Anyone here making their own barrels?

Been thinking of getting into making my own barrels In house.

Been researching this a lot and trying to decide if I can accomplish this on my grizzly gunsmith lathe.

DME tool has the drills and rifling buttons but I’d need to come up with a flood system to run the drills and reamers. I seen a company that makes a spray mist type flood for this purpose.

Of course I’d build a ram system for the button rifling. Unless I build a sine type machine and cut the rifling.

Anyone here have any insight to help me out?

I have an idea I’m trying to develop for a new gun system and need the ability to make custom barrels for the platform.

making your own barrels on green junk that's in no way shape or form made for that task, what could go wrong? sounds like a plan. let us know how that goes.

By all means ...but store bought gun drills aint cheap ,and the situation with the Russian buttons may be problematic..........for a pressure source ,might I suggest a cheap pressure cleaner ......you need 1000psi + to flush out chips positively.......You may also find the lathe feed is too much ,and need some way of reducing feed down to say half or a third..........incidentally,buttons sound seductive,but they require very accurate hole sizing and finish,whereas cut rifling is more or less impossible to stuff up.

I have helped a number of shops setup for machining of barrels for a production environment, and ALL of them got rifled blanks made from suppliers would just make blanks.

Hardly surprising...in the US you can buy rough finished rifled blanks for $50......here a finished rifled blank would be $400 (US$300)

Making good barrels is an art that is learned from working with someone who is already making good barrels. We looked into making test barrels in house, but decided it was better to purchase rifled blanks from known good manufacturers. The cost and time to setup and learn to make good barrels was not worth it compared to buying blanks.

Making a gun barrel--entry level.
A whole lot of "you don't know what you don't know"
Wanna try?
Buy a stick of round 4140 and then a similar size 4140 rifled barrel blank.
Set them on a table, sit down, look at them, and ponder the knowledge and cost to put that hole down the center with the twist and turns.
99.99% of sane people will find a rifled barrel blank supplier.
Of course those with money and lots of time used to seek out an elusive P&W
Sine Bar rifling machine......but that is a whole other adventure.

Well the question was:

"Anyone here making their own barrels?"​

We do have at least one member that has and posted at least a few pictures. He cut the riflings and did a fair job of it. I think it took him a couple of months to complete. I am getting old and cannot remember his screen name, it was for a shop built black powder rifle. He is from Australia if that helps you do a search.

On that Grizzly gunsmith lathe threading and chambering barrel blanks would not be too bad. I would not even think about making barrels from scratch on it. Even short 6 inch long pistol barrels would be a bear.

So I read this and was trying to form a positive response to encourage you down this path. After some careful thought and consideration I have to say No ... just no. Even if you had all the correct equipment to produce a rifled barrel like a deep hole drill a rifling, machine tool and cutter grinder ect, the skill and expertise to produce a quality blank is also needed. Respectfully, I feel confident in saying a $50 Green mountain blank will be far superior to anything that you will be able produce with hobby level machinery. Like Dirty Harry said...A mans' got to know his limitations

Sea Sick Steve said:

So I read this and was trying to form a positive response to encourage you down this path. After some careful thought and consideration I have to say No ... just no. Even if you had all the correct equipment to produce a rifled barrel like a deep hole drill a rifling, machine tool and cutter grinder ect, the skill and expertise to produce a quality blank is also needed. Respectfully, I feel confident in saying a $50 Green mountain blank will be far superior to anything that you will be able produce with hobby level machinery. Like Dirty Harry said...A mans' got to know his limitations

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This one and a lot of other good replies.
Just in case the OP wants to try doing one for himself as a hobby thing, here is a link:

You could do a search on Homebrews other posts and get more insight.
He is not from Australia, but I was in the right neighborhood.

Yes-You can make barrels on that Grizzly lathe. Research online and educate yourself about the custom machinery you need to design and build in order to pull it off. Gun drilling has been around a long, long time and it is just a matter of getting everything working together correctly. The same practice applies to rifling, buttoned or cut. Then get a large enough milling machine to go with your lathe and build the tools and equipment up. Hold the equipment square, parallel, and concentric everywhere, because precision is the byword in barrel making work. I witnessed a friend who engineered, designed and built the entire set up, right down to proper coolant pressure at the drill point. He makes buttoned competition rifle barrels still today as far as I know.

I just attended an auction of a gentleman that was a fantastic barrel maker. All his equipment was homemade. He made barrels for years for muzzle loaders as well as many Barrels for a well known air gun manufacturer as well as center fire barrels.
So, yes it can be done. Can I do it? Well, that’s my challenge.

Thanks for those who posted encouragement.

