doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Barrel thickness study

I happen to found a gunsmith who had a barrel thickness device, and asked him if he could measure my new gun, and he said NO, but you can take it home and do it yourself

I have a British made side by side shotgun in 16ga from 1910. Barrel is nitro proved.

With a white marking pencil, I made 1cm marks over the rib, from 1 to 71 cm. Using the tool, I placed the barrel on each mark, carefully moved from one extreme of the rib to the other extreme, and took notice of max and min measure I got. Made it with both barrels, then used excel to convert to mm if needed, and plot a simple column graph that shows the barrel contour....

First measure was made al 9cm from the breach, last one at around 65cm because of the choke.

What I noticed was that min reading, but not always in the same spot, but normally in the same area, and that there where 2 areas of max and 2 areas of min readings....That is: max reading, then a low reading, then a high reading, then a min reading... Strange... Of course thickness of the barrels were they are soldered, are not possible to read.

In summary I get the lowest readings at about 43-45cm from the breach, reading 0,027" (0,6858mm) at the left barrel and 0,030" (0,762mm) at the right barrel.

And the important readings at 9" from the breach, (23cm), was 0,061" (1,5494mm) at the left and 0,065" (1,651mm) at the right...

This process of reading nearly 250 measurements, took about 1 hour (now I understand why the gunsmith didn't want to do it jajaja), as you have to be extremely careful and move veeery slowly not to get errors, and frequently removing the barrel to see if the dial gets a cero reading again or it has moved.

Any comments or suggestions now that I still have the device, would be appreciated.

Paco