Considering some version of lapping a Lee Enfield barrel?

[Rick]

Savage did 2 things that no one else did:

1. They straightened their barrels, still do, others did this too.

2. They lapped the barrels with an automated lapping machine, this is unique to Savage in that era.

The comment about Savage automatically lapping their barrels in a thread about 15 years ago leads me to mention this while wondering how they did it. Also curious if Long Branch did anything to the interior of their barrels after the drilling/reaming/rifling process was completed.

This personal experience might have some value for those considering whether there are potential gains to be made by lapping their Lee Enfield's barrel. Whether doing so by some version of 'hand lapping' or fire lapping.

In 2019 I became the 'ops manager' for a friend attempting to resurrect Montana Rifle Company after it was mis-managed into insolvency. MRC (the name at least) is in the process of being resurrected yet again by another company, but that is a different effort with nothing but the blueprints for the MRC bolt action. None of the original CNC machines or barrel making equipment.

MRC was briefly purchased and owned by Remington for the purpose of using MRC's century old Springfield Armoury surplus Pratt & Whitney gun drills to provide them with barrels for their AR-15 rifles. MRC was allowed to continue building barrels for their MRC bolt action boutique hunting rifles. All those barrels, whether intended for the Remington/Bushmaster AR-15s or for MRC's dangerous game hunting rifles were "hand lapped".

MRC's barrels from when Brian Sipe began the company until it's insolvency always had a reputation for accuracy. They were always "hand lapped" before being shipped to customers.

After, I tracked down some former barrel shop employees to begin the process of getting MRC back into operation, I scratched my head at how they had supposedly hand lapped each barrel while producing tens of thousands of barrels in the facility. I had carefully and painstakingly hand lapped two of my rifle's barrels practically one pass at a time using a poured lead lap with a stop at the end of the barrel to prevent the lap exiting the muzzle and a similar stop to keep the lap away from the ball seat.

For relevancy here, the very accurate 1950 Long Branch I did this with in hopes of even better accuracy and less trouble with cast lead bullets for practice and CBA military rifle competition had detectable differences in internal diameters (probably extremely minor differences only detectable by pushing a small cast lap through the length of the barrel). After I was finished lapping to the point of uniform force required to pull/push a lap the length of the barrel, I stopped. The bore of the rifle was more shiny, the bore diameter had only increased one .0005-" pin gauge - but I could still see very visible reamer and rifling marks. The results were slightly positive for both grouping of my best handloaded jacketed bullets and cast bullets were also significantly much easier to work with afterwards (this was before powder coating bullets was discovered).

Would I do it again? Considering that making and using the lap is easy, but it's also easy to be careless with the lapping and do more harm than good, probably not.

I was lapping what was already a well above average grouping new LE barrel, and few LE shooters are in my category of firing far more cast bullets down their rifle's barrels than they do handloaded jacketed. The grouping improvement I got for 10 round groups with jacketed bullets at 400 yards that I used as my test criteria probably wasn't worth the risk and the effort from what I started with. For a rifle with a barrel that has some degree of groddiness that I hoped to improve the grouping ability of, then I would do it again.

The MRC former employees, after we had gotten them on board as employees for the project, showed us what was considered "hand lapping" when manufacturing barrels for Remington AR-15s and MRC hunting rifles. The barrel blanks after drilling, reaming, and button rifling were clamped in fixtures about ten at a time. The employees then used a stout, short cleaning rod that had a long two-handed grip at one end and a worn barrel brush on the other heavily loaded with coarse steel wool.

The employees at the 'hand lapping' stations then went at the barrels with gusto, until at some point the company's standards on what the inside of the barrel should look like and .0005-" pin gauges told them was meeting company standards. This was circa 2019; Remingon had fled the AR-15 market in fear by then and Brian Sipe had bought MRC back from them at pennies on the dollar for what they purchased it from him. MRC rifles had a reputation for better than average accuracy as hunting rifles, apparently because they were all supposedly hand-lapped.

Like I assume most would be, I was aghast at this "hand lapping" process of going at drilled and rifled barrel blanks with coarse steel wool AFTER the barrel had been button rifled. Steel wool in any rifle barrel was a mortal sin in my life at that point, and I was watching these men go at it like an eight hour long crossfit exercise session... no overweight guys in that bunch. (Lots of complaints about tendonitis, however.)

