By Eye

[Peter Laidler]

We were taught barrel viewing by the late gentlemanly Mr Ayley at Carlisle. We used a wooden frame that you could adjust for your height against a straight blacked-out line against a clear window. We used to rotate loads of numbered barrels and barrelled actions of all sorts of weaponry and write down the faults; puckers, bulges, cord-wear, scratches, scores, metallic fouling and assess whether corrosion was still serviceable - on a scale of 1 to 10 etc etc. As for bends, we had to record where the bend was, distance over which the bloody bend was, direction of bend from 12 o'clock and if that wasn't enough, there could be two bends that would really fool you. Sometimes, these so called bends would JUST impede the plug bore gauge so you were left wondering whether there really was a bend or not.

The worst were those barrels (usually Bren and .300 Browning) where the bore wasn't concentric with the outside diameter. Rotating those barrels would change the half-shadow to give the usual concave or convex or any other combination appearance that we were all taught to recognise BUT that was because the actual BORE was changing/rotating eccentrically to the outside diameter of the rotating barrel. John 'big john' Hessell used to call these barrel viewing lessons 'concave, convex or just confusion.......'

Going off at a tangent now so all those not interested or already know this stuff, look away now........

To be honest, only a couple of the apprentices really got the hang of it in the classroom but I learned later that this was a good little wheeze for Mr Ayley and Mr Duffield or Mr Reilly, other instructors to fail 90% of the class so that we'd have to come back after tea time for extra lessons - and they got overtime! Could I still do it.....? Yep, like riding a bike!