I've got an older Howa 1500 in 204 Ruger that I decided I wanted to take the barrel off of to thread for a suppressor... Wow... Even with an action wrench, and barrel vise-it did NOT want to come off. I spent the better part of this afternoon trying to unscrew the barrel. Even using heat-NO GO! I called a gunsmith locally and he said that you have to do a "relief cut" in order to remove the barrels on these rifles... Apparently they are acid blued at the factory as an assembly (barrel and action) and the acid gets down into the threads and essentially seizes the two parts together. Think Loc-Tite on steroids.. Right up there with having welded them together. After spinning the barrel in the barrel vise-no matter how tight I got it... I went savage on it. Pipe wrench on the barrel to stop it from turning. It then took a second person using a long leverage bar (4 ft.) on the action wrench to break the bond between barrel and action. If any of you have a better way to do this... I'd love to hear it.. My barrel is reusable but now has some fairly deep linear gouges in the barrel from where the pipe wrench got ahold of it. I polished them out as best I could but now will need to re-blue the barrel before I put it all back together. This will be a truck/field/hunting gun so I'm not really worried about the aesthetic damage that I've done.. Just wondering if there is an easier way to have tackled this. Now that the barrel is off, I will be threading it for a suppressor, cutting a target crown on it, and performing a trigger job, before setting it into a new stock that I recently purchased for it.. Would I attempt this again if I knew how difficult barrel removal would turn out to be? I don't think so. The 'smith I called said he would not touch it unless I intended to buy a NEW barrel as he would absolutely destroy the old barrel trying to get it off. Anyone else have any experiences to add?

I've got the barrel chucked up in my lathe, go it turned down to the proper OD, and will be threading in the AM..

I am curious, in what manner did you set this up in your lathe?

Newspaper wrapped around the barrel before going in the vise.

I've also read about brown sugar between the barrel and the vise.

Wrench on the action wrench needs to be beefy. Hit the wrench with a very big hammer, very hard.

I would've put some real heat on the action. And told you it needs to be cerakoted now.

Not a howa but I also resorted to the pipe wrench alternative to remove a savage smooth barrel nut. It works for sure.

I've used tennis racket grip enhancer in a barrel vise to great effect.

Good question. I've got a fixture that goes into the lathe jaws first. It's essentially just a tube that has 2 sets of 4 screws threaded into it, or end of screws facing inward. Each set of 4 screws is spaced about 6" apart in a circular pattern. Each set of 4 screws are spaced 90 degrees apart around the tube, inline with each other of course. This allows perfectly centering the BORE of the rifle. I use a pin gauge riding in the rifling of the bore, that sticks out a coupe inches. I use my dial indicator on the pin gauge and move it back and forth from right at the bore, to the very end of the pin, centering the bore till there is zero run-out. I've done several this way and it always works out perfectly. This gives me a suppressor that will be perfectly inline with the BORE, and also allows my target crowns to be centered on the bore. As you probably already know MANY-if not all-bores are not drilled perfectly on center. Setting up this way with the fixture means I can get the bore centered on the lathe regardless of how far off-center the bore might be in the barrel.

I rebarreled a Howa Mini last year . Barrel would not budge.
Had to make a relief cut on barrel and it unscrewed easily.

Are you doing it this way because your lathe does not have an outboard Spider?

The Howa barrel to action threading is also slightly cone shaped. They do their barrel and action threading a little different. It's also metric threading, which a lot of gunsmiths won't mess with.

To JG from above, no, my lathe does not have an outboard spider.

Update-just finished threading, crowning, and now working on the trigger. After the trigger I've got to re-blue both the action and the barrel in an attempt to keep them uniform in appearance. Nothing like screwing in a freshly blued barrel to an old/older action and immediately seeing a drastic difference in the bluing where the two meet. I'm half tempted to just spray paint them just to save time.. I'm that guy that can touch a blued gun with my bare hands and rust will appear within minutes... pitting... rust... chaos... almost instantly.

This is why I like to only buy stainless guns.. .fewer problems with rust after handling them. On my blued guns I strip all the old grease & oil from them and slather them in a silicone free car wax... I paste it on with an acid brush and then just leave it.. I don't care about how it looks.. I know that there will be no rust forming under that hazy, pasty, layer of car wax. Otherwise, if I don't wax them-the finish is ruined within a very short time. Blued guns, high humidity, and acid like sweat from my hands does not make for a long lived finish. I digress..

Go look at the thread for the Pre-64 model 70.

That's custom in house Cerakote, made to look like bluing.

Old skewl look, new skewl protection of the steel from the elements.

You could ship the parts to me that you want blasted and coated.