Re: Fluted barrels?
Advantages alreayd stated, weight savings and cooling, and they look sharp. The disadvantages to fluting only tend to show up if you are fluting a barrel that happens to be a poor candidate 'after the fact' and not during the original manufacturing process. Basically its like this, you have a barrel of X contour and weight. Barrel thickness is a certain number all the way across. You have the barrel turned down to your desired contour, chambered, crowned/threaded what have you. You take your barrel, screw it into your rifle, pop off a few hundred rounds and decide its a little heavy and you want to flute it. Now you flute your barrel, you are removing even more metal, reducing the barrel thickness in the places that are fluted. As a result, your barrel weighs less and is now less rigid than a unfluted barrel of equal contour and thus becomes a little more temperamental to things like heating or harmonics. Yes, fluting cools a barrel faster but theres the caveat, your fluted barrel has less material than an unfluted barrel of equal contour/size and will probably heat up faster than the unfluted barrel. Ideally, you want the barrel fluted from a larger dia. contour and shaved down to the contour you actually want, this way you end up with a fluted barrel that has the same amount of weight, metal, and barrel thickness as the barrel you originally wanted to get fluted. They weigh the same now but the one with the fluting has the advantage of faster cooling without the drawback of having reduced barrel wall thickness.
This really gets exacerbated in extreme cases and probably would not be an issue if you were fluting a bull barrel; if you were trying to remove metal from say a lightweight or pencil barrel you would run into some possibly dangerous issues of having far too thin barrel thickness at the flutes.
