Cold Hammer forged, Cut, and Button rifling depends on who does it as to the quality of the barrel, just like anything else some are better than others no matter the method. Button is the cheapest method, and is standard for all American factory hunting rifles. This method requires a great deal of stress relieving, and there are always two grades for this type of rifling. The off the shelf Wal-Mart hunting rifles use the barrels that are bottom of that line, but are in most cases acceptable for hunting rifles, and will normally shoot better than the guy shooting them.

Real target rifles are normally cut rifling or cold hammer forged. The cut, and Hammer barrels are usually far better barrels that the button barrels, but this also depends on the guy cutting the rifling, or with the cold hammer forged barrels depends on the guy who engraves the reverse rifling pattern on the mandrel. Almost all hammer forged barrels are the same size on the outside but are bored to the size of the bottom of the barrel’s grooves to be formed by the hammering and the steel is forced into the grooves of the reverse pattern to form the lands in the barrel.

Almost all Austrian, and German barrels are cold hammer forged. The mandrel is full length and the hammers are rotary hammers that spiral around the barrel blank and the mandrel which are static in the hammer machine. The mandrel is simply threaded out of the barrel when the hammering is finished, just like unthreading a long pitched screw.

It is not common knowledge, but many of the barrels on some of the most expensive rifles, no matter where made use Cold hammer forged barrels made by Merkel In Saul, East Germany. The hammer forged barrels make the smoothest interior surface, and the whole barrel is much harder, and is only turned to the final shape after the rifling is finished, and then the stress is relieved buy deep freezing, and thawing after the final shape is achieved. The patterns in the early Steyr Mannlicher rifles with the spiral pattern on the outside of the barrel for the first 8" or so was simply left there for decoration, and the whole barrel looked like that before the barrel was turned to it's final shape.

Of course the 1000 yd rifles are very carefully made but they are no in any way representative of normal rifle used for real hunting in most cases, and are specialty rifles used for punching holes in paper targets for the most part. One minute of angle is certainly not TARGET accuracy, and most off the shelf German and Austrian made hunting rifle will do that, and many of the off the shelf hunting rifle made in the USA as well. As I said earlier most rifles shoot better than the guy pulling the trigger.