Lengthened chamber on snider type rifle

[dirtbag]

Hi,
A Dutch snider type rifle that I am looking at appears to have an lengthened chamber. The length of the chamber to the rifled part is 80mm (shotgun shell ?) which I thought is a bit long, and the original cartridge for this gun was just over half length that including the bullet, thus leaving an a gap. Has anyone else come across this, and should I be bothered (and run a mile) if I intend to use original cartridge's dimensions for shooting ?
Thanks in advance

[Graham M]

Looks like it was drilled out with a cheap drill

[dirtbag]

Looks like it was drilled out with a cheap drill

Yeah was thinking that. Such a shame really as the gun is real nice !

[channel12]

Does this mean that the rifle will now chamber a 24 gauge shot gun cartridge ? If yes it means you can use 24 gauge Magtech brass without the need to trim to length. I am assuming however that the original Dutch cartridge was similar to the Snider.


We forget that in the past guns like this would have been "millsurps" and drilling out the chamber to take whatever shotgun cartridge was available to make a cheap workaday shotgun probably was commonly done. Think about all the SMLE's and No.4's converted to 410 shotguns.

[Graham M]

I had a SMLE mk4 that had been converted to .410, but they hadn't just bored out the chamber, they had bored out the barrel and used a reamer to make the chamber fit a brass .303 case that had been opened up at the mouth of the case to load the shot etc. The downside was you couldn't shoot ordinary .410 cartridges in it because they wouldn't fit, so you had to find these special .303 shotgun cartridges which were as rare as rocking-horse poo.

[dirtbag]

The gun should be able to chamber a 16 gauge shell, maybe even a 12 gauge with modding the rim.
The dutch snider was much larger than the brit snider, more in line with the French tabatiere. I would rather try and mimic the original cartridge, and make it a tad overlength perhaps ... ?

[AL8]

How about using a round ball?

[dirtbag]

I may be able to use a mine ball as a have a mould that I had for tabatiere that I could size down.