Help needed! Who can turn down barrels from octagon to octagon to round quick?

[tecum-tha]

I have a 7/8" .45 cal brand new CVA octagon barrel and a brand new15/16" .50 cal octagon barrel. Both are rifled and percussion.
Barrels are for some flintlock guns I want to build with two kids together for them. To make the rifles lighter and better balanced I need these turned down octagon to round, cut off and drilled/taped for a flint breech plug.
the ambitious goal is to get the guns shooting for the NMLRA spring national shoot.
Please contact me via PM about price and timeline.
Thanks
Roland

[Dennis Glazener]

I suspect your best bet would be to call Bpbby Hoyt and see if he will do it. His contact info is :
Bob Hoyt 717 642 6696
700 Fairfield Station Rd
Fairfiled, PA 17320

[Long John]

I asked Bob Hoyt to make a couple of utterly custom barrels for me from my drawings at the Lewisburg show and they arrived about a month later.  They are simply superb workmanship - exactly what I asked for down to beautifully fitted breech plugs.  He is a fine source for barrels and very easy to work with.

Best Regards,

John Cholin

[Hungry Horse]

Roland;

  I think you are going to run into problems when you try to replace the drums, with touch hole liners. The drums on CVA guns have large threaded sections, with metric threads, on anything but the very old CVA guns. This would give you few options other than cutting off the breech, and rethreading, both the breech, and the touch hole. You will rapidly get more work, and money tangled up in this project than its worth.
 As for the O/R barrel project, I did one with an old lathe a local farmer let me use in his barn, and a couple of good big files. The lathe is only needed to knock the corners off the front part of the barrel. The contouring is all done with a couple of files, held against the now round section, to give it a little swamp.  Finish up by using the big flat file as a backer for some good sand paper.

                  Hungry Horse

[tecum-tha]

@ Hungry Horse: I want the barrels to be cut off and a flint breech plug installed not replacing the drum. Did it before with a lousy Pedersoli barrel.
I would only want to have the hole drilled and threaded. I can fit it myself.
Pretty easy to do if you have a lathe to do the octagon to round profiling. But I don't have the lathe.
I may get me a wood turning lathe and try that with files. Drilling the hole for the plug and threading isn't too big a deal. Did it before with some "Make do-Engineering" setup: http://pedersolilancaster.rsengineering.de/#!album-0-18


 

[T*O*F]

I may get me a wood turning lathe and try that with files.

A Makita grinder will make short work of the edges of the flats, followed up by rotating the barrel into a belt sander.  Then finish with files.  Original barrels were often ground by hand on a grindstone.  You can spin the barrel on the table of the sander and come real close.

[Acer Saccharum]

I've had nothing but bad luck turning barrels down. Maybe it's the stress that was in the barrel, or stress induced by my turning.

[EC121]

Track of the Wolf has a service for that kind of work.  Might call them.  If you aren't too worried about correctness, Plan B might be to file them 16 sided.  Just file the corners off the flats.  Easy to do and saves a little weight.  I did that once on a small kid's rifle.

[tecum-tha]

All barrels are usually stress relieved. I don't think it will do anything to the barrel. There will still be 1/8" of steel around, because these are rifles and not smoothbores.
I am checking if I can rig up something with my drill mounted. I have a clamp for that. I just need to cut the barrel off and then need to find something that wedges in each end and then I can support and turn them. Short wedge anchors with 3/8" bolts should work (thinly cushion with tape to not scratch the bore).
Then chuck it into the drill and rotate and file. I hope the local places have the short sleeve anchors with the lip I am looking for. The Muzzle will be relieved anyways with Ed Hamberg's tool, so I am not too worried about the muzzle.

[Jackie Brown]

Greg Christian will turn the barrel for you.  Email me and I will give you his phone number.   jbrowngunmaker@yahoo.com

[Long Ears]

A drill lathe a file and a gun barrel. That is not a pretty picture....