After watching this, out of curiosity one day after work I did an experiment to see how much use/abuse of steel wool in a rifle barrel it would take to create some degree of what could be considered damage: visual rounding the top corners of the grooves/lands or increases in bore dimensions.

I took a scrap barrel (barrel had slipped during button rifling and had a small section in the middle where the lands/grooves were straight instead of the twist continuing), pin gauged it, examined the rifling, chatter and reamer marks with a borescope, and then copied the employees by going to town on the barrel with their coarse steel wool on a two handed cleaning rod.

It took a LONG time and a LOT of passes with that steel wool before the pin gauges showed me a .001" increase in bore diameter. Visually, I couldn't see any noticeable changes in the appearance of the top corners of the lands/grooves as I expected and was looking for. And... the reamer/button rifling marks were still very visible.

I suppose the only lesson learned is I no longer fear the idea of using a finer grade of steel wool to clean or rehabilitate a rifle barrel when the usual preferred methods aren't getting the job done.

Custom barrel makers like Lilja (who won't disclose his method) and McGowen (also in Kalispell MT and who also lap using the same method as MRC) also advertise that their rifles are 'carefully hand lapped' just as MRC said.

Lilja and McGowen are accepted as producing and selling very accurate barrels. Given that their barrels are made on far more modern gun drills and robotic cells than MRC's century old Pratt & Whitney drills and reamers dating back to WWI, if they're also lapping their barrels at some point in the manufacturing process rather than just inspecting and air gauging after the rifling is complete, there must be some benefit to lapping or they wouldn't be wasting production time doing it.

As far as fire lapping goes, I remember when that was the rage in National Match but I never felt any need at the time to mess around with it. I think there are justified concerns about firing abrasive loaded projectiles down a rifle barrel, versus careful controlled passes with a lead lap the length of the barrel. But when I compare a coarse steel wool coated bore brush rammed back and forth through a barrel blank by a sweating, muscular labourer on the barrel shop floor to fire lapping... I wonder just how much potentially worse fire lapping can be. (Ignoring the fact that fire lapping involves a barrel where the chamber has already been cut, whereas the coarse steel wool treatment involves just the finished barrel blank).

Lilja and a few other custom barrel makers for the precision rifle crowd out there say that you can lap a barrel TOO smooth - but I haven't seen any of them elaborate on what point a barrel is lapped too smooth.

In summary based on my brief experience in the rifle barrel manufacturing business, if I had a rough Lee Enfield barrel that I felt was lacking in grouping ability, I wouldn't hesitate to use some steel wool with a bore guide at the breech and a stop at the muzzle to prevent the steel wool from exiting the muzzle. Pin gauges in graduations of .0005" +/- (your choice) are relatively inexpensive on Amazon to have some control over your progress if you choose lapping.

Also wouldn't hesitate now to use steel wool to deal with leading or other fouling that other methods would not remove in a reasonable amount of time and effort.

[Surpmil]

That was very interesting reading, thank you.

Who can forget the infamous steel "gauze" to be used as a last resort on service barrels? It would never reach the inside corners of the lands, but quite a different standard was involved in all respects of course.

And then there's Motty Paste and similiar preparations. I had some on my fingers the other week and it's pretty abrasive alright.

Steel wool is a mass of fine, sharp, cutting or scraping edges and considering the limitation of how much could be wound around a barrel brush and pushed in a barrel, how great could the pressure be on the strands? Tangential, but anyone who's bought Bulldog brand will have noticed the decline in quality and consistency since it began to be made off-shore.

The corporate chaos you describe is rather sad, but of course almost the norm now in North America. So much is lost whenever such disruptions occur, worst of all in "institutional memory" and skilled workers.

Chrome-moly steel is pretty tough stuff...

[Sapper740]

Interesting discussion and I'm following it very closely. This is all a little new to me but previously if anyone told me to push some steel wool down my barrel I would have thought they were off their rocker. Not now. For those simply attempting to remove leading from their barrels, would brass wool be sufficiently abrasive to do the job and steel wool left for the job of lapping the toughest crud and tool marks from a barrel?

[Rick]

That was very interesting reading, thank you.

Who can forget the infamous steel "gauze" to be used as a last resort on service barrels? It would never reach the inside corners of the lands, but quite a different standard was involved in all respects of course.

