Thursday, January 16, 2003

Sorry to say that I've been painting and refurbishing a room in my house to use as an office and not out shooting or hunting. I did mount my Dave Van Horne 28 gauge barrel on my Contender. Hopefully I'll be able to get out and hunt before most seasons end this month. Best to have it ready to go, just in case!

An aside, this has got to be the largest case you can chamber a Contender barrel to. There just isn't much chamber wall left and the gun is extremely light. Dave did a fine job on it though and I've not experienced any problems with it yet.

In relation to my previous post regarding the various case dimensions of formed and commercial purpose built 7.65x53mm Mauser ammo I must note that there is currently an auction on eBay for a .30 Herrett barrel that was rechambered (supposedly by TC) to 7.62x39mm. Aside from the fact that this is a .308 bore and there are safety concerns in firing .311 milspec ammo through this on a Contender frame, these folks are advertising that it will now shoot BOTH .30 Herrett and 7.62x39mm ammo!!! What they are REALLY doing is forming 7.62x39mm Rimmed cases from the .30 Herrett brass. As pointed out by somebody on the TC List, there is .025" difference in the 2 case heads (the Herrett being the smaller). This is quite a bit (as I noted in the previous post) and I don't expect that they have particularly long case life even though they are only neck sizing (and supposedly in the 7.62x39 die). One has to wonder, "Why?" In my mind this is one of those barrels that should be welded up and tossed in the scrap steel pile but undoubtedly somebody will get some use out of it. Won't be me!

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