Rifle Chambering Solution: Custom-Made Reamers

In this month’s roundup of product evaluations, news, and tips, we investigate how wildcatters can get consistent barrel performance by having tools made to exacting specifications.

Dan Green makes specialty chamber reamers for demanding rifle and pistol shooters.

Ian Green’s machine shop sits just a stone’s throw from the courthouse in tiny Robert Lee, Texas. Even in the dusty town of only 1,000 souls, if you don’t know exactly where Forgreens Tool Manufacturing, Inc., is located, you can miss it.

However, though he gets few visitors in the flesh, Green knows a great many shooters certainly know where he is. The reason: Dan Green and his family turn out high-quality machine tools that are in vogue among accuracy gunsmiths, exacting shooters, and wildcat cartridge developers.

Green’s niche is building one-piece chamber reamers which are tooled to exacting dimensions. The reamers, which are used to cut the chamber and throat areas of a rifle barrel, are manufactured, sized, and polished by hand in the Forgreens shop. “I guess what we’re best known for is custom-manufacturing reamers,” the laconic Green said. “We take a great deal of pride in our work, which means each tool we make is as perfect as we can make it.”

Green said the process generally starts when a customer sends in a cartridge spec sheet or even sample cartridges. Using dimensions from the sheet or cartridges, he establishes what every measurement on the reamer tool should be. He then begins fashioning the tool from a piece of steel stock, first turning it down to rough size, and then hardening it. Then he fine tunes the outer dimension of the tool and adds the cutting grooves. At this point, the tool is ready to be finished, and Green himself hand-stones the tool’s final cutting edges and polishes the finished piece.

These tools enable a shooter to get consistent performance from barrel to barrel. Most Forgreens customers are accuracy shooters who have developed loads that perform with a certain load, but they often want to rebarrel a rifle or make a duplicate rifle with the same internal specifications. When this occurs, they or their gunsmiths send in measurements to Green because he can build a reamer that will cut a chamber exactly like the chamber they already have.

“Customers tell me it’s much easier to develop a load and then cut a chamber that will probably perform with that load than it is to start experimenting with loads in a new chamber,” Green said.

Also, shooters who are developing nonstandard loads come to Forgreens for chambering tools. Some recent tools he has developed include a .17 Rimfire and a .454 Swahili, “You’re not going to be able to open a Brownells catalog and find reamers for those cartridges,” he said.

Green’s tools have found wide acceptance among foreign gunmakers, too. He counts among his clients a British sniper-rifle maker and a Swedish competition smallbore gunsmith, both of whom like the Forgreens tools for their dimensional integrity and hardness.

Prices for the reamers range from $80 for a rimmed pistol tool with throat to $150 for .50-caliber tool. His .22 rimfire tool with six flutes is $75, and a standard rimless centerfire bottleneck tool is $110.

For more information on Forgreens tools, contact Dan Green Forgreens Tool Manufacturing, Inc., Dept. PFS, Box 990, 723 Austin, Robert Lee, TX 76945, telephone (915) 453-2800, fax (915) 453-2460.