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C'mon man.

There was a piece of tape with a line drawn on it, and instructions to cut at the line. How much more clear could the OP be?

I could only offer since he got it wrong, clarity is in question.

Clarity is not in question, he ignored the instructions as per the OP's quote below.

Is that all he had to offer or is he going to rectify the situation?

In past experience, I have had to eat a few "rut rohs". The old saying of the customer is always right is more true now than ever before with the internet. I have in recent years learned that communication with the customer and record keeping saves eating the rut rohs and the ensuing bashing that occurs online. I have no problem emailing a customer again just to make sure of this or that or whatever. Actually they get a warm fuzzy from my attention to details. I hope he makes it right.

You write him off in the future, tell anyone who asks what your experience with him was and move on. That barrel ain't getting any longer and he ain't gonna give you a new one. Now you are stuck with dealing with it and he is stuck with the huge mark on his reputation.

Not too difficult to work a hacksaw. Should have sent it out to get polished up and a crown.

Crayon diagrams to go with the tape and pics?? Its just just poor work period. Sorry you had to experience this Utah...

I will be the first one to say that I have made some mistakes in the past. This guy did screw up but the answer is he needs to make it right.

I always do my own barrel shortening with a hacksaw. The gunsmith is utilized only to crown in the style specified, I send a picture along so it is clear what type of crown I want. Perhaps not totally foolproof, but has always worked for me in the past.

That sucks

Similar issue with a 6.5 x 55 Swede. I wanted only enough chopped to remove the front sight so I could take every advantage if its long barrel. Got it back chopped 24 inches.

Unfortunately, a friend had picked it up for me and it was about 5 months before I took delivery.

Workable or not, when something isn't right it simply wears on me. New barrel time.

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.

This is the right way to do it, not piecemeal.

But I wouldn't send it back to this guy. Why wouldn't he know enough to do a proper crown?

This guy must be on drugs if it takes him an hour to dial in a barrel in a 4 jaw and cut a crown. Maybe takes me 30minutes to install the chuck, dial, cut the crown and polish it, then tear the machine back down. That's including 2 cups of coffee if it's in the AM.

Sorry you took it in the pants on this deal but I think not sending it back to him was a good choice.

I'll back that.
And I'd lose my job if it took that long.
And my chuck weighs 450+ and the workpiece 300. Lol
And I have to have the face square.

A newb takes that long.
A real green newb.

$300 to set up a barrel - I am in the WRONG business!! I am a truck driver that runs heavy equipment in the summer. I dabble with a lathe and have about 100 hours leaning over one. It takes me about 30 minutes to dial a barrel in. $300 for a half hours work - where do I sign up!!
Mauser accuracy of good enough, doesn't work. You set everything as accurate as possible in order to make up for a possible "rut-roh" down the road.
My lathe may be smaller than his but I can count the number of times that I used my 3 jaw on my hands. The 4 jaw is always on the lathe. If it took me a long time to change from a 3 jaw to a 4 jaw I would buy another lathe and leave one set up with each type.
I do the best I can with the knowledge and skill I have, always looking to improve. I do not build "bench" guns because of this. I only work on my toys and build hunting/sporting rifles. Rifles that require more accuracy get sent to somebody competent. A man has to know his limitations!!

Do not send it back to have it "fixed" - it will only come back worse!!

I timed myself cutting and crowning a factory takeoff barrel I spun on a vanguard this afternoon. Just for kicks.

The 4 jaw was already on the lathe, a grizzly gunsmith lathe, the medium sized one. Tape barrel and wrap a sheet of brass over the tape under the jaws. Inserted barrel through headstock and dial ID of bore to .0005, use spider to dial the shank in on the backside. Used parting tool to cut to length, the right one. Square up with carbide tool. Use solid carbide boring bar choked up in tool holder to cut 11 degree crown, change angle and chamfer edge of the bore and use backside of the cutter to break the edge of the OD. Bump lathe up to 1000rpm and polish the toolmarks out of the crown. Loosen jaws and remove barrel. Check clock.

Verdict 18minutes. I need to go to work for that guy on commission, I'd be rolling in $$$$

I saved up for two years and got all the parts to build a .300 WSM for crop field hunting in North Carolina. I sent it to Jim Boatwright. He sent it back and it did not fire. He did not test fire it before sending it to me. I told him I wanted a minimum sammi spec chamber and that I would be hand loading and cleaning up case necks. I waited a year and gave Dan Lilja $400 for a fluted stainless barrel, and they sent back my gun with a true Sammi spec barrel that was 5/1000ths larger than a loaded case. The gun shot 3" groups with factory rounds. I argued with him about the chambering and the fact that the gun did not fire. He told me that he subbed the work out, by the way... I hand carried the gun to my local gunsmith, who I thought was out of business, and paid him another $500 to fix it. I hand carry all my guns to my gunsmith and go over everything with him. He is good, and I pay him every cent he asks for to do a job in top shelf fashion. I find I have way less issues.

By the way, I drove from Rhode Island to Pennsylvania to bring Jim Borden a rifle he built so he could put a new barrel that he chambered on the gun and test fire it, which he did in front of me on his range before I took it home. Sooo worth it.

Based on my experience, some of these problems come from the gunsmith subbing out certain jobs, and/or assigning tasks to poorly trained and supervised employees. I also strongly suspect that some of the "big name" gunsmiths have one set of standards for their high roller regular customers, like top competitive shooters, and a lower standard for Joe Sportsman who just wants one special rifle done by a top tier 'smith.

The psychology motivating this is pretty simple. Money. The 'smith makes a minor error, might throw accuracy off a bit, or a cosmetic flaw. He has hundreds of dollars in, say, a barrel, plus his labor. It would be human nature to be tempted to pass it off, hoping the customer wouldn't notice. One of the old time barrel makers was quoted as saying some people didn't deserve his barrels. Peasants?

Plus, these days communication as well as customer service seem to have vanished into history, and gunsmiths are no exception.

Paul