Anyone know why there were no bids on this H&H 500 BPE DR the number was 218752928 and the starting bid was just under $15K
Thanks TC

The BP rifles don't have nearly the resale value or interest as the more modern Cordite or Smokeless rifle do. Most are only adequate to hunt Whitetails or hogs at close range.

Biebs
Agree re resale value but not many Toplever Hammerless DR's around for that money, BP or not.

What do you class as close range ? A 500 BP would flatten a pig at 150 yards, maybe more.

Interesting gun being such an early Hammerless.

From memory, were Scott's were still making all of Holland's guns in 1894 or had Holland started making some of their own by then ?

He could have put a bit more effort into the detail of the gun - like weight, LOP.

.

Definitely no stone unturned on that rifle.


Looks neat anyway, I wonder how it shoots!



Cheers
Tinker

Before all these V-C and Sabbati doubles started showing up the BPEs were selling good. Most of the guns like A Henry, H&H,Purdey and some others are actually better made than most of the Nitro guns. True works of art. I picked up quite a few and hoped they would go up in value. Now trying to sell one is a pain. I think the BPE guns of good makers are still some of the prettiest doubles made.

Sam

I looked for some time at the 577 BP rifles out there. If properly proofed, they can be loaded to power levels (650gr @ 1,850 fps or so) with smokeless or compound loads to use as a DGR. As Sam mentioned, some are just exquisite rifles.

Quite a few over here use NfB in suitable BP DR's.

.

NFB is a great way to go for sure.
It's nearly impossible to find a proper .577BPE in usable shape.

500n, did you see the muzzles on this rifle shown above?



Cheers
Tinker

quote:

Originally posted by a.tinkerer:

500n, did you see the muzzles on this rifle shown above?
Cheers
Tinker

Yes I did, but I haven't commented yet, been doing a bit of research.

What's your take on them ?

Have the barrels been cut and the rib / sight re put on and the whole lot stippled so that the join can't b seen ?

I am still guessing ATM but my initial thought was that.

The other thing is it was worked on by JJ and he could have put a wedge in it.

What's your take on them ?

.

500N-

quote:

Originally posted by 500N:

What's your take on them ?

Guess time, as I know nothing about the rifle...

The muzzles were absolutely shagged (bores still "...show light pitting with very strong rifling..."), JJ was hired for the 'Week at the Spa', he faced them then he counterbored them, then he shoved a new wedge in between them while getting the rifle to print both barrels on the same page - and what was that load with which he got it to shoot..?
...then he refinished the whole thing and called Bob it's uncle.

That little counterbore trick (to much lesser an extent) is how I finally got my 5-1/2 dram Tolley .450 to shoot.
No re-regulation necessary, just a bit of a touch-up on the muzzles.
I think that 125 years of cleaning rod masturbation had given the rifle a 'Sabatti Smile', killing the original tender loving regulation.

If I can manage to remember it, I'll snap a shot of my rifle's muzzles some time soon and show for comparison.



Cheers
Tinker

"SABATTI SMILE" LOL, very good indeed.

Yes, I think you are right - as you know, another Tolley here was fixed up
by re cutting the crown and the wedge being added would help.

I would expect a gun of this type in BPE to have lightly pitted barrels - nothing to worry about IMHO, the bigger the bore, the worse the bores can be and the gun will still shoot is how I look at it, as long as the rifling is still good in the last half of the barrels.

Either way, I doubt someone would go to the trouble and $$$$ of having it refurbished by JJ if the gun was a load of crap.

Either way, it is a nice Toplever Hammerless BPE DR.

.

I asked the owner about this rifle when it frist went up , a month or 2 ago & thats how most of the photos got on there as he only had a couple up then & I asked for some more !

Has a bit of pitting over the rifle in general , hard to see in pic's he said
But some visable on action bottom , some also on sides .

Weight is 9Lbs

500N-


Here are the muzzles of my Tolley 450 Magnum.
Excuse the crap cellphone photo, but this gets it out here for you to see now instead of god-knows-when.




Note that I worked to keep the hundred-odd year old profile of the muzzles intact, and took as little material away as possible.
I only wanted to bring the crowns back a tiny bit, to clear them of cleaning-rod damage from the generations.
I'd turned a solid teflon plug/pilot bushing for the bores and a brass lap with a pilot, used valve lapping compound to do the work on the crowns.
In all the process took about an hour, and as I'd said earlier this is what it finally took to get the rifle to shoot. Where before accuracy and regulation just completely sucked, it's a ripper now and quite accurate.



Cheers
Tinker

Interesting.

The other Tolley we have spoken about also had very little taken off - like you, a quick turn of the inner crown and it fixed it.

Anyway, good learning experience.

