Bleg: Enders Royal Service shotgun
My dad gave me a doubled barreled 12ga, it’s an Enders Royal Service. Read on the intertubes that one shouldn’t shoot modern ammunition through it. Read elsewhere that only applies to 3 inch shells. Any of you know?
November 24th, 2015 at 6:30 pm
If it has Damascus barrels then you do not want to use modern shells.
November 24th, 2015 at 7:19 pm
“Modern” of course meaning smokeless powder. They made both Damascus and “Armory Steel” barrels. No proof marks?
LOTS of information here;
https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=1OxZo5Tkvx2G8eYf747QR9B5RJdN6Siu5JGIhfguSXXQ=
November 24th, 2015 at 7:34 pm
I have a Enders Royal S/S in 20ga but it is not Damascus. It’s a safe queen.
November 25th, 2015 at 2:09 am
Old 12 gauge shells are generally 2 and a half inches long. It might chamber and survive shooting 2 3/4 inch shells, but extraction will be difficult, and a break action might refuse to break.
November 25th, 2015 at 2:12 am
You can get 2 and a half brass cases fram the SASS crowd, and load them with black powder loads.
Get a jar of water-glass to seal the over shot cards.
November 25th, 2015 at 10:06 am
Today I learned what water-glass is, thanks!
November 25th, 2015 at 2:22 pm
A break-open shotgun should be fairly easy to measure the chamber size with. Hell, crack it open and see if a 2.75 shell drops fully into place. Of course someone could have reamed it out, and by doing so did NOT automatically make it safe for modern shells.
Waterglass for shotgun shells goes back probably 60 years, probably back before they had Elmer’s glue. I’ve also heard and experienced that sodium silicate dries out and cracks. I suspect the use of waterglass came around because someone tried it on paper shotgun shells and it worked, and then it somehow became “tribal knowledge”. They use to use it to preserve unwashed, as laid eggs, (so it was around on the farm) and much more recently to destroy perfectly good engine blocks as part of the “cash for clunkers” program-scam.
If you really want to get some they sell it as brick sealer and whatnot on Amazon, or at Lehman’s if you want the “egg keep” stuff.
Get one of those “four-tenner” inserts and go squirrel hunting.
November 25th, 2015 at 2:32 pm
>Hell, crack it open and see if a 2.75 shell drops fully into place.
On second thought, I could see the extractor getting in the way, and the closing of the break action “levering” it into the forcing cone. It might be best to remove the extractor first.
That and you could probably take a chamber casting with canning wax and an old crayon. You don’t need to send the casting out to make custom reloading dies or anything so super-duper precision is not needed.
Rotometals has generic low melting point alloys at good prices.
hxxp://www.rotometals.com/Low-Melting-Fusible-Alloys-s/21.htm
November 25th, 2015 at 5:07 pm
This sounds like one of the many budget shotguns made in the early 20th century by companies like Crescent Arms. They would stamp any name on the guns if a certain number were ordered. Therefore you could sell a “Nate’s Hardware” brand shotgun. Few if any of these were Damascus type barrels. If it has foreign proof marks, I wouldn’t shoot it as Europe’s budget gunmakers dumped a lot of really cheap junk on the market and some of these were Damascus and unsafe for modern loads. The layers of welded up metal could rust in the seams and the barrels unwind in a spectacular fashion.
If you just want to run a few rounds through it because it might be cool, get some light trap loads and shoot a few. If the empties are missing a bit of the plastic end of the shell. it is probably chambered in 2&1/2. I don’t see why you’d want to shoot it much, modern guns are better than the old cheap stuff.