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ARTICLES
I was Googling "Border Barrels" the other day out of curiosity and found that one of the most common links to our website was for the article "The Making of a Rifle Barrel" that I wrote many years ago. Trouble is, that article has not been on our website for at least ten years. If I had known it was so popular, I would not have taken it off. Anyway, I have updated it and put in some better pictures, and here it is back again. Those old links that have not worked for ten years will suddenly do so once more.
This article was originally published in the National Rifle Association Journal in 1996 as one of a series of articles, with the title "Even more on Long Range Ballistics". It was aimed particularly at Match Rifle Shooters, who in the UK are performers at ranges from 900 to 1200 yards, and are restricted to using the 308 Winchester cartridge and 30 calibre barrels with a weight of less than 2.5Kg or 5lbs. In 1998 it was mildly re-edited to generalize its appeal put on the Border Barrels website under the title "Comments on Long Range Ballistics". For reasons now lost in the mists of time, it was subsequently taken off the website. However, it seems that there are still a lot of links to the article on numerous shooting websites, so I have done some more editing, added some pertinent comments reflecting on the 15 years since the article was written, and reinstated it. An investigation into the effects of tight throat and barrel dimensions on maximum chamber pressures for the 308 Winchester cartridge. This was an interesting piece of work we were involved with back in 1997. The prime motivator was the fullbore target rifle shooters to want tight barrels, firstly to get the Radway Green 308 Win. ammunition of the day shoot well (the bullet had very little - if any - parallel on it) and secondly to increase the muzzle velocity for better performance at 1000 yards where the bullet velocity was trans-sonic. There had been a number of cases where ammunition (not Radway Green) loaded to the top end of CIP specifications and shot in these tight barrelled target rifles had clearly shown signs of overpressure. There had even been some 'incidents' where the primers or the back end of the cases had let go, with some shooters getting hot gas in the face. The problem was, there was no literature on how much chamber pressure would increase as a result of decreased bore, groove, or throat dimensions in a barrel. So, a number of interested parties in the UK gun trade got together to form the "Pressure Trials Consortium" and find answers this problem. I have to say, the joint venture worked very well and the outcome was a nice piece of work which is as relevant today as it was then. Another link which people are still regularly hitting is the old "workshop tour" webpage, which was long out of date and has long been removed. But there is always an interest in the people behind the business and in having a look behind the four walls that present the outside image of the business, so I have put together this short behind-the-scenes tour showing some of the personalities of the business and how they spend their working day here. Other articles of interest that were elsewhere on the site or were once on the site have been put here. |