Finished up some tweaking on my mod 3 today to get it a little closer to “clone correct”. Only other thing is the collar was installed with the latch cuts horizontal instead of vertically for some reason. I’m not sure if it can be rotated or not. Either way I’m super happy with it.
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Did you purchase one of the pre-made barrel journals to install on the barrel? Or did you get a barrel complete from
@crazynoto? I've seen this happen before with the loose barrel journals that have the gate latches channels pre-cut into the journal. It looks like the barrel was installed on your receiver, the gunsmith screwed on a loose barrel journal, and then just said "good enough."
The crazynoto barrels don't have the gate latch cuts in them, so a gunsmith installs the barrel like normal, then mounts the barreled action into a jig, and then cuts the vertical gate latches. Hell, even just flipping the barreled action upside-down to rest on the top picatinny rail would give a pretty good vertical alignment for the gate latch cuts. If the barrel was already installed and the gunsmith was fitted a pre-made pre-cut loose barrel journal, then he should have timed the barrel journal cuts vertically to the receiver.
The point is that a gunsmith should NEVER allow a barrel to leave his shop like that, they're very easy to time, no matter which way the journal was added to the barrel. I would have immediately sent the rifle back to have the barrel timed properly. This can be a lesson for other cloners, NEVER accept sub-par work from a gunsmith. This was very easy to prevent, and it's very easy to fix. It should have never left the shop looking like this.
Unfortunately, if your gunsmith marked the sides of the barrel with a caliber or other information, the markings will now be off if the barrel is turned and timed for your gate latch. So, you can easily have a gunsmith fix the problem, but if the barrel is marked horizontally as it sides now, the gunsmith will also have to fix the markings.
There's a few ways to do this, either put the barrel on a lathe and turn down the back end to get rid of the markings, and then blend that turned down area into the rest of the barrel to keep the same profile. Or the markings can be spot welded and cleaned up. The latter will show through bluing and parkerizing, and can be seen in raw steel. But it won't matter if you powder coat or paint the barrel. The gunsmith will have to be extremely careful to take his time spot welding the markings if you go this route because the high heat can ruin the barrels tempering.
I hope this information helps and I hope that you can get it fixed. It doesn't take a crazy amount of rounds to burn out a .300WM barrel. So, shoot the shit out of that barrel, order a new Mod 3 barrel from crazynoto WITHOUT the pre-cut gate latch channels, and then have a different gunsmith install the new barrel and properly do the vertical gate latch cuts.
