Freshening a barrel

[Ken G]

I'm under the impression that freshening a barrel used to be a fairly common process.  From the accounts I have read on the board from folks actually doing it and Gary's excellent tutorial ( http://flintriflesmith.com/ToolsandTechniques/freshening.htm ) on the subject it seems to be a real time consuming and hard process working the slug through the barrel.  
  
Would it be easier to use something like wooden rifler to run the slug back and forth?  If the guide tooth was removed the worm would free wheel as needed to match the original twist rate.  My thoughts are using the carriage would make working the slug in the barrel much easier than doing it by hand?

Just curious and hoping someone may have tried this already.  

[Carper]

Ken: I have freshed about a dozen old rifles. Although having a rifle index machine, I did them all by hand. I would think the drawback to using the machine is that you would not have the feel. At some points in the operation it is closer to drawing a bow across a fiddle than putting a real pull on the cutter. BTW at the end of each of them I went ahead  and bored them up a touch and cut a new set of rifles anyway. Yes the freshing did improve the accuracy but none of them were tack drivers, partly because the bores were in terrible shape to begin with. The great thing about old guns is a .32 in a 7/8 or larger barrel leaves lots of room to go up a little.  Johnny

[Dphariss]

I'm under the impression that freshening a barrel used to be a fairly common process.  From the accounts I have read on the board from folks actually doing it and Gary's excellent tutorial ( http://flintriflesmith.com/ToolsandTechniques/freshening.htm ) on the subject it seems to be a real time consuming and hard process working the slug through the barrel. 
 
Would it be easier to use something like wooden rifler to run the slug back and forth?  If the guide tooth was removed the worm would free wheel as needed to match the original twist rate.  My thoughts are using the carriage would make working the slug in the barrel much easier than doing it by hand?

Just curious and hoping someone may have tried this already. 

I think there are photos of freshing rods in Ned Roberts ML Caplock Rifle or Clines book or Dillon.

Dan

[Ken G]

Thanks Johnny.   Not the answer I wanted to hear but helpful.  I have a couple of old salvage barrels.  Guess I need to break down and fresen one out so I have done it before.  There's never enough time to do everything you want to do.  
Ken

[flintriflesmith]

Freshening a pitted old barrel to restore it is a fairly big job but one that was not what a period gunsmith did. He only had to take a very light cut to sharpen up the corners of the lands. Some times he wouldn't even have to touch the furrows until he had recut the lands several times.

What I show on my web site was restoring a barrel that was both worn and had suffered a good bit of neglect. I addition to being fired a lot while I was in the shop, the rifle had been used for several years to fire blanks at CW Militia musters and the cleaning it got wasn't very through. As I recall, to get rid of the light pitting, I took out about .005 from both the lands and furrows.

When the guys with Lewis and Clark are talking about cutting or freshening a barrel I believe they are just scraping the lands enough to crisp up the corners of the rifling. This seems to have been done with a bore radius cutter set in a wooden rod -- no need to cast a slug, etc.


Gary

[Steve Bookout]

Ken, I'd tackle that job by hand.  From my experience, "feel" can be a crucial factor if the riflings are heavily pitted or largely gone.  You can do the job with a long piece of ramrod stock very well.  Just don't think you're going to push and pull for "three songs on the radio" to git'er done, though.  Cline does show a couple of fresheners.  Good thought, Dan. Cheers, Bookie