Bore A Paintball Barrel For Freak Inserts

[MountainDewFKR]

I recently watched a vid of a guy demonstrating the process. Its pretty damn simple if you have the equipment.
Our shop has a couple manual lathes that rarely ever get used. Maybe afew times a year for a rework job.
Think I will pick up a couple barrels locally and try it out for myself.
If it turns out good maybe ill just leave the machine setup and possibly randomly run barrels and sell them. Probably wouldnt want to take orders due to liability if I mess something up like the finish.
Just need to get the tooling and some freak inserts.
I assume going XL will be the better option but might be dependent on barrel type too.
Im sure there are some variables I need to figure out. Even if i dont sell them i can always just run some for myself and friends.
Anyone ever do this before?

Heres the vid i saw, sure there are more

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUM2wWzTfTg

[netsurferdude2]

There are a few of us who do it here. If you have some basic manual lathe skills its pretty easy. Holding concentricity on a freak XL bore is way more tricky than a normal freak. Start slow and you'll learn along the way.

I'd recommend hitting the barrel will a boring bar before using a reamer. The reamer is doing a little too much work in that video. Rule of thumb for reamers is 2% of the dia. 18.8mm = 0.740 reamer so 2% of that is 15 thou. He is cutting about 3.5x that amount. The reamer wont last that long and surface finish will suffer a bit. Granted its only a $20 reamer so send it. No harm no foul. It gets the job done.

It is a lot of fun so get some junk barrels and turn away.

[MountainDewFKR]

Yeah, i will be having our engineer who is a really good machinist help me along the way.
Hes a really smart guy so he will probably give me advice similar to what you just explained.
This will be something fun i can mess around with while im also rebuilding my Autocockers.
And yeah i figured the XL would be more a pita. Ill stick with standard.
Thanks

[Jimmydee]

Cdn_Cuda has some inserts coming his way he would likely sell

[superman]

I have inserts in the misc section if your looking.

[Cdn_Cuda]

I have a manual lathe, like your second one, in my shop. I need to horse more crap barrels and figure out how to do this.

[Jsc5150]

If you want some practice, I want some SL68-II barrels freak bored… [waits for the polar bear to burst from a wall and hit me with a mallet]

The catch is that I don’t want the full 5” (giggity), I only want about an inch bored I think. Might be good for practice.

[Psycho91]

Just the tip he said 😂

[Jsc5150]

Giggity giggity

[Frmrspec]

wouldn't even bother with a reamer at that depth...just a small boring bar and hold the barrel in a collet

[KMDPB]

Hey, that's my video! 👋

[MountainDewFKR]

Hey thanks for the vid
Inspired me

[KMDPB]

MountainDewFKR glad to hear! Hearing that kinda inspires me to make some more videos

[XEMON]

Inspired me to buy a reamer ... Now I need to find the time 😅

[BrickHaus]

If I were gonna do an sl 68, I'd want the insert captured.

It's funny this popped up. I had a few barrels done up by KMDPB, the OP of the shared video. And I have 2 barrels that are rifled. I cant esplain the magic of a freak bored rifled barrel.

They work great, but one of them was an Allen Paintball barrel which are straight rifled. The barrel had a poor surface finish internally where the grooves were broached. I polished the heck out of it last weekend, and was taking pictures for myself but I figured Is share em here.

[netsurferdude2]

I have a freak bored Armson rifled barrel on my bushmaster and it is deadly.

[MountainDewFKR]

Very cool 😎

[Jsc5150]

If I were gonna do an sl 68, I'd want the insert captured.

Yeah, I got a 16” deadlywind x8 for cheap, and DW made me an adapter that captures the insert.

Did you know SL68-IIs shoot ridiculously good if you give them a $150 barrel? It feels like a dirty secret.

However I have more than one of these shitters, and they’ll need something for rollouts if they will fulfill their destiny as loaners.

Thinking about boring an inch or so, and cutting up a 686 and a 677 insert to glue/loctite/epoxy/whatever into the bored out inch, about half an inch of each.

[BrickHaus]

Yes I knew. Lol, if they didn't chew the webbing of my hand up, I'd still have an sl68. I have a buddy who works on them quite a bit.


I've knocked the threads off of a5 barrels before with good success. Also, but a freak sounds nice.

[Jsc5150]

Lol pretty sure my sl68 adapter started life as an a5 adapter now that you mention it

[flyweightnate]

My first ever game of paintball was a mixed rental fleet of SL68 and SL68-IIs... and they desperately needed a good barrel or two.

Now you've gone and made me nostalgic.