly flawless bore may or can foul twice as bad {or as fast} as one showing little imperfections or tool marks.
One thing not mentioned here regarding the different rifling methods is the stress imparted on the barrel. Single point cut rifling causes the least. Button rifling, which is like a snake swallowing an egg certainly imparts some and cold hammer forged has to render the most stress. Modern practices can remove most of it.
The various rifling methods, just like the rifling configuration itself can all produce a perfect shooting rifle. Make no mistake, there is no one way to cut rifling and there is no clear standout type of rifling that is enough of an advantage over any of the others. If it was, that would be all you could buy.
Slight tooling marks won't prevent a barrel from shooting one ragged hole at 100, just as a perfectly flawless hand lapped bore is no guarantee it will do the same. 5R or polygonal doesn't clean any easier or last any longer, although it can certainly outsell conventional rifling and no alloy or shooting method will prevent a hot caliber from burning out the throat.

You just stop with all that TRUTH nonsense... lol

I think we are all on the same page here.

msinc...doing a little googling on metal manufacturing and specifically cold hammer forging ... several websites , listing the pros and cons specifically state that grain alignment makes for a uniform dimension low stress workpiece. At a lower level of reasoning, anybody that has completed any welding training ...has had it drummed into them that peening relieves stress in welds. This is inarguable.
It's a bold statement to claim that cold hammer processes impart stress.

I kinda suspected you might--but good to know for sure!

John

For anybody that would like more info on the subject, check out Erik Cortina's podcast interview with Mr. Greene from Bartlein barrels.

I do know that the Sako/Tikka stress-relieves their excellent hammer-forged barrels at the factory in Finland, due to having visited it and asking that specific question.

At least one guy who sounds knowledgeable over on Accurate Shooter claims Sako stress relieves after the contouring machining....who knows.
Well we have just scratched the surface here with our discussion, for every point there is a counter point, this discussion has gone on for years, hotly at times, on AS, with no conclusion. I did learn a several things....one, I didn't know that many if not most HF barrels have the chamber formed in the same process...I did not know that out of the box Sako TRG's could compete in the 1's and 2's in BR....and on and on. Some rabbit holes have no bottom.

Remington's hammer forged barrels have a partial chamber formed around the carbide mandrel used in the process. The chamber/neck/throat are then finished with a pull-through style reamer. The receiver is on the barrel during this process and the bolt body held against the back of the reamer. When the bolt drops, that's the headspace. Firing pin assy then goes in the bolt and the barrelled action heads down the line to the next stop.

Good shootin' -Al