doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com barrel straightening

picked up another auto-5 at the market hall show. was my ideal configuration - light 12, round knob, 25.5" plain, IC. totally devoid of finish and had been treated inconsiderately but was mostly unhurt and original. front bead had been reshaped into a very tiny rifle type blade and there was a sheet metal rear sight taped to the receiver which is why i didn't notice more when looking it over. in the parking garage i ripped off the rear sight, shouldered the gun and pointed it at a light bulb. very obvious the bbl was bent to the left, what turned out to be abt 1/8". all the way home i tried to concoct what i could use for straightening it, thinking mostly of hydraulic jacks.

just for grins i got 3 of my rifle barrel vise oak blocks that fit fairly well. put one at the muzzle, another under the bbl behind the magazine tube ring, and the 3rd over the bend. got my biggest c-clamp and pulled it down to my workbench till it had noticeably moved. the first try took out half of it. the next try got it so close it looked straight, a straight edge placed on the barrel extension and front bead showed the space between the matting to lie right under it and checking each side with a straight edge and feeler gage stack showed the same (within reason) space on each side so i called it straight and quit.

what amazed me is how easy it was. it took longer to get the petrified tape residue off the receiver than to correct the barre. i got curious and ran the #'s and for the barrel and the support spacing i used it only required a little over 300# of force to bend it back.

the scary thing here is the implication of just how easy it is for a barrel to get bent in the first place. a reasonable sized grown man, slipping, falling into a tree or the ground or whatever would very easily do it. double guns would be a at least twice as stiff in the direction perpinducular to the plane of the barrels and a lot stiffer in the other direction but there's still the risk there.

roger

Roger,
I've bent two sxs barrels to get them back to straight...complete with upper and lower ribs intact before and after straightening. That first one was some real pucker factor, but once you do it, it gets easier mentally. I used common pine blocks and a hydraulic press.

Years ago I read an article in Handloaders Digest (?) about how to bend a shotgun barrel, to plant slugs where it should. I tried on an old 12 Ga. single shot and it worked !

BTW,
No sand or other filler in the barrels is necessary. Many that haven't done this have recommended filling the barrels with sand or other material. It is really not necessary for bending unless you are making a bend that is extreme like 45 degrees or some such nonsense.

re: slug guns. with this gun having its cobbled together "sights" i was almost suspicious that it had been bent deliberately for the purpose you mention. but surely anyone with any sense at all would realize they could have just moved the rear sight since it was only taped on. but it was centered on the matting on the receiver so possibly whoever did it wanted to leave the rear where it was.

this one was easy being nothing but a tube. i can well imagine on a double with the risk of popping a rib loose, or even a single bbl with a soldered on rib, that the pucker factor would have been far, far greater.

roger

how's it shooting

I remember a number of years ago, perhaps 50 or so, as a young lad I used to hang out in the gunshop of an old guy whom I believe must have been French or Belgian. He had a pretty good reputation as a gunsmith, and like many guys my age, I was facinated by the gunshop and all the equipment and gadgets and the way he used them in working on guns. Not sure why he allowed me to hang out, but he did. I recall going in one day to find him with a barrel from an autolaoder shotgun of some sort set up between centers in one of his lathes (he had two, as I remember.) He ran the tool holder down to where the bend in the barrel was, turned the lathe on at low speed, and marked the high spot with a piece of chalk held in the tool holder. Then, with the power off, he took a rawhide mallet and simply whopped the marked spot, wiped the chalk off, and repeated the process a few times until it ran pretty straight. I remember the proccedure very clearly, being surprised at how simple it was to straighten the barrel, and, as has been said, how simple it must have been to bend it in the first place. I wouldn't want to do that job on my lathe today for fear of dinging the bearings, but apparently he was not concerned about his at that time.

i've not had a chance to shoot it. my concern about point of impact and the possibility it was done deliberately for slugs made me wonder where it'd hit now. but i'm sure where a bbl throws slugs has no direct relationship to where it'd throw a shot charge. i looked down the barrel at myself in a mirror and it sure looked like it was pointing in the right direction. will likely be next week before i get out to the range.

have been meaning to pick up one of the mini-mag lights using the AA batteries. a buddy said those are a perfect fit in the muzzle of most 12's and you can focus the beam tight on a wall and get a fair idea of just where a bbl is pointing. i know they sell laser devices for that but i'd rather spend that money on shells. a few shots at a pattern board are cheaper than a laser.

guessing how hard to hit with a hammer would have made me a lot more nervous than wondering how many turns to tighten a c-clamp. i'm guessing he'd done that more than once.

roger

If you watch the H&H video, you'll see a guy with a barrel straightening press take a tube and straighten it. Not much fanfare to it. The press looked to be a 3 roller arrangement with one of them pressing down between the 2 others. I don't think I'd chose whacking a barrel with a mallet as my choice for fear of putting a dent in the barrel. But I'm kinda chicken.

The reason I did the bending was to use the bead and the ‘notch’ in the upper receiver forward of the hammer as the front and rear sights. I used wooden V Blocks and an old Arbor Press as I recall. The old Handloader’s Digest had fairly detailed instructions (with pictures) about how much to bend and where; also mentioned you had to get a little past the correct measurement to allow for spring back of the barrel. This was over 20 years ago. It worked out very well for me; beginners luck ? If I had a need for a “Field Expedient” single barrel gun, that was a utility gun, I wouldn’t hesitate to try again.

As a side note, I have a old gun that was my Grand Dad’s; his brother borrowed it and used the barrel to try and scare a rabbit out of its hole on a Snowy day back in the Teens, of course my Great Uncle fired the gun later and the barrel peeled like an overripe banana with a bend to the left. My Grand Dad took a Hack saw to it, and didn’t quite get the entire bend cut out of the barrel. He used the gun like this for the next 70 odd years very successfully, he just said he knew how much to hold off, to account for the bend. I have the old gun today, and I can’t hit anything with it. I don’t plan to straighten it, it reminds me of my Grand Dad and Great Uncle and I can just imagine two young Farm Boys tramping through the snow rabbit hunting with black powder shells every time I notice the 1/8 bend a t the muzzle.