I finally got it all put back together again. I then weighed it again both with and without the scope in place. Without the scope it still weighed in at 6.11 pounds. With the scope in place it added one and a half pounds to get the total weight to 7.6 pounds. So, with an 18" Carbon Fiber barrel in place I was able to shave about a pound and a half off of what it was before when wearing the 16" Spiral-Fluted bull barrel in place.
I had a heck of a time getting the headspacing just right this time around. I must have put it together and then taken it apart three times before I figured out what was going on. If I weren't already bald-headed I would have pulled all my hair out trying to figure out why I wasn't getting the head-spacing to work for me. I'd try cycling cartridges after each assembly and some would cycle just fine and others would not. My No-Go-Gauge was doing exactly what it was supposed to do but I got no repeatability when cycling various cartridges. It turns out that some of my reloads had the primers sitting flush with the bottom of the case and those that were giving me problems had the primers sitting just above the surface of the base of my reloads. Rookie mistake.
I torqued my Compression-Nut down exactly the way I'd described in my previous posts. I heated the barrel again till it expanded length-wise as before; this time I let it expand to .023" then I quickly slipped my Carbon Fiber tube into place and torqued it down just past the point where it felt snug. The one mistake I made when doing so was to not hold the Carbon Fiber tube firmly enough as I tightened that Compression-Nut down.
The Carbon Fiber tube was perfectly indexed so that my vent-holes were at top dead center in relation to the reciever but when I tightened that compression nut the tube spun clock-wise along with the Compression-Nut so my vent-holes ended up slightly off center.
I have a pretty extensive internal library of cuss words to draw from in situations like this and I was able to pull out a few of those choice words when I noticed what had happened. To find some sense of consolation I reasoned within myself thinking, "Well, this is just a prototype to see if this Carbon Fiber Wrapping project is really going to work or not." So I opted to leave it as it was for now. If by some chance I manage to heat up that barrel to the point where it expands just enough for me to simply use hand pressure to spin it upright then I'll do that. Shooting my range sessions the way I usually do, I really don't think that the barrel will ever get that hot. Maybe if I shoot alot during the summer months. I'll just have to wait and see.
This time around before I heated up my donor barrel I had sprayed it with some flat-black spray paint in certain areas so that my laser thermometer would give me some useable readings. That seemed to work out a whole lot better than trying to take temperature readings off of a shiny stainless steel barrel. I also tried putting my melting-pot-thermometer right against the barrel as I was heating it. I tied it onto the barrel with some thin strands of copper wire. That was a waste of time. The needle on that analog thermometer never moved, even while the Thermal Expansion of the barrel had reached .023".
After assembling the rifle for the last time I did make it a point to mask off the base of the barrel and the muzzle so I could paint it black. This wasn't done for any aesthetic reasons; I did it so I could take my laser thermometer to the shooting range and take some reading off of those black areas after each shot. Now it's just a matter of finding the time to get to the range for the testing. I'm hoping for the best cause I deliberately tried to do my best to keep everything as perfectly concentric as I could. All my rifle components were put together using the same torque specs I'd used when I previously/initially rebarreled this same rifle and it turned out just as accurate as it was in it's factory configuration.
I took only a couple more pics of the assembled rifle sitting on my postal scale. I'll try to post those a bit later.
HollowPoint