I made some chips on the old girl the last couple of days. I find great pleasure in doing things old school. All flats were milled off the compound swiveled to split the taper. Slow going and lots of tramming setups, but the barrel really turned out well. Flats are sized, parallel to the bore and each other within .003" worst case. I drawfiled and polished one flat to see just how purty it will finish up. Sun is coming out and life is good. Happy Easter to all!

Beautiful machine work. Beautiful old machine.
My hat is off to you. Could not do better with more modern machines, maybe a little faster but not better.
Chuck

I do not have any of those pictures.  Interesting...

It is a 1929 South Bend 13". 

I spent most of my working career as a Mfg Engineer surrounded by CNC equipment conducive to blazing speed and high accuracy. It is refreshing to me to step back and slow things down a bit. Yes, it took me a full day to actually cut the octagon. Counting night time worry and brainstorms, it could easily stretch to two or more days. Ninety percent of the time at the lathe was spent in tramming the setups. Working with a double taper on every cut was a good brain exercise . I caught myself setting up incorrectly twice. I had part of the taper reversed. I have often wished that I could be present in the shops of some of the great old barrelmakers.

Thanx for all the nice comments. In hindsight, I'll probably never "flat" another pre-tapered barrel again. Starting with a cylindrical blank is night and day easier. I sure wish that there were enough stock to turn a nice wedding band transition, but I will probably just re-taper to meet the octagon as were the factory Stevens. This is going to be one heavy barrelled 'Bee when finished!

Well, I'd like to see this project, but my screen shows rows of .28-30 brass and another photo of a set of dies for same. This from a thread earlier.
I wanted to see Mike's machine shop assembled after coming in on pack mules and pony express.
All the other threads having photos seem to be working just fine. What is going on with this, do ya suppose.

Marlinguy,
Thats a great idea for the band. That will let me safely experiment with a silver inlay as well. I want to do a couple circumferential silver bands on the wedding band. I started playing with this a while back. I undercut a small dovetailed groove in some barstock and then peened in some 3/32" silver solder. The technique needs more work but it looked pretty nice.

SBoomer wrote on Apr 17^th, 2017 at 10:08am:

Would you end up with a non-tapered barrel or would you machine the taper when starting with a cylindrical barrel?