remember that 308 win barrel i milled in half? this is why i had the spare barrel.
the seed was planted when i started that stupid custom gun day dreaming thread. Everyone adding their ideas just pushed me over the edge and i started looking for a blank.
fast forward 2 weeks and a palma contour 6mm 1 in 8 30" blank comes up on gun nutz. the seed was already planted so i struck a deal. i've twisted lots of barrels on savages and i ream stuff day in and day out, i practically live machining so i figured i could put it together no problem.
so i had my caliber but not my cartridge and i didn't know what action i was going to use yet. luckily i had a few different rifles that would work but i had one that stood out my 308 mod 70 that had seen better days. so that meant i was going to try for a short action and heavy bullets, good luck... i settled on the 6-284 after talking to ptg. after a good talk about pushing back the free bore it was then a couple of weeks to get my crowning tool, range rod, gauges and reamer.
dies, brass, bullets were next. dies for a 6-284 should be hard to find right? it took one phone call to prophet river and they had 6.5-284 lapua brass, redding dies, and all the bullets i wanted! actually I thought this was going to be the hard part.
Getting the barrel ready was the next task. Nice tight top of tolerance threads that I filed by hand to fit the action this took about an hour and everyone in the shop thought I was nuts. When leeper tells you something is important I guess it pays to listen because it fit like a glove. This is the part where I said “if I have to push this back I’ll cry”
The reaming was very straight forward, push in the reamer nice and slow with lots of cutting fluid. I stopped 0.080” short and finished by hand with the action snugged up.
Time to flip her around and decide my length. I held out my thumb and moved the part off blade closer “that’ll work!” as the end of the barrel plunked in the bottom of the lathe. Crowning was the same process as cutting the chamber, slow and lots of cutting fluid. I chose to not leave the outside edge sharp and filed it to have a small rad. So I pulled it out and measured, 29 ½” long, as good a length as any.
This is where the fun really starts I can see everything coming together now. I had the barrel torqued, the pillars in the stock, and a sporter barreled stock sitting in front of me.
This is where cam software is really nice. I measured the contour and we had a program to mill it out 0.030” large in no time. If that’s not worth $50,000 I don’t know what is! We used a 1” iscar inserted ballnose end mill to widen it up and we did it in the 200-C. in 20 minutes we had a stock that fit but wasn’t quite right. So we pushed the program down 0.008” and we had the fitment we were looking for.
This is where the heavy work ended and the light touch began. I had some rough edges and such that needed touching up.
And this is the final product!
the stock unfitted.(and my dinner)
first test fit in the stock
some goodies from wgp
now just before some test shots!
questions? comments? suggestions?
my fresh 6-284
Linear Mode
