Some help with EAA .41AE barrel Please

[DPNM1A]

I recently found and won a Witness .41AE barrel off eBay. I may be wrong but there doesn't seem to be any rifling in it. I will post pics of it along with the .45 barrel from my Witness P. The .45 will be on the left and top with the .41AE on the right and bottom.

Would anyone have an idea what this barrel is? Any info would be much appreciated.

I paid less than $19 including shipping so I feel I can keep it as a curiosity if nothing else. The seller has listed at least 7 of them including the one I won with another being on now, item # 401020366356





As an aside, why did the 2 pics I posted turn into a cat 24 hours later?

[win308]

.41 AE is a round that is not made anymore, for which brass, for reloading, if you can find it, goes for a buck a piece, and which was replaced by the .40 Smith & Wesson.  About the same power as a .40 S&W.  Even with all the rifling, a worthless barrel today.

[DPNM1A]

Thank you for the reply win308. My question concerns why and for what purpose the barrel I have has no rifling. Is it a pre-production, sample, etc., barrel?

Useless or not I only bid on it as I thought that it would make a unique addition to the 9mm, .40 S&W, and .45 barrel/slide/spring/rod combination that my Witness P has and, to me, I got it for cheap.

[john_bud]

Polyangle like a glock?


Guessing

[ReloaderFred]

It may be a polygonal rifled barrel.  It's been several years since I've looked through my .41 AE barrel.  I sold all my .41 AE ammunition and brass for enough money to make me put the .41 AE barrel in mothballs.

Run a brush and patch through the barrel and clean it up.  Then take another look at it and you may see the polygonal rifling.  If I get a chance later today, I'll dig in the back of one of my safes and see if I can locate my barrel and see what kind of rifling it has in it.

Hope this helps.

Fred

[DPNM1A]

Thank you for the tip in a clean up Reloaderfred. It does appear that john_bud may be correct. It does  look like it has a polygonal barrel I'd guess. There seems to be some type of twist in it. I am new to this hobby and I had not heard of that before. Nothing personal, but Glock's don't do anything for me. I've never looked at one or read anything about them.

[Bret]

That barrel is out of a Jericho 941, so it should have polygonal rifling like other Jericho's.  Read the design and features information in the link below.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IWI_Jericho_941
That barrel will not work in your 45 Witness though.  In fact, I'm not even sure that it would work in a 9mm Witness.  I'm pretty sure you'd need a 9mm Jericho (Baby Eagle).  Then there's the issue of bullets and brass which are virtually impossible to find.  As win308 pointed out, the 40S&W killed this cartridge.

[larryflew]

As an aside IMO it was like the old VHS Beta wars way back when, The Beta was a much better format but the VHS won out like the 41 was better than the 40 but marketing prevailed.

Note after the info below this:  This was when I had a Jerico 941 and it came with both barrels. Shooting with factory ammo was my only comparison as I did not reload back then or even know much about cartridges.  I thought the 41 shot more like a 45 with a push rather than a snap like the 40 has.

[Bret]

I'd say that the 41AE was better in that all it took was a barrel and magazine swap to convert a 9mm to 41AE.  However, the 41AE has a rebated rim which can be problematic for extraction, so the 40S&W is better in that regard.

[ReloaderFred]

The .41 AE case was very expensive to make, since they ended up with so much scrap after cutting the rebated rim.  Quality Cartridge said they would only make the brass to fill orders, since at the time cartridge brass was costing them $6.24 a pound, and they were getting $1.75 a pound for scrap brass.

At one time, I had 2,000 rounds of virgin primed .41 AE brass, and 1,000 rounds of factory .41 AE ammunition.  I sold it all to buy a Witness Elite Match in .38 Super, and still had enough money left over to buy some extra magazines.

If you locate any .41 AE brass, you can use .40 S&W loading data for it, with the same weight bullets.  In fact, some loading manuals just refer you to the .40 S&W data for the .41 AE.

Hope this helps.

Fred