I've never had a Douglas not shoot,but their interior finish isn't on par with the upper echelon offerings.
PacNor easily remains my favorite and I think highly of Hart.......................
You can look through a Douglas barrel and see reamer marks but they can't be measured...only seen because they're a slightly darker color. Tim Gardner, owner of Douglas barrels, is a close friend and I've asked him a lot of questions about barrels one of which is why don't they lap barrels.
Now Tim is not exempt from having his prejudices just as I mentioned in the thread about McMillan. His reply is, "If you know how to make a barrel you don't have to lap them."
Stop and think about it for a minute. The carbide button actually moves steel to form the lands. This means that the maker has to calculate what size to ream the hole so there will be just enough metal displaced to form the lands.
This, naturally, induces much stress into a barrel so it must be stress relieved after rifling and before it is contoured.
I noticed that Gary Schneider put in his ads that he
pulls the button through his barrels. I asked Tim why did Schneider pull his buttons and Tim's reply was that Schneider hadn't learned how to push the button yet.
Douglas uses a certain lubricant on his button and P.J. Hart has tried for years to find out what it is and Douglas won't tell him. Hart uses copper as a lubricant for the carbide button, unless they've changed in the past few years, and they lapped to make sure the bore was uniform AND to get all the copper out of the barrel. When a barrel is air gauged it tells that the bore size is uniform to .0001 inch from one end to the other. How on earth can a lead lap with lapping compound improve on that?
I like Douglas barrels because they perform well and I get good service. Try to get Hart to replace a barrel sometimes! I had Douglas replace a barrel I thought was bad and it was replaced with no questions asked. Turns out the guy had a bad Kahles scope.
As for benchresters not using Douglas you need to understand that benchrest shooters are really lemmings that have not fallen off the cliff yet. It's a case of 'monkey see-monkey do'. Seely Masker made the comment once that if he won the Super Shoot with a small paddle wheel on the side of his rifle you would see half the guns on the line with paddle wheels at the next Super Shoot.
I have a lot of customers specify things and when I ask them why they made that choice it turns out that most of the time they base their decision on something they read and have no idea if it will help or not. We shooters are a strange bunch sometimes. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/blush.gif" alt="" />
