Zouave Quandary

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25cschaefer

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I have an old Zouave rifle that I am fixing for a guy, I think I'm going to buy it from him, that somebody chopped down to 16.5" an made it about 60 cal smooth bore. Its bore has some heavy pitting, around .010 - .020, near breech end, enough I think it could cause a bore obstruction with a round ball.

Does anybody have an idea of how to bore it out bigger without buying an expensive reamer?

Would it be okay to shoot shot out of? The other option I was thinking of was to turn it into a pseudo blunderbuss, I have the technology.

Either way, it is getting the brass tack treatment on the sock, and rawhide wrap around the forend.
 
If it is an original, from the 19th century, the barrels back then were wrought iron. The materials were not high quality and frequently had seams that let go. Even modern blackpowder barrel are made of material that is barely steel and are dead soft. I would not fool around with a thinned blackpowder barrel which also acquired pitting.
 
Would you classify AISI 1137, 12-L-14, or 4140 chrome moly steel as barely steel and dead soft? For that is the steel that three modern muzzleloading barrel makers, Green Mountain, Colerain, and Rice, use for their muzzleloading barrels.

Be that as it may...,

If it's an original barrel, leave it alone.

I suspect it's a repro, and you don't know really where the barrel came from and by reaming it out, you don't know who did the job. A lot of repro Remington 1863 rifles came out of Italy and Japan, and although the Italian barrels were proofed before export, the reaming has removed all validity where your barrel is concerned, plus you have pitting. So you will need to replace the barrel if you want it as anything other than a wall hanger.

Dixie gunworks has new, full sized barrels for the Zouave, and you should consider cutting one down and crowning the barrel to replace your current barrel. They're not cheap but considering the risk of shooting it without a proper barrel, it is worth the money (imho).

You may be able to find an inexpensive smooth bore barrel that can be breeched and made to shoot caplock that would suffice, but it may take a while to find.

LD
 
It is an Antonio Zoli Italian repro, I have turned the outside of it already and it machines like 4140. At the muzzle there is still over .080" thick walls, the breech is way thicker, and I know BP shotguns are a lot thinner so I don't think I will run into any integrity issues. I will be proofing it before I ever get behind it too. I am thinking the blunderbuss route will be the way I go, I may try to hone as much of the pitting out as I can if not just soften the edges of it.
 
No, It is so short it will be a novelty no matter what you do, putting it back to 58 would be kind of a waist, that's why I'm going to just use it for throwing shot. Teepee defense gun.
 
If it has a pretty uniform "hard edge" in the breech area I'd say it sounds like somebody failed to properly seat the breech plug after reaming it out. You might double check that. It would be odd for corrosion to do something like that at random, and sound like there was a gap that was tough to properly clean that held residue which then corroded.

LD
 
12L14? Yep, barely steel. Dead soft. easy to machine, but welding or heat treating are out of the picture. Not what I'd use to make a barrel.
 
I asked the gent at James River about the materials in his barrels, which were Italian 4130 blanks, and what was used in the barrels made by Daniel Whitacre. Whitacre's barrel material was 12L14 which is a leaded steel. This was easy for the gent to machine and cut rifling but according to MatWeb the material properties of ISI 12L14 Steel, hot rolled, 19-38 mm is 34,100 pounds yeild. While this is appropriate for blackpowder, this is not a high strength steel.

Even soft modern material is better than historic, but barrel makers want soft materials because they are easier to cut and the barrels are not heat treated. I am of the opinion there is not a lot of margin of strength in even modern blackpowder barrels and those advocating reducing the diameter of a thin blackpowder barrel are providing risky advice.
 
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