I'm not historically minded; mostly shooty-minded, although I appreciate the history after 30 years of being one of The Queen's Uniformed Lawn Darts at the back end behind a pointy bayonet. If my vague memories of enjoying the conversations here are correct, the steel gauze was only allowed to be used (theoretically, eyeballs can't be everywhere...) with the approval of a senior NCO or the platoon subby or something similar? With what pull throughs embedded with assorted crap can do to the crown et al, it leaves me curious to what the fears regarding the steel gauze were all about? Of course, steel gauze and steel wool are probably different in abrasive properties?

Steel wool is a mass of fine, sharp, cutting or scraping edges and considering the limitation of how much could be wound around a barrel brush and pushed in a barrel, how great could the pressure be on the strands? Tangential, but anyone who's bought Bulldog brand will have noticed the decline in quality and consistency since it began to be made off-shore.

I don't use enough steel wool to have purchased any new stuff in the last twenty years or so; I have three or three boxes of three grades of steel wool still sitting here. So I don't know about changes in the steel wool, but Brian Sipe/Montana Rifle Company have been "hand lapping" all the barrels they made since the 1990's with steel wool.

Obviously, steel wool isn't going to get to the bottoms of the grooves much - certainly not into the corners. But those workers really wound a lot of steel wool around those bore brushes and it was a two armed effort for them to drive those cleaning rods back and forth in the barrel blanks. I tried replicating that in the curiosity test I conducted on that barrel blank - the effort was sufficient that it would qualify as being called 'exercise'.

The corporate chaos you describe is rather sad, but of course almost the norm now in North America. So much is lost whenever such disruptions occur, worst of all in in "institutional memory" and skilled workers.

We walked into MRC just a bit over a week after the group of owners called it quits - it looked like everybody had gone home at the end of the Friday shift and forgot to come back the next Monday... lunches and food still in the fridge, open files laying on desks, notes of callbacks to be made, unopened mail, unfinished work in the CNC machines that were shut down in mid operation as though to be restarted the next shift, verniers and micrometers on work tables beside the CNC machine control panels, etc.

In my few days of rooting around through everything in management offices to try and figure out how the heck I started the process of trying to get it back on its feet at least making barrel blanks, the one thing that really stuck out to me is that QC/QA were absolutely Delta Sierra.

There were letters from one owner of one of their Africa professional rifles in .458 Lott, purchased for his dream bucket list trip to go on Safari in Africa. He had returned his rifle to them SEVEN TIMES and it still wasn't working properly - the last letter was not pleasant and it was him informing them that he was about to fly out on his trip and his professional hunter would be supplying him with the rifle for his Cape Buffalo and lion hunt. For the price of that rifle, after the first return had failed to solve the problem, I would have flown him to Kalispell, paid for his hotel, and invited him to be present while the lead gunsmith in the shop sorted out the problem and then took him to the range to confirm it was fixed.

At the same time, their idea of dealing with mould slump in their receiver castings wasn't to send those receivers back to the company who cast them to be replaced - instead they put workers busy attempting to push the receiver blanks straight enough that they could load them into the Haas CNC machines' tombstones so the milling operations could be carried out. And if THAT managed to turn out a usable receiver, then they had to ship the finished receivers to another company back east to be re-heat treated/annealed... which didn't always result in a usable receiver.

Who thinks like that? The owners at the end were a bunch of wealthy guys mostly from California I think, some successful trap shooters, but one would think they had some basic business sense rather than just happy with the idea of a boutique business where they could go to the SHOT show and have business cards with their name and 'Montana Rifle Company' on them.

Anyways, that's a good part of what killed whatever MRC was back when it was winning Rifle Of The Year awards and stuff like that (if you believe there's no industry politics in stuff like that).

Chrome-moly steel is pretty tough stuff...

Well, it's certainly tough enough that muscular scrubbing with coarse steel wool takes a while to have a measurable affect on it.

[Rick]

Interesting discussion and I'm following it very closely. This is all a little new to me but previously if anyone told me to push some steel wool down my barrel I would have thought they were off their rocker. Not now.

I was in the 'senior citizen pensioner' category when I first saw them "hand lapping" like that with steel wool; I'd been reloading and competitive rifle shooting since the early 1970's. Everything I had heard and read to that point said that only a fool would put steel wool in one of their barrels. Another childhood/'everybody knows' myth dies a sudden and unexpected death...

