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Douglas Ultrarifle™ Barrel

Manufacture Sequence of Operations

1. Special USA gun barrel quality steel made to Douglas specifications is ordered directly from the steel mill. Both chrome moly, and stainless alloys are used.

image shows corner of custom barrel area.

2. Next step is to use a bandsaw cut the steel bars to length.    

Douglas barrel craftsman at work

3. Bars stacked in stress relief furnace. Proper Stress Relief  insures uniform hardness and grain structure throughout the bars.

Annealing Furnnces

4. Outside of the bar is turned on an automatic lathe to true the outside diameter.

Douglas barrels Craftsman

5. Each bar is then center drilled.

6. A four-spindle drilling machine using single flute gun drill, makes a hole through the bar. It is at this stage that inspections begin, each bore is checked for straightness.  We rarely have rejects but if a hole is not perfectly true, it is scrapped. Douglas does not straighten barrels for any reason.

Douglas barrels lathe

7. Each drilled bar is slowly reamed to insure a smooth bore surface.

8. After reaming, the bores are again inspected for interior surface finish.  The bars are then coated with Teflon in preparation for rifling.

Douglas barrels checking interior

9   Rifling operation consists of pushing a tungsten carbide button through the bore, guided by precision steel gearing.  This insures uniformity of rifling twist.

10.   After the rifling process, the rifled blank is filled with a special heat resistant liquid, plugged at both ends, and placed into the furnace for its second Stress Relief. .  This process is vitally important to an accurate barrel.

Douglas Barrels ready for stress relief

11.    Each Douglas barrel is magnetic particle inspected. 

12.   Each Douglas barrel is air gauged. All our barrels will gauge at less than .0002 variations, and our “air gauge quality” or Premium barrels will be within .0001 inch. We do no lapping to achieve these tolerances. We prefer to engineer and build our precision into the barrels during the manufacturing process; not lap the bores into tolerance afterwards.  This is an added cost for Douglas, but the results are worth it for our customers.

Douglas Barrels Air Guage Machines

13.    At this stage the blanks are placed into inventory to be machined later into the various shapes we offer. Each barrel is custom contoured to your needs when you order it.

14.    CNC lathe turning one of our precision Ultrarifle™ blanks into a customer’s barrel.

Douglas Barrels CNC Profile

15.    Douglas Barrels also offer threading, chambering, and fitting to the customer’s rifle action.

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