[bsder]

> your average garage setup is not remotely capable of rifling a barrel.

I'm going to argue the point. Yes, your average suburban weekend warrior won't have the stuff. But if you are even slightly into machining, you almost certainly can.

Practically every machining magazine will have at least one article about rifling in every issue.

Yes, you need a metal lathe and some tooling. Those are neither rare nor that expensive--and very old lathes and tooling work just fine.

The biggest problem a machinist always has is space for the equipment.

[_jal]

Amateur machinist here. I don't care about guns, so it would probably take a mistake or two, but I have zero doubt I could make a rifled barrel on the tooling down the block at my local makerspace. It isn't hard at all. (QC and repeatability are different topics, I'm not talking about commercial manufacturing.)

I can't do it in my garage, because I don't have one. My machines have to go up stairs in an urban walkup, so they're too small, and as mentioned, I have no interest in making guns anyway.

But yeah, a lot of people have both the skill and the means. Remember that people started making rifled barrels in the 1500s, a little while before we had CNC or overnight commercial-grade metal delivery.

[6nf]

All you do is make a die, harden it, and then carefully force it through the barrel? I guess?

[AWildC182]

Yea, that's a fair point, it's not insurmountable. I responded to apr mentioning something similar but ultimately the point I'm making is mostly that the upper requires a small machine shop filled with mostly commodity tooling and the lower requires a file and a drill press or a cheap 3D printer.

[roel_v]

At work so can't watch videos on rifling a barrel, but can this tooling also be DIY'ed? I imagine rifling is 'just' a matter of using a very thin, very long cutter on a suitable lathe, but then I would think it would be pretty hard to make such a cutter yourself.

[bsder]

> At work so can't watch videos on rifling a barrel, but can this tooling also be DIY'ed?

There are a zillion videos on YouTube about this.

The hard part isn't the rifling, it's cutting the bore. After that, you can "just" push a rifling button through it and it will cut the rifling.

[convolvatron]

haven't looked at rifling, but making single point boring cutters for a lathe isn't at all hard. you can just screw a carbide cutting insert onto any old piece of steel.

seems like you'd have stiffness problems for long barrels (?)

[dsfyu404ed]

You could make a push broach that holds an insert (or make it out of HSS then press it through the barrel.