One-Shot Wonder

Fred Feddersen makes a rifle barrels, and now he’s on a mission to do something that's never been done before: create a barrel for commercial-grade weapon that can shoot successive bullets through the same hole, using an inexpensive semiautomatic rifle, not a bolt-action Olympic race gun.

To do this, Feddersen first had to accomplish several equally challenging feats of metalworking. He developed new ideas in gun drill design to achieve greater straightness. He invented and patented a new whip-guide stabilizer for gun drills and reamers. He push-reams small-diameter holes with his proprietary tool design, capable of 0.0001-in. accuracy. He uses proprietary carbide formulations for his rifling buttons. And, he is using the world's most advanced tube hone from Sunnen Products to impart accuracy-enhancing bore geometry and diameter , with a fine finish of 3-8 microinch Ra that sheds fouling and copper bullet-jacket residue. The hone's servo-spindle also serves as a quality check on reaming, with its extreme sensitivity to spindle load detecting – and correcting – tight and loose spots that escape most air gages, Feddersen says.

Feddersen has ample evidence of his success in a binder full of targets with near single-hole, five-shot groups fired from 50 yards using a semiautomatic Ruger .22 magnum rifle equipped with his barrels. Shooters familiar with this rifle and cartridge "know" this accuracy is not normal, but Feddersen takes barrel making beyond what's known After a decade of development, he is also experiencing excellent uptake from firearm OEMs. More important, his company's capabilities have earned it a role as supplier of choice for barrels used on.50-caliber BMG and .338 Lapua magnum versions of U.S. military sniper rifles.

Fred Feddersen is a design engineer and inventor with boundless curiosity and drive who does not accept current limits on any technology, whether it is welding or bottle blowmolding. His varied interests and career moves have led him to learn Morse code, pass the FCC exam, earn seven welding certifications, and become a CNC programmer and CAD/CAM engineer. Some of his most widely used inventions and patents were developed for blowmolding PET bottles. After notable success in that industry, he sensed a market opportunity about 10 years ago to make ultra-accurate rifle barrels on a volume basis for military and commercial use.

After studying the art and science of custom barrel making, closely examining the industry's best barrels and acquiring high-quality machine tools, Feddersen established RFour Inc. During the first years, he spent much of his time and effort pushing past the known limits of barrel manufacturing technology to achieve his goal, starting with improvements in gun drilling and reaming. He stressed that what he's learned about barrels applies to similar tube-type products that require very small holes (down to 2 mm) to be reamed or honed. These include stents or water-jet cutting nozzles. The latter must be free of internal surface micro cracks, so it can be honed down to base metal in a process similar to what is used for high-pressure diesel fuel rails.