Our intrepid Smyth Busters, Brownells Gun Techs Steve Ostrem and Caleb Savant, are back to answer a question they hear fairly often on our Tech Line: Can I thread a muzzle without a lathe? There are tool kits out there that promise you'll be able to cut muzzle threads by hand, and.... Caleb says they're not a good idea. The difficult part is getting the threads accurately aligned with the bore axis. While many of these kits include little alignment gizmos to help you cut the threads accurately, the problem is many barrels are not concentric. If you used one to install a sound suppressor and then checked the result with a suppressor alignment gauge, the bore of the suppressor would not align with the bore of the rifle. Steve points out there is ONE exception: AK barrels. And he explains why you can hand-thread an AK / Kalashnikov muzzle. The only way to do it correctly on other guns is with a lathe. So the myth that you can thread a muzzle by hand is BUSTED. Rather than buy that crude threading tool that isn't going to work anyway, the money is better spent on hiring a professional gunsmith or machinist to do the job right.
