most rifle barrels today, even your big named mfg's are produced on 110+ year old maches
Not if your talking the barrels. Few manufactures use anything other than CHF today if we are talking mass produced rifles and not boutique rifles.
No a lot of barrel makers that make button rifled barrels are still using WWII P&W machines but not like the one shown.
Generally parts are either unobtanium or have to be made in house to keep them going. So a lot of companies have designed and built their own machines. The limitations of old machines, their up keep and all the modifications needed to bring them into modern production flexibility often dictates they go to the great machine shop in the sky.
Now if you are talking about a lot of rifle actions and such being built with metal shapers and the like that too is dying off. You can not offer the precision and accuracy that people want out of the box with old dedicated metal shapers.
That is why for instance Remington and Savages had such crude finishes, all kinds of tolerance stacking and tell tale signs of ancient production methods. When you would unthread a Remington barrel you could see the unmachined receiver face saw cuts from when the bar stock was cut to length.
One of the reasons the Ruger American is so darn accurate out of the box is because none of it's construction is done with metal shapers or chop saws and the like. The barrel is CHF, the receiver and bolt surfaces that matter are all CNC. The new Marlins are slicker and more accurate than ever because they are not using the original Marlin machines. They have figured out how to make the parts so much more consistent that you no longer need gunsmiths or artisans hand fiting the parts. I think they have the action and bolt down to the point that it only takes 4 bolts of fairly narrow window to account for all possible head space variation variation +- with no hand fitting outside of choosing the best fit of 4 standard bolts.
The reason the RPR is built on the bones of the Ruger American is because of it's heavy use of CNC in it's production and the fact that it was designed to be cheap, fast, and easy to produce with simple bar stock and MIM parts to very high levels of consistency from one to another. Anyone can go back in and remachine surfaces to improve the fit aka blueprinting completely different to design a rifle from the ground up to be cheap and efficient to manufacture with CNC so that it does not need to be blueprinted and is still affordable.
All of the little tiny parts that Savage uses to build up their bolt was compromises to make it cheap. The barrel nut was to make it fast and cheap to machine barrels and assemble a finished rife. Savage and Remingtons use of bar stock round receiver and sandwiched washer type recoil luge was again trying to be cheap or affordable to maximize profits. The Ruger American is just a modern take on how to build a better Savage 110 from the point of low cost but they also worked in a lot of precision on the cheap at the same time. The feeding problems it has from time to time in some calipers is down to some of those compromises. Having a bolt body the same size as the locking lugs makes for greater accuracy potential and less camming of the lugs but also lowers production cost.
Old school metal shaping machines produce products along a bell shaped curve from fantastic to average to a real dog because of the crude manner in which they work and the lack of freq. recalibration of the machine as tooling wear each day during production. If you are really lucky each shift change the tooling get recalibrated but only if it is not a UAW Union Shop becasue those Union Shops do not have time for things like calibration they have to get back to playing cards and drinking coffee in the break room! Well at least int he automotive world! LOL
I would suspect that Savage and Remington are likely the only companies now still using mostly outdated obsolete and probably questionable machinery.
More and more companies are getting rid of or mothballing old machines in favor of higher tech more flexible and efficient machines!
