doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion German & Austrian Sporting Guns @ doublegunshop.com Help ID Drilling caliber, etc.

About a year ago now, I managed to get my hands on a Drilling that went for less than $200 at an estate auction. I would really love to get it shooting again- it would be perfect when a coyote jumps out of the brush while we're quail hunting. A local guy specializing in Drillings says it should be safe; it's nitro proofed.

Right now my main questions are about proper bullets for the rifle barrel, but if anyone cares to tell me a bit about this gun's history or anything otherwise, I'd be happy to hear it.

Here's a shot of the proof marks.

Note that the chamber is marked 9 with a small superscript 3, and 72, while the barrel itself is stamped 9mm. This has caused me some confusion, because I've done a chamber cast, and eyeballing it, the cast seems to be a perfect match to factory loaded (RWS and Norma) 9.3x72mm R ammunition I have on hand. These rounds fit perfectly in the chamber with no discernable play, and the action closes fine.

However, I slugged the bore with a couple soft lead balls, and the groove diameter is only 9.0mm (.354") ahead of the chamber, and constricts (or may be dented) to 8.9mm (.350") towards the muzzles. Thus, it sounds like the markings are correct, in that I have a 9.3x72mm chamber and a 9mm barrel.

Elsewhere, someone suggested it may be a 9x72R (8.7x72mm), which is made from the 9.3x72mm brass. But I can't detect any bottleneck or shoulder at all on the chamber cast.

I played around with the calipers for a while now, and it turns out I was only remembering the minimum dimensions of the slug.


But I can find bigger measurements, too:


So I took 10 measurements randomly around each slug, and the average of one slug is .360" and the other is .362". So should I be using the absolute minimum diameter, or would these average measurements be better?

Also took a pic & measured the chamber cast. It seems to match the type E chambered 9.3x72mm R.

9,3x72 in mm:
overall case length 72,00 rim thickness 1,30 rim diameter 12,35 case diameter at base of rim 10,91 case diameter at neck 9,82.

I would guess it was made in Suhl by Imman. Meffert between 1910 & 1914, although it could be a bit later but I would think the round to have been normalized by WWI. I don't think the pre-rifling bore diameter to be 9mm but rather 8,9mm and the 8 was worked off as were some portions of other marks. I do not see a Nitro stamp for the solid projectile tube but do for the scattergun tubes. What's the serial number range? Any marks near the forend hanger and also could you pleasure us with an image of the sideframe reinforcement?

Kind Regards,

Raimey
rse

Thanks a bunch for the reply, ellenbr.

Cool. I have a link to someone else who had a Hubertus marked Drilling. In that thread, a gentleman said these guns weren't marked "Nitro" until after 1912. Is that possible? Hubertus Drilling

Other markings on my gun include a name on the rib- I think it says O Kennewitz Kaiserslautern ?

It's also marked Ehrhardt * Lauf on the shotgun barrels:



Ahhh... So, in other words, the blank tube/barrel was marked with the pre-rifling diameter, and then after it was rifled & chambered a new stamp was added?
Here's another look at the markings on the rifle tube-

I don't really see anything else that looks like a proof mark- just the crown over U, crown over G, and that other thingy, but there is a tiny EA stamped by the forend latch, and there's just a letter R stamped on the other side. I think that tiny EA is also stamped just over the 9mm marking. I can't detect any evidence there was ever anything else stamped in front of the 9mm marking... Is it possible that the shotgun tubes are nitro proofed, but I have to use black powder loads for the rifle? Does the new info above help narrow down the date it was made?

Serial number is 44779. At least, I think that's the serial number; it's marked in several different places on the gun.

Figured this question deserved its own post. Since you asked, I'll share some pictures of the side frame, but I don't think they'll please you. They nearly made me cry.

This is what the gun looked like when I got it, and probably why it sold for less than $200.



