I've finally gotten to use my 24" 28 ga. The gun was made in 1900, one of a pair of guns with identical specs, as ordered by Folsom. These two guns were the very first 28 ga. guns made with 24" barrels.
Brian Dudley did a first class job of converting the gun from it's original 13 1/4" capped pistol grip stock, to a 14 1/8" straight stock. Brian gave a detailed summary of this job on his Facebook page, BMD Gunstocks (
https://www.facebook.com/permalink.p...69039873863885)
I bought the gun from the grandson of the original owner; his grandmother. She was given the gun when she was nine years old, in 1901.
I never shot the gun before sending it to Brian, mainly due to the very short stock.
So here's the part I referenced in the title, above. It turns out the rim diameter is nearly .010" smaller than my other 28ga VH, made in 1920. This smaller rim diameter makes it very difficult to close the gun, and equally hard to open, due to rim of the hull sticking in the rim groove of the chamber. This will be an easy correction, by using a rim cutter intended for standardized 28ga shells having a rim of .684"
What I am trying to learn boils down to whether early 28ga. shells had a smaller rim than today. SAAMI details the 28 gauge cartridge rim dimension as .687" +.000"/-.017". SAAMI was adopted in 1926, but were shotshell hull, and chamber dimensions different before that date.
As I stated above, the fix is very simple, but I'm equally interested in knowing why the gun was made with such a small rim groove.