Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters unusual chamberings

bought some gun stuff and a lot of gunsmithing stuff today lots of clymer reamers in this stuff.
but some unusual chamberings these three are what caught me most for unusual.
22-30 carbine
17 - 9 mm Luger
14- 25 ACP

also in the not normally seen much 5.56x51

You should ask the smith if you can get the print book on those reamers…

All customs have specific prints, and most non-customs as well because there are multiple reamers per cartridge.. I think PTG has over a dozen 308 reamer specs…

well the guy that these did belong to is in the process of passing away from brain tumor... so I would be on my own with the manufacturer but there are numbers on these I do believe that might be of some help?

there was also reamers for 44 mag neck down to 6 mm and 44 mag neck down to 22.

I recall M1 carbine conversions to the 22 or 5.7 Spitfire, which I believe used a .224 bullet and the 30 Carbine case.

yes I am doing some googling looking up different stuff and that's exactly what I just found 22 spitfire..

The 17-9mm and 14-.25 ACP sound really out there, but I recall a Rifle or Handloader article from (I think) the 70’s about the .22-.30 Carbine as a cartridge to turn M1 carbines into varmint rifles. Don’t know if the idea got much traction then and it probably wouldn’t today, with the plethora of sem-auto varmint rifles available and the value of original M1 carbines.

I recall reading an article some years back that claimed that this cartridge was developed by Melvin Johnson, the Johnson of Johnson Automatic Rifle fame, for the South Vietnamese Army. Johnson apparently though that the small statured Vietnamese soldiers would be better armed with converted M-2 Carbines in 5.7 Spitfire then with the M-1 Carbines and Garands that we were supplying to them with at the time.

I believe the 44 mag necked down to 22 was called the 22 Stark.

44 mag necked down to 17 was popular for a while using TC and Martini actions.

Also, the 17 Javelina

Some wildcats come from somebody's fertile mind, some fill a perceived need, and some are a reaction to a worn bore. My oddest is a Savage 1899CD that was rebored from .38-55 to .40-55 at some point in the distant past which I assume was done to give new life to good rifle with a worn or corroded bore.

Those sound like amazing PITAs to form.
Is there some special technique needed to get those necked down?

did a little Google work. apparently at 25 ACP case they necked on down to 10 and 12 caliber. one article was talking about for the 10 copper that were shooting small pieces of copper wire for a bullet.

I have a Rem 700 chambered to 22 spitfire. The cartridge goes by various names including the 22/30, 5.7 Johnson, 5.7 MMJ [Melvin M Johnson's initials], and 22-30. It's listed in Cartridges of the world. I use it for walking around prairie dog towns. Fun gun to shoot, little noise, no recoil and easy to hit a prairie dog with up to a couple hundred yards. If I recall ballistics aren't all that different than the 22 fireball or the 5.7 x 28, but I could be wrong on that. I have a set of Lyman dies for it that I bought off the net somewhere. Necked down 30 carbine brass in one step losing 2-3 cases out of 500 to crushed necks. I do remember the smith wanted to have both the dies and reamer when chambering it to make sure the dimensions matched up (or something like that).

How would you get powder in that?

One stick at a time??

Lol, maybe like some of the old WWII .303 British cases I've pulled down with spaghetti noodle looking powder...almost looks like the powder was loaded in place, then the cartridge case necked down over and bullet seated.

I guess the most unusual chambering I have come across was I rifle I bought many years ago chambered in "240 Olson".
Never heard of another to this day, I did a chamber cast and never figured out what it was formed from. No big deal the barrel was rough anyway and the only reason I bought the rifle in the first place was for the action. A true single shot Whitworth Mauser action with a custom trigger of unknown origin, never seen another like it.
Has spent the last 20 years as a 6mm-284 but the barrel is toast, trying to figure out what oddball chambered barrel to put on it next

how about a 22-284 got a reamer for that. finish reamer brand new never used.
or maybe you want to just bore that barrel and make it a 35-284 got a finish reamer for that

That's how it was done. The powder was clled cordite.

Looking at the "Used" rack at a gun store in Dallas.
A tag caught my eye and I asked the kid if I could see the rifle.
He handed me a custom built .333 G&H Magnum!