Wrought iron barrels

[okawbow]

How long was wrought iron in general use for rifle barrels? I have a rifle coming that was probably made in the mid 1800's. Does it look like the barrel is wrought iron?

Picture 009 by okawbow, on Flickr

[sbaker]

if i remember correctly bessemer steel didnt come into play until the 1850's but steel was still expensive until after the war for states rights. in the 1880 there were several mill through out the country that produced steel so I would say most small time gunsmiths used wrought iron until well into the early 1900's

[JV Puleo]

English made crucible steel a.k.a. "cast steel" was used for barrels as early as the 1820s. Remington usually takes credit for introducing it, but this isn't true. They should, more properly, say they popularized it. All military barrels were made of iron until the introduction of the Trapdoor Springfield. Bessemer steel doesn't come into production until the 1850s, but not, as a rule, here. In fact, as late as the 1840s Springfield was importing all its steel from England and Germany and lamenting the fact that no good steel was produced in America. From about 1855 on even the iron used at Springfield was imported because no American iron could be used reliably with the new barrel rolling & welding machines introduced to build the M1855 series of arms.

A civilian rifle barrel from the mid-19th century could be either but if made of steel it will probably say "cast steel" somewhere on it. (It was more expensive than iron, thus sellers wanted people to know what it was). A cast steel pistol barrel is much more likely than a rifle barrel as they could be drilled. Full length barrel drilling for rifles wasn't developed until after the Civil War... the earlier barrels were drilled as short blanks and drawn through rollers over mandrels to lengthen them. (They are, effectively, seamless DOM tubing). The term "cast steel" does not mean the barrel was cast. Its a reference to the method by which the steel was made.

[Acer Saccharum]

Thanks, JV. Good info.

Remington supplied blank rifle barrels for many NY smiths who liked to rifle their own barrels. Lewis of Troy was one. Morgan James.
I have a Lewis barrel that says 'Remington' on the bottom flat. Later in the 19th Cent, cartridge gun builders also bought Remington barrels and rifed their own, such as A.O.Zischang from Syracuse, NY.

Remington was ideally situated on the canal system, shipping barrels all over the state and the world  from central NYS.

[Gaeckle]

Thanks, JV. Good info.

Remington supplied blank rifle barrels for many NY smiths who liked to rifle their own barrels. Lewis of Troy was one. Morgan James.
I have a Lewis barrel that says 'Remington' on the bottom flat. Later in the 19th Cent, cartridge gun builders also bought Remington barrels and rifed their own, such as A.O.Zischang from Syracuse, NY.

Remington was ideally situated on the canal system, shipping barrels all over the state and the world  from central NYS.

Very True.....many Ohio guns sport remington barrels.

[okawbow]

Thanks for the info. It appears to me, from the picture, that the surface of the barrel has irregularities in it. The seller also said there were no markings on the barrel.

As this rifle may have been a contemporary of later St Louis Hawken rifles; what were the Hawken barrels made of?

[sbaker]

In the U.S. by 1867 only 3 tons of bessemer steel was produced but 13 years later the amount was 1,000,000 tons surpassing Great Britain for the first time. In 1899 8.5 million tons was produced.

[Dphariss]

The Springfield muskets of the Civil War had "best iron" welded barrels.
But I doubt that best iron was the slag riddled iron many people think of as "wrought iron".

Dan

[JV Puleo]

Dan is spot on. The Civil War rifle barrels were made of Marshall's Iron... this was something of a political issue because it was British-made and had to be imported. It had very uniform slag inclusions. Under extreme magnification they look like long black needles running with the grain of the metal. Its the slag precipitating out of the hot iron that insulates the edge where the barrel rolling machines forced a welded seam. Up until then, Springfield had been using a lot of American iron for barrels, mostly Salisbury iron. The American iron worked adequately when the barrels were hand welded because the barrel forger could flux them when he hit a bare spot but it was not uniform enough to work when the welding was done by machine. This was a huge headache because there was a lot of political pressure to "Buy American" from Congressmen who wanted the business for their constituents.

Remington supplied both iron and steel barrels, so the mark "Remington" does not mean its a steel barrel. There is a Remington company advertising broadside illustrated in Charlie Schiff's book on the Remington Beals revolvers that lists the barrels they supplied and their prices, ca. 1861.

The steel for the Remington barrels was also imported though I don't know from where. This was true even after the CW, as the Danish RB contract was held up over the fact that the material for the barrels was not delivered on time. Remington would have had to pay a big indemnity to the Danish government and settled the issue by giving the Danes a license to make the RB's themselves without paying a royalty.

Early Bessemer steel was full of blow holes from the air blast and wasn't thought suitable for rifle barrels. Sir Joseph Whitworth came up with the idea of re-rolling hot and under extreme pressure to eliminate this problem. His product was called "fluid steel."

[JCKelly]

Decent cast steel was not made in the USA until just after the unfortunate dispute amongst the states. Collins Axe Co., despairing of the highly variable response to heat treat of US cast steel, initiated the work on good quality cast steel. I do not know what mill.
The British had the advantage over us.
They (Huntsman, early 18th century) developed the process, so had experience & knew what they were doing in Sheffield.
The locally available clay, runs in my mind it was called Sturbridge clay, had properties which helped them deoxidize the melt before casting it.
The English had long-term contracts with the Swedes for the best grade of iron. I believe that meant for low phosphorus iron. Seems to me phosphorus was detrimental to carburizing the wrought iron into blister steel, the first step to making crucible steel. Phos is harmful to all properties of steel, such as toughness and ductility. But it makes the stuff machine with short chips so some people love it, regardless of properties. $$$

I believe Sharps rifles were made with wrought iron barrels pretty late. Think Colt's rifle musket used a steel barrel. Colt got his steel, and/or rough steel forgings, from England.

