Found this at a long-ago gunshow; early '80's IIRC. It's on the Hopkins & Allen "Medium" rifle frame; the Davenport patent H&A got when they bought out the Bay State Arms Co. I see a fair number of the 922/932 H&A falling-block boy's rifles, and an occasional specimen of the rather ungainly large-frame shotgun, but the medium frame is quite uncommon, in my experience.
Attachment 270959
When I got it, there were few .38-55 empty cases available, so I made some of my own by blowing out .30-30 and .32 Spl. cases with Unique and Cream of Wheat. The headspace was excessive in the gun, in that the rim seat was cut too deep. It may have been chambered for the early folded-head reloadable shells. The thinner rims on modern solid-heads seated too deep for the firing pin to hit, unless the gun was pointed straight up. I had gotten my 6" Atlas lathe by then, and it was easy to depth-mike a shell in the chamber, select a piece of shim stock of the same thickness as the depth, solder it to the end of a piece of round stock, cut out the center to the width of the chamber and cut the outside to the width of the rim seat. The resulting "washer" was melted off the stock and the rim seat fluxed. The washer was pressed in and the necessary heat applied. After cooling and cleaning, the extractor cut was filed through the soldered-in washer. The modern shells chambered and fired just fine ever afterward.
Another early triumph on the lathe was the manufacture of a crimping button that I could drop into the chamber of a Winchester 1880 reloading tool. A squeeze on the handles crimped the end of the shell over the overshot wad that I punched out with a 3/8" Arch punch. Door sealing felt strip was dipped in molten wax and punched out with the same punch to make the overpowder/undershot wad. I could then perform all the operations except full-length sizing on the tong tool.
Attachment 270960
I am embarrassed to say that back in my salad days I did not often include load data in the boxes of shells I made up. I thought I had it in my loading notebooks but so far cannot find it. However, in my searches for things I know I have around here somewhere, I did come across three boxes of shells loaded long ago, and it occurred to me that I had never checked them out for patterns. The lack of open restaurants I presently endure keeps me well supplied with frozen pizza boxes and I had saved a few of the cardboard discs that go under the pizzas. I took four of these out and patterned the gun on them at 5, 10, 15 and 20 yards with the following results:
Attachment 270961
The game in the 1880's must have come scampering and fluttering up to you and landing on your shoulders, like a Disney movie, for this little gun to be very effective. I would guess 12 yards is about as far away as a shot should be tried at a small game animal or bird. However, for garden pests that you just want gone, I found that I could riddle an aluminum can fairly well at 25-30 yards, and remember standing on the roof of the Club trap house and getting a chip off almost every straightaway clay bird that came out under me, if I could get on it immediately.
C. Sharps Arms makes a rather costly but nice replica of the 922 rifle now. It's better made, no doubt, than the originals. I wonder what a modern replica of the medium-frame one, with a screwed-in barrel and made of better alloy than the malleable-iron originals, could take as far as a modern smokeless cartridge. The mechanism is more or less like the Remington-Hepburn, and cartridge pressures for that are limited only to the extent that the rebounding hammer will allow primers to flow into the firing pin channel and tie up the gun.
Anyway, it's kind of a cute little thing, evocative of a less-urbanized, more leisurely time. The large holes in the patterning discs are the wax wads, which may be more lethal than the shot charge. I once fired six shots out of a friend's .410 gauge Taurus Judge at an aluminum can at 15 yards, and found only one pellet hole in the can, even though the dust raised all around the can was quite impressive. So maybe this little gun isn't all that ineffective, after all.
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