Morning all,
Because I'm fed up with snow and because I just got a new gunsafe, I dug out a lifter I'd purchased about 8 years ago as a wall hangar. Got it from Texas and it had a crack in the stock next to the receiver and also a cracked breachbolt. After receiving it, I decided to send it to Bill Schwarz (probably spelling it wrong) in Ga to repair the crack and make a new breachbolt and do nothing else. Wall hanger it was. When I got it, I had noticed some pretty significant pits in the bore and a pretty good ding about 4" from the end of the right barrel. Gun wasn't tight, but wasn't too loose. Anyway, I got the gun back and cleaned up the barrels a bit and put it away. Well this morning I dug her out (to put in the gunsafe) and decided to actually look her over and also to take a few measurements. First off, accordingly to the s/n book she left the factory in 1879 as a D2 10 gauge with 32" barrels and that's what she currently is. She tips (literally) the scales at 10 lbs 3 oz. on her number 3 frame. Barrels are marked with a D and a H, and 5 12 and they actually ring like they are supposed to. LOP is 14 1/4" to the steel buttplate with a 2 3/4" DAH. Checked the chambers and they are indeed still 2 7/8". Bore diameters measure are .788. I checked the outside diameters of the barrels with my digital caliper and at 4" from the breech they are both 1.094. Narrowest of the barrels is .900 and that is 28" down the barrels. Anyway, far from perfect, but taking the outside diameter and subtracting the inside diameter and dividing by 2 would indicate that the min barrel wall thickness (not counting pits) is circa .055 28" down from the breech. At the end of the chamber's, the barrel wall thickness appears to be .163. Anyway, in theory at least, the bores could be honed quite a bit and still have enough barrel thickness to shoot light (RST type) loads. Anyway, I think this might have the potential of being shot, after of course I get someone to look her over a bit more then I have. Also, a few pictures: PS. This gun has really nice wood. What checkering she did have is just about gone from being over 130 years old. PS. Both choke are 20 thousands. With backboring to clean up the bores, they would certainly tighter up a ton.
