Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Gunsmithing How to tell if barrel is crooked

I have a winchester 70 classic stainless in 7mm rem mag i am about to spend some money on. I purchased it on the fire as a barrelled action and stuck it in a pillar bedded hogue. near the end of the stock, the barrel was touching on the left side. it shot like crap. then i took a dremel and freefloated the barrel by removing material at left of stock. now it shoots 1/2 groups, my most accurate rifle. since i butchered the hogue i want to put it in a new stock, so i purchased a factory synthetic, and guess what, it touches on left side at end of stock too? could my barrel be installed crooked? i am about to buy a boyds stock for it, but dont want to buy it if my barrel is crooked. Is there a way a non-gunsmith can tell easily if a barrel is crooked?
thanks

since you know the gun is a shooter i wouldn't worry about the barrel being crooked ,hog out the bedding around the action screws until you can get the barrel to lay in the barrel channel wedge in this position while glass bedding it. if done carefully it will never show.

Ed

Whether it shot good or not it would drive me nuts if I knew the barrel was crooked to the receiver. But that's just me.

If you are handy with a few shop tools there is a fairly simple way you can check the axis of the barrel to that of the receiver via diffraction rings in the bore.

In the simplest form, if you were to wipe the bore clean and insert an unprimed cartridge case into the chamber with the bolt removed and looked into the bore from the muzzle end while aiming the action at a white wall, you would see the image of a target in the bore. What you are seeing are diffraction rings around the axis. A perfectly straight bore would show perfectly concentric rings around the center. The image would form a perfect target. If the axis of the bore were out of whack, you would see it as a distortion of the rings in the bore. The rings, or a single ring, would appear off center.

Now, if you were to take a wooden dowel slightly larger in diameter than the body of the bolt, and drill about a 1/8 inch hole in the center of it, and insert it into the rear bridge of the receiver, and then peered into the bore as before, from the muzzle end, if the axis at the rear of the receiver were out of alignment with the bore, then the diffraction rings would clearly show it.

In order for this to work, you would first have to perform the test with just the bore in order to form a base line from which to compare the view of the second test. Did that make sense? It's a lot faster to actually perform the test than it just took to type it. Really.

FWIW, the wood dowel should fit a little bit snug in the bolt bore so a not to give a false result. If you can find someone with a lathe, they can whip you out a plug with a perfectly centered hole in nothing flat. Use a 3/4 inch dowel to start.

Try putting an empty shell without a primer into the chamber, shine a light(LED) through the action so that the light shines through the primer flash hole and into the barrel.
Look through the muzzle and watch for light rings down the lenght of the barrel.....you want all the rings to be with-in each other.
A crooked barrel stands out like dogs balls, as in the rings are not round and they touch/overlap.


And for those that feel the need to straighten, use a large round of lead as an anvil face....and NO hitty barrel with hammer !

Bugger Malm, you are quick.

Yeah, he was only an hour and 15 minutes ahead of you.

Close race!

Ha !...give me a break, I was at work.


....so I was almost asleep.

Here's an easier, quicker way that'll basically give you the same info.

Remove action from stock - lay it on one side and ensure the receiver if flat to the bench. Measure the gap from the muzzle to the bench. Turn the action over 180 degrees and repeat the measurement. I've had barrels off by as much as .2" and I'm betting yours will not measure the same also..

Much easier plan redneck. I'll try that.

Just performed Rednecks test and the barrel measures a full 1/8" difference off the bench. So now that I have a crooked barrel, what can I do? Can barrel be removed and squared with action and reinstalled?

Do you know how it's crooked?

The chamber end could be straight and square to the receiver, yet have significant curvature down its length. I had one like that.

In order to correct it, you first need to know if the barrel is bent or if it's attached to the receiver at an angle. And the way to check for that is to isolate one from the other, and the fastest way to do that is to throw an unprimed case in the chamber and have a look. If the image forms a perfectly concentric target, then the problem is at the joint.

I did too - A Shilen I got (years ago) from Brownell's.. Between centers, that thing wobbled visibly on the lathe - yet shot 1/4" groups all day long after installation.. It was for my own rifle and I wanted to see if it would actually be a decent barrel..

I'm betting the barrel's fine, but the receiver face isn't square. I find that on 3 out of five actions I get in for a rebarrel.

My banana was on a 700 Youth in 7mm08.

I put the barreled action in an HS stock with plenty of float clearance. It would shoot a really nice group on center. If I then shot the barrel while warm it would show big time horizontal stringing. If I kept shooting the barrel enough to get it hot and keep it there, it would shoot an OK group about six inches left of the cold barrel group. The heat made it unwind I guess.

Anyway, I hauled it to a nearby 'smith and he had a new, take-off barrel in 243. I had him fit it to the action and it's a great shooter.

How to fix it. Sell it to me I am not that picky when they shoot 1/2 moa. And a deer, elk or what ever I shoot isn't going to care what it looks like in the stock.

can a smith pull the barrel, square the action, and reinstall barrel? if so, how much? i was about to restock it and i hate to do that until barrel is straight.

To do what you want, assuming the action is the cause of the problem, it's a bit more complicated.

To square the action requires cutting a larger dia thread in the action. hence the barrel will then be a sloppy fit. The way to correct that is to cut off the threaded tenon on the barrel, rethread the barrel to the larger dia, then re-chamber the barrel. The problem is most sporter barrel contours don't have enough meat to allow that much of the barrel to be removed at the breach. So what you're really looking at is having the action squared and a new barrel fit.

BTW, I picked up a rem 700 .223 varmint gun with the same afliction. Some "gunsmith" had set the barrel back so I don't know if he cut the threads in the action crooked, or the barrel threads, or screwed up both. But the darn gun shoots, so I'm going to shoot out the barrel, then get it fixed.

Another way of checking for a bent barrel, is to make sure the
barrel is super clean and take a perfectly straight and clean
section of cleaning rod and drop it down the barrel. If it is
bent the cleaning rod will catch or hesitate on its way down
the bore. If straight it will fall out the end of the reciever.
A tweaked reciever is another issue.