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Octagon Length on Octagon to Round Barrels?

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AFriendOfLife

32 Cal
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Just a quick question, how long are the flats on your octagon to round smooth bore barrel? I'm currently designing a barrel but I have no idea how long I want my flats to be.

Other question, how wide is the breech of your barrel flat-to-flat? Specifically for a .75 cal. Thanks guys!
 
Well, it really depends, is this an English or French Fowler? And then on the type, is it a sporting fusil, military arm or a larger club butt boucanier?

In regards to how wide across the flats it is, it really should be a fully tapered breech area, with the barrel fully tapering all the way up to the muzzle, a thin walled one at that! Otherwise you lose all the balance and the gun will feel like a ‘club’, in the lower forend area.
 
Well, it really depends, is this an English or French Fowler? And then on the type, is it a sporting fusil, military arm or a larger club butt boucanier?

In regards to how wide across the flats it is, it really should be a fully tapered breech area, with the barrel fully tapering all the way up to the muzzle, a thin walled one at that! Otherwise you lose all the balance and the gun will feel like a ‘club’, in the lower forend area.

Well, truth be told, I'm making a short barreled "Blanket gun". So I'm just going for a kind of generic look for mine.

Another question sparked by your reply, wedding bands. How much depth/height do they have? Does the crest of the band match the profile of the barrel, if that makes sense? Are they cut into the profile, rather then an "Extrusion" on the profile?
 
Well, blanket guns aren't real, so go for whatever you want,

For the height, same height as the transition from oct to round. So if you laid a metal edge ruler across the barrel, the band height would follow. It is is 'sides' of the ring decoration that is cut into the profile. Most likely use a single band transition, unlessmimicing a cut down version of one you can document as having two.

French guns would also be faceted back for a few inches, making what amounts to be 'another flat', between the flats that show, going backwards from the band towards the breech, like shown below.

Facet.jpg
 
Octagon length,, transition to 16 sides, wedding rings and other barrel features vary with time period, location and particular original gun. My recommendation is that you choose the correct full size barrel for the actual historical gun you want to cut down into a blanket gun. Unless one is making a historical short gun that was made as such like a blunderbuss or coaching carbine, etc, you need to configure your barrel, pins, pipe locations as if it was cut down after manufacture.
 
The real blanket guns known were used during the Pontiac rebellion. And unfortunately we have little real info on them. Howsomever Pontiac was allied to the French. So I would suspect your dealing with a French style gun.
In Practical terms any gun could have been cut down to a blanket gun. However known times of doing so are historically few and far between.
So you have a Lancaster rifle or a third middle Brown Bess you’ve hacked up, in that case it’s whatever you want it to be.
Trade guns and fowlers tended to be octagon about half to three quarters of the way between the breach and the rear entry thimble. It seems to me the 1803/17 HF rifles were up just shy of the end of the stock. Some of the club butts I’ve seen the octagon area tan just forward of the front of the lock.
 

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