Howdy all! I'm new to the forums, but I had some info that I thought all y'all might like to hear about.

I recently heard about the Spanish barrel maker Bergara had started making barrels for the T/C Encore but couldn't find much info anywhere. For those of you who don't know, Bergara is a company in cahoots with Ed Shilen that is currently making barrels for CVA's high-end muzzleloaders and switch-barrel rifles. Press on the muzzleloader barrels has been very good and with Ed Shilen on board it's not surprising that they'd make an accurate barrel.

The CVA Optima Elite barrels are a lot like Encore barrels so it wasn't a surprise that they started making those too. The big surprise was the price! Last week I noticed that Natchez Shooters Supply had a good sale on Bergara barrels ($150 for blue, $175 for SS) so I figured for THAT price I'd be a guinea pig!

Good news, bad news, no news.
The good news is that they look extremely well made.
The no news is that I haven't shot it yet.
The bad news is that it was completely unusable out of the package. I installed it on my frame and it wouldn't close and wouldn't re-open either. I knocked the pin out and tried again, this time with the barrel in the closed position. Nice, but it wasn't about to open either.

After a little investigation I found that the far front tip of the extractor was WAY too long and had too steep of an angle cut on the end. This kept it from camming rearward by inpinging on the frame and instead just simply blocked the barrel from rotating altogether. Now I had two options, send it back and maybe get another just like it (it is a production item after all), or fix it myself. Not much time spent thinking about that one.

In the picture below you can see the 1/16" pin to knock out and just how much material I removed from the extractor with my ShadeTreeGunsmith's bench grinder. I also reshaped the angle to be closer to that of a factory T/C barrel. One item of note, if you take yours apart (I suppose you could just Dremel it in place) is that there's a leaf spring riding under the extractor to provide drag.

It's supposed to get above freezing next week, so I hope I'll get to pop down back and touch off a few!

Whew! Long first post! See ya', Jeff

That's a great price on the Bergara TC barrels, if you want to read some shooting reports, there are several in the TC Rifle forum at Graybeard Outdoors, none have had any kind of a problem tho, all barrels have offered good accuracy out of the box. I've had a CVA Optima Elite 7mm-08 for almost a year now and added a 300 Win Mag barrel, they both shoot very good. Watch the video at the Bergara site, you'll see an Encore barrel in the making.:)

http://www.go2gbo.com/forums/index.php

http://www.bergarabarrels.com/process.html

http://www.bergarabarrels.com/products.html

Thanks for the info. I checked out GBO and there's still not a lot of solid feedback yet. The Bergara website just gives the usual corporate promises of excellence.

I'm begining to wonder if the barrel was on sale for a very good reason...I gave it a good first cleaning today and found one helluva ring in the chamber! I doesn't look like a scratch, it's more of a shoulder from an offsize or offcenter reamer. It's about 2/3 of the way into the main body of the chamber and subtends about 160 deg. of arc. It appears to be less than .001", but it definitely stops a screwdriver slid along the chamber wall. I'm gonna hafta paw around the gunsmithing posts and see if there's any info about fixing it...should I just shoot it as is or hit it with some 600grit for a few seconds? We'll see...

'ta, Jeff

Thats too bad you had trouble with your Bergara barrel. I have three of them, a 30-06, 243, and a 45/70. They work just fine, and the accuracy is amazing. The 243 shoots through the same hole at 100yards with my favorite load. One thing I did do was to lap the bores with Tubb's Final finish bore conditioning system, that Cabela's sells. I use it on any new rifle or barrel I buy. It really does make a difference