There is a barrel maker local to here ...he has million dollar machines and charges million dollar prices...........neverthe less ,he has quite a following making correctly OD profiled military replacement barrels.....such as for the MkIII Ross

I subscribed to a magazine that deals with hobby machining because there was a guy that was making barrels with his lathe.
It can be done but it is way beyond my skill level!
Guy Latuard had a video on how to build a rifling machine and I was thinking about getting it but it is not available now.
I bought the pillow block bearings needed to make the machine but that is as far as I got.

I think that I could make an OK barrel with a G lathe..but the cost for a one-up likely would not be worth it. and likely it would not be as good as a bought one.

deltaenterprizes said:

I subscribed to a magazine that deals with hobby machining because there was a guy that was making barrels with his lathe.
It can be done but it is way beyond my skill level!
Guy Latuard had a video on how to build a rifling machine and I was thinking about getting it but it is not available now.
I bought the pillow block bearings needed to make the machine but that is as far as I got.

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Somewhere in my piles of .... archives...I have a copy of both the video and the paperwork that goes with.

Pretty sure I have seen both the video and the paperwork, at various places online on the various document upload sites. They tend to not take the stuff down until someone complains, so the lifespan varies with the effort put in by the copyright owner.

There isn't much to it, and the guys that I have read that commented on building one to those plans, said it was an OK machine for essentially Hobby production, but way too slow to consider trying to be in the custom barrel game.

If you didn't know, Guy Lautard got screwed over by his Ex., and she got her fingers in to the rights for his books, and such, past and future, so she essentially choked off the goose that laid the golden eggs....

Anyways, Webb's machine is one of many, just that he also got hooked in to documenting his. FWIW, if i were headed in that direction, I would look at some decent sized linear rails as the main ways, the oiling requirements for the drill itself, can likely be picked up from the drill suppliers' literature. If you have the knowledge base, or the willingness to torture yourself while learning it, I would look to an AC servo to drive the spindle, a ballscrew or such, to drive the table, and be able to have both feed back to the computer so they can be used to turn the barrel for rifling.

On speaking with a fella that is/was doing this stuff stateside a while back, the one piece of advice that really stuck, was "Don't drill out the far end of the barrel blank, the mess isn't worth it!"

I spent a fair bit of time in CAD designing the cutters. And had a 14" Rockwell I was going to outfit as a a barrel making rig, based off Lautard's design.

It sat gathering dust. And I decided to use the space for something else. Ironically, the guy that came to buy it had a son that wanted to try making rifle barrels

I gave them a deal ;-)

Anyone with a lathe can drill a barrel......you can even make a drilling machine yourself ........Back in the day ,I got some stuff set up for making barrels ,and already had lots of junk machines that could be used for guns ......Anyhoo,in the timeframe the Port Arthur Massacre resulted in the 1996 federal gunlaws.......lotsa people know the details.........However what they dont know,is the govt also set aside millions $ to buyout anyone who was making guns ....or...anyone setting up to make guns........All I had to do was get a someone "established" in the trade to certify that I was set up to make guns........and the federal govt would buy me out at my valuation .....best deal of a lifetime.

john.k said:

Anyone with a lathe can drill a barrel......you can even make a drilling machine yourself ........Back in the day ,I got some stuff set up for making barrels ,and already had lots of junk machines that could be used for guns ......Anyhoo,in the timeframe the Port Arthur Massacre resulted in the 1996 federal gunlaws.......lotsa people know the details.........However what they dont know,is the govt also set aside millions $ to buyout anyone who was making guns ....or...anyone setting up to make guns........All I had to do was get a someone "established" in the trade to certify that I was set up to make guns........and the federal govt would buy me out at my valuation .....best deal of a lifetime.

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Forgive me for saying so, but yeah, best deal ever. /<sarcasm>

Except that you no longer get to be involved in a business you knew and enjoyed.

And you are not allowed to own guns that didn't do anyone a lick of harm, on behalf of a knee-jerk reaction to a fucking pshycopathic killer, to whom Laws were not an impediment.

Well, beyond that anyways, I hope you got at least a lifetime worth of retirement funds out of them...

I've been to New Zealand, and very briefly to Australia. You can travel around, but you have to live somewhere at least a year before you know anything about it IMO. I enjoyed the military museum in Auckland immensely, it was pretty close to our hotel room so I walked down and killed the better part of a day there. The marble walls were covered with chiseled names of vets, and since America was not the only place the Scots/Irish went, my surname was pretty well represented. Breaks my heart to see folks lose their rights at the stroke of a pen, but that is the difference between being a free born American citizen, and a British subject. Too bad the country is leaning more toward the subject direction as time goes by it seems. Franklin and company armed us realizing that was possible I guess.