Opinions on Columbia river arms barrel

I have bought around 40 of their barrels in the past 5 years.

I’ll start with the bad:

Lead times are crazy long from them. Weeks and months longer than other makers. No bones about it, this is the biggest turn-off I have experienced in buying their barrels.

Quality control is allegedly much worse than their original foray in the market. They expanded rapidly a couple of years ago, allegedly couldn’t pay rent in the new space, and reverted back to their original location, and in that limbo, a lot of folks had specification issues.

Personally, I have only had ONE quality control issue with their barrels, and quality assurance caught it. They called me last year stating they had profiled one of my barrels incorrectly, and asking if I wanted to go ahead and accept the incorrect product, or wait additional time for the correct. This really wasn’t great, because it was for a customer rifle, who was coming from a few states away to a “build your own AR” class. I spoke with my customer, he wanted his original profile - better still, a heavier profile, and naturally, changing vacation schedule and travel arrangements was sub-optimal. So they made us a custom profile to meet that desire, and pushed it through IN ONE DAY to keep us on schedule. Out of the number of their barrels I have bought, an in-house caught mistake is reasonable, and I was satisfied with how they handled it.

The good news:

They have a ton of options, and are very easy to order from. I have also changed specifications as well as cancelled orders from them, which have been handled well.

Every barrel I have bought from them has been a sub-MOA, without extensive load development. Every barrel I have bought from them has been easy cleaning. Every barrel I have bought from them has shot 30-50fps faster than expected by load data or other brand barrel data, as common for polygonal rifling.

I have 7 of their barrels on my shelf right now for projects for myself and others. I’ll probably by buying another one for a .350 Legend when they release it as a chambering, and I am tempted to order one of their bolt action prefits for a specialty pistol.

I’ve not been impressed by the McGowen barrels I have owned. Not disappointed necessarily, but not impressed either. I have not had an AR barrel from them. Only bolt action barrels - I’m which, it’s just a barrel. Better than most factory tubes, but not on par with my usual match barrel performance.

Columbia River’s customer service has been awesome for me. Maybe I get a bit more white glove treatment than others because I buy a handful of barrels every year, but I doubt that to be the case - many guys buy a lot more barrels than do I these days. They’re slow, but they’re good to work with.

I haven’t used a Craddock barrel.

Varminterror said:

I’ve not been impressed by the McGowen barrels I have owned. Not disappointed necessarily, but not impressed either. I have not had an AR barrel from them. Only bolt action barrels - I’m which, it’s just a barrel. Better than most factory tubes, but not on par with my usual match barrel performance.

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I've used a half-dozen Shilen Select Match (Savage pre-fit), two X-Caliber (one Savage prefit, one AR-10), and better than a dozen McGowen on various Savage and AR-10 builds. For my non-critical needs (just being sub-MOA with standard handloads is fine; I'm not shooting for bugholes or trying to tune loads to a specific rifle), the McGowen's work fine. In my hands, I could not tell any accuracy difference between the McGowen and the Shilen and the X-Caliber. I have had one issue with McGowen, in that they mis-machined the action / receiver threads on one Savage pre-fit and they needed to re-cut them. They covered the issue (shipping and rework) with no complaints.

I have gravitated towards McGowen simply because ordering from them is easy and their web site allows me to pick from a very broad range of chamberings, twists, and contours. They offer, for example, options for 25cal and 35cal chamberings that most other pre-fit folk do not. Having said that, I used X-Caliber specifically because I wanted a 257 Roberts AR10 barrel and they were the only folk that would commit to making that. X-Caliber took about 10 weeks to turn around each barrel, while McGowen has been running between 6-8 weeks for the last several years and Shilen was relatively fast at 6 weeks.

I've borescoped all three brands with my cheapie Lyman digital borescope, and they looked equally finished internally; clearly lapped, with a clean chamber and concentric leade, and no obvious machine flaws.

Since I don't have a laser engraver and I don't trust my hand stamping skills any more, I found that I very much prefer how McGowen puts a strong chambering / twist stamp on the barrel over, say, Shilen's hand engraved notes on the breechface. It makes it much easier to tell what rifle is what without my having to spend the $50 to get the barrel custom-engraved.

@rbernie - it’s unfortunate that you seem insulted by my honest opinion about McGowen barrels. I’ll explicate my experience with them which has formed my opinion: I haven’t been impressed by them - and as I said, not really disappointed, just not impressed. For a non-competitive Savage prefit shooter, they’re a great option at a low cost. That savings on the prefit chambering and threading work is a big savings. For non-prefits, where they cost basically the same as everyone else, or slightly less, I take my money elsewhere, and I get smaller groups for it. They make a good barrel, as I stated above, better than factory barrels, but I’d be lying to say I thought the average McGowen would shoot as small as the average Shilen, Krieger, Lilja, Hawk Hill, Proof, or Bartlein I have ever bought. A 3/4moa rifleman who never intends to improve would never notice the difference in any of them.

I haven’t used McGowen’s AR barrels, and I haven’t used Columbia River (Black Hole) bolt action barrels yet, so I haven’t had them side by side. I tend to expect bolt guns to shoot smaller than AR’s, but maybe McGowen barrels don’t follow common logic and shoot the same in either. If that were the case, I’d expect them to shoot just about the same 1/2-3/4moa groups as Black Hole/Columbia River barrels, but looking at their prices, they’re higher cost, and won’t have the advantages inherent to polygonal rifling. So objectively, same accuracy, longer cleaning time, higher cost, and slower speeds...

They aren’t bad barrels, but I need an objective reason to buy one. In Prefits, objectively, you get a great value. I even considered using their prefits on a switch barrel Ruger Hawkeye hunting rig. But for blanks, eh. Money better spent elsewhere.

Varminterror said:

it’s unfortunate that you seem insulted by my honest opinion about McGowen barrels.

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Why did you conclude that I had any emotional reaction at all? I just offered my experiences, and in fact was careful to indicate that my needs / demands were likely less critical than yours. <shrug>

It doesn't make much sense to read other folks contributions as being contrary, especially when they're not.