Some $#*^&W@# decided to bolt & weld a couple plates of scrap iron right onto the sides of the frame. There is absolutely no evidence of any frame cracking, or that it was done as a repair. A local Drilling collector told me that sometimes the frames could crack, and it looked like the previous owner added these plates to prevent it from happening. Who ever butchered this gun deserves a swift kick in the nuts.

I couldn't stand the sight of those nasty plates on it, so I ground them off just the other night. They were only partly welded around the perimeter, so there was actually still some engraving left underneath them. You can see there is a small clamshell? type reinforcement already. I still have to finish cleaning up the welded areas.

The tube steel is that of Heinrich Ehrhardt and there was a strong sourcing relationship between Imman. Meffert and Heinrich Ehrhardt, so strong that my guess would be that they were related by marriage.

Heinrich August Theodor Ehrhardt was born in 1840 to simple beginnings, and retired & expired(1928), in Zella Saint Blasii where in 1866 he founded his first firm which faltered. It was then that he moved to Düsseldorf where he founded the Rhinish Metal Works Rheinmetall and made many wares including corkscrews. He real 1st success was a new technique of bullet making where he fabricated 8x57I steel jacked bullets for the M88. He then went on to bigger and better bullets, and tubes, for artillery pieces in the last decade of the 19th Century. It was then that he developed his tube making process and it has been pointed out to me that the square bolt/rod in the round hole, which can be seen in the diagram between the signatures in the signature block, became his trademark. Note the trademark on sheet 5 in the diagram: http://www.google.com/patents?id=S2x2AAA...rdt&f=false

The firearms merchant was O.(Otto??) Bennewitz and he placed an order with Imman. Meffert and had his name roll stamped on the top rib. Any chance the "EA" is "FA"? True the 1912 rules, not actual law, were the beginnings of addressing the lack of emphasis on the up and coming semi-smokeless powders. Some that were made before the rules, or during the transitional period, could also have experienced "Nitro" proof to be in line with the times.

True the ad hoc reinforcement addition isn't very easy on the eyes but there still seems to be some original musselshell reinforcement on the side frame, as you note, similar to that seen on F.W. Ke�ler's examples.

9mm just seems to large for a pre-rifling diameter. Maybe Ford is reading from a late hour on riverview time and has an opinion. But I would 1st guess the diameter was 8,9mm and I can't say for certain if the diameter was 9mm that the stamp would be 9,0mm. No, they would not have stamped another diameter unless there was a reproof effort. Imman. Meffert didn't allow much engraving effort on their examples and their business model was to churn out as many quality pieces as possible. It may have been empirical data that led them to note that 3 quality pieces cold be produced to 1 upper rung example.

Have you attempted to chamber a 9.3X72R D cartridge?

Kind Regards,

Raimey
rse

Yeah, I don't know if a swift kick in the cods would be payment enough but you are on the right track. I've seen quite a few examples peddled by Otto Bennewitz of Kaiserlautern, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaiserslautern , and am sure that he was pretty much a firearms merchant.

I would use a load that approach the pressure of the original black powder load but I don't know that the normalized/normalisierten(Ford has told me the correct term but I can't recall for now) was that much higher in pressure. But I'm sure most questions can be answered if you had a copy of the 3 part article in the GGCA publications by Mike Ford about a year back.

Kind Regards,

Raimey
rse

Ford thinks the pre-rifling diameter marks is just the "9"mm and that the proofhouse tech felt like the plug gauge that would pass the whole length was a 9mm that day.

Kind Regards,

Raimey
rse

Is there not a chance that it is a 9x72. I had one of those (and the 9.3 would not chamber). Still have the loading dies and about a hundred rounds of new brass I might be persuaded to part with. The 9x72 does not have a bottleneck. Interestingly, the Sellier and Bellot ammo marked 9.3x72 mics out to 358 on the bullet--pull one and see! Maybe they were concerned about the occasional narrower bore out there. (Of course you COULD just double your money on the gun with me...) Steve