Considering some version of lapping a Lee Enfield barrel?

[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...

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[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.

[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.