For those still fearful of steel wool, I get it. So try a safe experiment for yourself: grab a piece of 3/8" drill rod and mic an area of the rod. Then grab a handful of steel wool in a leather glove and go to town on the exterior of the rod with your bunch of steel wool. See how long it takes you to remove a thou from the diameter.

For those simply attempting to remove leading from their barrels, would brass wool be sufficiently abrasive to do the job and steel wool left for the job of lapping the toughest crud and tool marks from a barrel?

Ah yes, the ol' strands of copper/brass Choreboy cleaning pad trick. That and firing cream of wheat through the barrel... done that often, along with the Lewis Lead Remover with its screens.

Powder coating bullets along with finally realizing that the most important fit when using cast bullets is a tight fit into the ball seat/leade has eliminated about 95% of my leading issues. Since working at MRC, when I do get leading now, if a bit of patience and the right cleaning solutions doesn't remove it, I'm not going to bother with the softer copper/brass scrubbing pad strands - I'm going straight to medium grade steel wool.

After what I saw at MRC and my experiment, I don't think I'm going to live long enough to do enough bore scrubbing with steel wool to make a minutiae of difference to the interior of a barrel. (but I'm also going to remember that steel wool isn't going to remove lead it doesn't touch i.e. leading/crud in the bottom corners of the rifling.)

As far as barrel corrosion and crude along with tool marks, I think I posted that after a lot of effort and scrubbing with coarse steel wool, I'd only managed to remove enough metal to increase the bore diameter .001" - and the tool marks were still very, very visible in that barrel.

Lapping can obviously have positive affects on barrels, whether to quickly remove tiny microscopic manufacturing burrs on edges (which shooting would eventually remove anyways) or to smooth out the edges of corrosion and pitting in the barrel. But attempting to remove crud and corrosion with steel wool? Thinking of the amount of time it would take to do that is painful to consider.

I have helped others improve really crappy antique barrels by pouring a lead lap and then starting with the coarsest abrasives and working their way up to the finer grits; those episodes took me pretty much a day of patient careful work at a vise at a bench. Maybe gunsmiths can rescue a barrel in bad shape much faster than a nervous guy like me who's worried about harming the barrel can.

But whatever effort it takes, a lead lap is going to do a much faster and more consistent job than a wad of steel wool wrapped around a worn out cleaning brush and dragged back and forth through the bore. Additionally, using a lead lap, pulling it back and forth through the bore tells you whether or not there are tight and loose spots in the bore and where they are so you can use your lead swage to eventually even everything out so that it is far more consistent.

I have zero experience with fire lapping, so I can't offer any personal experience regarding going that route.

[Eaglelord17]

Vickery's gunsmithing book from the 30s details how to lap a barrel after reaming it, I can't recall off hand if he did it before or after rifling the bore. Mind you I think he was doing it more as a finishing process to ensure uniformity in the barrel due to the constraints of the manufacturing technology of that era, as opposed to attempting to gain much in accuracy.

From what I have been reading we are basically at the point where manufacturers don't even need to send a reamer down the barrel anymore, sometimes modern gun drilling is accurate enough to go straight to rifling.

Personally I don't buy into the idea of firelapping myself. Too many uncontrolled variables in there for my liking. If I was to lap a bore it would be a lead lap like you describe. As I slowly get myself set up to manufacture barrels (likely several years away with my personal time and budget constraints), that will be something I suspect I will be playing with at some point.

[Surpmil]

We walked into MRC just a bit over a week after the group of owners called it quits - it looked like everybody had gone home at the end of the Friday shift and forgot to come back the next Monday... lunches and food still in the fridge, open files laying on desks, notes of callbacks to be made, unopened mail, unfinished work in the CNC machines that were shut down in mid operation as though to be restarted the next shift, verniers and micrometers on work tables beside the CNC machine control panels, etc.

In my few days of rooting around through everything in management offices to try and figure out how the heck I started the process of trying to get it back on its feet at least making barrel blanks, the one thing that really stuck out to me is that QC/QA were absolutely Delta Sierra.

There were letters from one owner of one of their Africa professional rifles in .458 Lott, purchased for his dream bucket list trip to go on Safari in Africa. He had returned his rifle to them SEVEN TIMES and it still wasn't working properly - the last letter was not pleasant and it was him informing them that he was about to fly out on his trip and his professional hunter would be supplying him with the rifle for his Cape Buffalo and lion hunt. For the price of that rifle, after the first return had failed to solve the problem, I would have flown him to Kalispell, paid for his hotel, and invited him to be present while the lead gunsmith in the shop sorted out the problem and then took him to the range to confirm it was fixed.

