Finish Reaming Short Chambered Barrel

[Harmon]

on a short chambered 1911 barrel, is there any reason a lathe would be needed to finish chambering it?

ive finished the chamber on a bolt action rifle with just the finish reamer, t handle and headspace gauges...dont know why i couldnt do the same with a pistol barrel?

and for setting headspace, do you actually use heaspace gauges on pistol cartridges, or do you just use new factory loaded ammo?

Thanks

Harmon

[John Heiter]

I personally haven't done it but I know others who have and you don't need a lathe for it. In fact, the finishing reamers have a pilot on the end and so little material is removed that it's probably better to do it by hand. Most people try to adjust the chamber to their own favorite ammo length.

[Dan Sierpina]

I finish ream pistol chambers by hand, and measure with a depth micrometer. I've never seen any chambering reamers that don't have a pilot, or provision for a floating pilot. Some will have a solid pilot, and the ones with floating pilots always come with a pilot mounted.

[Patrick Sweeney]

Ditto, hand-ream and use the tail end of a dial caliper. The only question is, what length? Me, I reamed to minimum and then test-fired. If the gun was pissy about running when dirty, I'd clean the chamber and ream it forward a few thousandths. If not, I left it alone.

[Carlos]

Have always done them by hand, going very slowly towards the end.

Patrick wrote: If the gun was pissy about running when dirty, I'd clean the chamber and ream it forward a few thousandths. If not, I left it alone.

-same here. THe advantage to a slightly deep chamber can be two-fold; reliability when slightly fouled and reliability even if a high primer is encountered. Potential downside is slight loss of accuracy, but not always.

I ream to the longest case I expect to encounter. This means I pull several factory loaded rounds, measure the cases & select the longest to use as a guide.

[Harmon]

thats what i was thinking..ive played with rifles enough in the past to know that you do need a lathe to barrel a rifle from a rough blank(chamber, thread, taper, ect.) i didnt think you would need one with a pistol barrel.

Thanks

Harmon

[cautery]

A lathe would be nice, but not absolutely necessary.

My finish reamer was made at pacific Tool and Die to my specs, with super close tolerances and a very nice floating pilot.

Whether a lathe is really required might depend on how close the barrel was taken with the roughing reamer... Because my finish chamber size has a very short lead, they have to short stroke the roughing reamer to keep from cutting away material that will/would be left in my finished chamber... thus my finish reamer has to remove more than the "optimum" amount of material. Hence, i am currently having mine done in a lathe.

However, I am putting a drawing together for a roughing/finishing reamer set that I am going to have made. Then I'll let the barrel supplier use my roughing reamer, and I will do the finish reaming myself to have more control over the finished product.

I do not use headspacing gauges... I guess I could have one made...

I use a depth micrometer to measure from the headspacing shoulder/step to the barrel hood face to set "nominal' headspace. Then I custom cut the brass to achieve the desired headspacing I want. It takes a little work to determine the sized case length to trim to, but once you have it, it's done.

Then I can make up a dummy round and use that as a gauge.

EDIT: Obviously, you'd want to the barrel pre-fitted to the specific pistol BEFORE you set the chamber depth/headspacing...

Edited October 6, 2005 by cautery