Thread: Baikal single shot rebarrel - Anyone done this?

First off, sorry if the images are huge, I am trying to post from my phone and can't work out how to resize them.

I have been working on putting a new barrel on this rifle

Once I had the old barrel out, I started by cleaning up the barrel adaptor. It was full of solder and was pretty rough machining underneath that. I also wanted to make the hole a little bigger so I could keep the barrel a bit larger. I bored it out from 19 to 20mm and cleaned up the other faces.



I then cut the barrel blank to 360mm and got to removing a whole lot of metal. This is slow going on a lathe like mine, with a depth of cut at about 1mm max and each pass taking about 8min, going from 38mm to 20mm took a while.



Once I had the barrel mostly profiled, I turned it around and mounted it in my action truing jig, which I have actually used way more for working on short barrels. I decided to tighten up the headspace a little, as it was a little deep for my liking. I then turned the shoulder thickness down to match the barrel adaptor.




The next job was to cut the slot for the extractor. I was not sure how to do this, as I could not get the barrel into my mill for this job. I considered fixing the barrel to the cross slide of the lathe, with the cutter in the spindle, a technique brilliantly shown by Homebrew.357 in his rolling block thread. Then I realised I could clamp it to the v slot on the side of my little shaper machine. I ground a couple of cutters to cut the slot, and had at it. I left a very small amount of material for hand fitting with a file.






A little more hand fitting and it will be perfect.



Now I have to machine the extractor to match the chamber and rim. I'm thinking of assembling it all temporarily and fixing the extractor in place with a tiny shim behind it, then doing it in the lathe. That way I can dial the chamber in and match each face perfectly. Any other method would involve a lot of guesswork.

Im tossing up whether to put open sights on this rifle, or a low profile red dot. I will likely put a scope on for working up a load, but I want this to be handy and easy to pack down, so the scope will likely not stay.