Mine came with the GM barrel, marked on the bottom flat in front of the breech along with Kibler, GM, 50cal, 1;70TW. It’s nicely done with the barrel lugs machined right into the barrel.
Script from Jim’s Q&A Video series explaining the change to GM barrels:
“So the biggest news we have is that we're going to be doing a lot of barrel work ourselves. So things are changing with regard to the barrels and our kits. So we're working with Green Mountain, they're going to produce our barrel blanks for us. So they'll produce the bore, they'll ream it and rifle it in most calibers, and then we'll do the balance of the work. We'll rifle everything 40 caliber and below, but everything 40 and above 45 and above, they will be rifling. So we won't be using Rice barrels anymore. You know, we've had a great relationship with Jason at Rice but they're just a number of reasons why it made sense for us to go this particular route. You know, one of them being that we always feel good doing as much stuff as we can in house.
It just sort of fits the nature of how we like to do business. So that's certainly a factor. It allows us to try some different ways of making things, ways of manufacturing things, which which works well for us. Green Mountain has a lot of production capability, which is very good for us as well. And you know, by bringing things in house like this, you know, even with the, the cost of machinery, we're able to save some pretty significant money in the process. Now I would like to note that for anyone that's not familiar with Green Mountain barrels, we don't feel that this is any kind of a sacrifice in terms of quality. They're known for -hey have a great reputation as far as accuracy and bore quality bore finish and so on. So I'll go ahead and show you a little bit about how the process works. So here's an example of a barrel blank that they'll be providing to us. So again, it's been bored, reamed, honed and then rifled, and we have some kind of unique ways of making these barrels ourselves or during the, the part that we do.
First thing we do is we bore the barrel and thread it for a breech plug. So that's done on the lathe over there that you saw Marshall working at, Make a make breech plugs, as you can see breach plug blanks, It's actually, what's, he he's running right now. These will then of course, thread into the end of the barrel, plug it up. From there we machine the whole barrel, including the breech plug in basically just two setups. So we, we have what we think is a real nice way of machining these barrels. And we're very happy how they've been turning out so far. So here's a sort of a little sampling of some of the barrels we've made. Hopefully the camera, will be able to focus and pick up on the details. The finish you see is pretty much the finish that comes right off the machine. We're real pleased about that. Some neat features of this barrel. One being the underlugs are integral to the barrel. So this may seem kind of crazy or odd. And from a historical perspective, it is kind of, kind of odd, but we have enough material to machine them right on the barrel. So we chose to do it. It actually simplifies our process a little bit in order to not have to worry about making under lugs, dovetailing them, getting them to fit right, so forth and so on. So that'll be a unique feature of these barrels. And one thing that's cool about it is you have to look very close to be able to tell that they haven't been dovetailed and fit in the barrel. So that's a real, kind of a unique thing. The barrels will come with the touchhole installed milled flat. So that's all done during the machining operation
Since we machine the breech plugs right on the barrel. They'll be perfectly aligned. There won't be any kind of misorientation with rotation or anything. One thing that's real neat about these barrels. That's a good one to look at, get the dust off, Not only the surface finish, but also the shape of the barrel. Traditionally in the modern era, swamped barrels have been made by basically connecting a series of straight lines and then blending those straight lines with some kind of a radius.
This is a basically a continuous curve. So you won't see any of those kind of kinks that you sometimes see on, modern made barrels. So we're real pleased with that is not something I never really considered a great deal in the past until we making these, and we just noticed how, how nice of a shape they had. So I think it's sort of one of those examples where you get used to something, but when something changes, you kind of appreciate how, how it has changed. These are slightly different shape barrels than the Rice barrels we've used in the past, so they won't be interchangeable. We just want to let you know about that. See the bore here, maybe. It's happens to be 50 caliber that we're working on right now.
That's the, the exciting news regarding our barrels. If you have any questions, you know, please please ask, you know, we're happy to answer them. As far as there will be a transition time when we transition from Rice barrels to the combination of green mountain and Kibler barrels, Probably going to take two to three months. So some kits may have rice barrels. Some kits may have green mountain barrels with, but we consider them equivalent in every way. And they'll both, you'll both be, you'll be happy with either. That's for sure. We'll move on here to one more little tidbit. Here's just a rifle I'd like to show. This is one of our colonial rifle kits that I assembled. And then my friend Ian, did the carving and finishing on it. So just kind of something fun to, to show It's stocked in Walnut. Pretty nice piece of Walnut
