- We produce rifled barrels up to 44” long.
- Straight octagon barrels can be made to any length in the range of 20” to 44”.
- Smooth bore barrels can be made to 46”.
- Bore sizes are as follows: .36, .40, .45, .50, .54, .58, .62, RIFLED, plus 16ga(.660”), .690”, 12ga(.728”), .750”and 10ga(.775”) in smooth bore only. Note that any bore size we make can be left smooth. 54cal, 58cal and 62cal equate to 28ga, 24ga and 20ga.
- Octagonal to round barrels are made both in smooth bore and rifled.
- Machining of our barrels. The most desirable form of machining is to eliminate all forms of stress during the machining process. This means little or no generation of HEAT and no COMPACTION of the steel. We have achieved this on all fronts by precision drilling, reaming with long bore reamers, single point CUT rifling and during the machining of the flats on the exterior. The choice in cutters we use for machining the flats carry the heat away in the chips that are formed and the barrel never gets more than warm to the touch. With cut rifling, because we are cutting the material away and not embossing the rifling in with a carbide button, we have eliminated stress due to compaction of the steel. History has shown that the process we use in our bore work is still the chosen method to predictable be able to manufacture a PRECISION barrel. I will refer to the big names in, “High Power”, modern barrel manufactures whom as far as I know most if not all use CUT rifling to rifle their barrels to eliminate stress and as a farther note, we like them, do not introduce anything mechanical into our barrel bores after precision drilling , reaming and rifling. The high power guys will do some hand honing/lapping, itself a form of the gentle cutting away, THUS NO STRESS, of the microscopic tooling marks left by the reaming process to eliminate copper build up left by modern jacketed bullets. This is not a need for worry in a muzzleloader barrel.
- All barrels, with very few exceptions, come with a fitted breech plug that is machined on and to the barrel, is tapered from top to bottom to allow for easier inletting into the stock and witnessed marked on the bottom of the barrel. (straight octagonal barrels do not come plugged)
- All muzzles are crowned.
- There are many different barrel configurations, to many for us to list all. Patterns can be shortened or lengthened, breech sizes can be increased or decreased outside of our standard dimensions to create a one off unique size as long as it allows a safe barrel per bore size.
- We cut round bottom rifling as a standard, however we will cut flat bottom on request at NO EXTRA costs.
All breech plugs are machined from bar stock while attached to the barrel. You will see in the photo to the left that the tang of the plug has some drop towards the rear machined into it. This allows for less bending to match the curvature of the wrist of the stock. In the right photo you see a top and bottom view of the breech plugs. Note how the bolster of the plug has a witness mark is narrower than the bottom flat. This is machined deliberately to allow for a better fit when inletting into the stock.
