• This community needs YOUR help today. We rely 100% on Supporting Memberships to fund our efforts. With the ever increasing fees of everything, we need help. We need more Supporting Members, today. Please invest back into this community. I will ship a few decals too in addition to all the account perks you get.



    Sign up here: https://www.muzzleloadingforum.com/account/upgrades

Refreshing rifling with simple tools and few skills?

Muzzleloading Forum

Help Support Muzzleloading Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.
Joined
Jul 18, 2020
Messages
424
Reaction score
515
Location
Queensland
My rifle (a 1976 Pedersoli Plainsman .45) has very shallow rifling and I would like to deepen it or at least refresh it.
I’ve enquired with several barrel manufacturers in Australia but they all say they don’t do that kind of work including reboring and re-rifling. So my options are to try to do it myself or to import an after-market barrel from the US, which would likely cost more than the value of the rifle.

Other muzzleloaders I’ve had had rather prominent rifling (CVA and Thompson Centre). I could load those rifles many times without having to wipe between shots, and accuracy remained decent. My old Pedersoli has shallow rifling (likely from the factory). Accuracy is very good but it must be cleaned with several patches between shots or it loses accuracy and becomes hard to load. I suspect the deeper rifling grooves in the other barrels helped contain fouling.

My thoughts about refreshing the rifling is to plug the bore about 6 inches from the muzzle and pour lead into it, making a slug of the bore. Withdraw the slug and with the highest quality emery cloth I can find, glue it to the high spots on the slug, which corresponds to the grooves in the barrel. Then with patience and a light oil, move it little by little down the bore.

Any ideas? Maybe I have just demonstrated my foolishness?
 
Windows Son, welcome to the forum from a Yank in North Carolina.

Personally have little experience with actually refreshing a bore, but from what I know it is a process used on barrels that have been ignored and/or in rough shape. Sounds like you have an accurate rifle and a refresh may be a bit premature. Don’t want to mess up a good thing. What are you using for a patch lube? Have found that with the correct wet lube I can shoot all day, even with shallow rifling, though if I want to let the load sit on the powder I may need a wad of some sort to protect the powder from the wet lube. You may want to exhaust other options before considering refreshing, particularly if you are not familiar with the process or don’t have a mentor to guide you through the process.
 
Windows Son, welcome to the forum from a Yank in North Carolina.

Personally have little experience with actually refreshing a bore, but from what I know it is a process used on barrels that have been ignored and/or in rough shape. Sounds like you have an accurate rifle and a refresh may be a bit premature. Don’t want to mess up a good thing. What are you using for a patch lube? Have found that with the correct wet lube I can shoot all day, even with shallow rifling, though if I want to let the load sit on the powder I may need a wad of some sort to protect the powder from the wet lube. You may want to exhaust other options before considering refreshing, particularly if you are not familiar with the process or don’t have a mentor to guide you through the process.
That’s wise advice. My problem is fouling, not accuracy. Thank you.

Most of my life I’ve used tallow with just enough beeswax to keep it firm in hot weather. But perhaps this shallow rifling wants something softer.
 
I would agree with trying a different lube first. Many of us use spit with good results or other water based patch lube.
Your concept of a lead guide cast to the bore is valid but not with an abrasive. You must remove the breech plug and cut a groove in the lead where the groove is. Then make a cutter along the design of a couple of saw teeth that fit the groove. This can cut the groove deeper and is advanced to the next groove. Then a paper shim is placed under the cutter and the process is repeated till the grooves are deepened to your goal. A slow and labor intensive job but rather simple. I have a write up of freshing a barrel in this manner.
 
If the rifling is clean, leave it alone. A liquid lube will get rid of that cleaning between shots thing, as long as you have a good tight patch and ball configuration.
You didn’t mention your load. That might help sort this out. What are you using? Powder, patch, ball, lube?
 
Thank you all for your good advice. It only makes good sense to try to solve the fouling problem by less intensive means.

I already worked out that a .445 round ball and a .012-.015 patch give the best accuracy. If I’m shooting under 50 meters a 45g charge of fffg will almost cloverleaf on the target (provided I clean between shots). For longer shots I use 60g. I have learned this from trial and error.

The only powder available to me is Wano, which is sold as Shutzen in other parts of the world. I have never seen any black powder substitutes for sale in Australia. And being a traditional kind of fella, I’d rather use black powder anyway.

What I haven’t done is experiment with patch lubricants. I’ve simply stuck to my tallow beeswax I’ve used since the 80s. I shall endeavour with this.
 
I read in the Lewis and Clark journals of their blacksmith refreshening Lewis's rifle on the expedition so I set out to figure out how he did it. He poured a lead slug then cut off one of the lands sticking out, groved the area and inserted a "cutter". Then used a wiping stick to force the slug and cutter through rotating until he did all of the groves in the rifle. He would have to have removed the breech plug to do this. What I did was machine a brass rod .001 under the lands, slotted it to hold a cutter and "squared" up both ends. I then poured lead slugs on to each end with the cutter in a grove. I then adjusted the cutter to cut about .0005, and rotated the cutter untill each grove was deepened. Then readjusted the cutter and repeated. It took me about five hours to make the holder and about five hours to refresh the first barrel. But in the end I took a barrel that had groves .002 deep down to .006 deep. And it has shot very well. If you think you can understand the process and know a machinist who could make the holder I could email you a diagram of the holder and cutters.
 
