Barrel Chop & Crown

The crown is the job

Anyone can shorten a barrel. What decides whether it still shoots straight afterward is the crown — the last edge the bullet touches before it's on its own. If that edge isn't square to the bore, or has a burr on one side, gas escapes unevenly and the group opens up or keyholes. So the barrel goes in the lathe, gets indicated to the bore, and the cut and the crown are made in the same setup. A recessed target crown, an 11-degree, or a plain chamfer — your call, and we'll say which suits the barrel.

We measure twice on anything close to a legal minimum. A rifle barrel has to finish at 16 inches, a shotgun at 18, measured the way the ATF measures it — from the bolt face, with any permanently attached device counted only if it's pinned and welded. If you want a muzzle device to make up the length, that's the pin-and-weld page, and we'll plan the cut around it.

Form 1 builds, and the paperwork that comes first

A good share of the chops on this bench are short-barreled rifles and shotguns being built on an approved Form 1: an AK cut to the mark on the barrel, a Savage 420 profiled to a pistol grip, a Saiga 12 taken down to what the form allows. We'll cut it, crown it, and engrave the NFA markings at the same visit — but only once the approved form is in hand. Bring the approval or forward it to us, and we'll hold the firearm until it clears if it hasn't yet.

Not a Form 1 job? A bare barrel, a Thompson Contender barrel going to 6.5 inches, a bolt gun losing an inch of damaged muzzle — those are simply cut to spec. Tell us the length you want and what it's for, and we'll tell you whether it's a legal cut and a sensible one.

How a chop-and-crown runs here