Vortakt Barrel Works provides OEM barrels to top brands across the firearm industry. By effectively harnessing automation technology and adhering to engineering best practices, our team provides innovative partnership solutions based on your unique needs.
This promise is more than just platitudes. It’s built into the process we use to manufacture YOUR barrels. The foundation of this process is built on specifications, quality, and workmanship. While these phrases often find their way into marketing and sales collateral across the firearm industry, the actual manifestation of these principles is something Vortakt actively measures through process improvement and automation technology.
Defining Specifications
Every barrel delivered by Vortakt is designed to meet your desired specifications. These specifications are defined by engineers based on the expected use of the final product. Our business is configured so that thousands of consecutive barrels clear production and meet those exacting specifications.
Our team will work with you to balance cost with specification. You will never have to worry about giving up quality since it’s our job to hold quality to your defined specifications. Some manufacturers will look to hold tighter tolerances, layering in unnecessary costs. This is largely due to their inability to control their process to hold the defined specifications.
What is Quality?
How do you know if a barrel meets quality standards? It meets the defined specifications! Quality is NOT the specification. Every barrel manufactured by Vortakt will meet your standards.
When a client asks if Vortakt can deliver quality barrels, we’ll respond with “Yes, we want to deliver that.”
We’ll then follow up your question with another question: “What are your desired specifications?”
Until we define what those are, we won’t be able to determine what quality looks like.
Delivering Workmanship
If quality is consistently achieving the agreed-upon specifications, then workmanship is the perception of quality based on end-user feedback. If a barrel manufacturer delivers a hand-lapped barrel that meets specifications but has visible tooling marks and scratches due to poor handling, they’re not demonstrating high-quality workmanship.
Many gunsmiths can deliver a custom quality barrel that meets specifications with a high level of expertise, but a select few deliver that degree of workmanship at scale. Vortakt has invested significant resources into ensuring it is consistently delivering hundreds or thousands of barrels at a high level of craft at a significantly lower cost. This ability to incorporate workmanship at scale is a significant competitive differentiator.
The Dangers of Overspecification
While defining specifications is essential to achieving quality, overspecification comes at a cost. Our team will work with you to capture each of the facets of a barrel that are most important to you. If items within that specification cover workmanship (cosmetic features), we will leverage manufacturing technology to deliver those results through tangible quality measurements.
Achieving this requires a solid working relationship and an open dialogue with the design and engineering team to understand the critical features. Vortakt goes the extra mile by delivering a full spectrum of defined specifications with the Barrel Performance Series. We have the experience and know-how to deliver an excellent specification, applying our standards of workmanship to the production process.
Vortakt’s Culture of Quality
A culture of quality permeates every facet of Vortakt Barrel Works. A significant investment in manufacturing engineering and technology empowers us to set up quality plans and develop internal automation solutions that ensure quality happens repeatedly, positioning us to acquire data that holds us accountable for production outputs. A drive for operational efficiency does not come at the expense of achieving specifications or workmanship.
We’re not barrel makers who happen to have a machine shop. We’re professional manufacturing engineers who love making barrels.
The perception of workmanship across the firearm industry comes with the assumption that those specifications are either assumed or hard to capture. The consistency and classically defined standard of care delivered by a custom gunsmith are actually quite measurable.
We took those standards and scaled them through not just care of handling and movement of parts, but in operational planning. How tooling and fixtures are set up, the level of consistency in cutting tool application, and how we process the barrels are all defined in a well-planned manufacturing system. The resulting costs are equivalent to existing market rates, but a higher-quality barrel is delivered.
If that manufacturing system were not built effectively, achieving that level of quality would be very costly (resulting in a much higher scrap rate). Another consequence could come from customer overspecification, leading to cost overruns and friction in the business relationship.
If you need to meet the specifications of a 300 Series barrel, you can select that option. If a 200 Series barrel is what is needed, you can rely on it consistently meeting the defined standards. A 100 Series barrel will be of high quality. A 500 Series barrel will be of high quality. The overall cost and specifications are yours to choose from, but they will all be delivered with a high degree of workmanship.
Bringing Quality, Specifications, and Workmanship Together
So how does this manifest itself in production? Let’s focus on a single specification related to OD to ID runout after gundrilling:
As you place your order for a production run of 200 Series barrels, a defined specification of 0.006″ TIR on muzzle end and 0.028″ TIR on breech end is in place for the gundrilling operation. To achieve that quality standard, Vortakt has outfitted its automated rifling cell, “The Beast” with a technologically advanced inspection camera. As each workpiece makes its way through production, it takes pictures of both the outside and inside diameter of the barrel blank, documenting those critical dimensions. It then flips the workpiece, repeating the process, automatically documenting the runout data, and reporting its findings on a custom page built into the CNC.
A higher frequency of inspection can be built into the process through automated gauging systems, providing 100% inspection of a feature that might only require 10%. Manual inspection introduces the potential for human error, but the trade-off of automating these processes is that the machines exercise less judgment than their human counterparts. That lack of judgment is accounted for through process improvements, programming, and data reporting delivered through our engineers, programmers, and machinists.
Vortakt doesn’t just have to meet these specifications, deliver quality, and provide excellent workmanship once. We don’t just have to deliver on it twenty times. This standard needs to be delivered with an extreme degree of repetition over thousands of cycles.
To fulfill our OEM promise, Vortakt has invested millions of dollars and decades of combined engineering knowledge to develop our barrel manufacturing operations, with a never-ending eye on continuous improvement.
What barrel specifications are essential to meeting your quality standards?
OEM Promise
Vortakt Barrel Works provides OEM rifle and pistol barrel manufacturing services to top brands across the firearm industry. By effectively harnessing automation technology and adhering to engineering best practices, our team provides innovative partnership solutions based on your unique needs.