Douglas Barrels: Handcrafted Precision

I take you through Douglas Barrels’ factory to show you how they’ve been handcrafting super precise barrels for over 75 years.

When I began wildcatting the 2Fity-Hillbilly cartridge—now the .25 Creedmoor—a decade ago, I had two rifles made up for it. The second rifle was a Remington Model Seven with a 1:8 twist barrel, and when Hornady introduced the .25 Creedmoor, I was excited to finally have factory ammo for my rifle. Unfortunately, Hornady’s factory ammo is loaded with bullets that require a 1:7.5-inch twist, and the ammo did not shoot well in my rifle.

So, I was left with a dilemma: Do I keep handloading for my rifle … or re-barrel it?

I’d ordered my 1:8 twist 0.25-caliber barrel from Douglas Barrels in Charleston, West Virginia, and my personal gunsmith Jerry Dove at Dove’s Custom Guns installed it on my Model Seven. With my handloads, that rifle shot very well. I used it to take a big nine-point whitetail in Nebraska and several other deer. Since I already have a brand-new Christensen Arms Ridgeline FFT rifle in .25 Creedmoor—with the correctly twisted barrel—I didn’t see much sense in refinishing my Model Seven into another .25 Creedmoor. Instead, I sent the rifle to Douglas Barrels for the installation of a different barrel in a different caliber and chambering.

A Legacy Barrel Maker

When I was much younger, I was heavily involved with traditional muzzleloading rifles, and back then you could not be around muzzleloading rifle enthusiasts without them talking about Douglas Barrels. When I first learned about Melvin Forbes and his tack driving featherlight New Ultra Light Arms rifles, I found out he used Douglas Barrels exclusively. That’s the barrel Melvin put on my first NULA rifle, which was chambered in .35 Remington.

Douglas Barrels has a stellar barrel-making reputation that began in 1948 when a hobbyist gunsmith named G.R. Douglas founded the company. By 1954, Douglas was fully committed to fabricating premium, “ultra-rifled” custom gun barrels. Douglas pioneered a unique push-button rifling approach, where a handmade carbide button is pressed through a barrel hydraulically, and using a gear-driven process, the button displaces instead of subtracts metal to form cleaner rifling than is achievable with the cut rifling practices. The company has occupied the same building since inception.

Douglas Barrels has a long history of supplying winning shooters, long-range professional marksmen, and the U.S. Military with ultra-rifled barrels that have delivered results. The walls at Douglas Barrels are covered with awards of the unrivaled success their barrels have achieved. Also, Douglas Barrels is the only gun barrel manufacturer to have had a barrel on the surface of the moon during the Apollo missions—and the rifle Bradley Cooper’s character used in American Sniper was fitted with a Douglas Barrel.

Aside from their unique 75-year technique of gear-driven push-button barrel rifling, some other things set Douglas Barrels apart. Unlike some of the big-name barrel makers you read about in all the gun magazines and see splashed all over social media, Douglas does very little advertising, and they have not engaged in big marketing campaigns. They’ve never needed either to get business—the word of mouth of satisfied customers has and always will be the best marketing available. This allows them to offer their services at very competitive prices.

The other difference is experience: Not only does Douglas still use the same techniques and even the same machines they built their reputation on, but the experience of their technicians is unrivaled in the barrel-making industry. They have an average time in service of about 20 years. Travis Asbury—the plant manager at Douglas Barrels—has been with the company for 2 decades. Asbury’s father worked for Douglas Barrels, and Asbury’s first visit to the company was on his way home from the hospital the day he was born.

Unquestionably, when it comes to precision barrel making, there are mechanical tolerances that must be maintained, but Asbury and some of the other long-term Douglas employees also have that “feel” for what’s right and what’s not. It’s a skill that can only come from crafting, looking at and gauging thousands of barrels by hand and by eye, for many years.

When I was visiting Douglas, Asbury tossed a newly bored barrel on the rack where a light could shine through it, and he told me to look through the bore and see what I thought. I did, and the barrel looked damn good to me. Asbury said, “Let me see.” In a matter of seconds, Asbury said, “I’m glad you don’t work here. That barrel is sh*t. It will never leave this factory.”

Two years ago, Rodney Chiodo and a couple of his close friends purchased Douglas Barrels. Chiodo is a businessman from Pennsylvania, but more importantly, Chiodo is a hunter, shooter and handloader. Just a few minutes after I met Chiodo, we were talking about the different ballistic advantages of various cartridges, handloading techniques and about the deer we did and didn’t kill last season. Years back, Chiodo had purchased a barrel from Douglas, and he’d driven down from Pennsylvania to pick it up. He became enthralled with the company, the employees, and the character of both. When the opportunity to purchase Douglas Barrels presented itself, Chiodo was all over it like a rut-crazed buck on a hot doe.

The new ownership is committed to maintaining the high standards Douglas Barrels is known for, but also in helping Douglas step into the future. They’ve made substantial investments in new machinery, rededicated the company to maintaining their industry-leading four-week delivery times, created an all-new customer-friendly website to make online barrel ordering easier and hired a new metallurgist. Douglas Barrels now implements MET (Metal Enhancement Technology) and a new lapping-type process for all their barrels. During my visit, it was refreshing to see that this legacy company will continue to deliver even better barrels as they approach 100 years of business.

Proof in Precision

But, back to my rifle. As mentioned, one advantage with Douglas Barrels is that they will not only make you a barrel in the caliber you want, at the length and contour you want, and with the twist rate you want, but they will also install that barrel on your action and chamber it for whatever cartridge makes your heart go pitter-patter. Douglas has a large catalog of carrel contours, but one of the coolest machines they have is a barrel contour duplicator. This allows Douglas to match the contour of the barrel they make you to the barrel they’re replacing on your rifle.

With my rifle, I made it rather easy for them: The first Douglas barrel I ever owned was the 0.35-caliber barrel on my NULA rifle in .35 Remington, so I specified a 0.35-caliber barrel with a standard Remington contour and a 1:12 twist rate, chambered in .35 Remington. The common twist rate for a .35 Remington is 1:16, but I wanted to specifically shoot the Tipped Controlled Chaos bullets from Lehigh Defense, and Mike Cyrus of Lehigh Defense suggested the 1:12 twist rate.

Douglas Barrels’ master gunsmith, Travis Beasley, made the barrel, installed, crowned and chambered it, and like with all the barrels Douglas makes, it was air-gauge tested and—most importantly—it held up to the eyeball scrutiny of Asbury.

Cyrus picked the re-barreled rifle up for me, and while he had it, he worked up some handloads for the Lehigh Defense 180-grain Tipped Controlled Chaos bullet. After he dropped the rifle off, I tested it with those loads and two factory loads, including a hardcast load from Buffalo Bore. The handloads shot great, but the real surprise was Federal’s factory 200-grain load that averaged almost three-quarters of an inch. I think G.R. Douglas, Chiodo and even Asbury—with his keen barrel-peering eyes—would have been proud of how it performed. I sure was.

In today’s world, you’d not expect a custom-crafted rifle barrel installed and chambered on your action at the cost of less than $700—all finished up in less than four weeks—to deliver dime-spitting accuracy. But the guys at Douglas didn’t think it was a big deal at all. Hell, they’ve been making barrels that shoot like this and doing the same thing for a long, long time.

Shooting Results: Remington Model Seven w/18.5-inch, 1:12 twist, Douglas Barrel

Contact Information:

Douglas Barrels
5504 Big Tyler Road
Charleston, WV 25313
(304) 776-1341
DouglasBarrelsLLC.com

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in the March 2026 issue of Gun Digest the Magazine.

More On Barrels