Blurring The Lines
I wonder if our British friends are allowed rifled shotguns? I’ve heard that shotguns are much easier to acquire over there than rifles. And if there’s one place on earth where you could lay your hands on a well preserved No. 4 SMLE with ease, it ought to be the country where they were built in the first place.
Another approach would be building a short barreled version. As long as the John Bull people are allowed slugs for their shotguns, you could work up a load using standard 10mm (0.409") pistol bullets. From a rifle those “little” hollow point bullets can be pushed to crazy speeds. Used as a home defense weapon, you wouldn’t have to worry about wounding the bad guys. It would be more like trying to find the chunks afterwards. Such a shot would just about blow them apart. Or, as the prairie dog shooters say, “nothing but mist”. And it would still qualify as a shotgun.
I think Hoening/HBBS should be awarded the Gold Medal for Bending The Rules. Awesome!!!
HOT DAMN! And Darn you, darn you all to heck! Now you’ve got me thinking I need to add something ELSE to my collection. *SIGH* Will it never end?
It’s gonna cost ya! Right now the company is pretty much still in start up, so the prices are high.
If I had the spare cash, I’d go straight out and get a custom chambered barrel and do the Enfield conversion, then just buy the brass from HBBS. The overall cost would be about the same, but you wind up with a gun with much more potential. And go with a heavy barrel: the recoil from the full power round is serious, so you want to absorb as much of that as you can with a heavier weight weapon.
And no, it never ends!
Actually Drew there are quite a few Enfields in the UK that have been converted to .410” shotguns. However you would need a Firearms certificate to possess rifled slugs. There are a lot of those Enfields still lying around. Every now and then the government in the UK has a firearms amnesty and a few more are handed in. Also they keep turning up in hidden caches after being buried around 1939/40 by Churchills guerilla army. Though as you can imagine they don’t tend to be in a very good condition. At the range I used to shoot at in the UK they had dozens of Enfields but most have now been rechambered to .308 Winchester. The old .303 is still available but reloading is not competitive compared to the “cheap as chips” .308
What a delightful and useful wildcat. Semi-wildcat. (For those not speaking ‘reloader’, a ‘wildcat’ is a cartridge converted from another cartridge; such as the old .30-06 cartridge which has the neck section reduced in size to hold a narrower bullet. [One must prepare a matching barrel of course.] One such example is the .270 Winchester, a .30-06 necked down to .270 caliber.)
Imagine a SMLE (Short Magazine Lee-Enfield, affectionately called a ‘Smelly’) in a serious game caliber? How useful! I have often maintained fighting rifles and dangerous game rifles have much in common. Accuracy requirement is not as stringent as target rifles, triggers must be ‘good’ but not ‘light’, sights much be simple to use and suited for quick shots, and power must be serious enough for the task at hand. The SMLE is arguably one of the best fighting rifles of all time.
A SMLE in .410 HBBS sounds fun. Like I don’t have enough calibers as it is.
Hmmm… Probably needs either 3031 or 4895 to shoot it properly…
Unfortunately, it’s still illegal in The Peepls Republik of Noo Yawk, for deer anyway. Can’t use anything less than a 20 gauge for deer and black bear.
Posted by BlueStateSaint
07/27/2009 at 07:46 PM
Still, y’all, you’ve got to admit it’s awesome.
Here’s a happy thought. How many .410 rounds would fit in the ten round mag of a SmElly?
Better yet how many in a P-14 Enfield? Which I happen to have two of, one of which needs rebarreling/rebuilding…Posted by emdfl
07/28/2009 at 01:42 AM
07/27/2009 at 03:23 PM
