Ed Rayl Barrels !

[Bob Gerard]

I have been sighting in and load developing my new .62 rifled “British Carbine” at home, and I am so surprised at how well I can shoot with it.
It has an Ed Rayl barrel with round-bottom rifling with a 1/72" twist.
I use 80 grains of Scheutzen 2F powder and a .610 cast round ball with spit-patch of .018 pillow ticking.
I have it sighted in for 5O yards (I can actually hit the 10X at that distance with this gun- the target below is my final sight-in, with 3 of 4 in the 10x).
Yesterday I went to a range with my buddies, and wanted to see how it did at the 100 yard mark.
Sure enough, without changing my sight picture or load, I had shot consistently in the black, with several shots in or touching thr 10 ring! There is no drop from 50 to 100 yards!
On a whim I decided to try a shot at the 200 yard target, a man-size metal torso and head metal gong. I aimed about 6 inches above the fellow ( resting my rifle across a box). My gun fired but I heard no hit. At first. About three seconds later I hear the thud as the ball smacked that steel!
I repeated this twice more with the same results. When I saw the target, I could see the three splatter marks in the lower third of the torso. I guess the ball dropped about 24 inches or so at 200 yards.
I was so surprised at what I was able to do with the rifle and have determined that this gun with its Ed Rayl barrel is the best muzzleloading rifle I have ever shot.

[rich pierce]

Many bench and chunk gun shooters favor Ed Rayl barrels. I’ve never heard of one that didn’t deliver fine accuracy.

[alacran]

I have 2 rifles with Rayl barrels. They are very accurate barrels.

[Eric Kettenburg]

I've used quite a few over the years and always have found them to be excellent barrels with extremely well-fit breechplugs.  I just hate filing them!  He uses an alloy considerably tougher than 12L.

[Bob Roller]

Ed told me when I met him at the CLA Show but I forget the number of that steel he used.MAYBE 6150 but whatever it is the chance of black powder blowing it up is zero.When the controversy over gun barrel steels came up I had not thought much about it until the blow up of a Douglas barrel came along.A lot of us were told that any newly made barrel could not be blown up with black powder.Some time after that sad event I ordered some 12L14 for screws in 3/8 and 5/32 diameters.The 5/32 was an after thought and I was surprised to find it because I was using 5/32 drill rod for lock screws.I bought all of it they had on the rack,about 30 bars.The woman that took my order was filling in that day and when I made a comment about 12L being used for gun barrels she said she would not want to be near one when it was fired.She was a metallurgist and said the developing of 12L14 was dedicated to fast production of screws and threaded rods and nothing else.
I am not writing this to stir up another endless controversy which IS endless.Ed told me he wanted no part of it and Douglas dropped the muzzle loading part of the program and Fred Depoy* told me it was scheduled for discontinuation because of the reluctance of the black powder shooters to pay for anything to make a gun with and the blown up barrel accelerated that and Douglas had insurance to pay for any barrels they made to be safe with proper loads,black or nitro.I THINK the barrel that blew up was a 13/16x45 caliber and the damage was to the shooters hand supporting the rifle.
Bob Roller
*Fred Depoy now deceased for a long time

[alacran]

Any barrel can be blown up.

[Bob Roller]

Yes,any barrel can be blown up.Antique guns from the pre nitro era that have the powder measure with them show no extreme loads and that includes the Hawken..Black powder is a mechanically mixed concoction and "smokeless"is  very different.Going off topic,I have experimented with Elmer Keith's revolver loads with 3 readily available nitro based powders and one pound of a certain brand of smokeless will load 1000  cartridges for the 357 "Magnum". I have done this.Getting back to what some call "The Holy Black"powders,any barrel that bursts with it is a defective product UNLESS it was altered.As I recall the blown up Douglas barrel,it was a 13/16 across the flats and 45 caliber,There was no mention of too deep dovetail cuts that weakened it and I was told the shooter had a very bad injury to one hand.
That makes me think of dovetails on the bottom flat for pins or wedges that may have been too deep.We probably will never know after all these years.I will not defend the use of 12L14 for any gun barrel but there are a lot of them that did not blow up or if they do we never heard about them.
Bob Roller

[Daryl]

I had a rifle with a .50 Bauska barrel on it  that had a deep dovetail for the wedge. Testing showed it shot best with 80gr. 3F, but one day when loading it  I noticed a skip, right at the wedge. I stopped shooting it, cleaned it and found the barrel had bulged at that point. Needless to say, the barrel was junked.

[Dphariss]

I had a rifle with a .50 Bauska barrel on it  that had a deep dovetail for the wedge. Testing showed it shot best with 80gr. 3F, but one day when loading it  I noticed a skip, right at the wedge. I stopped shooting it, cleaned it and found the barrel had bulged at that point. Needless to say, the barrel was junked.

I have a story about one of these. One of the lands flaking off. Gotta love them cheap steels. Or maybe not. There were several pipe bomb makers in NW MT at one time. And I saw photos of a TC Hawken barrel that split in the bottom of the underlug too deep dovetail. But few want to hear such things.  Or the one that blew out at the bottom of the nipple seat in the breech. I guess it was drilled a little too deep. When someone tells of finding an early TC and is shooting it it gives me shivers.  Pretty sure IIRC the early barrels were from NW MT. 

[Bob Gerard]

I had a rifle with a .50 Bauska barrel on it  that had a deep dovetail for the wedge. Testing showed it shot best with 80gr. 3F, but one day when loading it  I noticed a skip, right at the wedge. I stopped shooting it, cleaned it and found the barrel had bulged at that point. Needless to say, the barrel was junked.

