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Plating rifle chamber to correct size

I have two British WW-II Enfield rifles for target shooting, and will reload ammunition myself. The chambers are normally manufactured to be oversize to allow shooting dirty ammo in combat. This complicates the accurate peacetime resizing of cartridges, and if I could plate the diameter down with about 0.004 inches of nickel and/or chrome, the reloading would go well. Only a small spot, the neck area about 1/2 inch long, needs to be done. It is now 0.3455 dia. and should be only 0.3380. I would like to brush plate this myself, if it can be done correctly. How should I do this?

Leonard Fashoway
Firearms hobbyist & instructor - Fraser, Michigan, USA
2005

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To be honest I think you should take this into a professional shop, they will be able to be much more accurate on the thickness of the plate.
Plating at home is dangerous due to the number of hazardous chemicals involved and possible cleanup fines from the EPA.

Marc Banks
Blacksmith - Shiloh, North Carolina
2005

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The M-16 barrel is chrome plated. Nickel will not withstand the pressures and friction of repeated firing. An anode must be placed through the entire barrel to distribute the plate evenly.

You can't do this with a brush plating kit. Take it to a chrome plater, someone who specializes in hard chrome. DON'T TRY THIS AT HOME!

I was acquainted with an engineer who decided to make his fortune doing hard chrome plating in his garage. He had no exhaust system and the fumes went into the heating system of his home. The chrome caused all of the family to have nosebleeds. The engineer ended up with a perforated septum caused by the chrome eating through the tissue, that had to be surgically repaired. Chrome is nasty stuff.

Daryl Spindler, CEF
decorative nickel-chrome plating - Greenbrier, Tennessee
2005

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2007

I'm a former Army Ordnance Officer, a long time reloader and target shooter, and currently work as a civilian Ammunition Equipment Specialist for the Army.

In response to the original question about chroming a chamber. I agree with the responses to the question. Trying to chrome plate a rifle chamber at home is impractical and dangerous. Plus, there's a lot of plating involved to tighten up the .004" he mentions. A simpler solution:

Use a moderate load to fireform the cases to your particular rifles. Keep the brass for each rifle separate. Reload the cartridges using neck resizing dies, in which only the neck that grips the bullet is resized. The brass will have expanded to fill your chamber, which is more accurate, plus only resizing the neck greatly extends the life of the brass cases. You can get neck sizing dies with micrometer adjustment that will allow you to accurately adjust how close the bullet is to the rifling ... all of these steps will greatly increase accuracy.

FWIW,

Steve Smith
- Layton, Utah, USA