Well worth the drive to take your work to him rather than ship it. His shop is a monument to old-school analog technology. If you enjoy being surrounded by drilling, reaming, rifling machines, and lathes and mills with more barrels and raw steel stacked around than you can imagine, on a floor caked with dried oil and grease in a small wooden building heated by a big old wood stove then you've attained nirvana. The man is the real deal.
I grew up and lived all of my adult life a mere hour or so in any direction from him. First wandered into his shop back in the late 80's when i needed an 1861 Springfield barrel lined. Went along with a buddy who had commissioned a swamped ML barrel for his project and I took the .58 barrel along to see what's what. That Springfield barrel turned out to be a cloverleaf shooter at 100 yards off the bench. Many years passed and last fall another buddy needed an original .36 Ohio-style half stock barrel freshened so I took him to Bobby Hoyt's. The commission took about 5 minutes to finalize but it then took us about an hour to get out of there because Mr. Hoyt likes to talk (as did we)! The freshened barrel, now a .40, prints its balls into cloverleafs at 50 yards.
