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34 inch stainless steel fluted barrel
I decide that once I retired I would take back up elk hunting so naturally I would need a new elk rifle. This gun should be capable of killing an elk cleanly at 1500 yards. Factory cartridges that filled this bill were the 30-378Wby and the 338-378. A guy in Montana was building long range rifles and had just developed a 7mm wildcat cartridge by radically “improving” the 338 Lapua magnum case and necking it down. The improved case was mated to an equally radical 200 grain rebated boattail hollow pointed bullet with a ballistic coefficient that was reported to be somewhere in the high 0.8s to low 0.9s. With a 30 inch barrel velocities were being obtained of about 3300 fps. This all worked out to enough killing power to kill elk at 1500 yards. However there were two flies in the ointment. The 338 LM like the 30-378 needs a very large bolt face action and when you seat a very long bullet it needs a very long action. Secondly, barrel life was going to be short burning 100+ grains of powder in a 0.284 bore. Two benchrest actions were suitable: Nesika Bay and Bat.
As luck would have it a guy had a Nesika M single shot action and wanted to sell it so I bought that and shipped it to the gunsmith with detailed instructions on the stock and the barrel. Despite his objections, I insisted upon a 34 inch barrel instead of the normal 30 inch barrels most people use and I wanted a #7 contour which is the usual with a 30 inch barrel. Dan Lilja just happens to make a 34 inch 1-9 twist four groove barrel and so it was decided to use that. Fortunately the Nesika action is extremely strong and would have no problem holding up a 34 inch barrel but the smith believed the #7 taper would be too flexible and wanted a #8. After he talked to Dan Lilja the two of them decided that the #8 with small flutes would work just fine and that is how I came to have a fluted barrel. I was out-voted by the barrel maker and the gunsmith. The reason I chose a 34 inch length barrel was that it would allow for at least one and maybe two setbacks if the throat got cooked faster than expected from burning all of that powder. Fluting has nothing to do with cooling the barrel of such a gun. If you ever let the barrel on such an over bore gun get hot enough to need cooling you might as well just grab a pipe wrench and screw it off because you have ruined it.
So we see in the above build that a large strong benchrest action can hold a long barrel and the fluting is more to control barrel stiffness and not needed for action flex.
Of passing note here is that Dan Lilja also makes the 50 cal barrels for the Canadian Special Forces snipers and one was used by the guy in Afghanistan to make the kill at 2,430 meters. Long fluted barrels are good for something it would appear. For those of you who don’t know what I am talking about, the story is posted on Dan’s website under “50 Caliber”.
I drove out to Montana in September and picked up the gun, drove over to Idaho and did a little elk scouting and then dropped back to Wyoming and met up with my partners and shot five antelope with the other gun and then drove back to Idaho. To make a long story short, after about eight days of hunting, a six point bull elk appeared at 968 yards and I placed a bullet behind his shoulder and he went about ten yards and stopped so I dropped another round in the chamber and lined up on his shoulder bone instead of behind the shoulder and blew his whole shoulder ball socket right into his chest cavity. Below is a picture of his heart and lungs and you can see that the arteries and veins at the top of his heart are just shot to pieces. This is the kind of precision you get from a benchrest action and a benchrest quality chamber and a benchrest quality barrel- 2 rounds through the heart at 968 yards. Whether the flutes are good are bad I don’t know but the elk is sure dead.
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Threaded Mode
