[Dean Romig]

Here is a bit of Austin Hogan's article, "Parker Bores and Chambers".

Austin certainly wasn't the 'last word' on the subject but he and Charlie Price and Richard Hoover were the prominent Parker researchers and analysts for a couple of decades.

It may not tell you much of anything about your gun but I think we can rule out it having been bored to 11 gauge - those were 99% 4-digit serial number guns.

. King became superintendent of Parker Bros., with the knowledge that imported tubes could be bored and turned to profile at lesser duty and lower cost. King’s earliest Parker related patents covered tooling used to bore and contour tubes into barrels. He devised a method called “bulldozing” to swage the breech of a tube to contour, that formed the railed barrel flat.
It was apparently quite difficult to cut straight, uniform diameter bores in Damascus and other composite tubes. King first cast the tubes in plaster to support them during the boring operation. He apparently mastered boring composites by around s/n 3000; we find some high grade guns of lesser number with extremely variable bores. We think that the reason it is difficult to bore and turn Damascus (composites) is because the compound material breaks at the lamination, and does not produce complete, or multi turn chips. Research continues relative to learning the cutter sharpening and cutting speed that King may have used.
A chronology of bore diameter relative to serial number is shown in the figure. These are bore diameters measured on PGCA member’s guns at meetings and gatherings. Note that almost all guns less than 70,000 s/n have bore diameters of 0.750 – 0.760 inches. Note that the variability of diameter seems to diminish after introduction of the top action around s/n 25000. Perhaps new tooling was incorporated.
Note that bores of greater than 0.750 are not found after 1891. New tooling was incorporated at this time which apparently bored to about 0.730, to be followed by a polish that produced bores of 0.731 – 0.735. Note the two large circles indicative of barrels of 0.740 bore. These are live bird competition guns. Super Foxes were bored to the same diameter in the 1920’s.






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