An Overlooked Option For Tired Lands And Grooves

Rifled barrels appeared in what is now named Germany in the early 1500s.

- John Barsness

The first rifling was straight, apparently designed to accommodate black-powder fouling, so barrels could be fired more times without cleaning. Soon shooters discovered that spiral grooves increased accuracy by spinning bullets through the air.

Back then, and for centuries afterward, each rifling groove was individually cut into a smooth bore, using a cutting tool mounted on a rod. The first cut was shallow; after all the grooves were started, the cutter was adjusted and each groove sliced a little deeper. This process was then repeated until all the grooves reached the desired depth.

Until mass production became common in the nineteenth century, reboring and rerifling barrels was normal. Before then most rifles were built one at a time, and while gunsmiths tended to build certain calibers, it was relatively easy to change hand-powered tools to other calibers. A flintlock often started life with a relatively small-caliber barrel, but after the lands and grooves degraded with use, the bore was reamed larger, then rerifled. “Refreshing” a barrel was sometimes repeated, since all a shooter needed for each new caliber was a new bullet mould.

Rerifling (usually simply called reboring) became less common after power-driven machinery speeded up production of barrels early in the nineteenth century, and again after metallic cartridges for breech loaders appeared in mid century. Most worn-out barrels were replaced rather than rebored.

After the appearance of smokeless rifle powders in the 1880s, barrel life increased, although before noncorrosive primers became common in the 1920s, many black-powder and smokeless barrels died due to a lack of cleaning. From the 1920s onward, most barrels lasted until the rifling in front of the chamber eroded away.