One for the books

After nearly fifty years I thought I'd just about seen it all. I was wrong. The other day a guy walks in the door with a swede barreled action with instructions to unscrew the last four inches of the barrel and recrown it. An examination showed that,sure enough,there was another four inch piece of 6.5 barrel with a female thread that had been attached similar to a muzzle brake. Did a nice job of blending it in too! As if that weren't bad enough the extention had a left hand twist. Don't know if he ever shot it. Didn't really care to know.
 
Maybe this guy discovered that a bullet going from a right hand twist to a left hand twist did evil things to even the best bullets. Wonder how close to the muzzle something would have to be to get hit by anything but bullet fragments?
 
We once asked Phil Sauer (who was known for experamenting) if he ever tried long lead and long bullet jump length.

He replied that he had throated a barrel out to 18 inches of free bore before any rifling started. He said the bullets would get going and then hit the rifling and it would strip, he could tell by the amount of copper build up at the rifling after only a few shots. Yes Phil tried many things. He was one of rhte best.

Paul
 
The early Swede carbines (not the model 38, maybe model 94 ?, I cant remember now) anyway, they had barrels that were just under the 16" minimum.
Lots of them were just threaded and had a barrel extension added, instead of being rebarreled.
Maybe it was one of those ?
 
Many/most of the long rifles had the muzzle threaded for a blank firing device for use with wooden bullets I think. Hate to be next to one of them with the splinters flying.
 
Back
Top