barrel stub 444 martini

[justashooter]

i have access to a martini (prolly Khyber) that is in 24 gauge smoothbore, and was thinking about barrel stubbing it with a 444s marlin barrel for pyrodex or trip 7 reloads. your thoughts about soldering a stub in this case?

[Ballistics in Scotland]

Well first, a Khyber Martini could mean anything. Some were made for a native clientele who intended them for interpersonal relations, and took a terrifyingly robust view of product liability. Others are tourist trade junk, and a few are unsafe to fire with just about anything. It needs checking out by someone who knows Martinis.

I would be more inclined to sleeve the barrel all the way to the muzzle, and the liners from TJ's are worth checking out. If you do use a shorter stub, and are relying on soft solder, it needs to be long - I would say to a position where the join can be hidden with a barrel band front sling swivel or an open sight. Most of the sizes of liner you might want are 5/8in. diameter, but if you fancy one of the 9/16in. ones, check the bore diameter. A true 24ga should leave about .017in. clearance, which is too much, but this rifle might be tighter than that. Silver soldering can be much shorter, but it needs to be really good silver soldering, filling all of the joint, and I still would prefer it to extend forward of the nock's form on the old barrel.

[justashooter]

to clarify, the barrel intended is a marlin 444s barrel, old stock, as available from numrich, rather than a liner. I see brownells sells a "44 force" 475* solder (20ksi), but I was intending to use a cadmium fluxed 1150* silver solder with 40ksi strength.

I had thought about shortening the breach of barrel by about .125" so that a factory 444 cartridge could not be chambered, and using shortened brass to match the short chamber, reloaded with BP or comparable to keep pressures below 20 ksi. trouble is, the 444 case is tapered by 15 thou over 1.8", so that would be about 1 thou over .125" travel. most chamber specs call for chamber diameter 1-2 thou larger in diameter at any point than sammi specs the standard case diameter. it would be close, but a definite safety advantage.

the gun is in very nice condx, with typical Khyber markings that don't quite clone true brit marks. metal work is nice for a Khyber, not soft.

[Ballistics in Scotland]

They may ask for that, usually in the form of maximum cartridge and minimum chamber, but it doesn't mean they always get it. It is very unlikely that there will be as little as 001in. clearance between a production Marlin barrel and a loaded cartridge, and if there was, you could easily polish the chamber that much larger with abrasive paper on a wooden dowel. Anyway, it wouldn't take that much shortening to prevent the use of a full length .444 round.