As a “gunsmith” I find it entirely amusing how often customers believe that there is some real secret to what we do. Most of the time it’s simply knowledge, and more importantly, a confidence to work on a specific firearm. In fact, it’s amazing how often I get a firearm in that I do not know much about (especially old revolvers).

One of those common tasks is chambering a barrel, which actually is a relatively simple (yet time consuming) task of running a chamber reamer into the barrel. Re-chambering or chambering is a simple operation, mechanically speaking. One sets up a barrel in a low-speed lathe and using a piloted reamer (which is NEEDED, if one is not using a pilot, the chances for error are huge), slowly pushes the reamer into the barrel, making sure to clean out the “chips” or metal shavings.

Production barrel manufacturers will typically use a different process using a “roughing” reamer to get the general shape before using a final “finish” reamer to provide the final shape of the chamber. Further, they will use CNC machines to set depth accurate within a few tenths.

High Speed Shooting Solutions breaks this down visually on a custom bolt-action barrel.