Yep, we do that with a slight twist. Years ago I kept a 3 ring binder with everything in it. I had a couple of hundred receivers documented in there. When we moved the shop in the beginning of 2018 that notebook was inadvertently destroyed and we lost everything in it. Shortly after that shop move I also bought a laser so we started taking aluminum business card stock and engraving all the pertinent details onto the business card and shipping it back to the customer with their completed work. It looks really slick and professional and it removes the burden of keeping all the information here where a HDD crash or some other disaster can wipe out so much important data. Plus it now gives the customer a piece of data that they can pass along to the next owner if they decide to sell it.
I tell folks all the time "the information to make a new barrel without seeing the action is all on that tag. It doesn't have to come back to us. If you use someone else they can use that tag. If they tell you it's not possible then take caution sending work there."
The following replies are not written in any form of malice from my part, so as people read them please keep in mind that about 5% of overall communicated information is retained in written form as opposed to full in person speech. I took the time to write replies to this because I think the comments raised are frequently used to put down one brand vs. another even though the data that forms these comments is suspect at best. Much of it is really not realiable in my opinion.
As usual the cut vs. button topic comes up and yet the discussion of "how is the material prepped for rifling" isn't happening. So I took the time to make a thorough and thoughtful reply to these points because it is my intent to get folks thinking about what they're saying instead of just throwing back the same reply they've believed for years.
If we sit and think and work through the manufacturing and actually get to the guiding principles of a technology (causal data, not correlative data) then we can understand and improve faster and improve to a larger degree. This approach has served me well from our business perspective. I can't think of any other "gunsmith shop" that holds utility patents in aerodynamics, composite technology and reliability engineering topics and that's due to our constant drive to look for the root cause instead of just taking the tribal knowledge as gospel and going blindly along the path as the industry and consumers say we should. It ruffles feathers with folks sometimes but I think the overall performance of a precision rifle has been improved based on what we're doing here.
So in the sense of argument for the sake of academics sake, in an effort to bear out good data for our common goal of making really REAALLLY good rifles, here's some commentary:
That kind of performance is borderline unheard-of (7 shots) in the carbon blank industry. Excellent shooting for sure! Nicely done.
In any industry when a new entrant shows up to the market it takes a while for the established companies to see any blip in their sales because the consumers of those parts have a strong tendency to say "I have no incentive to change to the new guy" and they just buy what everyone else uses. It's market momentum.
In 2000 (amazing, 25 years ago!) Only 1 of those companies you listed had any place on the firing line because 1 didn't exist and the other was infantile or had yet to be founded, I honestly forget now. Did the others have some magic that Kreiger didn't to be in that named group now? Not really, and they're still disciples of the original master (Obermeyer). What happened is Bartlein and Brux sold blanks, gave away blanks, put things on prize tables, had blanks available in a shorter lead time and they marketed their wares and they did a great job making them.
The establishment turned their noses up and said "I don't know the new guys, I'm sticking to what I know." Reasonable, money in a hobby shooting budget is hard to come by. Use what you know and don't deviate from it. I remember reading about Brux on this forum 15+ years ago and it was a new company, almost nobody had heard of them and the guy who posted about them took some flak for potentially wasting money on a barrel maker nobody heard of, why not use a proven entity? He had a certificate...
Then the Brux and Bartlein started winning and people noticed. They make an excellent product. Now they're the establishment and folks like yourself say "I don't know this new guy at all, they're not getting my money". No problem, we're busy and people are clearly happy with our product. Consider for a minute, here's a thread comparing Bartlien to this new company you don't know and don't use yet half the thread is people with extremely positive reviews of the Osprey marque and showing off groups that rival anything that comes from The Big 3.
Ben and I were talking about this thread today actually. Initially he was a little put off by people questioning the work after "all these years" but he realized we're being favorably compared to one of the biggest names in the precision barrel industry and people, our hard won customers, are standing up to say how happy they are with the things that we made them. I'm not going to throw rocks at Bartlein because I know they make a great product. I know we are making a product worthy of comparison, if I didn't I would be working hard to fix it... and it's clear that our customers are seeing the performance and they're standing up for it as well. I've said it before: I have the utmost respect for any company that decides they're going to drill 100:1 L/D holes in a piece of stainless, rifle it, contour it, and turn it into a rifle barrel that shoots like these things do. It's a hard job and doing it over and over means you have a process really dialed in properly.
One thing I know we can hang out and let other people lust after is that our lead time for blanks sent to your chosen smith is typically 10-14 days to ship in just about any contour want and our lead time for prefits can be as fast as 1 week. That's a bar that virtually nobody else is touching in the custom rifle industry. Even when we're completely sold out and caught with our pants down (which happens less and less) our total turn time from raw steel to finished prefit is still about 1/3 of the time that the average custom order takes with much of our competition.
As I said to someone above: We cut customer supplied blanks all the time, the only thing that changes is how the warranty on the blank itself is handled. Our work doesn't change and the warranty on our work doesn't change. I would like that you buy the blank from us, after all I'm trying to build a brand, but I don't turn away customers who already have a blank they want to use.
