doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com .410 Side by Side

I get real misty eyed around .410 shotguns myself. My favorite is the DeHaan S2 with 30" IC&M barrels pictured below. Weighing 6lbs, it balances and points very well and is deadly on decoyed doves around a waterhole. It keeps company with a model 42, Huglu redhead O/U with 30" IC&M barrels, and (forgive me) a Remington 1100 Sporting .410. Currently, I am considering an AYA 453 .410 with 29" barrels. At the Houston Gun Show once, I had the pleasure of handling an original Winchester 21 in .410 and, as much as I love 21's, wouldn't have one...what a fencepost! At the other end of the spectrum, a friend has a London best hammer gun .410 with 28" barrels that weighs 4lb. 11oz. What the hell do you do with that.....shoot squirrels?

None, and they won't ship. A friend was standing at the counter of one of their stores in New Orleans and wanted to buy four Yildiz to be shipped to his FFL. They refused the sale. Reall screwy.

.410 sxs guns have pretty much become my main guns lately. Sure, I'll pick up a 20 or 12ga from time to time, but it's not often anymore.

I recently bought another 28" Ithaca NID ejector to add to my existing one. At about 6 lbs, they are sweet to shoot.

The Skeeter's I've held seemed to be around the 6 1/2 lb mark, just guessing. Pretty close to the Repro I have with the CSM barrels.

Pretty close, Chuck. Steve Barnett has a pretty one and posts the weight at 6# 10 oz.

SRH

That's bad. What is also dumb, IMO, is that they will not order for you from Yildiz. You take what is there on the rack or do without. I like my little Elegant 4, but Yildiz shows a very large variety on their website. It's a shame they cannot be ordered.

SRH

Gary, those little English hammer double .410's were originally made for collectors; that is collectors of specimens for taxidermy rather than as sporting guns. Most had 2" chambers and would chiefly be used for small song birds etc. I have a Stensby of Manchester weighing in around the 4 1/2 pound mark. Lagopus.....

Now, that is interesting lagopus....I will look at Ronald Gabriel's book American & British 410 Shotguns again and see if I missed that bit of info.

For what it is worth the standard load for a British 2-1/2" 28 bore was 9/16 oz. Very 410ish.

Gary, I have his book but don't know if that is mentioned. The .410 here comes from the 12mm. walking stick gun cartridge; they freely interchange and are sometimes marked with both metric and imperial, and as such was first available in 2" black powder with a load of 5/16th. ounce of shot. The 2 1/2" cartridge followed later in about 1913 to match the BSA single barrel .410 bolt action gun which used surplus military actions; I think it was the Lee speed action. The 3" followed a few years later in the 1930's with Midland Gun Company's side by side shotgun. The 2 1/2" carries just 7/16th. ounce of shot. The 32 bore or 14mm. was also intended as a'collector's' gun and fired the same load as the 2 1/2" .410. The 28 bore with its 9/16th. ounce was the smallest real game gun at the time. Lagopus.....

The .410-bore shell first appears in the U.S. circa 1915, kind of jointly evolving from the European 12mm and the American .44-40 Shot/.44XL Shot cartridges. The 2-inch .410-bore shells carried a load of 3/10 ounce of shot and the 2 1/2 inch shell a load of 3/8 ounce of shot. There are no .410-bore shells in the Remington Arms - Union Metallic Cartridge Co. 1913-14 catalogue, but they are in the 1915-16 --



1923 --



From the J. Stevens Arms & Tool Co. General Catalog No. 54 --



For some reason when non-corrosive priming was first being introduced to American shotshells, the .410-bore shells got it first, circa 1930, with the larger shells getting it within the next year or two.

The 3-inch .410-bore shell with 3/4 ounce of shot was introduced in mid-1933 with the Winchester Model 42. I've posted this before, but will paste it in here again --

Ithaca Gun Co. 3-inch .410-bore Chambering -- July 1933 National Sportsman �

"We have not seen the official announcement but we have heard rumors that a 3" .410 shell was coming and on April 13th Norman Pillot of Houston, Texas, whom you may remember as having won the Amateur Live Bird Championship at Kansas City a short time ago, if my memory serves me right, wrote us that he was sending the barrels of his No. 4 ejector .410 Ithaca to be chambered for the new 3" shells. He also wrote us that last year he killed 180 ducks, 120 doves, 40 jacksnipe and broke 47x50 Skeet targets with this same .410 Ithaca.

In anticipating the stepping up of the .410 load, as we have previously anticipated the stepping up of loads for other gauges, all our .410's from the least expensive to the most expensive in either Ithaca, Lefever, or Westerns, have been built with material and strength enough to be rechambered for the 3" .410 and then handle it with a great big factor of safety.

I think it would be well to caution all users of .410s against using a 3" shell in the shorter chamber and I think that caution would bear repeating from time to time as applied to all makes of guns, because they still keep doing it with disastrous results.

You may say that any of our three outfits will furnish any of their .410s chambered for the 3" shell without additional charge for the longer chambering, and you may also say that the Ithaca Gun Company will rechamber an Ithaca or a gun of any other make for the 3" shell at a cost of $2.50 per barrel; and all the Ithaca Gun Company would need would be the barrels."