Gotta love those narrow lands and wide groves!
J.B.
I wonder if Bill Large was a pioneer of that design or if others were doing it at that time. GRRW barrels were very similar in rifling design and I’d be surprised if Bill Large’s barrels were not a major influence.
Bill Large did not start with wide groove,narrow land barrels until the early 1960's.I had a semi military Whitworth* with an
Alex Henry 7 groove barrel that would easily shoot tight groups at 100 yards and beyond if I did my part and Bill took an interest in that system and after shooting againstit wanted to see what it was. We unbreeched that barrel and he studied it for a long time and we pushed an oversize bullet thru it and that really showed us what was going on.He made tooling and used it in his 8 groove barrels and after a while he started getting reports of fine accuracy with patched round balls from a lot of people who shot in competition.That system also made loading a patched ball easier.I also tried to convince him to copy the 12 groove harrels of N.G.Whitmore whose rifles were declared as unfair competiion according to Major Ned Roberts.Whitmore's test of the presentaion rifle he made for General Grant said that using only the tang sight and the pin head front sight that every shot (10)
hit a target rhe size of a percussuon cap round tin at 110 yards/This was with a picket bullet that MUST be carefully loaded thru
a false muzzle.Bill had a Whitmore barrel that the rifling could still be seen but never got interested in that idea.
Bill did contribute a lot to the accuracy of the round ball rifle and I am glad to have had an involvement with him for 35 years.
Bob Roller
*
A semi military match rifle was a high class target rifle with a long forearm and barrel bands like a common musket/
The sights,locks and barrels were all target grade and so was the overall workmanship.
