doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Buy The Action vs. Buy The Barrels

Hi all, I was reading an old article by Dig in an older issue of the DGJ in which he stated about a gun bought at auction was a case of buy the action, not the barrels.

For years the mantra was buy the barrels, but I've always been of the opinion that the action is just as important as the bbls.

So....in your esteemed opinions which is more important or are they equal?

Thanks!

Greg

Very interesting question. The basic reference line in shotgun design is the barrel axis, and the barrels are the firt bit that is put together in gunmaking.

However, the barrels are the most "consumable" bit of a gun, and while you can barrel an action you cannot action a set of barrels, unless you want to spend more than the price of a new gun.

So yes, when buying a gun for a rebuild you buy the action. And in this context you can appreciate the technical merits of monobloc barrels since in the case of a monobloc equipped double you retube rather than rebarrel, a process much less costly than rebarreling or sleeving.

"And in this context you can appreciate the technical merits of monobloc barrels since in the case of a monobloc equipped double you retube rather than rebarrel, a process much less costly than rebarreling or sleeving."

Shotgun Lover. You have made this statement before and I'll agree with the rebarreling part but since the process of sleeving is much like the process of building a monobloc bbl set, given that you can't normally buy a profiled replacement monobloc tube from the original manufacturer, where is the cost saving in replacing damaged monobloc tubes over sleeving a set of chopper lump or dovetail lump bbls? For this discussion I'm assuming that both the monobloc bbls & the chopper lump/dovetail lump bbls have similar rib arrangements.

The only less costly part I can see with retubing a monobloc bbl set is that you don't have to machine the bbl stubs to receive the new tubes which is a relatively small part of the process. Otherwise you have much the same process of stripping & refitting ribs, profiling & fitting tubes, chambering finishing & on & on.

Brittany Man, let us see a specific example, a Bretta 626 with a badly bulged barrel. It was deribbed, the Monobloc was gently heated and the barrel knocked out. Yes, nowdays you cannot buy profiled tubes easily in Europe, so a semi fiished tube from Effebi was finish profiled on a CNC lathe and internally honed on a modern honing machine. It was solder tinned and inserted in the monobloc and then chambered with a Clymer reamer. As the new tube was not chromed, and the barrels were to be reblued anyway, the other barrel was dechromed and honed as well and the forcing cone lengthened with the same reamer. The job thus far took two days and the smith had time to do other things in the meantime (one being to take care of my broken V spring). The rib resolder took longer, the rust bluing had its own schedule but the whole thing was done in about a week.

Last time I looked, the British time and cost for such a job was in the hundreds of pounds for sleeving and thousands for rebarreling and the time quoted was in months.

Sleeving looks like monobloc work, but it is not. One reason being that chopper lumps are machined before brazing and the flat (braze) side may extend further out than the chamber. When sleeving the breech ends must be cut off at a point that offers free and round breech ends to receive the new tubes step. Hence the breech ends in sleeving jobs vary in length, the cut off point being determined by the point where the barrels are free from each other. And once you sleeved your chopper or dovetail barrels you end up with a multi part assembly which was never designed to be this way.

One additional point re sleeving. One technique employed to ensure that the "monobloc" will retain the original barrel alignment is to use a guided reamer to enlarge the chamber end before cutting out the barrel. In this method there is the risk that the reamer will eat out the barrel before the point where the tubes offer an integral round base to receive the new barrel.

And so what? So the new tubes will need to be filed flat on the internal side where they meet each other but this flattened bit will not have the benefit of mutual reinforcment from brazing. It sounds like an arcane detail, but it is at the most stressed bit of the barrel. I have seen a Westley Richards and a Jeffries sleeved this way and the barrel thickness at the flat internal abutment was 60 thou.

I will pick monobloc every time over these kinds of worries.

Sure is refreshing to read well thought out answers and opinions delivered in a civilized manor all pertaining to the original question that was posed. This is like... the good ole days of this BBS.

Educational, informative and interesting topic.

I think the essence of the issue I raised is the opportunity to build a beautiful gun around a beautiful action.

It used to be that if you bought a gun with lousy barrels, the work required to put that right would outweigh the value of the gun.

It also used to be that sleeving was a cheap fix to get a gun working but was not close to the quality of the original barrels.

Now we can sleeve and apply exactly the same quality controls as we would when re-barreling. We hide the joint, balance the gun as original and for �3,000 you have a viable and aesthetically identical alternative to new barrels. On a very good, rare and expensive action, it works.

I remember a Woodward O/U pigeon gun with an action like new. It had been sleeved to 26". Bought cheap and properly sleeved to 32", it made someone a fantastic gun he could not hope to find anywhere - certainly at his budget.

I'm currently building a pigeon gun around a W&C Scott best grade hammer pigeon gun - in this case we made new barrels, re-stocked it to client's requirements and all because the action was immaculate.

While I see some merit academically in Shotgunlover's argument, practically it is a non-issue. Properly sleeved chopper-lump barrels do not fail or constitute any risk as a consequence of the sleeving process.

That pretty well sums it up. Sometimes it's the action,sometimes it's the barrels,sometimes it's the name,and sometimes it's how much you think the gun will make you when you sell it.
It's a wonderful pursuit

Modern breechloaders do not get "reactioned" but they might get rebarreled or sleeved. The "reactioning " period seems to end with muzzleloader conversions to centerfire.

It is another way to look at a purchase. Does the action merit the investment of repairs? Too often people get caught up in the name or look at the current gun state and forget what it could be a basis for.

I bought a house and tore it down. Then sold the lot for more than twice what I had in it. People could not see the great lot for the lousy house on it. Bought it and sold it in the same month. Same thing with guns if you have the knowledge and money. Take a solid gun and turn it into what you are looking for is the way to get what you are looking for. Might not be any other gun like you want in the world. Do not wait, act.