Patterning

[ArtS]

Originally Posted by Stan Hillis

That's the part that's buggin' me. I've never shot a gun that shot flat for me when I was looking down on the rib. But, rules are made to be broken. Now, I'll start second guessing myself when I pass on a nice shotgun stocked high for the traps, or such. Livinlearn.



Pitch plays into it too, Harry.

It can happen though. Just out of graduate school in 1972, I traded an Ithaca M51 Trap with a sawed off barrel (cousin's wife's gun that she shot at a dove with a corn stalk in the barrel) for a 1948 Ithaca 16ga field grade with a high grade stock (finishing up guns with available parts). I had been thinking of a classic double and they were cheap at the time. Took it out for its first trip and hit not one thing. I patterned it and both barrels were dead 18" high at 30 yds. This with a gun with 2-3/4" drop. It also had very light barrels. I thought a little and took a towel and wrapped around the center of the barrels. I was at an abandoned concrete plant near my house found a tough looking small tree that hat a vertical narrow V fork in a low limb. I put the barrel with the towel in the fork and bumped it hard on the top of the action. Three tries at this and it patterned perfectly. With light barrels it is easy to bend a set of doubles up or down. This went on to be my lifetime regular dove gun.

I knew nothing of Parkers at the time and hadn't seen pictures of them truing barrels in the factory. What prompted me to try (besides money) was I had a Weatherby gun catalog that showed a picture of a worker truing rifle barrels in their German factory. I figured if you could bend and adjust a rifle barrel in a press with a 4" handwheel crank, bumping a shotgun barrel enough to get a pattern right should be easy.

The same wouldn't work, of course, if you start with a straight barrel. Then the pattern would depend on distance.

[Stan Hillis]

Originally Posted by Harry Gietler

I have spent over 45 years bending shotgun barrels for people. It is very easy,but you have to go easy, you don't want to ''Kink'' them. I have seen barrels get bend by guys sitting on them while the gun was in a case on the back seat of a car. It only takes a few degrees, they don't look like a ''Crossbow''. Most of the bending was for slug shooting for deer hunting. The hardest to bend were Ithaca 20in. slug barrels.

Harry


.

I have seen it done too, Harry. But, there's a difference in making a gun shoot to where you want it to by bending a barrel, as opposed to finding out why it's shooting that way in the first place.

Bending a barrel makes one shoot where you want it to at a specific range. Less than that distance and it's off, and more than that distance and it's off in the other direction.

My opinion is that, if possible, it's better to correct the issue on the back end of the gun than on the front end. Read Oswald's book and you might agree. Or not.

[Stan Hillis]

Originally Posted by Harry Gietler

''Making a gun shoot where you want it, as opposed to finding out why it's shooting that way in the first place'' The reason they were shooting that ''Way''
in the first place is because they were ''Not Straight'', by bending them I was Straighting them. I put them dead on at 50yds.

Harry

They may have been straight before you bent them. Bending them just made them shoot where you wanted them to. It's very easy to look down the bore of a barrel and tell if it's straight or not, by looking at the light rings that show up in the bore when the barrel is pointed towards a light source. If the series of rings are truly concentric then the barrel is straight. Making it "not straight" may be what you're doing, thereby making it shoot where you want it to.

I'm no stranger to shotgun barrel bending. But, when you've spent a lifetime shooting shotguns as I have and have never seen a gun shoot flat on which you were looking down the rib, it makes you question whether all these guns over all those years were "not straight", as you suggest.

Regardless, I agree that bending a barrel slightly can yield satisfactory results in moving the pattern up or down (in the case of a S X S). We just don't agree about whether or not those barrels were straight to begin with. I say the majority of them were.