We rarely get to pick the brains of the people in our industry who are the technical geniuses that bring the products we love and enjoy to fruition. In this episode of InRange TV, Ian and Karl from Forgotten Weapons have a candid Skype talk with Nathan from Faxon Firearms about various barrel making procedures. They specifically discussed the differences between Nitride and chrome lined barrel manufacturing that takes place at Faxon. Although from the outset, Nitride might seem to be of lesser quality than a chrome lined barrel because it is cheaper but really this has to do with the manufacturing process involved. Nitride is used to treat the actual bore while chrome lining is a lining that has to be inlaid into the barrel, and thus could see more imperfections over time.

But the advantages of chrome lining are that it provides great protection against corrosive ammunition which was a very large issue in the previous century. Something I didn’t realize is that the Japanese military was the first large-scale military to adopt chrome lined barrels with the Type 99 Arisaka. Another advantage of chrome lined barrels is in machine guns in service with the military because of the heat transfer capabilities of being chrome lined.

Make sure you give the video a watch as it discusses a number of subjects in a very candid way that we rarely get. The only point of improvement I would say is that if the audio were better, it would be a much easier to follow the dialogue.