Gunsmithing Carbon Fiber wrapped barrel question.
- Thread starter Sil17sd
- Start date
Probably risk and time. Steel is very forgiving. You can take deep roughing cuts, get a mirror finish in a final cut if you know your stuff and use the right tools.
Carbon fiber is a pita to work. They take diamond tooling in some cases. Many passes to machine and tiny cuts. And the replacement cost is such that if the smith has an error, they are on the hook for two or three X the cost of a steel blank.
And in some cases, may simply be some market based pricing added in. More exotic=more dollars...
Cheers, Sirhr
Carbon fiber is a pita to work. They take diamond tooling in some cases. Many passes to machine and tiny cuts. And the replacement cost is such that if the smith has an error, they are on the hook for two or three X the cost of a steel blank.
And in some cases, may simply be some market based pricing added in. More exotic=more dollars...
Cheers, Sirhr
I guess you have never seen a CF wrapped barrel. You don't get anywhere near the CF. The only thing touched IS steel.
What? Are you talking about? I used to work for a composites company who made cf barrels for a few companies.
First the barrel blank was provided to us chambered and threaded with the appropriate amount of steel removed for the carbon fiber to be laid on a spindle winder.
OP you wanna know wtf it costs so much? It's all set up by hand.... Usually in batches of less than 10 at a time on advanced machines....
Resin impregnated Carbon is wound on then cured.
If the company is using stiff aerospace grade carbon and high temp resin that shit ain't cheap either easily 100-200 in material costs per barrel.
The carbon is then sanded by hand or turned on a lathe as @sirhrmechanic said using specialized tooling to be flush with the steel
I completely understand the blank costing significantly more, just wondering qbout the chambering and threading which is done on the stainless "stubs". Gunsmith will do no machining on the actual cf.
To the op... I am very familiar with carbon wrapped barrels... I headed an Advanced Programs unit at General Dynamics for a time and was one of our big projects. Trying to make CF Gatling gun barrels c. 2003.... and we weren’t the only ones, but as we had just acquired a carbon fiber company making radomes and other composites, we got a huge head start. Ultimately, not economic... the MRO cost didn’t justify the performance gains. Something not necessarily true on precision rifles and infantry weapons.
Next, , your post did not say crowning and chambering. You said “spinning up.” Spinning up from my perspective meant profiling, not steel work. My apology.
Second, risk is high in expensive blanks. So charge more. Third, as I mentioned, market price means you can charge more for more Exotic stuff. Market pricing. You charge more to work on a Mercedes than Kia... because you can.
There may be other factors, so maybe others who do it daily know additional details.
Cheers, Sirhr
Next, , your post did not say crowning and chambering. You said “spinning up.” Spinning up from my perspective meant profiling, not steel work. My apology.
Second, risk is high in expensive blanks. So charge more. Third, as I mentioned, market price means you can charge more for more Exotic stuff. Market pricing. You charge more to work on a Mercedes than Kia... because you can.
There may be other factors, so maybe others who do it daily know additional details.
Cheers, Sirhr
Not on all of them.
Furthermore, I charge more for the fitting of a carbon blank partly for what the other guy said and also because we have to make special aluminum collets for each one because the contours are rarely consistent from barrel to barrel and grabbing on bare carbon is a recipe to leave marks and damage it. So there's the cost of making 1 off aluminum split rings for each one that factors into it.
There are a couple barrels that do allow you to cut through the carbon and don't rquire the barrel to be ordered at a specific length, Paradigm Tech and Helix 6 come to mind though there may be more. Those have specific approaches required to cutting through the carbon without causing delaminations that then junk the blank.
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