[mike blair]

phos in wrought iron makes it red short.that means it crumbles when forged at any  usefull heat.ive not run in to it often.but its a big headache when you do.

[doug]

    Bessemer's process came out in 1854 and within a year was being used widely.  The unfortunate thing was that english iron was high in phosphorous and the process to remove that did not come out until the mid 1870s by an american named Gilchrist if my memory is correct.  The reason that swedish and german steels were preferred for tools was that they were high in maganese and low in phosphorous.

    Of the guns that I have owned, the earliest was by John Moll (father or son? ) which was definitely wrought iron with large coarse blotches in the metal after rusting.   I also owned a 1842 percussion Springfield and that was a welded tube with a longitudinal seam down the bottom of the barrel.   I have several british percussion rifles and they are damascus (twist) steel.   I think the british started rolling their barrels in the 1850s starting with a piece about 6" long and 3" diameter with a hole drilled or punched in the middle.  I can't remember if they started punching and switched to drilling or vice versa

    In the photo by the original poster, it looks to me that there is a faint longitudinal pattern to the rust pits near the muzzle and that is suggestive of wrought iron

cheers Doug

[Acer Saccharum]

I thought the Springfield Armory had 9" long by 2" diam blanks with a drilled hole down the middle, that they rolled thru successive dies (with a mandrel inside) to get the length and contour. I thought this was around the war between the states.

[JV Puleo]

I think you'll find that that process came in with the re-tooling to make the M1873 trapdoor. That is the process that was generally used to make a cast steel barrel. Its the process Remington used. Deep hole drilling hadn't been invented and it was impossible to drill a straight hole through a full size barrel (at least on an industrial scale) until new equipment was developed. I have seen an illustration of a machine at Springfield to do just that but I'm unsure when it was introduced and we can't always take the captions in books as being gospel. I remember an extensive article in a 1900 issue of American Machinist on the Springfield Arsenal and the manufacture of the Krag that, while it had good information, also had some screaming errors.

[satwel]

Acer,
At the time of the Civil War, Springfield Armory was using a system of rollers to form and weld musket barrels. The wrought iron skelp was heated then run through progressively smaller channels between two massive rollers that would bend it around a mandrel into a tighter and tighter U's. After re-heating to welding temp, the final pass through the rollers would weld the seam and form the finished contour of the barrel. The Brits gave us that technology.

The process you described, forming a red hot 9" x 2" cylinder with a hole through the middle, into a rifle barrel by passing it between rollers was adopted when Springfield Armory switched to using steel for barrels for the Model 1873 Trapdoor. To this day it is still a practical technique for mass producing rifle barrels.   

[JCKelly]

Whitworth's Fluid Compressed Steel was just that. He had the cast ingot solidify under pressure to keep gas (carbon monoxide) bubbles from forming.
That carbon monoxide formed from the reaction between all the oxygen in the steel, and the carbon. Maybe 0.4% in Whitworth's steel.

Later the steel mills learned to add the right amount of silicon, then aluminum, to react with the oxygen. This step is called "deoxidizing"  or "killing" the molten steel. Killing, because the ingot is quiet as it freezes/solidifies, otherwise it would be boiling. One old boss of mine said that aluminum killed steel made a "dry weld" when they tried to forge weld it. He was born about 1905. I suppose that dry weld (didn't really stick together) was from the tiny amount of aluminum oxide in the steel.

The last heat of wrought iron made in the USA was about 1960 in Western Pennsylvania.

Walter Cline's book shows a couple of guys hand forging a barrel, I assume of wrought iron, around the 1920's or maybe 1930's.

I remember when Jerry Kirklin gave me a left-over bit from an old wrought iron barrel on a rifle he was restoring. When I looked at it under the microscope . . . THAT was a weld? So @!*% full of holes it shoulda been able to float. About then I stopped shooting any old guns.

The lines in this forged Belgian Colt Brevete revolver frame are from slag in the wrought iron used -


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[Dphariss]

English made crucible steel a.k.a. "cast steel" was used for barrels as early as the 1820s. Remington usually takes credit for introducing it, but this isn't true. They should, more properly, say they popularized it. All military barrels were made of iron until the introduction of the Trapdoor Springfield. Bessemer steel doesn't come into production until the 1850s, but not, as a rule, here. In fact, as late as the 1840s Springfield was importing all its steel from England and Germany and lamenting the fact that no good steel was produced in America. From about 1855 on even the iron used at Springfield was imported because no American iron could be used reliably with the new barrel rolling & welding machines introduced to build the M1855 series of arms.

A civilian rifle barrel from the mid-19th century could be either but if made of steel it will probably say "cast steel" somewhere on it. (It was more expensive than iron, thus sellers wanted people to know what it was). A cast steel pistol barrel is much more likely than a rifle barrel as they could be drilled. Full length barrel drilling for rifles wasn't developed until after the Civil War... the earlier barrels were drilled as short blanks and drawn through rollers over mandrels to lengthen them. (They are, effectively, seamless DOM tubing). The term "cast steel" does not mean the barrel was cast. Its a reference to the method by which the steel was made.

I believe the Civil War Musket barrels were welded from  short skelps then rolled to stretch them to contour.

Dan