I have owned quite a few Martinis, including a few Cadets. I hadn't owned one for a while; sold the last one because I got frustrated trying to load it. I happened to see one a few weeks ago that was a nice looking but was marked on the top of the action as one of the 32-20 rechambers. I got it for a song, and when it arrived I was amazed. It was a BSA in absolutely pristine condition with a Ser # in the 50000 range. It looked like a gun that had been handled a while in a showroom but not used. Everything fit, worked and looked un-worn. I suspect it was an early import that was rechambered, marked and sold in the early 60's.

I went through a lot of effort to get ready to shoot it. No one has any cases in stock, and I had to look to find some cases, finally locating some primed Remington 32-20 brass. Loaded some moderate 32-20 loads and they wouldn't chamber and lock up. A lot of fiddleing and measuring revealed that when the chambers were cut to 32-20 with the extractor out of the gun and remained cut for the Cadet round, which is too shallow for the 32-20. I ground the extractor recess enough to close and proceeded. I tried the 32-20 loads and they chambered, but pulled the bullet if ejected unfired. The gun was new enough at least so that the ejector had a lot of power. I went on and fired 5 of the rounds to function test, and got high pressure signs and sticky cases from the very moderate loads. This surprised me since I have had numerous custom cadets with much higher pressure rounds.

Examination of the cases showed that the chamber neck was too short and the case neck couldn't expand and was impeding the bullet release.

More investigation. I discovered that Remington cases are generally a little longer than the Winchester and Starline cases. Apparently, I had a minimum chamber that wouldn't work with the Remington cases without trimming. I cut a couple of cases off to 310 cadet length, loaded with cadet bullets and found that the bullets still jammed in the rifling, even with the much shorter case. At that point, I cast the chamber and bore and discovered that the Australians are correct. In the US the Cadet is accepted to have a .321-.322 bore. This is the excuse givenfor poor accuracy with the 32-20 bullet. The Australians, and one very famous expert that is knowledgeable in this area, says this is often not true; that the BSA's have much tighter bores than the Greeners and other makers. My rifle has a bore of just under .316, explaining the bullets jams with Cadet bullets.

I thought this all over, considered the rechamber and the bullet/case options, and decided to lengthen the chamber neck to accept any case and allow for a little case stretching. I then freebored the barrel with the same reamer and reamed until a 32-20 Remington case with a cadet bullet would seat without interference. My thinking is that the gun has already been rechambered, the tight bore may work reasonably well with a 32-20 bullet, and if not the cadet bullet will fit the chamber properly and give a good bore seal. The beauty of all this is that I have a lot more useful powder capacity than with a stock cadet case. The difference in length all becomes powder space, and the heeled bullet takes less case volume than the 32-20 bullet. I am getting ready to load some new rounds and try these to compare the new loads and see how much increase in performance over the standard Cadet.

I have not been able to find any instance where someone loaded the Cadet bullets in a full size 32-30 case and shot them in a 32-20 chamber modified to take the heeled bullets. Any of the rechambered guns would fire normal 32-20 loads if the cases are trimmed to fit (not necessary with Winchester and Starline cases apparently) but would only shoot 32-20 bullets and accuracy may or may not be there. The freeboring would seem to open up the possibility of accurate loads with more bullet weight and more velocity potential. Wanted to check if anyone had tried this or seen data for this.