Home Forums Hunting & Shooting AR and Tactical Rifles Forged, Cast, or Milled?

Rusky, What was it that I said that "was completely wrong about hammer forged barrels"??

That is what I was trying to get out of him.

The quote that he dug up and posted was only part of a post on another forum. It was in response to someone that had asked: "How do they get the rifling into the barrel?" My reponse covered hammer-forging, cut-rifling, and button-rifling. None of it was done in any great detail or high technical level.

The process of squeezing a metal tube, with hydraulic impact, over a mandrel that has the rifling on it, and ending up with a barrel that is contoured and rifled is tough to imagine, but that is exactly what is done, and many of the major gun makers are still using this process.

I said Oly barrels are good barrels. I a have used around 2000 of them by now, along with many other barrels. I am now chambering my own barrels from Shilen blanks. I get better accuracy out of the barrels that I make from the Shilen blank, but that's not comparing apples to apples. I have used Wilson blanks as well. When I hand-chambered Wilson barrels, I got good results, but even that is not comparing apples to apples. What I have said is that, in my opinion, the Oly SUM barrel is the best, off the shelf, AR barrel you can buy. That is, that they are more consistently accurate than a stock DPMS, Bushmaster, ArmaLite etc. stock barrel. Do some DPMS, RRA, Bushmaster barrels shoot great? Of course they do!