12 ga. and round ball?

[arcticap]

I'm not addressing the specific functionality and safety issue of shooting a PRB out of a rifled choke "tube". But I have read about something that was designed and based on a similar principle. It was called a "Paradox Pistol" made by a man named Bowen, and it was based on a reworked Ruger revolver.
It only has rifling near the muzzle, and can shoot bullets, cartridge loaded balls and pistol cartridge shotshells well. There was an article and testing of it in a major gun magazine in the last 10 years. And the unpatched round balls shot very well although only engaging the rifling just before they exited the barrel, and the bullets did too. The term paradox refers to solving the problem of having one barrel shooting all the different style projectiles reasonably well, and how to accomplish or solve that problem. The partially rifled barrel was the solution, and not the problem.
While the gun below isn't the same Ruger revolver that Bowen designed and created, and which was written about and tested, I believe this commercial version is based on the same principle.
[url] http://www.bowenclassicarms.com/NEW/Paradox_r1_c1.htm[/url]

 

[paulvallandigham]

Please remember how thick the barrels are on modern revolvers, like the Ruger. All that extra metal can allow you to do a lot of things you can't still do with the typical thin-walled shotgun barrel. I don't recall that work on the Ruger, and I am fuzzy about what everyone calls paradox rifling these days, as the term has been in use for years, and seems to get applied to different things. Also, rifling in modern guns i much more shallow in depth than you find in black powder arms designed to shoot lead projectiles. Certainly any gun bore designed to shoot a Patched Round Ball is going to have deeper grooves than would ever be contemplated for a gun shooting modern cartridges, at higher velocities and chamber pressures, using copper jacketed bullets. Because those jacketed bullets are so hard, deep grooves would actually allow gas cutting, and accuracy would be, and is terrible! There is a limit to the extent to which modern technology and old firearms can be married together.

This is why I suggested that a shotgun barrel would have to be based on a thick barrel concept, that is now available, BTW, from New England Arms, and it would have to be a barrel extension design with the tube also being very thick. I think the resulting weight would make the gun unwieldy to use for anything other than shooting slugs, or PRB like a rifle. It would make more sense to simply rifle the bore of the gun and call it a " slug barrel", which is what it would be.


A Friend of mine has been working on improving Shotgun performance since the mid 1950s, and even has a letter from ATF dated in about 1958 telling him that it would be illegal for him to rifle a shotgun barrel! He keeps it with an Ad placed in Shotgun News, by Hastings Barrels, showing a copy of al letter from the then ATF to the president of Hastings, saying his rifled shotgun barrels are legal! My friend has worked with round ball, slugs, sabots, choke tubes, even rifled choke tubes, and he designed his own slug for use in smoothbore barrels, and then modified it to be used in rifled barrels, after he and I discussed some ideas.

The idea of using a rifled choke tube for smothbore shotgun came up, and it does work. The gun becomes very muzzle heavy. It works fine with a cartridge gun. We have not really found a satisfactory way to load a patched round ball down the barrel of one of these for a muzzle loading shotgun.