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Brennon;

Mark gives you very good advise about P&V as well as the English suppliers to the gun trade.

I wish that I had the depth of knowledge that Mark has about actioning and building guns, wishing that I had met a renown gunmakers like him earlier in my life.

I am an amateur gun maker having worked in the engineering and construction trades, and now an old man of 77 years of age. Through the last 60 years in my interest in gunmaking I have learned many methods from people in the gun trade here and in UK.

I have recently "thrown in the towel" and sold my shop tools and equipment for building guns and rifles--vertical and horizontal milling machines, lathe capable of turning 30 inch long barrels, hand made gun tools, indexers and so forth. These are the tools that are required to make from scratch (ie 4140 round bar stock) double rifle or shotgun action and to turn rifle blanks to the appropriate size.

3 years back I decided that I would build a set of barrels for a double rifle and use the shoe lump method that is used by such gunmakers at Verney-Carron and Heym. My friend Jack Rowe (famed gunsmith and gunmaker)formerly of Birmingham, England was of the opinion that shoe lump barrels are stronger than chopper lump barrels, however I see no evidence that shoe lump are stronger--it is just counter intuitive to me.

However, I decided to build a set of shoe lump barrels here in the wilds of South Carolina. I thought that maybe someone here in the USA had built a set before; but I could not find anyone that had and I set out alone without any knowledge of how they were built. I happened upon a video of the shop of Verney-Carron and viewed how they brazed the shoe lump to the barrels, which was the only help I found in my 6 months of effort to machine a shoe lump and braze two barrels to this shoe lump and in the end have the center of the set of barrels at the breech end aligned with the center of the two firing pins of the action, when the barrels were closed and locked in place with the locking bolt of the action. In planning how the I could make certain that when the barrels were fitted to the action hinge pin, draw and action standing breech face and at the same time in direct center with the firing pins (strikers); I decided upon a method that called for a recess to be milled into the bottom of the breech end (area that fits down to the action water table) of the barrels.

I had to make numerous barrel shoe lump platforms before I was satisfied with the results.

I am writing all of this to you so that you will understand that there is method to build your own double rifle barrel set if you have the requisite machines and equipment, welding and brazing skills and gunmaking knowledge. You will need as a minimum a vertical mill built on the Bridgeport design with a long table and a metal lathe that will at least 1 3/8" hole through the head stock capable of turning barstock 30 inches long between centers--not that the barrels will be that long, but that you have room on the lathe bed to mount various tooling that will help you. Best of all is to also have a heavy (couple of tons in weight) horizontal mill that will be used to mill the simi-circle shapes into the length of the shoe lump. This task can be done with a vetical mill as I did it using a 1 inch ball nose milling cutter.

By now there may be someone else here in the USA that could help you whose has built a set of shoe lump barrels as I seem to recall that maybe Butch Searcy was stating that he could build a set. I do not know if he was going to build the shoe lump himself or if he was going to source the shoe lump from Germany or France.

You can get a general idea of how to do what I have described by viewing photos and comments of a long post of mine dated 26 March 2017 on this website. The post is titled "Building and regulating a DR with shoe lump barrels".

Edited by transvaal (20/12/18 06:15 AM)