Are you saying the drill would walk off too much by the time it got to the muzzle?
My little dissertation. . . I've got some time this morning. Fresh coffee and I'm waiting on a spindle to warm up on a machine I'm using today. So, lucky you. I'm taking my idle time out on you all instead of doing something more constructive, lol.
Answering your question: Yes.
My babble:
Let me start by saying that if I sound like I'm talking down to anyone, I'm not doing it intentionally. Experience has taught me that not everyone gets to spend 30+ years in a machine shop. Vernacular/terms can be a little tough to keep up with for some so I try to whittle this down as best as I can while still making it interesting to read.
I probably suck at it so sorry for that.
Let's begin by first understanding how this game gets played. A deep hole gun drill gets set up with a stick of material supported in two places. -basically at each end. If it's a super long piece there might be something along the lines of a pillow block support somewhere in the middle. That would be done in an effort to mitigate "whip" or vibration which can/likely would lead to tools wandering down the hole.
Depending on the age/design of the machine, the tool itself may or may not rotate. There are a couple of ways this gets done. Some just spin the part where're others spin the part AND the tool (drill) in opposite directions of each other. I don't make barrels for a living so there's probably some details here being left out. Forgive me, please.
-A little sidebar discussion. A direction that a tool travels is known as an "axis" in the machining community. X/Y/Z/A/B/C, etc. . . These all mean something and they are common regardless of the machine being used. Everything is based on the spindle. In this application, we are talking about the "Z" axis direction of travel. Z moves are "with" the spindle. "X" would be "to and from" the spindle at a 90* angle from its face. "Y" would be "up and down" from the same face.
Yada, yada. . .
The process is known as deep hole gun drilling. Poking long skinny holes in steel is not the easiest thing to do. The single biggest machining challenge is the swarf evacuation. -getting the cut-up junk out of the hole efficiently so that you don't compact the hole, load up the drill, create chip weld where the junk literally melts and welds itself to the tool/tool shank and the part.
-as a result of it failing to evacuate efficiently by the flood coolant. This is literally one of the toughest things to deal with in machining. Life on a Bridgeport or manual lathe is pretty simple by comparison. When you start trying to actually make money at this stuff the second hand on the clock becomes a lot more relevant. The quantity drives this boat exponentially. Speeds and feeds are astronomical in today's manufacturing. They have to be. Getting the cut-up junk out of the way can quite literally be the difference between you spending $300-$400 for a barrel blank and not $500.00+.
It's why deep hole gun drills typically use a very impressive amount of hydraulic pressure (####'s of psi) on the cutting fluid so that the crap gets pushed out of the way. It's also why they almost always use a
petroleum-based cutting oil instead of water-based coolant like a typical modern lathe/mill uses. The lubrication is
much more critical than trying to keep everything at a cool temperature.
So, wrap your head around that a little and keep it fresh in your mind. Now think about this little tool and what it is being asked to do. The task at hand is to poke a hole for a good 2-3
FEET in length in a piece of steel that isn't known for being the most friendly to machining. (Chromoly or stainless steel. Take your pick) It travels one inch in the axial (Z-axis) direction and the tool for whatever reason wanders .0005" of an inch off of the theoretical centerline position. Once that happens, it is what it is, there's no magical steering wheel to bring it back.
.0005". It's a number that gets tossed around on gun forums a lot. To put this dimension into perspective a little. . . Go pluck a hair from your skull and measure it with a qualified, well-made, carbide anvil micrometer. Unless your DNA links to Sasquatch, it's typically going to hover between .003" and .0035" of an inch. You're gonna have to "Julienne slice" that hair 6 or 7 times to do this.
Grab a razor and have at it. We'll watch.
The point being, a "half thou" walk on a drill over an inch of travel is a very, very easy thing to do. Once it starts, the cascading effect is basically unstoppable. As I said, there isn't some magical steering wheel that will fix this. What you are stuck with now is the reality that when you hit the 2" of linear travel, the error has likely doubled. The hole's center is a full .001" out of position now.
The shitshow before you just keeps getting worse as the tool wanders down the hole.
The good thing though is that it's of little consequence at this point. Sure, the hole isn't straight in comparison to what the outside of the material is doing, but we can fix that because the blank hasn't been qualified to its final shape yet. I believe I touched on this in my original post here. All a guy has to do is set it up between centers and rip the desired contour into shape. The real beauty here is that even if the chuck and the tailstock/center on the lathe are not aligned with one another on the common axis, it
still brings the concentricity back. -at least it should anyway. There's no assurance you'll get the contour you are after, but the OD of the part would still run parallel the axial centerline for the bulk of its length. So long as the tool is reasonably close to being on centerline and the error between chuck/tailstock isn't absurd, it would still do the job). There are a dozen or so other ways you can still ferk this up, but that is a different discussion.
Make sense?
Your earlier comment that compelled my interest in this discussion would likely go something like this:
I do everything I just described only now the outside of the barrel is finished. The muzzle threads are done. Your barrel is finished at 24" in length overall. I add the "wrinkles" (muzzle threads) and begin to drill my hole that is later reamed and finally rifled for the land/groove features. BUT, my drill wanters the .0005" I've been talking about. (understand I use .0005" because the math is just easier. It might be less or more) At two feet in length, we can anticipate a deviation from the center that adds up to .012" of an inch. Let's pretend this is a 30 cal barrel and you want 1/2-28 threads for your brake, can, whatever.
The math ultimately pencils out to where the distance from the crest of the thread to the inner wall of the bore's GROOVE diameter measures right around .09375" ( I figured all of this off a .495" OD for the threaded cylinder and a .3075" ID bore groove which is pretty typical stuff for what I've described as my example.)
I promise you that Ray Charles would be able to see a .012" shit in concentricity on a part like this. It's precisely why gun plumbers worth their salt make the effort to dial a barrel in off the bore from two places when fitting up a blank or turning muzzle threads. The two location points ensure you have the axial alignment in addition to concentricity. This is how you keep bullets from doing weird stuff on paper and how you avoid whacking can baffles/brake ports.
Make sense? Hope it helps.
The machine's warmed up so I gotta bounce.
C.
LRI