I guess the title says it all. I have picked up an old ball and shot gun called the Ubique. It is not rifled but is built for shooting shot and full 12 gauge size round balls round balls. I am gathering the material to shoot the gun but don't want to damage it in any way.
Shooting a solid ball won't really stress the barrel any more than a similar load of shot, as long as the ball fits through the barrel (and any choke.) That's easy enough to determine, but the real question is what kind of load the gun was originally designed to shoot. If it's really old, then you need to be thinking about black powder. Modern guns are almost impossible to destroy without a barrel obstruction (notice I said almost!), but this is not necessarily true for older guns made of older steel (think of the Titanic here), especially if you load an old black powder gun with modern smokeless powder.
I split an H&R .410 firing round balls in it, the gun recoilled forwards and the muzzle split open like the hood of a cobra when the ball wouldn't go through the choke. I cut off the muzzle behind split and recrowned it and I now have a .427 cylinder bore .44/.410 snake gun.
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I suggest SOFT lead. I cast some 58 cal roundballs from hardball and from nearly pure lead. "snug" fit in a wad (you could turn it upside down gently, but shake and the ball falls out) and into my 20ga handi slug gun.
The soft came out and left the wads ok, but the hard cast left wads with missing petals. Maybe that's OK, but I got a little paranoid and decided to stick with soft lead for all shotgun work.
If the gun is made for shooting round balls it probably has a rear sight? Just remember not to use any form of over-disc if using roll crimp.
Cap'n Morgan
How did a .410 shotgun come to have a .427 bore?
That's what it measures when H&R built it about 1910, marked ".44/12mm/.410"-2-1/2"Originally Posted by BAGTIC
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Which gets back to what I was saying about the Titanic---metallurgy wasn't the same in 1910 as it's been since WWII. But I think it's pretty awesome that after blowing the gun up, you cut the barrel down and kept shooting it!
Oh yeah! But the barrel I use MOST for it is a .44-40 which I had John Taylor fit up and chamber for it!
MUCH better than shooting shooting .433 Speer round balls through the .410 barrel!
Attachment 151480 Attachment 151481Attachment 151482Attachment 151483
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Nice! Is that a companion piece for a .44-40 revolver? Peep sights are nice, too.
A smart acker and a few brews later ruined a Winchester Model 59 shot barrel by putting the barrel in a stream to shoot carp! The Model 59 had a nylon string wrapped barrel to make it light weight. I heard the barrel looked like a fishing reel with a bad cast happening. The guy just got a stunned look on his face from this stupid stunt. What his Dad said about this is unprintable.Robert
Of course! SEVERAL of them....Attachment 151527
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Out post 75 thanks for the reply. This is an old Ubique made by Tolley. It has rear sight and the advertizement/brochure of the time says it is made to shoot a full size 12 gauge ball. Using plug gauges the barrel tapers quickly to .723 +/_ .001 at the breech and then drops to .720 at the muzzle.
The problem is that only RB mold I can get my hands on cast a .732-.734 ball. I have tapped one of the dead soft balls thru the bores and it doesn't take much force to get it through. I would not worry about a .729 ball but I am alittle worried about going from .734 to ..720 or 14 thousands swage???.
Does any one know where I can get a .729 mold from. I tried Jeff TAnner in England. He uses pay pay and I tried to set that up but I couldn't get the payment to go through..
well good news . got my order to Jeff to go through should have a mold in 7 to 10 days. I hope hope I can get the old girl up and running by Dec. I would really like to try to shoot a deer with it.
Tolley made more than one kind of Ubique gun. The smoothbore version had a recess choke, with the muzzle little or no narrower than most of the bore, and did indeed give pretty good results with round ball or shot alike. Tolley claimed that it would give the performance of a shotgun and of a rifle, and it probably came very close, as long as you are talking ranges of up to forty yards or so. But in Indian jungles you could do a lot of shooting without exceeding that. The books of Jim Corbett, the hunter of maneaters, are fascinating, and very often describe shots and cine film taken from much closer. They also claimed that the 8ga Ubique was about three pounds lighter than most double rifles in that caliber and yet hit with more power. True with a "but" again, I should think. It could achieve greater velocity, without the resistance of rifling and with less risk of leading or stripping. But the recoil would be extremely severe with such loads.
They were designed to give a tight fit for the ball, but I am sure that didn't mean tight enough to swage a belt around it. I wouldn't derive any security from the ball being soft. Water is soft enough to stick your finger into, but behaves quite differently if you hit it at high speed. Shotgun barrels, unless impaired in some way or built more flimsily than Tolley (renowned for their heavy waterfowl guns) were likely to do, seldom burst from overpressure or from the impact of lead and choke. It is due to the buildup of a pressure wave, catching up with a bullet which is slowed in its course, and that can happen with the softest lead or a charge of small shot.
