Interesting barrel from auction - Italian made Dixie gun works

[Philip Chua]

When buying at online auctions you win some, you lose some. Picked this up this week. I think it was about $70 all told. Was much info - just that it was from Dixie. Appears to be Italian made. It’s 0.82 across the flats and bore is 0.435. Where the rear has some flat piece welded to it the barrel is clearly warped and you can see something inside the barrel at that level. Well…. That’s probably not great for the barrel as a whole but the rest of it doesn’t look
Too bad. Prob have it cut into a few pistol length barrels. Weird bore diameter. Anyway, was interesting enough to post. Figured the tinkerers were in this part of the forum might have other ideas of what I can do with this.

 

[smoothshooter]

When buying at online auctions you win some, you lose some. Picked this up this week. I think it was about $70 all told. Was much info - just that it was from Dixie. Appears to be Italian made. It’s 0.82 across the flats and bore is 0.435. Where the rear has some flat piece welded to it the barrel is clearly warped and you can see something inside the barrel at that level. Well…. That’s probably not great for the barrel as a whole but the rest of it doesn’t look
Too bad. Prob have it cut into a few pistol length barrels. Weird bore diameter. Anyway, was interesting enough to post. Figured the tinkerers were in this part of the forum might have other ideas of what I can do with this.
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Looks like scrap metal to me.
Does it even have a breech plug?
Is that a hole rusted almost all the way through?
From the picture it looks like two pieces of barrel welded together.
What was the seller’s description in the ad?
A lot of the Italian imports from the late 60’s thru the late 80’s in .44 caliber, until for whatever reason they standardized on .45.
This one is likely a .44.

 

[Billy-by-gosh]

I bought a pistol barrel from Dixie in the late '70s with the same .82 external dimensions and the bore of .435. Mine was a smoothie with a patent breech installed, but the internal bore had a slight flatness on one side. No other oddities or rust anywhere on mine, so we carefully measured it, and then remotely test-fired it with heavy loads. No damage or dimensional changes were noted. Installed into a stock blank, Patched round balls gave unimpressive accuracy. I think it's still in my parts pile somewhere...at one time I considered reaming it out to true the bore up, but never did that b/c it was cost prohibitive.

When buying at online auctions you win some, you lose some. Picked this up this week. I think it was about $70 all told. Was much info - just that it was from Dixie. Appears to be Italian made. It’s 0.82 across the flats and bore is 0.435. Where the rear has some flat piece welded to it the barrel is clearly warped and you can see something inside the barrel at that level. Well…. That’s probably not great for the barrel as a whole but the rest of it doesn’t look
Too bad. Prob have it cut into a few pistol length barrels. Weird bore diameter. Anyway, was interesting enough to post. Figured the tinkerers were in this part of the forum might have other ideas of what I can do with this.

 

[Philip Chua]

I think I’ll probably use the good parts for a pistol project and scrap the rest. It was threaded for a breech plug. Pretty interesting piece of nothing else. I’ve gotten ahead on a few auctions so it’s always just a matter of time until you lose a little. And really can prob can even get 2 pistol barrels out of this.

 

[poker]

Generally the twist rate would be all wrong for pistol length barrels, but hey its good practice if nothing else.