[Daryl]

I once filed a round barrel, octagonal.  If I can do that, you can certainly file 1/2 of an octagonal barrel, round. did I mention, strong arms are a good thing to have - otherwise, hire someone to do it on a lathe.  Note that barrels that are not properly stress relieved, may split, warp or enlarge the bore if or when turned. Maybe that is what Acer was talking about as in bad luck.

[tecum-tha]

I was in contact with Mr. Christian about it earlier in the year and we exchanged e-mails about it. I e-mailed him back several times and never got an answer back.

I turned a steel ramrod an a drill lathe once and it was going fine. It took a while though, but here I can file off the edges of the octagon before turning anything, too.

We will see if the "Afghan Arms Company " solution is an option. If I can spin the barrel with minimum wobble, it should work.

[T*O*F]

Don't you have a vocational school or high school shop class near you?  They would probably do them for free as shop practice for their students.

[JTR]

Maybe I'm confused, but I thought the modern black powder barrel makers rifled the blanks, then shaped the outside?
Curiously, John

[tecum-tha]

These are octagon CVA percussion barrels I bought for a decent price. They were from kits but were never used before and are brand new.
Instead of investing $250 in 1 profiled rifled barrel I have about $70 in each of it. One is .45 and the other .50.
My friend's 10 year old grandson already shoots  his own .50 percussion rifle, but after shooting my .45 small flinter and my .65 jaeger, he doesn't want to shoot percussion really any longer. Especially because granddad now also has a double flint shotgun and one can see his fire for flint :-))
I bought one of Mike Lange's small flint guns and although the geometry is fine, this rifle also is muzzle heavy and has the more hawken style crescent buttplate.
The lock is also not very good. (For the price it is still a nice flint gun though)

So he has gotten the following from me for Christmas:
+A brand spanking new small siler flintlock with flints
+ a curly maple grade 4 plank which is more than 25 years old, but only about 1 5/8 wide and which should yield 2 small rifles.
My mentor won this plank 10 years ago in a chunk gun shoot and I never had the time to make something out of it.
He passed almost 3 years ago and I was thinking about doing something useful with it.
+ to choose either the .45 barrel which is slightly longer or the .50 barrel which is slightly shorter
+ a nice single trigger with plate, an early trigger guard and  1.5" wide early butt plate and all required bolts

Pre-requisite was, that we would build the gun together, so he learns how to do metal and woodwork.
The idea is to build somewhat of a sized down jaeger rifle with a slightly transitional geometry.
I don't like the octagon only barrels as they make the gun too muzzle heavy and this should be a handy and easily pointing gun.
So I did calculations and could probably reduce the weight up to 17% by going octagon to round while still being safe.

[tecum-tha]

Well, what I planned to do did not really work. Will now just swamp the barrels with a file. It will also make it a little more authentic for the style I am looking for.
It was interesting to see, when I cut off the barrel in front of the breech end how much shorter this breech area was on the CVA than it was on the Pedersoli I did a while back.
An indication why there are generally less problems with ignition reliability wit CVA compared to Pedersolis, when it comes to powder bridging etc.
But maybe Pedersoli adjusted their design a bit. Did anyone cut off a more resent Pedersoli barrel and measured the depth of the breech?

[Ezra]

I asked Bob Hoyt to make a couple of utterly custom barrels for me from my drawings at the Lewisburg show and they arrived about a month later.  They are simply superb workmanship - exactly what I asked for down to beautifully fitted breech plugs.  He is a fine source for barrels and very easy to work with.

Best Regards,

John Cholin

Yup, Bobby is good people.  Makes great barrels too.


Ez

[tecum-tha]

Swamping the barrel with a hand file is "fun". One for sure needs some elbow grease :-))
At the most slender spot I will go down to about 0.760" from 0.9375".
I hope to finish the first 4 flats tomorrow and do the remaining 4 in the next 4 days.
At least the lower arms get a work-out....