Recently came into one of these old originals at an auction down in Italy. Auction house stating that the gun had been modified as far as its chamber, which was total and utter BS as it turned out - to my great joy.
In hindsight i have to give it to ol´ Ebenezer. He did something right this time out. A 55cal gun it is tho, so read on.
Before i got to use the gun i asked on a few forums what the rear sight setting were, to no avail. Now, having blasted away with the thing, it´s obvious that we´re talking 100/300/500yds
A falling block design i thought to myself that it´d be along the lines of my Sharps rifle. Not so. The Starr uses two interlocking blocks and the one, forward, of them sports a...
...lid for the chamber. The slightly peculiar part was that the gun was in as nice condition n nick it is while the mechanics were REAL worn. At that in turn the rifling was way above par!?
Peculiar. No matter though, owning heavy machinery i set forth to take out all that freeplay out of the construction and presto...
... we were back in business. The actual sealing surface though.. I know from my other paper cartridge guns, which the Starr certainly is too, that you´re on the money when you close the action, pull the hammer back and put a finger over the flash hole and blow to kingdom come down the muzzle aaaaand... no air escapes.
So.
How handle that?
What i did was turn a sorts of brass "shim" and hand lap that to correct thickness. Then install it with a rather specific industrial two comp glue. Of course the residue was taken off..
Installed that and closed the action and just let it sit for two days. When i opened it back up.. yes Sir. As tight as you could ever ask.
Now. This back story brings us to what castboolits is all about.
See. Back in the day there were reports that the Starr carbines were no good, wouldn´t fire, wouldn´t keep its own as far as accuracy and so on. This, it turns out, due someone deciding that Sharps cartridges could be used for the Starr too, which is about as false as anything comes.
The Sharps bullet first up is of lesser diameter and the actual cartridge in turn to short to give reliable ignition in a Starr.
Thanxs to a gent on YT that has put a vid up on his Starr i got the dimensions for a contemporary bore-rider, and we all know that i´m partial to bore-riders for paper cartridge guns right.
These were basically the numbers, converted to millimeters - as we drew the thing in Solidworks. That however got me thinking and indeed as it turned out the bore rider diameter needed to be upped. To 13,75mm more specifically.
Said and done..
She sure turned out on the hefty side though, but all good - being well aware since other experiments on the matter.
Two aluminium matrix´s were turned to be able to make hulls. One to roll the actual cylinder and then one to install the bottom of the cartridge.
Yeah! N then some!
..then at the range. The thing ran like a damn locomotive. It just wouldn´t stop. Only thing i had to attend to was drift the front sight a tad to the right to be dead on target.