doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com A Shotgun's P.O.I.

Sirs, I am looking at a double that originally had 32" barrels. They have been cut to 28". Will the POI be way off? Only patterning will tell?
In your experience, have any of you bought doubles that have lost 4" of barrel length? Probably 1/2" to maybe even 2" of loss can be okay. But 4"?

At 4" all the choke is gone. Balance might have shifted back a bit but it might feel livelier than it did at 32. In the field I really like my 25" Bernardelli copy of an XXV and in the blind my 30" Husqvarna is great. I think you need to have it in hand to see how you feel about it.

I doubt poi would change much.

As Oskar said, you won't have any choke. Are you going to use it that way or have it threaded for choke tubes?

I bought a cheap Turkish sxs to fix up as a turkey gun and had the gunsmith cut the 28" barrels to 24" and thread them. I had tested the poi before sending it to him and both barrels centered 20 gauge field loads very well. When I got it back, it still centered the field loads, but didn't come close with turkey loads. That wasn't surprising - the gun was made for shooting 7/8 oz loads and I was using loads almost twice that heavy. The right barrel shot right and the left barrel shot left.

It took some choke filing to get both barrels to shoot to the same place, but it does and has been a very reliable turkey gun. I'm confident I can file choke tubes to make a gun shoot to poi on anything within reason, but it's harder to do on a gun without tubes. But on one without choke, I don't know. If it was close before being shortened, it might still be ok. Good luck if you decide to get it.

If i wind up with it, I intend to use it as is. The seller states no choke left in either barrel.

If it shot straight before being cut, then my guess is it that it will shoot almost the same now. With no choke, it will probably be close enough for whatever you want to do.

I hold my breath when I get any sxs to see if both barrels will shoot to the same POI. You never know until you pattern it, and I don't want one that won't shoot straight.

Amen, brother.

It occurs to me that, to a somewhat lesser degree, I have seen lack of regulation in O/U guns, too. I once was privy to pattern testing of a Beretta target style 12 ga., 32" barreled O/U. While doing the pattern testing of some choke tubes it was noticed that the patterns were at least 8" out of regulation at about 25 yards, with any combination of chokes in the gun. A call to Beretta yielded the unwelcome fact that as long as the patterns are within that distance of being atop each other it is within Beretta's level of tolerance.

It is, however, NOT within my level of tolerance.

After having F.W.Heym make a 60cm long set of O/U barrels for me, I had the honor to watch Helmut Kerner and Rudi Henneberger test and adjust the regulation. They used a reamer with a long handle that one of them turned from the breech end, while the other one "crowded" the reamer to one side with a brace that looked like a yoke. The "magic" was in knowing where to apply the pressure and how much to apply. It worked; I killed a pickup load of game with those barrels.
Mike

a great deal of things regarding shotguns tend to blur the distinction between science and art.

best regards,

tom

Agreed, but point of impact is not one of them.

SRH