International Barrels Inc. is a relatively new company based in Chilliwack, BC. That isn’t to say that the folks at IBI are new to barrel making. Their head barrel maker has been in the game for 35 years. That should leave it as no surprise that their pre-fit barrels for the Remington 700 pattern rifles perform spectacularly.

Each International Barrels Inc. barrel starts from the finest 416R stainless steel, sourced from the US. The bar stock is then cut to length and stress relieved before drilling. Next, the tubes are reamed and honed to less that one tenth of an inch from end to end. Finally they are button rifled then stress relieved for a second time.

Once the rifled blanks are done, IBI turns then to one of a handful of profiles and performs a final hand-lapping. The blanks are then polished and packed for shipping.

Pre-fit barrels, like the one we received, are dialed in on a lathe with a multi-axis chuck using a range rod to indicate the perfect center of the bore. The chamber is cut with a single point tool and then finish reamed while high pressure oil is pumped in from the muzzle. This keeps any chips or debris from getting in the way of a perfectly finished chamber.

The barrel that IBI send to us for review is a 26″ M24 profile, chambered in 6.5 Creedmoor. This is significantly heavier than what I usually shoot, but this was going into a heavy PRS style competition rifle.

The advantage of a pre-fit barrel is that you can take it out of the package and spin it on a rifle receiver at your workbench with a few hand tools. There is no need to send your rifle off to a gunsmith and wait weeks or months to get back to shooting.

I had a factory fresh Remington 700 short action stainless receiver sitting on the bench for another project. I decided to divert it to this use. The receiver has never had a barrel on it, so I was saved the task of breaking loose one of the Remington factory glued-in barrels.

Installing the IBI barrel was as easy as threading the barrel nut onto the shank of the new barrel, following it up with the recoil lug and they threading the receiver in. A Northland Shooting Supply action wrench was solidly clamped into my bench vise to hold the receiver and keep the recoil lug in place. Once the barrel was snugged down against a chamber “Go’ gauge the barrel nut was torqued down. A quick check with a no-go gauge and the barreled action was ready to install in the Modular Driven Technologies ACC Chassis.

It truly takes longer to read the paragraph above than it does to install the barrel. Once you have the tools on hand, replacing barrels is far less expensive than sending the rifle off to a gunsmith.

The convenience and economy of pre-fit barrels is hard to argue. However, that means nothing if the accuracy is not sufficient. We took the IBI barrel to the range and ran some factory ammo through it for a baseline.

Federal Gold Medal Match ammunition with the 140gr Sierra Match King bullet performed extremely well. Five shot groups ran about 0.45″ at 100 yards. Hornady 147gr ELD-Match performed slightly worse at 0.54″ for five shots.

Overall, I am extremely pleased with the International Barrels Inc. Pre-fit Remington barrel. IBI also manufactured blanks for gunsmith installation as well as AR15 barrels. This will certainly not be my last IBI barrel and I am looking forward to how well this rifle will shoot after a proper load work-up with fire formed brass.

International Barrels Inc. Barrels are now available at Brownells Inc!