10 Bore DR, let the madness begin...

[Idaho Sharpshooter]

I am building a 10 bore Paradox rifle this fourth quarter. An original 3 1/2" magnum goose gun from Tradewinds, Inc. out of Zabala in Spain. We cut the barrels from 32" back to about 241/4".
I read up on them quite a bit, and got some information on the heat treat. As a BPE it will safely digest any load of black I can fit in the case.
FYI, the british built a lot of SxS 10 and 12 gauge shotguns with the last three inches or so of the barrel rifled. They worked well enough for India, even against Tigers and Gaur, etc.

The modern day equivalent is this shotgun with three inch long rifled choke tubes.
I have a barrel ordered from Oregon Rifleworks. My guy is going to part two 3 1/2" stubs off the blank and then thread the barrels and the barrel stubs. We will thread the barrel stubs 2 3/4" and leave roughly a quarter inch hanging out. Knurl that and make a few reference marks on them and the rib. We can carefully develop a good load for one barrel, then work it on the second to get them to each group under 3" at 50 yards. Then the fun begins. Turning the stubs in and out to get a decent regulation at that range. Once we can accomplish that, we mark the tubes, remove them, and coat lightly with the four hour the Loc-Tite blue stuff.
Back to the range and work back slowly. Once we regain POI, let it set overnight.

Part of the fun is learning how to make a rear quarter-rib and front ramp set of sights.

I started looking for a mould. Not too many makers offer 10 gauge bullet moulds. Fortunately, NEI does. Last Monday I called them to ask and talked with Patrick. He says, send me $162 for a single cavity in meehanite blocks. Done that afternoon. He actually went out to the shop and cut it for me first thing Tuesday morning. It went in the Priority Mail box that afternoon and it arrived this past Friday. It's a 790-960gr RFN. This thing make boolits that look like the old army 45LC 250grainer on steroids. Out of 94-3-3 alloy they mike .796", weigh 974gr, and are not quite half a thousandth out of round. Half of the cast mike round, half about that .0005" out.

I owe all of this to my older brother EdK who first introduced me to casting long about 1965.

Rich
DRSS

[longbow]

I have been thinking along the same lines but have not had the time or money to make it happen.

I would even be happy with a single barrel Paradox.

I was planning on making a rifling bench to make a deep rifled slow twist tube then installing like a Cutts Compensator.

I will be very interested to see what you do and how it turns out.

Please keep us posted, there are a lot of people interested in the same idea.

Longbow

[elk hunter]

Rich,

Sounds like fun. I've been contemplating a ten or twelve bore double, but was thinking more along the line of full rifle instead of paradox.

Get that little thing finished and bring it to our next big bore/double rifle shoot in Central Oregon. It will be in good company, this year one of the guys shot an original 12 bore paradox. The shame is, I didn't get to see or shoot it, but I sure heard about it, I was too busy taking people around the course.

[StrawHat]

Ross Seyfried wrote an article on how he got a H&H Paradox up and running again. If I can find it I'll post the info.

As I recall he said the rifling was applied in the choke and restricted the bore by .03". Twist was something like 1/30" Sounds like a lot of freebore!

[NoZombies]

Back in the last half of the 19th century there were a number of target rifles designed to fire the .22 BB cap. Because of the relatively low power, they found that firing them through full length rifle barrels reduced velocity considerably, and many of them were built with only about 4" of the bore rifled, and the rest as "freebore" Sometimes the rifled section was near the breach, but more often than not, the rifled section was the last 4" or so of the barrel. The best version had gain twist rifling and a small choke.

I've shot several examples, and when the bore is still in good shape, they can be surprisingly accurate at 10-25 meters. I've shot them over a chronograph, and from a 24" barrel they had almost 50% more velocity than firing them in a fully rifled barrel of the same length.

Obviously the design shares almost nothing with the paradox rifle, excepting the short rifled section of barrel and smooth bore lead up. With a Paradox gun, having the bore and projectile closely fitted is really important to maintain velocity. With the older BB cap rifles, there was no pressure building in the bore behind the projectile, so gas blow by was a moot point.

In modern competition using .22 rifles for snap shooting, there was a trend to only have the first 8-10" of the barrel rifled, followed by a large overbore for the remainder of the length, the purpose was to reduce the bullets time in the barrel being affected by the shooters movement.

I'm posting this more for historical reference and information for the people who will find this thread, rather than for the benefit of the original poster, who clearly already know what he's doing, and needs no advice from me!

It sounds like a neat project, and I look forward to seeing photos of the gun and targets when you get it up and running!

[StrawHat]

The article I mentioned is found in the Feruary 2004 issue of HANDLOADER magazine. Volume 39, No 1