Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Gunsmithing Is my barrel toast?

I have an older Remington 700 in .264WM. It has a stainless barrel with about 500-600 rounds on it. Recently after a disappointing range visit, I decided to get serious about getting the copper out. Using Barnes CR-10 I finally got it clean. The Hoppe's #9 that I have used all these years obviously was not working.

Now the bad part. I noticed when cleaning it that the push on the cleaning rod got much easier about 2-3 inches from the end of the barrel, and then tightened up again for the last 2 inches. An inspection of the barrel shows a bulge like shape to the bore which extends around the circumference for all but the top part which is directly under the front sight ramp. See photos below:





The photos make the bulge look shorter than what it feels like with the cleaning rod. I also took the mic to the od and found about a 0.001" swell in the diameter which corresponds to the bulge on the inside. I somehow think the bulge on the inside is deeper than the swell on the outside.

I took it to the range again after cleaning the copper out and got a 2" group. As good as it ever has been is 1.5", so not too bad.

So what do you think the cause it? Is it toast?

Ron

My educated guess is that it was shot at one time with some sort of barrel obstruction. Maybe stuck in the snow and not cleaned out before being shot. Unless the throat's shot out along with the bulge a possible cure might be to have a good smith backbore the barrel enough to cut out the bulge and they could tell you if it would work and if it's worth it. That way you could save the front sight. The obvious cheap cure would be to cut the end off the barrel. But, you could always buy a new premium barrel and start all over again.
By the way, Great Pictures!

I have a ruger super black Hawk 44 mag that has about the same thing it was there when new and has never affected the accurcy at all if it did I would shorten the barrel.
I think it was caused by the boring tool probably had a chip spun part way around gouging it.

Depending on the present length you can always cut off the damaged area.

As for the cause, anyones guess is as good as mine. A flaw in the steel, damage from crowning at the factory with a piloted cutter, stress that was released during rifling and/or contouring...who knows.

A bulge in the barrel is going to cause erratic pressure spikes anyway you look at it and being close to the exit point ain't going to do much in the accuracy department.

If you can't live with the barrel being shortened that much I would replace it, but that's just my opinion.

If you can live with the accuracy, I really wouldn't worry about it. If not, cut, crown, and fire for effect. If you're still not happy, rebarrel it.

Pretty good pix, my friend.. Yeah, what you got is a bulged barrel. If it were mine, I'd cut the barrel back of the bulge and recrown.. If that would make it too short, it's 'rebarrel' time..

If you can cut it back to 22" it would be the same as a pre-64 FW and should do very well. If not it would be worth it to put a new barrel on it

Thanks for the comments guys. It is a 24" barrel and I would have to cut 3" minimum off and probably 4" to be safe. Seems to me having any kind of bulge right at the crown would be a disaster for accuracy. A 264 needs a long barrel, so this does not seem to be a good option. Further I inherited my father's Browning mauser action .264. It has a new 22" barrel on it, so I really don't need another short barrel .264.

My thoughts are just to park it (lowest cost) and shoot the Browning, or rebarrel it to a smaller cartridge for target shooting. I would like the 6mmBR, but that needs a new bolt. So as a compromise I'm thinking 243 WSSM. I see that Pac-Nor has a barrel for $255, and will chamber it, fit it, and true the action for another $250. Any experience with the quality of their gunsmithing? I hear fairly good things about their barrels. Pac-Nor

This seems like the least pain free one stop shop method, if I just send them my action. Is it difficult to get a remington barrel off, so that I don't have to ship it too?

Ron

Personally I love Pac-Nor and their service but if it were me I'd send it to one of the 'smiths that answered your questions right here. I'll bet you could get much the same thing for about the same $$$ and then you'd have a name and a face to talk to. Pac-Nor has 'smiths there but you're rolling the dice as you have no clue which one did it or is going to do the work. At least here you have guys with track records and a number of posters here that are very satisfied customers.

Pac-Nor is a very reputable company. I have used their barrels and have no problems with recommending them.

I have a hunch somebody drilled and tapped the front sight on a little deep and the screw is causing the bulge..I have seen this several times in both custom and factory rifles..

If the gun is shooting 1.5 or 2 inch groups your probably OK is you can live with that...It may settle down and shoot better after you copper it up a bit more like it was...Lot of guns shoot better fouled or dirty..

