POTD: De Lisle Carbine in 375 Raptor

For today’s Photo Of The Day, we have pictures of a very cool project by a company called Cotton Branch Custom Firearms. It’s a Lee-Enfield rifle converted to a De Lisle carbine configuration except instead of .45 ACP it is chambered in 375 Raptor. The latter is a .375-caliber short-action cartridge based on the .308 Winchester case.

Here is what Joshua Herring, the owner of Cotton Branch Custom Firearms, said about this project:

In January of 2022, I started what would eventually be referred to as the De Lisle Project. It was a commitment to build 40 De Lisle Commando Carbines. Somewhere in the middle of that, one of my regular customers pitched the idea of doing a De Lisle build in 375 Raptor. He had already done his due diligence and was convinced that it would work. I dug into it for myself and it didn’t take long to realize it probably would. So when the time came, I sourced an Indian Lee Enfield and started making parts for the build. He was right. It worked fine. The gun chambers, extracts, and ejects on par with any quality new production rifle. It’s a Lee Enfield No.1 Mk III Ishapour that was originally chambered in 7.62×51. I removed the front half of the gun and replaced it with a titanium integral silencer based solely on the De Lisle design, with a barrel machined from a 5R stainless blank. The can has a huge open chamber in the rear with a blast collar over a ported barrel. Gas pressure has to change directions several times in order to escape the blast chamber and then travel through another 13 inches of suppressor to make it to the atmosphere. So by the time it gets there, there’s really not much left of it. I believe that’s what makes the design so successful, the sheer volume inside the can along with a complicated exit path, and other factors but those two being the main contributors. In this particular caliber, supersonic suppression is about average, but subsonic suppression is absolutely phenomenal. We were very pleased with the outcome.