"Rick,
Have you any theories as to why barrels from India have such terrible bores?
We hardly ever see a decent one, though the outsides may look fine.
I can think of the odd and remote circumstance that could cause Some barrels to have bad bores, but why seemingly all of them is beyond explanation.
Cultural?
As in, it is old, no longer required so to heck with it?
I am sure the bores were very good originally.
Some guns surrendered in the mutiny may have been used ad not cleaned, but that would be only a handful of all the toradors we see, and only from the north of India."
That's a good question. You never see one with even a half-way decent bore. It's as if they were never cleaned after shooting. And if the bores were that bad, imagine what the narrow section and powder chamber would look like. Bobby Hoyt said I would never have been able to get a single "patched" ball down the bore without tearing the patch to pieces. But the locals probably used a bare ball (or maybe smaller shot) with wadding on top. Maybe, as you mentioned, the barrels were used until they couldn't be loaded any more, and discarded ? A Sultan could have maybe 100 workers making barrels every day ? LOL. I still don't know how they would go about cleaning the powder chamber. But yes, the bores on these original Torador barrels are awful.
By the way, do you know if your Omani barrel(s) have the same bore configuration as the Torador barrels ? Or are they straight cylinder bore ? Or.....is it possible they have a smaller than bore size powder chamber similar to some original hand gonnes ?
And, since the barrel tangs appear to be forged with the barrel, would you have a photo of the breech plug ? Thanks.
Rick