The front sight ramp is factory from Remington. I'm thinking that they may have overheated it when attaching it causing the material to be weak there. Not sure what the process is to attach it - brazed? I see no screws and if there were I would have removed it a long time ago as I can see a fuzzy image of the damn thing in my scope.

I am not aware of any pluggage events which could have caused overpressure. I do have to admit that I am not one for dry patching the gun to take out any oil from the previous cleaning before I shoot it. If that is enough to do it, then there may be a possible cause. I'm in Canada so we do have snow, and it was used lots in the snow. But I don't recall any event of plugging with snow and then shooting it.

Seems a bit odd, but I'm concluding it is basically toast? It was shooting much worse before I got the copper out, so I don't think there is any hope in letting it foul up again.

Ron

Dunno about your barrel, but Pac-Nor did two rifles for me. I am very pleased with the results and they'll get my Sendero as soon as I can get the factory tube shot out.

You can tell a lot about a company from how they handle their mistakes. They put the wrong profile barrel on my 30-06. They had it back in my hands in a WEEK with the right tube, plus they included the first barrel they'd put on it, which I sold here on the Campfire for $150. Anyway they were very nice about the whole thing. Not one bad thing to say about 'em and lots of good things!

Remington at one time hard silver soldered their front sights on. This stuff melts at about 1200 degrees F. They might still do do it the same way.

I saw a person remove one once, and he had to heat the barrel red hot before the solder came loose. In my opinion, this would ruin the barrel.

I have never understood how, or why Remington would heat a barrel this hot, or how they could do it without ruining the heat treating and/or causing the barrel to warp, or at least getting scale inside the bore.

I drilled too deep into a barrel once, but it didn't look like this. There was just a bulge the size of the end of the screw. That looks like a circular ring all the way around the bore, and was probably caused by an obstruction.

Directly over the ring, or just behind it, is the barrel bulged at all on the outside?

I suspect mine was silver soldered then. It was made in about 1966 or so. I've never tried to remove it. Based on what I see in that area, I'm not so sure silver soldering on the sight is the best idea.

In the area of this ring (which is quite a bit longer than it appears in the photo -- good 1" long based on feel of the cleaning rod), the outside diameter is bulged by 0.001" as best as I can measure with my micrometer. I've no way to measure the ID accurately but I suspect the diameter has opened up by more than 0.001".

Ron

With the bulge, even though a small one, my guess is that it was caused by an obstruction.

Maybe a small one, like a small amount of snow or ice, but still an obstruction.

Current silver soldering (by me anyway) is done with Brownell's 440 silver solder. 440 is the melting degrees. Never had one come loose to my knowledge, nor the several Remington 700 bolt handles that I have re-soldered on.

A short barrel is no impediment to accuracy, although you may loose some muzzle velocity( not much until you get below about 20 inches, then it drops off fast!). I'd bob the barrel and see how she shoots. Makes it handier to carry, but may increase the perceived recoil due to more muzzle rise, blast, and noise.

I hunt regularily with a 17 inch barreled .30-06 ( removed the barrel bulge it was bought with), have perfect confidence in it, and have killed to well over 300 yards. The first critter taken with it was a Dall ram at @ 330 yards. The two most recent were caribou bulls at 180 Lazered yards, and 357 long paces, in two succesive years, within a half mile of each other.

I really don't think they could tell the rifle had "diminished performance".....

Oh, yeah, it has a mis-shapen chamber too- possibly due to the same incident that bulged the barrel, or perhaps due to a wobbling reamer. I generally shoot factory rounds, and don't reuse the brass from this rifle. It gets 1.25 inch 5- groups with most factory loadings. I really should rebarrel that thing, I suppose, but why???.....

I would think that an over-pressure bulge would be uniform (as it was on my 06 bbl), rather than partial. I'd lean toward the loose reaming chip theory,myself.

does it shoot like it is? If so you are set.

Ask Pac-Nor how many rounds they expect you to be able to get out of a non-chromed barrel. IIRC Kreeger expects less than 1000 rounds before the throat is toast. My smith had to call them (Kreeger) after two of his customers roasted their barrels, one at 800 and the other at 1300 rounds fired (Kreegers comment was that the 2nd guy was extreamly lucky).

Anything that falls in the magnum category, bullet size vs powder capacity, give or take 1000 rounds of life even with a cut rifle barrel like a Krieger.

Most standard 243s won't hit 1200 rounds of life and many die around 800 or so rounds.