If a guy like you ever toured the Savage plant prior to 2008, you would **** your pants at the way they were doing things and the things they got away with. When I toured the plant in Nov of '05, they used several Mori Seiki turning centers to do strickly barrel work. It would turn, thread and crown a sporter barrel from 1.110" rifled blank in 2.5 minutes. At the time, this was their newest machines. Other than that, they had a total of 3 CNC mills doing receiver operations, the oldest being a Bostomatic purchased in 1988. The rest were done on an assortment of (about 50) Cinncinnati horizontal mills set up for just 1 operation.
Barrels were chambered on a Byrd vertical turret mill. The barrel is stationary, the tools turn. 1st op is a chamfer tool, 2 is a core drill, 3 is a rougher reamer, 4 is a finish reamer, and the last is a flexi-hone which does 20 peck cycles. Amazingly, the chambers come out very consistent in size, but they may not be centered in the bore. They retired those machines 2 years ago, and replaced them with new machines of the same type. When I asked the director of engineering why they did not go with HMC's he stated that they could not get the results they could with the vertical machines.