I recently bought a beautiful Hepburn in 38-55 Winchester. But the bore is worn pretty bad and it simply will not group. The five inches of barrel at the muzzle has zero lands!
I've treaded and rebarreled a few dozen V-Thread rifles but never a flat-top square thread. How much more involved than V-threading? Simply grind a cutter to match the existing barrel's thread and not use the compound?
If I decide to not tackle this myself, who do you recommend to rebarrel it for me?
Thanks in advance....

RoyB I had the same delima recently but mine was 40 cal already so I would have had to go up to 44 or 45 cal rebore and really didn't want to because I have several 40 cal rifles already and I just like 40 cal. I had purchased a 40 cal Badger round barrel several years ago for a very good price and never used it. I bought the necessary drills and reamer and removed the barrel then drilled it out and reamed it. I then turned the Badger to slip fit with .003 clearence a good smear of Locktite and it was done. Rechambered it to the same cal. If you are not capable of doing it yourself I recommend John Taylor. He is here on the forum. His prices are reasonable and he does good work. My Hepburn was a bit long in the tooth as far as looks but mechanically sound. If yours is a nicer one I would reline it. The only reason I lined mine was like you're the barrel was toast so if I was going to get any accuracy I had to do something to the bore. I would never do that to a gun with even a reasonable bore but mine was REALLY bad. I am taking it to the range tomorrow on it's first outing to see if everything I did was worthwhile.



JMH