One has to study old guns a lot to determine how much taper and flair the barrels had. Most of the barrels made today
are copies of patterns that we made years ago. Let's take a look at the 38" series of barrels that we made and called
our "transitional" series. These all evolved out of the heavy "D" weight barrel which was made as a copy of the barrel
on the Edward Marshall rifle.......can't get much more original than that. After looking at the nice profile of that barrel, we
thought, "gee, I wonder how that would look in a smaller version, thus we came up with an A, B, C weight barrel to go with that D weight barrel. They all looked good and soon became popular.....be they right or wrong, we were in the business to make and sell barrels. The 44" series of barrels that were known as the "Bicentennial" barrel was designed
by John Bivins in order to produce those Bicentennial guns. Once again, we also made some smaller versions of this barrel which became popuar.......we later changed the series and called it our "Dickert" barrel. If you start to study those
old guns, you have to realize that most of them were of the hand forged type of barrel and many did not have a huge taper and flair to them. Today, people don't want that muzzle heavy feel to a gun, and most are happy to live with the
barrels that are now being made, and how many guys for example, look at a Jim Kibler rifle and say, that's a nice gun but
the barrel has too much flair.....come on, gee whiz...............Don
