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Just happened to be reading an article in Guns & Ammo 11/02 about Rifle Accuracy, by Mr. Boddington. In it he states that of the three methods to rifle a barrel - cut rifling, hammer-forged, and button-rifling - the button method is the poorest. Is that so??? I was under the impression that lowest on the totem pole was the hammer-forged barrel, then button-rifling, and finally, the best-of-the-best being the cut rifling. Am I misinformed?

Button rifling is not the poorest. To be truthfull no kind is any better than the other.
It all had to do with the barrel maker.
If the barrel maker does his job right, the hole in the barrel is straight and the same diameter, the lands and grooves are right and held within tight specs and the bore is lapped or honed to perfection, there is no differance.

i use mostly button rifled barrels and they shoot as good or better than anything out there Period. They also last longer than almost every other barrel, but that has nothing to do with the rifling procsess.

Alot like cut barrels becasue most cut rifled barrels are made by great craftsmen that get it right. cut rifling is no better than any other. it is just that most makers that cut it, do a great job of it.

Celt

Button rifled barrels have won and will continue to win many target shooting competitions.Boddington is an author and not a trained expert at barrel making.His opinion is just that an opinion like anyone elses..

Boddington did not really state it was the poorest rifling method. He said "it supposedly is the poorest...". That was the caption underneath a picture of a Savage. However, in the article he went on to say that even though button rifling is SUPPOSED to be the poorest, Savages shoot nice. So, I think that may imply he doesn't actually believe that stuff about the rifling. I may not have been very clear on this. Sorry about that.

I think that Celt hit the nail squarely on the head. I don't believe that there is a poorest or best way to make a barrel. All methods have strong points and not so strong points. However, all methods turn out quality barrels if, and it's a big if, the barrel maker does it right.

Generally, it seems to me that most shooters rate a cut rifled barrel at the top, button in the middle and hammer forged at the bottom. Yet, as someone has alread said, button barrels win lots of matches. For that matter, so does hammer forged barrels.

I have quite a few hammer forged barrels and all that I have shoot lights out. I didn't select the barrels because they were hammer forged, rather, I was consulting with a company at the time that produced them and I could get them relatively inexpensively. All of them that I got were/are excellent barrels.

I've also owned and used outstanding cut rifled and button rifled barrels. The only really bad barrels I've come across happened to be button rifled, but the manner of rifling had nothing to do with the quality of the barrels - at least I don't think it did. It had far more to do with the barrel maker than it did the way the barrel was made.

Finally, any barrel maker can, once in a great while, turn out a poor barrel. S--t happens as we all know.

Tom

I'm not a barrel-maker nor do I play one on TV, but this looks like a good place to expose my previous assumptions and get them straightened out. Basically, I believed it wasn't a superiority of either method of rifling, but the final production steps that made any real difference.



Leaving cut barrels aside, I believed that for target shooting, neither button- nor hammer-forged had much real difference, but what was there was an advantage to the button-rifled. For sporter-weight barrels, I believed that hammer-forged had great advantages.



I believed that button-rifling had to be done with thick barrel blanks, and not much, if any, had to be milled off for a target rifle's thicker barrel. Buttoning a thinner barrel would induce barel bends that then had to be straightened, and this was obviously not good for accuracy. Likewise, milling off too much metal would induce stresses that would either be ignored (bad idea) or required some kind of stress relief (expensive).



I believed hammer-forging was expensive to set up, but once running, produced better (or cheaper) barrels than button methods, and that for the same price, a sporter hammer-forged barrel was more accurate.



What am I misunderstanding?



Jaywalker

Matthias
Celt is right on. I use a lot of buttoned barrels , mainly Lilja and they are as good as I have found. This market is getting more crowded, several folks are making top-notch buttoned barrels. Kreiger makes a cut barrel, and they are excellent. I really believe the most important part is the quality of the craftsman, not the process.
Charlie

As well as the quality of the raw materials................