dakota.potts
New member
I'm a student at Piedmont Technical College's school of Classical Gunsmithing in the end of my 3rd of 4 semesters. Since our second semester (roughly June of this year) we have been working on our class project rifles. Monday begins my last week of this semester, the last week for work on our rifles, which means it will be coming home with me some time this week. Now that there isn't much waiting left to do, I decided to start the thread that I've been waiting to start chronicling the build.
We started with our action, a Model 1999 action from Montana Rifle Company. The 1999 takes popular features from the Winchester Model 70 with some Mauser like features. They seem to be decent actions but have had a couple of issues that would give me hesitancy towards using them in the future -- very delayed shipments, some issues with the receiver threads, rifles shipping with half stainless and half carbon steel screws, and very deep casting/machining marks that won't be possible to get out without serious re-shaping. The future classes will be using Remington 700 actions. But, those small issues aside, I am excited for the final product.
We started by taking a piece of cold rolled steel stock and machining a mock barrel which we could thread to the receiver and then chamber to practice chambering to tolerance. We did this on two different pieces, one of which we also threaded at the muzzle end and had to maintain concentricity for a muzzle brake.
Then we took our barrel blanks (1:10" twist sporter contour from ER Shaw) and put them in our lathes. With a range rod, a series of indicators, a 4 jaw chuck and a lathe spider we indicated within .0002" concentricity of the bore of the rifle at both the muzzle and chamber ends, working first on the chamber end. We turned the barrel tennon to the right diameter and length (about .005" shorter than the distance from the face of the receiver to the false torque shoulder), threaded them, and chambered them. Then we repeated the process on the other end and cut the barrels to length and crowned them. I chose an 11 degree target crown for mine.
We then used extra-long inletting screws to drop our barreled actions into our rough-shaped semi-inlet stock. These had the rough, very large shape of a finished rifle stock and had some basic features opened up somewhat. A rough estimate would be about 150 hours for inletting everything so the barreled action, magazine box and bottom metal fit in, along with full bedding in the receiver and under the chamber area of the barrel with a free float along the rest of the barrel channel.
I learned the difference between good and mediocre during these tools. Most of the tools paid for in tuition are made in China or India and are generally not sharpened and made of poor quality steel. I learned to appreciate Swiss made gouges and chisels, well-tuned planes, and aggressive Japanese rasps for removing material intentionally and efficiently
I have a lot more pictures and even some video of specific processes but didn't want to do a massive photo dump, so if there are any specific pictures you're looking for of different processes I'll see what I have.
We started with our action, a Model 1999 action from Montana Rifle Company. The 1999 takes popular features from the Winchester Model 70 with some Mauser like features. They seem to be decent actions but have had a couple of issues that would give me hesitancy towards using them in the future -- very delayed shipments, some issues with the receiver threads, rifles shipping with half stainless and half carbon steel screws, and very deep casting/machining marks that won't be possible to get out without serious re-shaping. The future classes will be using Remington 700 actions. But, those small issues aside, I am excited for the final product.
We started by taking a piece of cold rolled steel stock and machining a mock barrel which we could thread to the receiver and then chamber to practice chambering to tolerance. We did this on two different pieces, one of which we also threaded at the muzzle end and had to maintain concentricity for a muzzle brake.
Then we took our barrel blanks (1:10" twist sporter contour from ER Shaw) and put them in our lathes. With a range rod, a series of indicators, a 4 jaw chuck and a lathe spider we indicated within .0002" concentricity of the bore of the rifle at both the muzzle and chamber ends, working first on the chamber end. We turned the barrel tennon to the right diameter and length (about .005" shorter than the distance from the face of the receiver to the false torque shoulder), threaded them, and chambered them. Then we repeated the process on the other end and cut the barrels to length and crowned them. I chose an 11 degree target crown for mine.
We then used extra-long inletting screws to drop our barreled actions into our rough-shaped semi-inlet stock. These had the rough, very large shape of a finished rifle stock and had some basic features opened up somewhat. A rough estimate would be about 150 hours for inletting everything so the barreled action, magazine box and bottom metal fit in, along with full bedding in the receiver and under the chamber area of the barrel with a free float along the rest of the barrel channel.
I learned the difference between good and mediocre during these tools. Most of the tools paid for in tuition are made in China or India and are generally not sharpened and made of poor quality steel. I learned to appreciate Swiss made gouges and chisels, well-tuned planes, and aggressive Japanese rasps for removing material intentionally and efficiently
I have a lot more pictures and even some video of specific processes but didn't want to do a massive photo dump, so if there are any specific pictures you're looking for of different processes I'll see what I have.
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Nothing of the setup unfortunately 