I have a story about one of these. One of the lands flaking off. Gotta love them cheap steels. Or maybe not. There were several pipe bomb makers in NW MT at one time. And I saw photos of a TC Hawken barrel that split in the bottom of the underlug too deep dovetail. But few want to hear such things.  Or the one that blew out at the bottom of the nipple seat in the breech. I guess it was drilled a little too deep. When someone tells of finding an early TC and is shooting it it gives me shivers.  Pretty sure IIRC the early barrels were from NW MT.

Are you talking about an Ed Rayl barrel or just is it of some unrelated barrel that failed? I am  at a loss to see what the connection is with the topic 🧐

[bob in the woods]

I had a rifle with a .50 Bauska barrel on it  that had a deep dovetail for the wedge. Testing showed it shot best with 80gr. 3F, but one day when loading it  I noticed a skip, right at the wedge. I stopped shooting it, cleaned it and found the barrel had bulged at that point. Needless to say, the barrel was junked.

I have a story about one of these. One of the lands flaking off. Gotta love them cheap steels. Or maybe not. There were several pipe bomb makers in NW MT at one time. And I saw photos of a TC Hawken barrel that split in the bottom of the underlug too deep dovetail. But few want to hear such things.  Or the one that blew out at the bottom of the nipple seat in the breech. I guess it was drilled a little too deep. When someone tells of finding an early TC and is shooting it it gives me shivers.  Pretty sure IIRC the early barrels were from NW MT.

Are you talking about an Ed Rayl barrel or just is it of some unrelated barrel that failed? I am  at a loss to see what the connection is with the topic 🧐

Somewhere,someone mentioned the type of steel that Ed uses ,which is not what many other makers use....and off we went !   

[rich pierce]

Barrel steel is a trigger for some.

The only downside (joking) to Rayl barrels is that draw filing is twice as hard. Similar to Green Mountain barrels.

[Daryl]

I seem to recall 1137 as being the steel GM used for it's ML and BP ctg. barrels.
Perhaps Rayl barrels are similar.

[Bob Roller]

1137M----modified for gun barrels is what my feeble mind says.The last one I used was a heavy 40 caliber for a BPCR rifle I made in the style of J.P.Gemmer,a breech loader with muzzle loader styling.
Bob Roller

[Curt Lyles]

I think Ed rail uses 8620 steel for his barrels

[hudson]

A second on 8620.

[Bob Gerard]

I am clueless about steel strength. What is the significance of 8620 steel? Thanks.

[Dphariss]

Any barrel can be blown up.

Not with black powder. Even with a stuck ball. In fact 12L14 if one is foolish enough to believe the tensile strength numbers (which are irrelevant if the steel in subjected to internal pressure which it is not designed or intended for) has a tensile well over what BP can generate behind a projectile. Cold rolled steels REGARDLESS of alloy are intentionally made brittle to aid in the machining operations. Brittle materials are NOT suitable for gun barrels. Example: The Remington fiasco with 1144M. The resulting brittle fractures, the maimings that resulted and the lawsuits and the money paid out to everyone who owned one in the serial numbe ranges and of course to the maimed shooters.
So far as “any barrel can be blown up” thing. This is true unless we limit ourselves to blackpowder. Then it is false. Modern barrels steels, such as the 4150 that the military has used since the 1930s for small arms barrels will cheerfully operate at pressure levels that blackpowder simply cannot generate. Period. If we do some research we will find that the new US military 7mm combat rifle using the combat load runs at pressures that a brass cartridge case will not contain. So they make the case heads from stainless steel. Stuck ball? I could tell on a “modern” HP barrel that was shot with dirt in the barrel an, while very thin at the point of contact, about 3” back from the muzzle only  bulged barrel was 4150 hot rolled since it was on a 1940s US Army rifle. Modern designs made of 4140/4150 series steels are extremely hard to “blow up” with an over charge. You make lock the breech shut and vent gas through the over expended case but a blow up is unlikely. UNLESS greatly reduced loads of grey powder are used. This REALLY dangerous.
Blackpowder is limited to 100000 PSI in CLOSED “BOMB” tests. It simply will not go higher. This was proven by Nobel in testing well over 100 years ago. 4150 will contain this level unless extremely thin walled.
Cold rolled, free machining steels are dangerous as gun barrels even at low pressure they tolerate internal pressure poorly a and have very poor tolerance to shock. But all the ML barrel makers get an out with the handloader defense and the fact that is really hard to blow even a 12L14 barrel unless you get one made from a bar with bad spots in it. Either from the rolling operation or from the high percentages of lead, sulfur and other metals added to “lubricate the cut” so as the make the machining operation take 1/2-1/3 the time that would be needed if a hot rolled non-free machining alloy was used.
A good grade of iron is better BP barrel material than 12L14.
I have seen a 12L14 barrel in which one of the lands started to simply flake away. Thats a real confidence builder.

[Dphariss]

I am clueless about steel strength. What is the significance of 8620 steel? Thanks.

Its a steel designed to be case hardened, thus the 20 “points” of carbon. It also does well in casting parts if memory serves. It is related IIRC to the chromoly alloys.
The tensile strength of steel, can, depending on the alloy, how its made and what its made into can vary from its published number. Some like 12L14 and other cold rolled steels have published tensile strengths that are not valid if the steel is subjected to internal pressure or shock loading. Gun barrels do both.
Also the allowable number of flaws or inclusions in the steel can determine is suitability for gun barrels. Steels used for gun barrels, in my experience at least are gun barrel quality and are certified and the bar are stamped at the mill. Mill run still can be a mix of almost anything and there is no testing or certification of flaws/inclusions.
Basically a gun barrel should be ductile and tough. Not brittle as cold rilled steels are.