.

Does that affect the regulation, or is there no effect? reason is I want to make sure of what I should be looking for when I come across one of these BPEs of smokeless DRs

TC-


The work I did to the muzzles on my Tolley was done after a fair bit of handloading and load development in attempt to get it shooting to regulation.

My rifle had/has the overall appearance of having been run for a very long time without any alteration to the metalwork. It looks like a rifle that has a great deal of field experience.
As is sometimes the case, the previous owner(s..?) didn't seem to have a great grasp of the original specified loads or use, and couldn't get it to shoot.
I got it for a very good price with confidence I could get it running.

Several combinations of load recipe components were tried, and when I got to a point where I thought I could expect better performance with my loads, I focused my attention on the rifle.
My goal was to minimize alteration to the rifle, and I'd seen similar (but from long ago) work on other old double rifles in the past.
This procedure was done to correct what appeared to be damage to the crowns, and the result was that my loads immediately got the rifle shooting to regulation.



Cheers
Tinker

quote:

Originally posted by Biebs:
The BP rifles don't have nearly the resale value or interest as the more modern Cordite or Smokeless rifle do. Most are only adequate to hunt Whitetails or hogs at close range.

How close in exterior ballistics would be 500 BPE ammunition compared with 50-90 Sharps ammunition fired from reproduction 19th-century single shot rifle?

Were there a substantial advantage to the 50-90, could the owner of [such an] H&H rifle safely attempt to replicate 50-90 ballistics?

TC-


To flesh out what I was implying there, I didn't do anything to the rifle's regulation. My assumption was that the rifle was good, that it was likely properly regulated.

This is how it now prints targets.



My guess is that most old BPE double rifles can do it this well too, but there's often small easily-sorted issues that keep them from shooting to their potential.

The H&H 500 shown above here in this thread has likely had it's issues sorted, and would likely be a great shooting rifle. That's IF it hasn't had it's nuts shot off by someone who doesn't know what he's doing, and tried to load it up to NE energies (or something to that effect...)



Cheers
Tinker

Naphtali-

quote:

Originally posted by Naphtali:
How close in exterior ballistics would be 500 BPE ammunition compared with 50-90 Sharps ammunition fired from reproduction 19th-century single shot rifle?

Were there a substantial advantage to the 50-90, could the owner of [such an] H&H rifle safely attempt to replicate 50-90 ballistics?

The 500 BPE (express) rifles were set up to run lighter bullets than the Sharps cartridges would typically use, a 500BPE double rifle is likely regulated to shoot a bullet of around 350gr or 450gr in the neighborhood of 1850-1950FPSmv

I've seen Sharps cartridges shooting long 550gr+ bullets, and it's not likely you'll get an express double rifle to shoot properly with those 'buffalo' bullets.



Cheers
Tinker

quote:

Originally posted by Tall Chief:
Does that affect the regulation, or is there no effect? reason is I want to make sure of what I should be looking for when I come across one of these BPEs of smokeless DRs

The other gun that I mentioned was the same. The owner had tried everything, it shot OK
but one barrel was a bit out.

In the end, a slight touch up (re cutting) of the crown fixed it up and from then
on it shot perfectly - ie SxS at whatever range.

So it was proved that a damaged crown caused the bullet of one barrel to throw off.

.

quote:

Originally posted by Biebs:
The BP rifles don't have nearly the resale value or interest as the more modern Cordite or Smokeless rifle do. Most are only adequate to hunt Whitetails or hogs at close range.

Partly true regarding the small BPE calibers up to .500ex. There are so many 3" 500express doubles around, that the condition of an old gun must be above average to mint in order to withstain a collectors value/investment.
Calibers like 20/577 or .577 3 1/4", 577/500 magnum, 12bore and upwards tends to draw a bigger following. It is my observation however that must doublerifle nuts starts out with a smokeless, hammerless DR in the more commen calibers, but as the interest matures, the victorian style expressrifles becomes more of an interest.

tinker,
So ,were the crowns done uniformly, or did you analyze that there was a needed difference in them?

TC-


I'm sure that the crowns on my Tolley were very uniform back then around 1880 when the rifle was delivered.
J&W Tolley built to very high standards.

The damage to the crowns looked like 100+ years of cleaning rod bruising and cleaned up nicely.
My work is perfectly concentric to the bores, perpendicular to the bore axes, and appears very well centered in the 100+ year old hand-cut crown detail (so, no steering was needed...) -- which I very much wanted to preserve along the way as artifact of the original construction of the rifle.

On Jens' comments, original condition is very desirable, and the subtle details of the sculpting of my rifle's muzzles (to me) looks too damn cool to just mill or file it flat.



Cheers
Tinker

Really good insight, thanks