Some barrels with shallow rifling were rifled not by cutting, but by forcing a carbide die through the bore. This leaves a lovely finish that is work hardened and very difficult to re-cut. I’ve re-cut about 15 barrels over the past 2 years. Flintriflesmiths page is very good. But it’s not enough for most folks. I lucked into a ML club that has weekly work nights and learned a lot about the-cutting rifling from an old timer Bob Favior (spelling suspect) who freshed and rifled hundreds of barrels. Still it took me a lot of fussing to learn how to be reasonably efficient. I would not recommend anyone do a one-off.

If the bore is not work hardened you’re looking at 4 hours shop work to pour the lap, make and harden and temper the cutters, and get them inlet into the lead lap. Making the cutters without a milling machine is not trivial. I saw and file a groove cutter within 0.001” of the width of the groove and an inch and a quarter to and inch and a half long and uniform in height within 0.001” from 1084 steel because that is what I have. Then file teeth with a triangular file with a vertical leading edge to the teeth (file held with one side vertical). After filing, the-check all teeth are at same height else only some cut. Fiddle with it. Harden and temper to pale straw. That’s the easy cutter. The cutter for the lands must be wider than the lands, also uniform in height, and the top must be rounded to match the bore diameter. Drill a hole in a piece of metal the size of the bore to use as a visual gauge for this arc. Then cut the teeth and so on. I usually end up with about 12 teeth per inch. If too shallow they leave no room to catch the cuttings.

These are some of the finer points. If you search for “freshing” I’ve made a few posts.

One of the guys on the Lewis snd Clark expedition was a gunsmith. With all their prep it’s virtually certain they had specific cutters with them. Folks reckon a fella with a pocketknife and a file and a little ingenuity but no experience could fresh a barrel in the wilderness but it ain’t so.
 
Some pictures of lead lap and cutters. It’s recommended the teeth not be evenly spaced. This reduces chattering. As you can see the lead lap gets really beat up. Scrapings get embedded. It gets worn. After gaining about 0.005” it’s time to pour a new lap.

One thing to watch for is that the breech rifling where the plug hits it is often raised a little. That must be filed with jewelers files or destroys the lap in short order. Start over.


23B6B8F4-2212-418F-BF47-1D4D3FB2840F.jpeg
60D0A901-BA57-4340-8B1E-15B8272AEA3A.jpeg
1AC29FB0-E024-4FA3-A9C6-837071981ED2.jpeg
5716578B-2C67-45DF-A19C-28DC2AD3A58A.jpeg
 
Some barrels with shallow rifling were rifled not by cutting, but by forcing a carbide die through the bore. This leaves a lovely finish that is work hardened and very difficult to re-cut. I’ve re-cut about 15 barrels over the past 2 years. Flintriflesmiths page is very good. But it’s not enough for most folks. I lucked into a ML club that has weekly work nights and learned a lot about the-cutting rifling from an old timer Bob Favior (spelling suspect) who freshed and rifled hundreds of barrels. Still it took me a lot of fussing to learn how to be reasonably efficient. I would not recommend anyone do a one-off.

If the bore is not work hardened you’re looking at 4 hours shop work to pour the lap, make and harden and temper the cutters, and get them inlet into the lead lap. Making the cutters without a milling machine is not trivial. I saw and file a groove cutter within 0.001” of the width of the groove and an inch and a quarter to and inch and a half long and uniform in height within 0.001” from 1084 steel because that is what I have. Then file teeth with a triangular file with a vertical leading edge to the teeth (file held with one side vertical). After filing, the-check all teeth are at same height else only some cut. Fiddle with it. Harden and temper to pale straw. That’s the easy cutter. The cutter for the lands must be wider than the lands, also uniform in height, and the top must be rounded to match the bore diameter. Drill a hole in a piece of metal the size of the bore to use as a visual gauge for this arc. Then cut the teeth and so on. I usually end up with about 12 teeth per inch. If too shallow they leave no room to catch the cuttings.

These are some of the finer points. If you search for “freshing” I’ve made a few posts.

One of the guys on the Lewis snd Clark expedition was a gunsmith. With all their prep it’s virtually certain they had specific cutters with them. Folks reckon a fella with a pocketknife and a file and a little ingenuity but no experience could fresh a barrel in the wilderness but it ain’t so.

So true about"button broached" barrels being hardened. While I refreshed many "cut" rifled barrels, my only attempt to refresh a pitted T.C. was a failure. The groves were to hard to recut. I just ruined my cutters.
 
Yet some makers stress relive the barrels even after button rifling. They use ovens controlled using a no-oxygen atmosphere. Making the bore surface the same as the rest of the barrel such as out side surface and anywhere in the depth of the metal.
 
Back
Top