doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Hosford barrel wall thickness gauge review

I have been looking for a Hosford barrel wall thickness gauge for sometime. I have three other wall thickness gauge systems with the one I bought from Midway or maybe the Glazon/ Connecticut Shotgun as my go to gauges. I use them on every gun I buy, before I do anything else. If the barrels are solid, everything else can be put right and if they are thin nothing else matters much. But the three gauges I have are about as portable as a cinder block and I wanted something I could take to gun shows or over to a dealers store. It seems around here no dealer has a wall thickness gauge.

So I bought my own Hosford and started to use it after reading the short booklet that came with. It is a very well made device and easy to set up and use, or so I thought. It is a fork type device, with the solid top rod carrying the weight and the other larger, hollow rod, holding the gauge. But it works with gravity, to give you "true" readings, and if you set it up without using gravity you get bad results. Calibration is the key to operating it and if you do not have it calibrated correctly, everything comes out about .015 thinner than it is. My first readings were clearly off so I went and watching a couple short videos about it's operation. I found I was not calibrating it properly. Once you go back and set it up correctly, and calibrate it correctly, it works perfectly. Good thing, because at first I thought I have a lot of thin walled barrels but now I know they are not. The issue is that to calibrate it you must let the gauge hang down, so the weight is being carried by the smaller, solid rod, the anvil is on, not the thicker rod the gauge is on. It uses the weight to allow the rod to deflect is the best way I can describe it. To zero it without this it gives you are false reading and they always reads thinner that they are in fact. If you watch the videos they found to be better to just use gravity. Gravity works fine. Watch the YouTube videos if you buy one and you will quickly see what I am talking about.

Overall I like the gauge and find it works well. Easy to change to the 28 gauge/.410 rod if needed. I spent a lot of time trying to verify that what I was measuring was what the walls were. So far everything comes up fine. But getting it setup and calibrated does take a bit of effort, until you figure out what is going on, and then it is dead simple. I have even spent a lot of time using feeler gauges and cut barrel section, which I can directly measure and find it is just about dead on. If you take your time, it is dead on and if you go too fast, you will see a bit of fluctuation that you know at once is operator error and when you go back and check it you get proper readings. So overall I am very impressed. If you were thinking about buying one of these I would recommend it, just give yourself a few extra minutes to become familiar with it. My results so far have been excellent.

Do you think it does a better job than a Manson gage that Brownell's sells for $110 new?

I have one of those but I do not use it much. The rod the ball anvil rest on tends to not ride on the surface and you can distort it if you do not have a soft touch. I added a metal rod to the backside, to keep it in firm contact with the barrel. I got that idea from what others here have done. That took a lot of the play out of it, but if you are too heavy handed or go too fast it will not give you accurate readings. Does the Hosford give you seven times better reading? I wish. But once I figured out how to operate it the reading Hosford gives you are very consistent. So far I am checking them against my other measuring systems and the Hosford seem more reliable or just as reliable.

What do I expect from a measuring device might be the better question? The results need to be consistent and accurate. They need to be verifiable, as much as possible with other tools that I have and I can use. If the Hosford tells me a barrel is .018, every time I measure it, after repeated attempts, and my other devices tell me it is .022 or .016 then I have a problem. Who do you believe? I have two different measuring devices, which tend to give me consistent readings, and I have never caught one of them in the wrong, unless it was my fault. Using any of them requires a soft touch and doing it the same way over and over again. I have several barrel cut offs which I have used to measure as a known thickness, that has been verified over and over again, by multiple measuring devices. On those the Hosford checks out against everything. It might vary a .001-.002 on other barrels but that is within my operator error I think. And if I can get within a couple thousands, that is well within what I need.

I guess it is comes down to where do you draw the line? I will shoot barrels at .022-.020 with "reasonable" loads. I have and do so fairly often. But reasonable is 5000 psi not 9000 psi and certainly not 11000 psi. And where the thin area is much more important than just how thin. If it is 10" past my left hand I am not worried very much. Nothing near where my hand rests or closer. There are too many guns to do stupid things with them. Often once you find a thin area you can see why it is thin. Most often there was pitting removed or a dent removed with poor results. But if it is three inches from the choke area it might be a concern but not really a safety risk. Find that same area on a gun you are thinking about buying to shoot and you better slow down and check it out closely from that point on. To me the Mason is a very good ruler and the Hosford is finer micrometer.

I would like to find my old post explaining Mr. Hosford's method of using the Manson gauge. I have not had trouble getting repeatable results on the Manson if I follow my own, (really Hosford's) directions.

I trust gauges that work horizontally much more than those that work vertical. I use a horizontal gauge made long ago that is called the Truth Gauge. Same principle as the Holsford. The only thing I would suggest for anyone buying a new gauge is to replace the Chinese made of dial indicator with a Starret indicator. This type of gauge is deadly accurate if used with a light touch.

The Hosford is easier to learn to use to get accurate repeatable numbers. The Manson needs a spring to keep the ball against the barrel. The vertical style can get good numbers but it requires the user technique to be more precise. The Hosford is a more an all in one unit than others. It is possible to make an accurate wall thickness gauge yourself if you are at all handy. I've seen them made out of copper tubing that work well.