doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Sleeved Barrels

Hallowell's Definition:

Sleeved bbls - An economical method of bringing new life to a damaged pair of barrels, regardless of their original method of jointing. The ribs are removed. The barrels are cut off 3" - 4" from the breech end and discarded. The bores of the remaining breech-end are reamed out oversize. New tubes are fitted down into the original breech section and filed down to fit flush. The original ribs are then replaced.

Sleeving is considerably less expensive than building a completely new set of barrels. Much of the time required to build a set of barrels is concentrated in the fitting of the breech end to the receiver; this work is salvaged through sleeving. Sleeving can be recognized by a pair of circumferential lines around the barrels a few inches from the breech; the more invisible, the finer the job. A sleeved gun should always be identified as such amongst the proof marks, and if done in England must be properly reproofed...

have sold quite a few sleeved guns over the past 30 plus years of hobby gun dealing...

yet to hear a complaint by an actual owner of a sleeved gun...

sleeving has been practiced primarily by the english gun trade for well over 50 years now...if it was not a reliable process, they would not do it...what sleeving does do, is add new life to unsafe guns, by providing them with new safe usable barrels...

care to post your experience with sleeved guns here?

experience only please...

If done correctly they are fantastic. Beats shooting a gun with thin walls.

It takes the value out but makes it usable some early sleeving is crap seamless sleeving looks great but it's still sleeved

While sleeving provides a less expensive solution to new barrels the marketplace has demonstrated a reluctance to accept sleeved guns without devaluation.

A sleeved gun will always have a lesser value and many will not consider buying one. I own three sleeved guns and use them happily, I prefer seamless or near invisible seams, but functionally they are no different than visible seams.

Done properly a sleeved gun is better than an unusable gun, done poorly the gun becomes trash. I find the market�s revulsion to sleeving curious given its same acceptance of Mono Block Guns from Italy that are so popular.

Regardless the lack of acceptance makes sleeving anything other than higher grade guns uneconomical. A sleeved field grade box lock will normally not bring the price of sleeving.

The mono block guns from Italy etc. Are new guns bright and shiny sleeved guns are considered by many to be worn out or abused and then new tubes put on a worn out gun I have nothing against sleeved guns I have sleeved a few but I think the above is the consensus.

A friend of mine and fellow sxs enthusiast was showing me his 28ga nitro special the other day. It was a twenty gauge that he'd bought from a hobby gun seller on the internet.

When he got it the 20ga barrels had been sleeved down to 28ga by a fitting which could only be described as plumbinglike. I know the Pieper french guns had a stepped barrel connection to the monoblock, but this looked just like something you'd see in the pipes under your house.

Anyhow my friend had just had a gunsmith smooth out the connection and engrave a design around the joint. 100% improvement...Geo

It�s important to remember that sleeving is performed when the gun�s original barrels are no longer safe to shoot. Therefore, the value of the gun before it is sleeved is next to nothing. It�s a wall hanger. The owner of such a gun has three choices: put it over the fireplace, rebarrel the gun or sleeve the gun. If it�s a nice gun in otherwise good shape, it is a shame to make it and wall hanger. However, the cost of rebarreling, unless it is a Purdey, Boss or Holland, would far exceed the gun�s value. Sleeving, however, can now be done well and economically. No doubt, there are poor sleeving jobs out there. Some are sadly comical. But if done well, sleeved guns look very nice, give the gun new life and bring the gun�s value from zero, with bad barrels, to something much greater. Overall, it can be a very good option. There are quite a few English guns that have been sleeved in England, on the market in the US. The generally represent a very good value for the American hunter and shooter.

Pieper figured out pretty quickly he needed to make that obvious seam go away. So he did. While the monobloc reduces cost by simplifying manufacturing, the gun buying public doesn't want to know about it. They just want to save the money.

Why would anyone fart around with a sleeved gun:

https://www.gunsinternational.com/guns-f...un_id=101329636

60 seconds of internet searching turned up this. Superior to any sleeved gun rescued from the scrap iron pile.

Why not start with something NOT worn out? There are 20 pages of English double guns for sale on just GI. They are not rare.

If you guys are lucky, Miller will be along to school you on the difference between a monobloc gun and a sleever.

I got to run a dog.

Best,
Ted

Because functionally a properly accomplished sleeved gun can be an excellent shooter for the money. All other things being equal the sleeved gun will likely be much less.

The value amplified in part by the number of people prejudiced against owning one.

Further some guns are few and far between, like my pair of Celtic engraved 16ga Alex Martin SLEs. If I would not accept seamless sleeving I would perhaps never own, as in more than a decade of searching I have never seen another Celtic 16ga from Alex Martin.

I understand that aesthetically sleeving can really bother some. It did me on my first sleeved gun, a Thomas Turner best hammer gun, but I got used to it and seams does not bother me much now.

I further note that some sleeved guns were redone with 2 3/4 proofs making ammunition an easier proposition.