I spent a few hours over the last couple of weeks scrubbing on a Farrow barrel.  It's a .22 rimfire.  It looks to be a 12-groove, but even with a magnifying glass, all those grooves in that little bitty hole are hard to count.  What's odd is the chamber or lack thereof.  It is just a smooth tube, with no real end and no leade, unless the entire chamber is the leade.  The rifling starts about the length of a .22 LR case from the breech and a loaded .22 LR enters smoothly and extracts normally.  Twist is a uniform 16", so it seems to me that it is intended for 40 grain bullets.  I know that in the BP days, both the .22 Short and the .22 LR were loaded with 40 grain bullets.

Has anyone encountered a chamber like the one I described?  Will such a barrel shoot OK with modern match ammo?  Something is amiss with the mainspring & hammer, or I'd answer the latter question at the range.

I chambered a loaded round of CCI Green Tag and closed the lever.  The cartridge extracted easily and had the barest hint of rifling marks on the front part of the full-diameter part of the bullet.  Unfortunately, the rifling impression was not uniform.    I'll try other brands later.  It's a morning for the range.

I learned that with a Farrow, you must be careful to keep the rim of the cartridge behind the extractor and let the breech block chamber the cartridge.    Has it been shot a lot?  The bore seems sort of frosted for 3 or 4 inches in front of the chamber, but perhaps I still have to clean some more.   

The rifle has seen some abuse.  Farrows had an integral tang sight base built into the action. The rocker part of the tang sight fit into this base, held in place by the normal sort of screw functioning as a pivot pin.  Some oaf broke off the tang sight, leaving the sharp broken end of the tang sight stem.   There is a scratch on the outside of the barrel near the breech that looks as if it was made with an old-time church key.  And someone made off with the buttplate and the inserts to the Winchester globe front sight.    I tried replacing the broken tang sight stem with one from a Parts Unknown sight.  It looks as if a bit of work with a stone is needed, but it can be made to fit.

I took off the buttstock.  If I close the breech with the buttstock removed, the hammer falls very slowly when I pull the trigger.  I'm still working up my courage to take disassembly further.  Looks as if the gunk of the ages is in there.  But how many Farrows does one see?  I think all is restorable.