On Thu, 19 Sep 2013 08:24:30 -0500, Karl Townsend
wrote:


What about the carbide listed in the next post?

Crack!...goes an expensive piece of carbide. It's not tough enough for
futzing around with a small-shop press.

Again, good luck. You shouldn't have trouble finding a piece of steel
that's strong enough, although ordinary mild steel might turn to mush
under that much compression. Go for a good, common alloy steel, or
maybe a hardened piece of 1070 or1090 carbon steel, and you should be
able to do it. At that small diameter, even cold-rolled high-carbon
should do it. Cold-rolling hardens small diameters much more than
larger ones.

(I always thought they pulled, rather than pushed, rifling buttons,
but maybe that's just the gun manufacturers.)

Thanks, not bad advice for a flaming liberal from KCB.
ducking and running

Push type buttons are cheaper, fits my lifestyle. Also, from what I've
read, pull type actually fail more easily. The pull rod breaks right
where the threads end.

Yeah, I could see that.

I guess I told about the rifling tool we used in my old shop to make a
muzzleloader pistol barrel. It was an adaption of the tools that
Pennsylvania rifle builders used over 200 years ago. We stacked a few
pieces of hacksaw blade side-by-side into a tool we made from drill
rod, with one slot in the side to hold the blades. We shimmed under
the blades to adjust cut depth, progressively through multiple
strokes.

For a final finishing pass, we ground a lathe bit to fit in the slot
and cut a couple of tenths to make the grooves flat and smooth.

The tool for controlling twist was a 3/4" piece of square bar that we
clamped at one end in a monster vise, put a big pipe wrench on the
other end, and twisted. This was pinned to the cutting tool and drawn
though a piece of plate with a square hole in it. Indexed four times,
we got a four-groove barrel.

My partner in that job shop had apprenticed to an antique gunsmith
(both the guns and the smith were antiques) in New Hope, PA. He
learned a lot of tricks and made several rifles and a bunch of horse
pistols from scratch.

--
Ed Huntress


Karl