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I believe that it is common in the USA that most folks think of a double rifle as either too expensive, or not suited to hunting anything smaller than an elephant, or both. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

The double rifle is the only rifle you can have that started its life as a hunting rifle. All other types started out as a war weapon, and then were applied to the hunting fields. Since it is the only true hunting rifle, that should be reason enough to attract hunters in the USA, but for some strange reason this has never happened.

I blame this on ignorance! Now before some of you guys get your feelings hurt, let me explain! Ignorance is nothing but a word that describes the fact that something is not well understood, or not known at all. It has nothing to do with a person's intelligence, but that he simply has not been taught something.

This phenomenon is not limited to the run of the mill hunter, or the guy who is not well up on "GUNOLOGY”, but is rampant among gun writers, and even some of the most well known rifle smiths in the USA, and many other countries. Even people who have taken the big five, and grand slams of all kinds are sadly ignorant when it comes to the double rifle. The misconceptions are a bag full that would slow a train to haul.

A double rifle can be made to shoot several different loads but it is not easy! The easiest thing is the regulating a double rifle to a known load at the factory. The hard part is finding a load that will shoot to the regulation that has been built into the rifle by the factory. That being said, to get the absolute best from any double rifle one needs to hand load, and once found the rifle will shoot properly with that load. What is needed is a pair of loads that will shoot to regulation with a soft and another with a solid to the same basic composite group. This takes some experimenting but once found you can take on just about anything on Earth with most of the chamberings that come in double rifles.

In the USA we tend to read the gun rag guys, as if we were reading from scripture, and anything they say has to be correct, simply because they said it. Again we are being misled, in some cases because the writer is too lazy to do the research, but mostly because they are printing opinion that they think is true. We all do that on occasion, it is only human because nobody knows everything. Still when it is put into print, by a self- proclaimed expert for the public to read it can lead the reader in the wrong direction. (some say this is what I am doing here but what I tell you can be verified quite easily)

The double rifle is a complex type of rifle to build and make shoot properly. No formula, or jig can be made to get away from the tedious work of fitting these things so they work properly. All types of things have been tried to make regulating the barrels easy, and nothing has worked. Most think if you simply make the barrel exactly parallel then the rifle will shoot side by side! So why not simply use a laser to align the barrels and save hours, and hours, plus several rounds of very expensive ammo to regulate the barrels? The reason is, it simply doesn’t work.

The barrels have to be laid to not only converge, but to point with the line of sight crossing, and low, compared to where you want the bullets to hit the target. The double rifle depends on the recoil arch (muzzle flip) of the rifle, and the speed of the bullet to shoot to where the sights are pointing when the trigger is pulled. IOW, if you place the barrels of a perfectly regulated double rifle in a vice with the sights held dead on your target at the iron sight' regulated distance, then with an empty case, with no primer, in each barrel using the primer hole like a peep sight, look through each barrel. What you will see is, the right barrel will be pointing at a place that is low and on the leftof where the sights are aligned. The leftbarrel will be pointing to a place on the rightand low in relation to where the sights are aligned. This is necessary because of thing called barrel time combined with recoil flip. What that means is, when the trigger is pulled on the RIGHTbarrel, the rifle rises up and to the RIGHT while the bullet is traveling down that barrel, so that the barrel is pointing to the point the sights were when the trigger was pulled, and Vice-versa for the left barrel. So the double rifle depends on the recoil arch, and the bullet's speed down the tube, to be aligned when that bullet exits the barrel. This converging of the barrels can be done exactly the same with two rifles shooting the same cartridge and they will not shoot the same, so each rifle has to be regulated by it's own rules to work properly. This is just one of the reasons even the cheapest quality double rifle requires over 800 to 1000 man hours of skilled labor to complete, hence the cost of manufacture. However when this is done properly no rifle in the world is more reliable for hunting anything from jackrabbit to elephant depending on the chambering.

The problem with the explanations for the way regulation works is two fold! #1 is the way the makers have always advertised their rifles. By this I mean when the maker says “THIS RIFLE IS REGULATED AT 50 yds or 100 yds!” people think this means the rifle crosses at that distance! That is not the case! This only means primary standing sight is cut to aim at dead center, of a composite group of both barrels for elevation, and windage at that range, nothing more. #2 Is because the barrels have to be slightly converging this and the makers statement about the sights seems to the unschooled to mean the rifle crosses at the sight’s regulated range. Both the reasons seem to be a no-brainer, but both assumptions are wrong, and not work that way!

Now we come to the smith who believes these two things and he may get the barrels to regulate when building a set of barrels but he seldom knows what he did to achieve it. So because he got one to work properly he assumes he has found the secret. My prediction is the next set he builds he will have a hassle with it as well, because he still believes the bullets from each barrel should hit the same hole at the distance he is regulating for. That DISTANCE has only to do with the way the sights are cut, and is done after the barrel regulation is completed. The reason for his thinking has made him confuse making all the bullets from each barrel make one large ragged hole at the range on the rear sight. The mistake he is making is that a regulator is looking for, not bullet holes to adjust, but the “CENTERS” of the INDIVIDUAL barrel’s four shot GROUPS that he wants to move to equal half the distances between bores on either side of the aiming point of the iron sights LEFT barrel GROUP CENTER on the LEFT of the aiming point and the RIGHT GROUP CENTER on the RIGHT of the aiming point, and both at the elevation of the aiming point of the sights .

To top this off the way these individual barrel four shot groups are come by is also most often done improperly as well even if the parallel concept is fully understood. In this case because a double rifle is a firearm that is to be used, firing the first shot from ambient temperature barrels set, with the second shot fired with a very short time after the first barrel being usually the right barrel, is fired, sort of a “ONE, TWO punch” from cool barrels. Because of this fact, to get a proper four shot group from each barrel to find the centers of each barrels group one must let the barrels cool to ambient temperature for each one two shots, one from each barrel till you get four from each barrel. Now you can find the centers of each barrels group, and these centers are what you want to move with adjustments not bullet holes! So now you begin to see some of the cost of building a double rifle when regulating the barrels, just to find the centers of the individual barrel groups has cost eight rounds of very costly ammo, and a lot of time, and this is simply to find the starting point to start the regulation!

Regulation and shooting by the owner are two entirely different things. However when regulating the rifle barrels, or finding a load that shoots to the regulates properly in those barrels the same four shot individual barrel groups must be properly found to load a proper load for a rifle that the regulation load is not known, just as it is with the factory regulator does with the cooling of the barrels properly to find the centers! Then speed up if shooting high and wide or slow down if shooting low, and crossing. The center of a barrel’s individual group should never cross over to the other side of the aiming point. As the groups of any barrel group with get wider at that groups goes down range so that as the groups of each barrel gets larger the RIGHT side of the LEFT barrel group will spill over into the other barrel’s group, but a properly regulated barrels set or proper load for that regulation the CENTERS will not cross. If it does then it is the shooter that is causing it to cross not the rifles regulation!

If you choose not to believe anything I have just written here that is your privilege, but that is the way a properly regulated double rifle was designed to work, and if it is fine with you that your rifle is crossing the individual barrel group centers, that is your privilege as well! I’m only the messenger, and I speak the truth it is up to you to decide if you want the message or not! After all it is free of charge.

................................. :wave: BYE!

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..........Mac >>>===(x)===>
DUGABOY1, and MacD37 founding member of DRSS www.doublerifleshooterssociety.com
"If I die today, I have had a life well spent, for I've been to see the Elephant, and smelled the smoke of Africa!"