MINI PROJECT RIFLE
REMINGTON 700 SPS TACTICAL by Laurie Holland
Winchester and Lapua brass was available for handloads.
Over on the other side of the Atlantic, those energetic one-time British colonists invented the button rifling barrel manufacturing process during WW2, also to increase production rates and reduce costs. Although the fruits of work by Remington Arms engineers, this company became one of the majority who subsequently adopted hammer forging in the post-war period, the button rifling method used by Anschutz, Lothar Walther, and Savage Arms alone of the major manufacturers plus many target and speciality barrel suppliers such as Broughton Barrels, Lilja, and True-Flite.
The Germans had installed their hammer forged barrel plant in a facility in Erfurt, a town in the traditional gunmaking region of Thuringia and likely to be occupied by the Red Army in spring 1945, so it was hurriedly removed to Austria to keep it out of Russian hands.
Powders that suit .223 Rem with medium to heavyweight bullets. H4895 is the most flexible of the quartet.
American engineers must have studied it closely transferring the technical know-how to the New World but I doubt if it’s coincidental that the world’s primary source for hammer forging machinery and tooling has been the Gesellschaft Fur Fertigungstechnik und Maschinenbau (GFM) in Steyr, Austria ever since. Note too that its neighbour, the major sporting and military arms manufacturer Steyr-Mannlicher AG, has used the method exclusively since it recommenced production after the end of WW2 and has taken such barrels to a very high standard indeed in cooperation with GFM.
‘Seating dummies’ for the four bullets used in the tests. The 52 A-Max was set too long.
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For the hammer forging process, we start off with a blank somewhat shorter and fatter than that of the finished barrel. It is drilled and honed to a diameter that will accept a very, very hard and highly polished tungsten carbide mandrel which has bore dimensions and the rifling groove pattern machined in high relief on its outside.
Our pair in their intimate embrace is then fed into the hammer forging machine that sees the blank
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