Barrel Welding Question

[David R. Pennington]

Question for you barrel welding smiths. What would be your preferred dimensions for a  wrought iron skelp? I want to get another one ready to weld and curious what you might consider ideal. Last one we welded two pieces of light wagon tire together to get a heavy enough piece.

[shifty]

  Way beyond my grasp but i would like to watch.Back in 70 i used to go into the gunshop in Colonial Williamsburg about every week end and watch them guys i all ways thought how in the world can they do that.

[mark brier]

1/2" x 3"x about 4" shorter than finished barrel wanted. If making a swamped barrel forge or cut a taper in your skelp depending upon length around 2 1/2" wide at muzzle end. Then spread the bar back to 3" wide for its entire length. This will give your your tapering thickness setting up the swamp in the tapered welded up tube. Jump they barrel at the muzzle end to achieve the flaring back out towards the muzzle.
Mark Brier

[David R. Pennington]

I am going to inventory my junk and see what I’ve got.

[Jay Close]

For what it's worth, what Mark describes is how we prepared skelps at the Williamsburg shop when I worked summers there in the early 1980's. We hot chiseled a sliver off of one edge of a parallel sided bar to make a bar tapered in width. Then flattened the bar back out to parallel sided but now tapered in thickness. The scrap sliver cut off was set aside to make small parts.

[David R. Pennington]

Thanks guys for the input.