The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly

[J. A. EARLY]

My two cents is this was shot bridging, since I see they were number 3s. The tungsten matrix is hard; tungsten by definition is harder than steel even in the matrix blend they make. And with a heavy wad with thick walls, when going down through the .032 choke there was no give and no shot deformation as with lead. The shot in the column formed a solid block and the walls like Jerico came tumbling down under the stress. With 4s, you may have gotten by, with 6s probably 99.9% of the time. With 3s or larger, disaster. With a more open choke, you probably get by. Remember with steel or harder shot, an IC shoots Mod., a Mod. shoots Full, and a Full shoots Extra Full and a thin barrel lets go.

Remember if you cut this back two inches, you are probably in the very thinnest part of the barrels, and there may not be enough metal to install chokes. so measure or have them measured to see how thin they will be where they will be cut. I think having the left side retubed is going to be the best bet, by somebody like Kirk Merrington.

[GH-16]

Originally Posted by Jerry Harlow

My two cents is this was shot bridging, since I see they were number 3s. The tungsten matrix is hard; tungsten by definition is harder than steel even in the matrix blend they make. And with a heavy wad with thick walls, when going down through the .032 choke there was no give and no shot deformation as with lead. The shot in the column formed a solid block and the walls like Jerico came tumbling down under the stress. With 4s, you may have gotten by, with 6s probably 99.9% of the time. With 3s or larger, disaster. With a more open choke, you probably get by. Remember with steel or harder shot, an IC shoots Mod., a Mod. shoots Full, and a Full shoots Extra Full and a thin barrel lets go.

Remember if you cut this back two inches, you are probably in the very thinnest part of the barrels, and there may not be enough metal to install chokes. so measure or have them measured to see how thin they will be where they will be cut. I think having the left side retubed is going to be the best bet, by somebody like Kirk Merrington.

This is the best advice offered so far! Send the barrels to Kirk to find out what your options are and follow his advice. It's not going to be cheap, but you will be saving a classic gun.

If it were my gun I would see if Kirk could just sleeve the one damaged barrel back to the original 32" length. I have a friend that had Kirk replace/sleeve just one barrel on a model-21 and it came out wonderful, you really had to look & know what you were looking for to detect that the one barrel had been replaced.

You'll probably never know exactly what caused the blow-up, but IMO; the first step is to never shoot any of those shells again to be on the safe side. Secondly; Get in the habit of looking down the barrels before you drop in a new round.