A friend said he thought the early guns might have barrels made by Pedersoli and thus might be of better quality than later ones.  Any thoughts on this??

Pedersoli barrels are machined from a chrome moly alloy having the metalurgical composition called 30Cr Mo4  Uni 7845 which is a patented alloy variation developed by Mauser in the 1930s specially for their new M34 light machinegun which has such a rapid rate of fire. The alloy was designed to prevent or minimize the barrel from "walking" the bullets on the target as the barrel heated up. To my knowledge only Mauser, Sako, Mannlicher and Walther use this expensive alloy which Pedersoli buys.

At Pedersoli all barrels are drilled and reamed but then we add a third step which is to HONE the bore hole to bring it up to the match grade tolerance of the final bore diameter.  Also the honing produces a much finer finish in the bore hole and this fine finish becomes the tops of your lands.....mirror finish affect before we start the broaches on their job of cutting all the grooves.
 
Also, we use two of these 5-6 foot long broaches on each rifle barrel.
The first broach brings the rifling up to within .0020" of the final dimension.  The second broach having 15 cutters brings the rifling up the last .0020" to the final dimension.
This second broach has the last three cutters of the exact same size.   As cutter #13 makes the final tiny cut it is worn a bit.  Eventually cutter #13 will no longer bring the groove up to the final diameter so cutter #14 which has been doing no work, comes into play and handles that final cut.
#14 eventually wears a bit and cutter #15 which has done no work up to this time, comes into play and takes over making the final cut.
 
Experience tells us when to remove the broaches and have them resharpened back to normal dimensions. Barrels are visually inspected using a borescope which projects the picture onto a large TV monitor.  Air gaging is performed to verify the rifling is within match grade tolerances (plus/minus .0002").