- Sat Mar 10, 2012 5:52 pm
#31176
Wait a minute, I'm confused as hell here.
Do we want to cut a barrel down, or do we want to dovetail it?
Cutting dovetails by hand... no thanks. Won't be as accurate or well finished as a milling machine can do it, and the mill will take FAR less time.
Cutting a barrel down with a hacksaw & truing it up with a file? That's f'en stupid. Take a perfectly good rifle & ruin it for virtually forever until someone with a lathe can get to it & face the muzzle off. I don't care how good you are with a set of files & a hacksaw, you will never be as accurate as a lathe.
I'm all for expediency & backwoods tech (because let's face it, not everyone has the experience, or equipment & I have been in positions like this before where I absolutely needed to make a part out of nothing so I DO understand).
The ONLY way I would cut down a barrel with a hacksaw, is if I didn't have the cut-off tool for the lathe at the time, but wanted to rough it out so I could later face the muzzle off in the lathe.
Sometimes you just have to Cowboy Up.