The actual sectioning process is quite simple, I stick the barrel in a horizontal band saw and cut the chamber end off leaving around 75-90mm of barrel and chamber dependant on what it was originally chambered for. I then face the sawn end off on a lathe, mostly to keep my fingers intact when it is handled and then make sure the barrel has been taken off my RFD register marked as scrapped. Next I cut the barrel lengthwise again in the saw which saves some time and finally I run a carbide roughing cutter across the cut edge to tidy things up a bit and clean the edges.
Such a process might not win any prizes for presentation however it does admirably display the condition of the chamber and throat and any other areas of interest such as fire cracking or reamer chatter marks or…. stuck bullets.
It is possible on occasion to remove stuck bullets and you can use a variety of techniques such as mechanical or hydraulic force or if you are lucky electrolysis, however these can be fraught with issues and time consuming unless you get an early win. My preference has to be the use of a drop rod (length of brass rod dropped in from the muzzle) followed by hydraulic force, when done carefully neither of these processes should deform the bullet as the last thing you need is a bullet that has been pushed further into the grooves.
When this barrel got to me it had already been worked on and I could see daylight through the barrel meaning the bullet was not intact so a hydraulic extraction was not on the cards. For cases that have suffered from a case head separation you can often extract the remains of the case with a large PB chamber brush in the absence of broken case extractor however you are less likely to see success with a fine PB brush on a bullet! This left very little in the way of choices and I opted for electrolysis first of all. This entails blocking the barrel at one end with a bung, filling it up with a conductive solution which in its simplest form can be something like salt water and then dropping an electrode into the barrel making sure it does not touch the sides.
Next stage is some power. I have a DC power source we use for anodising that can be wound right down to a few milliamps, for this sort of operation somewhere around 100mA is a good start. Connect the Red/Positive to the barrel and black/negative to the electrode and power the system up. Success of the process is usually denoted by a fizzing around the Cathode (Negative) which at least means something is happening. Now such a process is great for removing copper from a tired SOWR (Strange Old Wooden Rifle) however it can be somewhat time consuming with a complete bullet jacket. On this occasion I let things run for a while and then used a brass drop rod which is basically a length of brass machined to just less than the bore of the barrel dropped in from the muzzle end. I would never recommend hammering a length of brass or any other material as it can deform and then things get really bad. Never use anything harder than the material used to manufacture the barrel as you are just going to rip the bore to pieces.
The major problem with such operations is they are all time consuming and there comes a time when you just need to say enough.
Back to the sectioned chambers I will take some pictures of some more when the camera is next out and I have a couple of early .303 barrels here with countless rounds through them that might be interesting to section at some stage.
