Coyotehunter.net

Wow I love this stuff. great info man keep it coming.

The next step is to predrill the chamber with a drill bit. I normally use a bit that's .010 or .020 smaller than the shoulder diameter of the cartridge. While this step is not mandatory, it does save a bit of wear on the reamer as well as speed things up a bit.

After the chamber is pre-drilled, it's a good idea to clean up a half inch or so of the chamber with a boring bar. Drill bits rarely run perfectly straight. Boring with a bar gives the reamer a true surface to guide it. Resulting in a perfectly inline chamber.

Time to set up the reamer holder in the tailstock of the lathe and finish up the chamber.

The action, bolt, and a headspace guage are used to determine when the chamber has been cut to the final depth. Here's a photo of the finished chamber. It is necessary to chamfer the edges of the chamber to aid in cartridge feeding.

After the chamber was finished, I cut off 1 inch from the muzzle end and put the barrel back in the lathe for polishing.
The paper towels are used to keep abrasive off my lathe. I haven't bothered with a hand polishing setup yet.

After the polishing I masked off the barrel to protect the finish and put back in the lathe for crowning.
Here is a pic of the finshed crown.

The barrel is now done. Time to install it on the action. I normally use either moly or anti seize on the barrel threads to prevent galling the threads.

Savage uses a barrel nut instead of a shoulder on the barrel to set the chamber length (headspace). The bolt is installed in the action, the headspace guage is inserted into the chamber, and the barrel is turned in until the gauge stops it. Here's a pic of the bolt and go guage.

It's hard to tell, but this next pic is of the barrel being tightened down on the action. The barrel is pointing up. The action is in my action wrench in my bench vise. The proper tool for the barrel nut hadn't showed up yet, so I used a vise grip with a chunk of sheet lead to protect the finish.

With the barreled action now complete, it's time to begin fitting it to the stock. To aid this process, I've made up a couple of headless brass screws that are used instead of the factory ones. They are larger in diameter than the factory screws. This insures that when the factory screws are used in the final assembly, they will be centered in the guard screw holes in the stock.

I masked the barrel off and used a paintstick to give me a rough idea of how much material I need to remove from the original barrel channel.

I normally use a die grinder with different sized sanding drums to rough out barrel channels. It's not for the faint of heart. One wrong move with this thing and you're in a world of hurt. I normally finish them up with 80 or 100 grit sandpaper.

Once the barrel channel is opened up, The stock goes into the mill to remove the factory bed job to make room for the rebed. This process can be done by hand. The mill just speeds things up a bit.