Ultrarifled
Custom Precision Rifle Barrels
Douglas Ultrarifle™ Barrel
Manufacture Sequence of Operations
1. Special USA gun barrel quality steel made to Douglas specifications is ordered directly from the steel mill. Both chrome moly, and stainless alloys are used.
2. Next step is to use a bandsaw cut the steel bars to length.
3. Bars stacked in stress relief furnace. Proper Stress Relief insures uniform hardness and grain structure throughout the bars.
4. Outside of the bar is turned on an automatic lathe to true the outside diameter.
5. Each bar is then center drilled.
6. A four-spindle drilling machine using single flute gun drill, makes a hole through the bar. It is at this stage that inspections begin, each bore is checked for straightness. We rarely have rejects but if a hole is not perfectly true, it is scrapped. Douglas does not straighten barrels for any reason.
7. Each drilled bar is slowly reamed to insure a smooth bore surface.
8. After reaming, the bores are again inspected for interior surface finish. The bars are then coated with Teflon in preparation for rifling.
9 Rifling operation consists of pushing a tungsten carbide button through the bore, guided by precision steel gearing. This insures uniformity of rifling twist.
10. After the rifling process, the rifled blank is filled with a special heat resistant liquid, plugged at both ends, and placed into the furnace for its second Stress Relief. . This process is vitally important to an accurate barrel.
11. Each Douglas barrel is magnetic particle inspected.
12. Each Douglas barrel is air gauged. All our barrels will gauge at less than .0002 variations, and our “air gauge quality” or Premium barrels will be within .0001 inch. We do no lapping to achieve these tolerances. We prefer to engineer and build our precision into the barrels during the manufacturing process; not lap the bores into tolerance afterwards. This is an added cost for Douglas, but the results are worth it for our customers.
13. At this stage the blanks are placed into inventory to be machined later into the various shapes we offer. Each barrel is custom contoured to your needs when you order it.
14. CNC lathe turning one of our precision Ultrarifle™ blanks into a customer’s barrel.
15. Douglas Barrels also offer threading, chambering, and fitting to the customer’s rifle action.
