Originally Posted By: jimirwin


So I wonder...to get that velocity, the pressure must stay up much longer. So the higher pressure is not at the breech, but somewhere forward, where pressure behind the remaining. If it were gonna burst at this pressure, it would do so where barrel steel gets pretty thin; up around feft-hand position.


The highest pressure is always in the chamber. Pressure curves do vary, with some loads showing a more rapid decline than others. But even comparing smokeless to black--and with black, the old wives' tale was that the pressure curve was very different, remaining much higher farther down the barrel--tests conducted by DuPont and by Sherman Bell, reported in Double Gun Journal, show that the pressure curves aren't radically different.