I think you would do well to read Cliff LaBounty's book on rifling and rifling machines and do a little more testing yourself. I started down this road with a lot of data on cut compared to button and when filtering through the process metrics it was clear that cut vs. button wasn't the deciding factor. It is correlated but definitely not causal. The causal factor was the prep that goes into the bore prior to rifling, what I termed
"hole control" in this article on our website. I had a couple long conversations with some barrel makers from several brands as well as machine experts and the honing process is the hands down winner for consistency. It's expensive compared to ream/lap but the performance speaks for itself in consistency across every industry, not just firearm barrels.
We started this road with empirical data on about 9,500 chamber jobs that I had done myself with representation from every major and several minor names in the industry. At this juncture the total number is approximately double that number.
Bore consistency prior to rifling was the #1 indicator of a good blank result. The type of rifling, even when expanded to account for record strings in firing, was correlated but definitely not causal. From the good blank we can then go down a rabbithole of gunsmithing techniques and processes. There are certainly some things that I do differently than SAC, LRI, Spartan, Rubicon... just like with the barrel making, there are several ways to skin the cat. Who's right and who's wrong? Both and neither. The results that each of us gets speaks for themselves.
How much of a factor do you think may be at play with a superstitious group like BR that they won't deviate unless it becomes painfully disadvantageous to maintain status quo approach? This statement is not truly data driven but rather driven from emotions/superstition and market momentum. Furthermore, the vast majority of people competing in those circles are copying what the top 3 or top 5 are doing in an effort to equip their way into higher standings.
I strongly believe we could take over the podiums in the PRS in 2 seasons if I said that every PRS 2025 Finale participant gets 1 free blank and 50% off subsequent blanks for the 2026 and 2027 season. Does that mean we're all of the sudden making something so superior to everyone else? Or does it mean that we made a financial decision to buy our way into the top of something to push people off the fence? It's rather a moot point because I couldn't really afford to give away hundreds of barrels like that but if you give it thought what kind of impact would such a marketing move have on articles like "What the Pros Use"? Throw in a few checks written to the right guys who are really entrenched with the Big 3 barrel makers and the coup is all but assured.
The PRS Blog article series "What the Pros Use" seems like a good way to filter products until you apply the understanding that everyone will use something free if it's good enough to get the job done. More than any other industry I've been involved with the adage "free is for me" applies to shooting sports. The vast majority of the guys shooting in the finale, if not every single one, are getting that barrel and install work at a discount. That is how marketing works, but that article is rife with unintentional bias because there is financial benefit applied to the data set. I say unintentional bias because I know Cal Zant and he's honestly aiming for an engaging article series that is based on real data.
Here's what I mean being biased:
Mr. Top 100 Shooter: I have something here that's going to be just as good or better than what you have now. Is it enough for you to jump podium spots? There are performance benefits to it if you're good enough to use them... oh, and You have to pay for it.
Or
Mr. Top 100 Shooter: Here's a heavily discounted, high quality product for free. Tell everyone how great it is to use the status quo. No, you don't have to pay for it directly but we need you to talk about it.
There's no way to argue that situation isn't biased data, but that's what we have with the article series "What the Pros Use" and why I know that the prevelance of a few specific brands has a lot to do with the targeted marketing and not the performance. Anyone in here remember 2015 Surgeon deals that converted most of the top finishers to paid shooters with Surgeon? In 2016 Surgeon became the top winning action in all of PRS... was it so superior? Or did they just buy the top guys who were already winning with a mosaic of equipment. Read again my statment about how I know we could become the #1 winning barrel in all of the PRS, it's not an original idea that I wrote down above. It's just out of my financial grasp.
PVA has 3 directly sponsored US shooters; all of whom get discounts but not free items. That's it, 3, between NRL and PRS. Only 1 is in the PRS. If we played marketing games with data I can say that "100% of Osprey sponsored shooters made the PRS Finale". No other brand can say that. Is it an honest representation? yes. Is it also misleading through honesty? Absolutely.
In Canada there are 6, 3 of whom are a family that do more for our brand as ambassadors than as podium finishers and I want it that way. I want people representing us whom I would invite to my home and have sit at my dinner table instead of people who are always on the top of the podium but nobody can stand being around them. We all know some shooters like that... talented and miserable to be around.
For the OP,
@patriot07
I know that whichever blank you choose you're going to end up with an excellent rifle. Threads like this provide an opportunity for smaller companies like myself to speak up and also for our loyal customers to speak up and show off what they've accomplished with our products. I'm long past getting hurt feelings because someone chooses a different blank brand than ours. We are sending out a lot of work at a very high level and the results speak for themselves. If you do a hybrid approach and buy a Bartlein and have us cut it that is still going to net you an excellent rifle. Frankly, you're in the situation where the net result is two sides of the same coin: a great shooting rifle.
CHeers
in a pm I'll call them and mention you speak very highly of them...
