doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com How do barrels get dents?

A cousin of mine was cleaning his Scott in the bathroom and dropped the barrels into the tub.
They hit the edge and got a couple of dents. Luckily they were not of the sharp kind and got removed easily.

In short, you have to be careful, it can happen anywhere.

JC

I dented my Parker's barrel Saturday at the trap club. Hit the mic stand as I mounted the gun-not but a tap but a dent.

Darn. Iowa just got a dove season, which it never had when I lived there. Maybe hunters need to be warned that doves shoot back??

I slipped on a large, flat, wet rock in the UP hunting grouse and woodcock several years back. Broke a rib but protected the gun.

lean them against the side of your pickup or car or better yet put it on the roof. enough said

I've got a ding in a M12 16 gauge mag tube as well. Flimsy tube in comparison with the rest of the gun. Gil

Years ago (about half a century) my high school buddy was hunting with his dad's super light weight Franci 20ga semi auto. Usually he carried an A5 built like a crow bar which would fairly describe how he used it in prying open brush piles to flush cottontails. He shot a cottontail with the Franci and since it wasn't fully dead, delivered a rabbit punch with the barrel of the shotgun. Several shots later he realized the gun was strangely missing far wide of where he thought he was aiming. Sure enough, barrel dented and bent a few degrees to the left. Rest of the story as Paul Harvey said - he was specifically forbidden from taking that gun to begin with. We all understand the moral of that story I suppose but a few weeks later he topped it by driving his girl friends father's new car (another forbidden activity) and tearing the front and rear wheels off it by ignoring the old smoke pot lights marking a road repair where the concrete had been removed. Certainly made bending the barrel a minor foul!

I saw a rifle once that was used by a son to hit his dad on the head with in a drunken brawl. (No charges were filed, but the dad sold the rifle.) It was a 22 rimfire. The guy who bought the rifle, a single-shot Win, brought it to the office. I could tell by looking at it, before I knew the story, that the barrel was bent. The new owner said, "Hunh. I knew it was shooting low."

I think he hammered the barrel straight with a rubber mallet. You can look down the bore of a rifle and I suppose a shotgun at a bright light to a straight line (like a plumb line) and tell immediately if it's bent at all, if it isn't obvious on the outside. The refelction of the line will crook where the bend is.

Put your gun in a rack at a shooting club. Like magic, dents will appear.


OWD

If you lived near by I would machine a set of plugs for you. My advice is to find a good lathe man and have him machine a set for you. Use increasing size increments till you can get a plug through .001 smaller than the ID of the tube. Position that one over the dent and finish up by peening it with a soft mallet made of lead. Works for me.

Sacrificing a broke rib to protect your barrels is pretty strong, but really does not seem to me to be in the same league with stepping in front of a low shot-string on a dove shoot to keep the barrel dings at bay. It especially hurts when someone forgets to get rid of that old turkey load from the Spring before the dove season opener in September...Geo