Rebarreling a Winchester 94?

[crgaston]

Hi.

A few of years back I picked up a pre-saftey 94 in .45 Colt for really cheap. It had been used as a movie prop gun, and had some minor pitting in the barrel from the bp blanks, but I figured if it didn't shoot, Midway had the barrels listed for about a hundred bucks. Anyway, I wanted to put some XS sights on it, and I got the "trapper, dovetail front" set. When I started trying to drive out the front dovetail, though, it just wouldn't budge, so I decided to cut a little bit into the sight and squeeze on it to loosen it up. That would have worked great if the front sight had actually been a dovetail. Turns out on the .45 Colt it's actually welded in there, or all one piece.

So, now it has a really buggered barrel. And of course this was right around the time Winchester went out of business, so I couldn't find any barrels. At that point I was so disgusted that I just set it in the back of the safe and forgot about it for a while.

Does anybody know where I can get a 94 barrel in .45 Colt, or reccommend someone to fix this right? I've always thought the Trapper would have been much cooler looking with an actual ramp front sight and the front band moved back an inch or two, so this may be the opportune time to do that.

[KCSO]

If it has the standard 20" barrel it is no problem to shorten the barrel and tube to 18" and dovetail in a sight. You do need to be very carefull with the dovetail and if it doesn't fit just right you can put a kink in the inside of the barrel. Otherwise GPC had barrels at one time.

[crgaston]

Sorry, didn't really make it clear...it's a Trapper, so it's already as short as it can be. I had thought about maybe filing down the rest of the sight flush with the barrel, filling the front band screw slot, silver soldering a front ramp on, and reinstalling the front band behind the ramp, but that seems like a lot of work for a pitted barrel.

Numrich doesn't list any right now.

[pietro]

Just my $0.02, but I would file the buggering off flush with the surrounding/adjacent barrel and either file/mill a proper sight dovetail there or sweat/install a regular, tall/Trapper dovetail sight insert that I had radiused the dovetail's underside, to match the barrel radius.