Brodie
posted this
13 March 2024
If you want to smooth the throat out and clean up the tool marks in the rest of the barrel, all you need to do is make up a couple hundred paper-patched bullets, load them, and shoot them. They will clean and smooth the throat and the rest of the barrel out until it looks like it is hand-lapped and polished. I have used this on several rifles whose barrels looked terrible. If you ever took your kids to an amusement park you may have noticed how smooth the railing are. Those railings were polished by all of the bare hands of the people holding them while waiting to go on the ride. It positively will not harm the barrel either.
As for the crown, I discount the current craze and theory that the crown controls the accuracy of the rifle. Yes, it is the last thing that the bullet has touched, but I had an old gunsmith who built rifles for the US Navy's marksmanship unit and he would crown the barrel with an old hand-cranked drill and a semi-round bur in it. Bill would clamp the rifle or barrel in a vertical position in a vise and do the crown with his hand-cranked drill, and of the two rifles he built for me both shot minute of angle or less with my losds, even cast shot well in them.