Actual vs Rough Barrel Weight

[mobirdhunter]

Arthur, the difference between unstuck and finished barrel weight has always been of great interest to me. Certainly, the craftsmen at Parker Bros. selected components based on requests regarding weight and handling, and the frame size was often what helped determine overall weight and balance. Having said that, I've examined my own guns -- those for which I have research letters specifying weight -- and compared the un-struck barrel weight to the finished weight and have found a rather wide degree of variance. It's clear to me that the barrel strikers could work wonders.

It is interesting that your 8 oz. (give or take a small amount) figure seems to come up with some frequency in my guns, also. My sample size is small in the grand scheme of Parker numbers, but at around 20 guns for which I have recorded weights, 8+ oz. is not uncommon.

I think quite a few guns have had their bores "cleaned up" over the years, and that obviously contributes to some barrel weight loss, but by how much, who knows?

An interesting question, for sure, but also a reminder of how much hand work was done on these "manufactured" guns.

[ArtS]

Regarding bore size and the comment I made about 10 ga loading, I remembered that I had bought a mixed lot of antique hand loading tools on eBay several weeks and had unpacked them and hardly looked at them. I dug them out and found there were reversible decappers/rams in 10, 12, 16 and 20, matching bases and a neat old tin shell holder that was reversable and fit both 12 and 16 gauge hulls with a funnel on each end. I have never seen one, but it looks like you insert the hull and dro the powder, ram the wad, drop the shot and ram the over powder wad using this as a guide. Pretty slick.

What intrigued me concerning this thread was that in addition there were several old (!) wad cutter punches included, and lo and behold they were in 20, 16, 12 10 and (drum roll) 9 gauge. They were stamped with the identifiers. Looks like this may have been a common practice. Parkers loading instructions for their shells reflects. With bore size wads, I would think you could load light 12 loads in the 10 gauge shell and have really low pressure loads with much less chance of bloopers. It would likely be possible to load some 12 gauge level loads in cut off 2" shells if desired.