Originally Posted by LRF
There is a saying that goes way back; "The message sent was the message received", the sender is always responsible that the receiver understood the instructions correctly.
Not taking any position here, however when trying to understand why things went bad, always first look in the mirror. After that recovery is the next step and negotiation will go the furthest when coming to a resolution. IMHO


Well, this episode has come to its conclusion. I have chosen to quote the above statement because it is true. In all interactions, the outcome is the shared product of what both parties do, and I certainly may have contributed to the barrel length issue.

But what I did not contribute to is the quality of the crowning job. I asked for a refund on the crowning based on both the steady rest marks and the fact that the crown is indicated off the OD of the barrel and not the bore. I took my ball micrometer and measured several different points at the muzzle. There is more than 5 thou variation in the barrel thickness, which means a muzzle crown indicated off the OD is probably off center an equal amount. Visual inspection of the crown reveals that it is in fact off center. The very last bevel going down into the bore is of different depths at different points around the bore.

So I asked for a refund on the crowning job.

The gunsmith's response was that he would redo any work not up to my specs, including bluing the barreled action to address the scratching. This is his response:

i will gladly re-do any work you feel is not to your spec. and will even do the polish and bluing of the barrel or barreled action if needed but i do not feel that warrants me to refund the full amount on the job. i will also pay ret. postage back to you. you must build them different that i do, because i would have fit to the stock and bedded and mocked up the entire rifle and even fired it for accuracy then disassembled and polished and blued so as not to scratch anything during assy. or if the factory barrel was a dud it could be replaced easily. had i known i would have polished here and blued upon request this is why i have people send a detailed list of what is to be done


I may be over-touchy at this point, but I get the feeling he is blaming me for not knowing how to sequence the steps of building a rifle. I agree with him on the need for the detailed list of instructions. Here are my instructions to him, and I do not know how I could have been more clear:



Dear XX--
We talked about this project on the phone.

I would like the barrel cut to the mark on the blue tape, and crowned.
New front sights mounted
The rear sights moved to be correctly indexed.
I would also like you to consider the feasibility of removing the barrel, and doing a basic action truing (lugs, boltface, receiver face). I probably would not have you do this work, but it does not look like the barrel is turned all the way in, so I am not sure what we are dealing with in terms of headspace, or whether the barrel is up against the collar, or the receiver face, or just what. Look it over, and tell me what you think our best course of action is.

If you think this project will work, give me a call and I will get sights from Brownells headed your way.

In case you are wondering, I did not send him the front sight.

So his offer to re-do the work was promising. But it is of no value if he was merely going to recrown the barrel using the same steady rest/tailstock technique. So I asked him how he was going to do a recrown, and this is his response:

i will re-crown it however you want it. if i would have thought there would be this big of a problem i would have just put a crappy round factory crown back on it. on $400 barrels i charge $300 to dial in the barrels within .0005 or less when chambering and crowning, on a Mauser it's usually not an issue that barrel OD is so far out of concentricity to the bore i was not going to switch to a 4. jaw and spend an hour checking the 4-jaw and setting up and dialing in the barrel. send it back and i will set up the lathe and dial it in within .0005 i own more mausers that i will admit to and don't get too worried about them and most shoot in the .250 or less range. if i set up to the bore the OD will look out or if i set up the the ID the OD will look out your choice or i just put a factory round crown on it and let it run wild which is what they did. your choice.

At this point, I have decided to let the entire issue drop, take my losses and call it a day. When he says "there would be this big of a problem," is he saying a problem to me or to him? Again, I get this tone of blaming me. It seems to me that he believes that there are some projects on which he should do his best work, and others where he need not. He thinks I should get a crown no better than a factory round crown, perhaps as punishment for being overly demanding. He thinks putting in a four jaw chuck (which would have been the right way to do it, both in terms of crown concentricity and avoiding the scratching) would have been too much work for my project--even though I'll bet in the 2+ months he had my barreled action, he had the 4-jaw chuck installed at least once, or had several machining tasks that would have warranted its setup. Given his punitive tone, I am not at all sure I would get his best workif I sent the barreled action back at this point.

The bottom line is that I am free to have my standards on what I consider to be competent work, and he can have his. I went with him because his rates are good, and I thought this was "so simple even a caveman can do it."

I do wish he had owned at least part of the responsibility for the outcome. At no point in our communication has there been the a hint of an apology for cutting the barrel off over 1/2" from my "cut here" mark.