But Tolley also built a different kind of Ubique gun, following the practice of others by rifling a rather long choke at the muzzle. This is the principle others termed the Paradox gun, and dates it to after Col. Fosbery's invention of 1886. I have heard it said that this choke was difficult to see, which means it could be extremely shallow or extremely rounded rifling. That wouldn't be a recessed choke, which would defeat the intention. They were proved as rifles. They were often said to give as good a shot pattern as a smoothbore, which I would guess to mean regular but a little wide, due to centrifugal force.
To add another complication, rifled-choke guns have lived through many decades during which big game was being shot less than formerly, and rifles required to be licensed and registered, but shotguns didn't. So it is possible that the rifling may have been removed. If a smoothbore were cylinder bored or close to it without a recess, I would suspect this.
In the circles these guns moved in, the name would have been recognized as the motto of the Royal Artillery, which doesn't carry regimental colours, on which other regiments wrote the names of battles awarded as battle honours. So King William IV awarded them the single battle honour "Ubique", which is Latin for "Everywhere".
Ballistic's in Scotland thank you very much for the very informative reply. I also have an older 10 gauge under lever hammered gun that by proof marks was originally a rifled choke gun. It is now smooth bored. I suppose that it may have been reamed to smooth bore because of stupid laws. If so that is sad. If I remember correctly it was reproofed later in it's life. Of course all this is supposition. A person who is an expert in the field of ball and shot guns said it may have been sent back to tolley for the change because the recoil with the full bulleted load was extreme.
All in all thanks for all the replies. I have been given advice that the correct ball diameter is .735 but I am going to start with a .729 ball just to be safe.
That would be sad, all right, but it is just as likely to have been done because someone wanted an ordinary shotgun. They were really colonial guns, excellent for lion, but of little use in the UK. Our red deer has sometimes been considered the same species as the American elk, and could no doubt form fertile hybrids. The few which remain in woodland areas are nearly as big. But most shooting takes place in barren mountains which were denuded of forests in the Middle Ages. It is an expensive and exclusive sport, where an intruder can ruin someone's day-long stalk a mile away, shots were long by Express rifle standards, and the deer aren't really 10ga size.
While these guns generally delivered a pretty fair pattern, it is unlikely to have been the best for most purposes. The rifling was designed to minimize deformation of the pellets on the outside of the charge, and therefore "flyers" outside the main pattern. (Shot cup wads or sleeves were almost unknown in those days.) But this probably did happen to some extent, and there was very likely a tendency to deposit lead in the rifled area. There is a big difference between getting a trace of leading from one shot at your lion, or a hundred traces shooting driven pheasants, and the lighter Paradoxes were otherwise very acceptable for the latter.
The pattern would also be widened by centrifugal force. Indeed the French have made, and I think still do, shallow rifled shotguns for this purpose, to be used for rabbits in dense cover, where ranges are always very short. One myth is that shooting shot with a rifled bore produces a "doughnut" pattern, with a hole in the middle. On the rare occasions when this happens, it is due to shot deformity deep into the charge. For the pellets in the centre aren't spinning at all, and as you move outwards they are spinning in a spiral of differing radius.
interesting thing about the 12 gauge ubique I have is that it has a plaque on the but stock that it was a gift toPRESENTED TOOn his transfer to a parish in India. The old girl may just have a tale or two to tell.. I won't be shooting a tiger but I would like to harvest a few quail , doves and a deer for the pot with her.
THE
Rev d C. PRICE M.A.
BY THE
Parishioners of Mcesler ( best I can read it)
Feb 28th 1897
Not that there is anything wrong with your choice of 0.729" ball but I have shot many 0.735" balls cast from range scrap (basically wheelweights or maybe slightly softer) with no problems.
Like you, I was wondering about safety when a 0.735"/0.736" round ball hit the 0.729" bore after the forcing cone and like you I also did a "tap through" using a wooden dowel and hard cast lead Ball. It went through so easily I ceased worrying and loaded up.
The load I used as my basis for the load was a pressure tested load published by Precision Rifle for their full bore PileDriver slug that weighed 610 grs. My logic is that the ball weighs 575 grs. so is lighter and even though over bore diameter, the amount of metal to swage on the equator is very small where engraving a full bore slug with long bearing surface requires much more metal to be moved.
In any case, the load worked well and I got very good accuracy from my smooth bore (cylinder bore of course) with no signs of pressure.
Recovered balls show a narrow "belt" around the equator and those shot from rifled gun showed clean sharp engraving. A success all around.
If you like shooting big 'ol round balls as much as I do you will be having some fun I am sure.
Longbow
Thanks Longbow. I think I will try a .729 ball first since the barrel ends up at .720 and that will get me a 9 thou swage. If I don't get the accuracy I am looking for I will go to the .735 ball.
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