The Mighty 10 Gauge

That's the title of Ballistic Products' load manual for the 10 gauge.  Sounded like something Winston Churchill would have called it and its hard to go wrong sounding like Winston Churchill.

This is as fancy a picture as I'm gonna post of it today.   I did determine that the chambers are 2 7/8" and that the butt plate for this gun is bigger than most.  I checked Numrich and Dixie Gun Works and I checked three smaller places that sell reproduction butt plates and nobody had one big enough for this gun.  Perhaps I should name the gun after my sister.  

No.  It deserves better.

I strongly suspect that it had springs to retract the firing pins when it was built.  It has rebounding hammers so it wasn't like they hadn't figured out  the pins need to retract.  I'll have to take the pins out and measure a few dimensions to see how big a spring to buy.  Its funny.  Brownells didn't have a firing pin spring for it.  Its only a hundred and thirty something years old.

Spent close to a hundred bucks at Ballistic Products.  I found a recipe in their low pressure load brochure and bought all the components that I didn't already have.  Since this is going to be a duck gun, I bought a pound of their ITX shot.  That was the biggest chunk of change.  Next up was two loading manuals.  One thing that got kind of tedious was finding the wad.  Their recipe called for their own "Deci-Max" wad but I couldn't find any wad by that name on their site.  I even searched it by name.  I finally Googled it, found it at Graf's and compared their picture of it to the picture on BP's site to figure out what it was. 

After that I ordered a new shifter for Ruth's transfer case.  Once I get it all set up that will allow me to use just the front drive if I want.  That would have come in handy a few years ago when my rear driveshaft came unglued.

It should also help isolate one or two of those annoying vibrations and driveline noises so I can decide where they come from.  There will be noises.   Its a real Jeep.

And nope.  Didn't nobody pay me nuthin' fer sayin' none of this.