did you know antique guns did not have a standard calaber system?

[cjcgunnutt]

on the web i saw that the old mountain guns had now real standard for calabers. how ever 4 kinds of rifles where made. one of around .35 cal was a squirrel gun. about .40 cal was a turkey gun. one of around 45 cal was a deer gun and 50 was for bear. is this true?

 

[MeatStick]

That's what I have heard my whole life and have always believed, you get a gun and a mold for it back in the day.

 

[nchawkeye]

Commonality of parts didn't come around until Eli Whitney (yea the cotton gin guy) came out with it in the 1800s...He went to the War Dept with a box of gun parts and started taking them out of the box and putting guns together...

Before then, each gunsmith made each part by hand so yes, the caliber varied from gun to gun...That's also why lead was sold in bars so they could melt it down and make their own balls for their guns...

The number of balls it took to make a pound is how they discribed what we now call caliber...This is where the term gauge comes from...Thus a 12 gauge shotgun comes because 12 lead balls the size of it's bore weigh a pound...

 

[Loyalist Dave]

Yep, Joseph Doddridge did his memoirs after 1800, but he described the rifles of his youth as having bores of so many balls to the pound as a minimum, which showed the measure was still in use as late as the 1820's and what folks in his area considered a minimum, but he never specifies a caliber. (iirc) His minimum comes out to around the weight one gets with a rifle close to .50 caliber.

LD

 

[Rifleman1776]

Yes, that is pretty common knowledge.
Even today standarization only comes kinda close to stated sizes. That is why we have a variety of ball/patch combos to try with new rifles.

 

[Stumpkiller]

Most folks had one rifle, so a .45 or .50 was a squirrel, deer, turkey and bear gun. Same as a .54 is for me currently. If there were no bear or moose in your neck of the woods a .45 might suffice for everything very nicely.

 

[aeatwood]

And not only that, but they didn't STAY the same caliber as they were made. If you were hunting away from home, cleaning wasn't always what it should be. Barrels were "freshed out" every few years, usually just enough to clean up the old rifling and any pitting.

Danial Boone's rifle as preserved is about .44, but the good Lord only knows what it started as, or how many times it had been re-bored, re-barreled, or re-lined.

 

[nchawkeye]

And only the good Lord knows how many rifles Daniel had as the Indians were always taking them away from him...

 

[hanshi]

Yep, we are slick! :rotf:

 

[jsn]

And of those rifles I wonder how many he had built himself?

 

[Dphar]

Yep, Joseph Doddridge did his memoirs after 1800, but he described the rifles of his youth as having bores of so many balls to the pound as a minimum, which showed the measure was still in use as late as the 1820's and what folks in his area considered a minimum, but he never specifies a caliber. (iirc) His minimum comes out to around the weight one gets with a rifle close to .50 caliber.

LD

The first Sharps breech loaders were listed in gauges not in decimal inches.
MLs were listed in balls per pound for quite some time after this.
When elongated bullets became common in breech loaders these were then described in decimal inches. Other wise a 44 Henry would have been the same "gauge" as a 54 rb rifle. Something it certainly was not...

Dan

 

[Stumpkiller]

'S true. A mold marked "30" is likely for a .54 caliber rifle.

Number of lead balls to the pound was how they measured them - we call it gauge.

12 gauge = each ball is 1/12th of a pound

16 gauge = 16 to the pound (or a one oz. ball)

20 gauge = 20 balls of 0.615" dia to the pound

50 gauge is .45 cal

75 gauge is .40 cal

100 gauge is .36 cal

.50 cal is actually the odd one. That's a 38 gauge

So, it seems common firearm bores were based on weight of shot more than game pursued.

 

[Dphar]

Commonality of parts didn't come around until Eli Whitney (yea the cotton gin guy) came out with it in the 1800s...He went to the War Dept with a box of gun parts and started taking them out of the box and putting guns together...

Before then, each gunsmith made each part by hand so yes, the caliber varied from gun to gun...That's also why lead was sold in bars so they could melt it down and make their own balls for their guns...

The number of balls it took to make a pound is how they discribed what we now call caliber...This is where the term gauge comes from...Thus a 12 gauge shotgun comes because 12 lead balls the size of it's bore weigh a pound...

