Quote History Originally Posted By DanaHillen:
...........smoothbore barrel.........
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I bought one just because it was cheap and interesting.
It has a "Micro Grooved" barrel, cheapest form of rifling.
From the Altor site:
Tumbling bullets/Rifling
Tumbling bullets are completely normal. There are two reasons for this. First of all, the Altor pistol has an extremely short barrel-only 1.5 inches of actual barrel since the rest of the barrel/chamber includes the chamber and the front of the receiver.
It is also because we only cut four “microgrooves” as rifling strictly for ATF compliance purposes. “Microgrooves” were patented by Marlin in the 1950s so we knew they were legal and would prevent us from having a problem with ATF. Because a smoothbore would be a short barreled shotgun and restricted. The Altor pistol was submitted to the ATF during development and they approved the rifling as within the legal requirements, but they really don’t do much. For reference, the official SAAMI specifications for 9 MM barrels calls for 6 grooves, each of them 0.100″ wide and approximately 0.011″ deep. In contrast, the Altor barrel has only 4 grooves and each of them is only 0.014″ wide and only 0.005″ deep. These barrels have very substantial differences in rifling.
The Altor pistol was only intended to be a close quarters defense weapon or farm tool. According to FBI data, most gunfights occur in 3 seconds, involve 3 shots, and happen at 3 yards (9 feet). That was our design goal. Hit a center mass human size target at 9 feet whether the bullet is tumbling or not.
But it is incredibly more accurate than that even with a tumbling bullet. Whether you are ringing steel at 18-25 yards as some online reviewers have done or just wanting to do some damage to flesh during a defense situation, a tumbling bullet seems to hit the target. And while penetration might be affected, the wound cavity would probably be worse.
The only way to eliminate this would be to go to traditional rifling which would increase the price substantially since it requires button rifling which is a separate process. Therefore we would never do it.