The next is hammer forging which is the way BPI makes there barrels though they dont say it that way, its the standard for europes barrel making process, you call BPI products junk but remington,sako, tikka, H&K,steyr, and sauer all use hammer forged barrels and i'd hardly call any of those rifles junk!!!
Wait a minute, don't put words down I never used. I never once said they where junk. You just made that up. GO back and reread what I wrote. I said do your homework and make up your own mind. Knowledge is what you use of it. You take the potential pros and cons and you must weigh them in order to what you feel is valid and of importance. Then make up your own mind. Thats all I said. I personally like I said ealier wouldn't buy a BPI product but it is not just because of this one issue. Enough people have complained about the hard trigger pull to more than justify not buying one alone. I've handled a couple of BPI products just to check the triggers and I decided I don't want to play trigger roulette. Gee do I get a good one or don't I. As for BPI according to there web site they are using and cold forging method which yields a barrel with rifling in a single process which means they are using an extrusion technique. They could be extruding the steel at temperatures any where from room temp to a few hundered degrees. The method they use I would guess follow for the process would go something like this where a chemically lubricated bar slug of steel is forced into a closed die under extreme pressure. The unheated metal then flows into the desired barrel shape die. During this process the cylinder is formed and rifling is included in the barrel all in a single step process. Now whether they are using a forward or rear extrusion technique I don't now but I would guess its a forward extrusion technique. Now it certainlly differs from using a button technique where they take a barrel blank slightly smaller than the caliber expected and ram the button down blank. Now with Hammer forging your taking about taking a nearly 2-inch-diameter bar of steel about 12 inches long with a hole through its center, and hammering it until it, elongates it into a tube of the desired length. It usually ends up having a muzzle diameter less than one-third of what it was originally. All three methods then would have to be releived for stress. I would agree with you on one point that being most muzzleloaders probably are not using a cut or "hook" rifling technique since they tend to be time consuming and more expensive. Maybe Randy can tell us what manufactures use what techniques and shed some more light on the subject.