At the same time, their idea of dealing with mould slump in their receiver castings wasn't to send those receivers back to the company who cast them to be replaced - instead they put workers busy attempting to push the receiver blanks straight enough that they could load them into the Haas CNC machines' tombstones so the milling operations could be carried out. And if THAT managed to turn out a usable receiver, then they had to ship the finished receivers to another company back east to be re-heat treated/annealed... which didn't always result in a usable receiver.

Who thinks like that? The owners at the end were a bunch of wealthy guys mostly from California I think, some successful trap shooters, but one would think they had some basic business sense rather than just happy with the idea of a boutique business where they could go to the SHOT show and have business cards with their name and 'Montana Rifle Company' on them.

Anyways, that's a good part of what killed whatever MRC was back when it was winning Rifle Of The Year awards and stuff like that (if you believe there's no industry politics in stuff like that).

As pitiful as the now deceased Remington buying the company to get the use of some antique machines and then selling it and them again when that particular job was over, that is worse.

All predicated on the fast buck and to hell with the company, the consequences and everyone else.

Societies can only survive with that kind of mentality if they are geographically and financially isolated from all competitors, and we ain't.

[Rick]

All predicated on the fast buck and to hell with the company, the consequences and everyone else.

Societies can only survive with that kind of mentality if they are geographically and financially isolated from all competitors, and we ain't.

Possibly worse, the investor group that was the final owners of MRC as an operating entity never showed any indication they were actually motivated by profit and growing the business. I wasn't there while they were operating, but I did rummage through pretty much all their electronic files and paperwork they left laying around while trying to figure out how to resurrect the company.

About the only way I can generally describe what I saw was that it was a vanity project by the group - or at least the members steering the ship (perhaps one was a friend who came along for the ride).

It's going on five years now since that happened, so I'm probably forgetting some of the details already, but if there was any singular focus on turning a profit, I never saw any evidence of that. The way they mismanaged everything, with that mindset they couldn't have hit the water if they fell out of a boat.

Which is pretty weird, because from what I remember of who was in that investor group, they had the money to invest coming from building their own successful companies, not just a career in a high salaried job.

One of my tiny little dreams as we moved towards trying to meet the enormous demand for barrels was that perhaps one day with all that CNC machinery, we could one day do our own little vanity project and faithfully reproduce Lee Enfield and Ross Rifle barrels as close to the originals as possible. Unfortunately for that dream... my friend who bought the company then killed what should have been a millionaire-maker opportunity by veering off on his own vanity project. Rather than just making rifle barrel blanks as fast as possible to meet the enormous demand, he decided to ignore that with a dream of introducing his own line of AR-15 rifles with his name on it. Jumped over hundred dollar bills to grasp at quarters, etc.

The whole thing from beginning to end with MRC and then the new company was simply sad. The demand for barrel blanks is still huge... the three of us that helped him try to get it off the ground still get contacted about making barrel blanks.

But there have been almost four years of litigation since we walked away and he attempted to freeze out the investor who loaned him $1.5 million. Our former friend who we tried to help has been suing his investor, former customers, etc incessantly ever since then - losing every time. He's now down to living in his mom's basement suit with his wife and five kids, driving her vehicle... and still going back to court when he can find a lawyer willing to work for him. Madness.

The original Pratt & Whitney gun drills and reamers from the original Springfield Armory are gone. The Haas CNC machines are gone. A quarter million would probably be enough to purchase one machining cell and get running - but none of us have that kind of money and not sure about diving back into that pool, despite the people still beating on any door that could possibly provide them with barrel blanks.

I should probably post pictures of those vintage Pratt & Whitney gun drills and the cutoff machine - still running as it was when manufactured in 1902.

[Surpmil]

Yikes, another "bonfire of the vanities"?

And wouldn't we have loved to see those Enfield and Ross barrels you mention; no one here seems to work in chrome-moly now, all stainless.

Could have made and sold barrel wrenches and vises too for that matter - one leads to the other after all.

There's probably an even better market for quite a few other milsurp barrel types as well.

[Sapper740]

Meanwhile, in the Khyber pass a goatherder in a yurt is pounding out SMLEs with a forge, hacksaw, hammer and manually powered rifling machine made from bits and pieces of a GAZ-69.