Eli Whitney did not perfect the interchange of parts. He had the idea but not the way to really implement it.
Until Kendall, Robbins and Lawrence developed what were the modern milling machine and lathe there was no real way to make interchangable parts on a significant scale. The machinery allowed tooling to be made to make interchangeable parts for mass production.
Using the new technology production of 20000 guns year from one shop, all with interchangeable parts was possible by the early 1840s.
But Kendall, Robbins and Lawrence are hardly mentioned in the context of interchangeable parts. But they made the concept work. They set the stage for Colt, Sharps and the others. http://vintagemachinery.org/mfgindex/detail.aspx?id=2509

Dan

 

[Rifleman1776]

I have a made ca. 1800-1820 Belgium damascus forged smooth barrel that is 17 1/2 gauge.
'splain me that one. :grin:

 

[Stumpkiller]

There is no explaining the Belgians. (Coming from one who's Mother's folks were "Freaky-Deakey Dutch"). :haha:

 

[Coot]

I have a made ca. 1800-1820 Belgium damascus forged smooth barrel that is 17 1/2 gauge.
'splain me that one. :grin:

As a guess - possibly because the French and English pounds were not the same weight - the French being a bit heavier. The Belgians may have used the old French measure when they made the gun but if sold on the English market - the user would be looking to measure in English units. :idunno:

 

[mmahlock]

Something to bare in mind with discussing the size of period guns is that the size of the bore was not the determining factor of the gun's size. Guns were built to use specific sizes of balls based on the number of balls per pound. The barrel was made to accommodate a particular size ball not generally the other way around at least not until very late the patched round ball period. As a result toward the end of the patched round ball period 1/2 sizes began to show up when tighter fits of ball to barrel were desired resulting in a barrel that normally would use X balls per pound was provided with a mold for X-1/2 balls per pound.

Terminology also changed over time. In France, the number of balls per pound was referred to as "Caliber" e.g. 22 Caliber = 22 balls per pound or .607 in. This compares to 22 English balls per pound of .595 in. In England a comparable size would have been 21 balls per pound or .603 or possibly a later size of 21 1/2 or about .610. However it is important to remember that all of this discussion is Ball Size. The diameter of the barrel bore that used these balls would have been bored by the maker based on his belief in the amount of windage (oversize to accommodate patching or undersize to provide an interference fit if the gun was to be shot without patching) that produced the highest level of accuracy and this varied depending on the maker.

Our tendency today is to measure a gun bore and based on that diameter define its size based on the modern definition of caliber i.e. diameter. Seldom is consideration given to sizing guns based on the ball size they shoot especially since we bore barrels to accepted diameters which for the most part have no historical basis such as .50 cal. A gun with a .50 cal barrel was designed to shoot either 38 or 39 balls/pound (.493 or .489 in.) or possibly 37 or 36 balls/pound (.498 or .505 in.) if no patching was to be used. Balls of .490 or 495 in. were never made historically since would have required dividing a pound of lead into some partial number of balls/pound greater than 38 or 36.

 

[Rifleman1776]

I have a made ca. 1800-1820 Belgium damascus forged smooth barrel that is 17 1/2 gauge.
'splain me that one. :grin:

As a guess - possibly because the French and English pounds were not the same weight - the French being a bit heavier. The Belgians may have used the old French measure when they made the gun but if sold on the English market - the user would be looking to measure in English units. :idunno:

My theory is that first, the mandrel around which the barrel was forged and pounded had to be made. Whoever made it ended up with that arbitrary size. Precise machining tools were not available. His mandrel raw material was, very likely, whatever he had on hand. I do wish we could step back in time and watch and question why these historical mysteries came down to us. It is fun to speculate. And, as I said, my theory is that the answers are not always clear cut. They just happened that way.

 

[George]

My theory is that first, the mandrel around which the barrel was forged and pounded had to be made. Whoever made it ended up with that arbitrary size. Precise machining tools were not available. His mandrel raw material was, very likely, whatever he had on hand.

I think you'll find that the mandrel used was considerably smaller than the eventual size of the bore. They didn't just hammer the barrel around a mandrel and call it quits. The boring operation took place after the forging, and that is what determined the final caliber.

Anyone interested can read a very good description of all this from an 18th-century point of view by reading the first two chapters at this link.
http://books.google.com/books?id=Q...wfhzbzPBg&ved=0CCkQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q&f=false

Pistols were usually sold in pairs, so having them both of exactly the same caliber was important. An indication of the precision with which they managed that can be seen in this statement.

"Pistol barrels are forged in one piece, and are cut asunder at the muzzles after they have been bored; by which there is not only a saving of iron and of labour; but a certainty of the caliber being perfectly the same in both."

They did that because the chances of their coming out exactly the same if made individually was not high, apparently.

Spence

 

[Stumpkiller]

Could also be the bore was damaged or pitted and it was lapped out a hair.