As some of you may remember a while back, forum member, Gunsquirrel posted about a model 10 barrel that he had had removed by a "gunsmith". It was pretty obvious that the barrel was removed either with the pin still in or some kind of real bad burr in the pin hole. The treads from the pin notch back were all mushed up and ugly.
The ptoblem
I told him I would help him out. He sent it to me the other day and I believe I have it back in good shape. You can not just run a die over something like this because the die will probably not start in time with what remains of the original treads and when the die got to those it would reform those also. In all likelihood ending up not being as good as the original ones.
I could have chucked the barrel in my lathe, set it to cut 36 to the inch treads and run the cutter in on the last of the good treads then ran in reverse and had the cutter reform the messed up threads to give the die a good in time start. There might be a little bit of misalignment due to the lathes feed systems slack causing a difference between forward and reverse, but most likely it would work out fairly well.
But, I was able to do something better. I had a K frame barrel die that had split in half some time ago and as these custom taps and dies are not cheap, I had machined a piece to hold the 2 pieces together in alignment. I had since bought a replacement die. So, what I did is assemble the 2 halves of the die in place on the barrel's good threads and then place the holder over them and simply ran it off the barrel across the fubarred threads. That made them pretty nice and 100% in time with the original threads. I then ran my good die over the whole thing a couple times. Hardly any metal was actually removed from the messed up area, mostly the metal was just formed back into the correct position. While the reformed threads will not have as quite much strength as when new, between those and the remainder of the original threads it will be perfectly fine on a 38 special.
I also took a file and cleaned up the pin slot.
Tools
results
The ptoblem
I told him I would help him out. He sent it to me the other day and I believe I have it back in good shape. You can not just run a die over something like this because the die will probably not start in time with what remains of the original treads and when the die got to those it would reform those also. In all likelihood ending up not being as good as the original ones.
I could have chucked the barrel in my lathe, set it to cut 36 to the inch treads and run the cutter in on the last of the good treads then ran in reverse and had the cutter reform the messed up threads to give the die a good in time start. There might be a little bit of misalignment due to the lathes feed systems slack causing a difference between forward and reverse, but most likely it would work out fairly well.
But, I was able to do something better. I had a K frame barrel die that had split in half some time ago and as these custom taps and dies are not cheap, I had machined a piece to hold the 2 pieces together in alignment. I had since bought a replacement die. So, what I did is assemble the 2 halves of the die in place on the barrel's good threads and then place the holder over them and simply ran it off the barrel across the fubarred threads. That made them pretty nice and 100% in time with the original threads. I then ran my good die over the whole thing a couple times. Hardly any metal was actually removed from the messed up area, mostly the metal was just formed back into the correct position. While the reformed threads will not have as quite much strength as when new, between those and the remainder of the original threads it will be perfectly fine on a 38 special.
I also took a file and cleaned up the pin slot.
Tools
results
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(Machinists among us will recognize the second reason this suggestion is appropriate!)
