heavy barrels/ small bores

[dannybb55]

Never forget fashion, maybe they liked the profile. Also, for every new barrel size you need a new plane.

[The other DWS]

I want to thank Gary for the link to his article.  copied and saved it to my files.  good over all perspective.  It helps me a lot to keep these old arms in cultural and economic context rather than just as arts'n crafts objects.

[keweenaw]

I think it's naive to think that most of the late 18th century Pennsylvania gunsmiths were forging their own barrels.  We know of a number of eastern PA barrel makers whose marks are frequently encountered on barrels and also know about barrel mills in the Lancaster area.  The skilled German tradesmen who migrated to eastern PA would have included many smiths with a hundreds' year old family skill set.  The contemporary europeans  were forging fowler barrels with wall thickness thinner than you can make by drilling, boring and turning so a lighter weight rifle barrel would have been no big deal.  We shouldn't forget that the time frame we are talking about had craftsmen in all the eastern seaboard cities doing some of the finest furniture and silver work ever done.

Tom

[G-Man]

As a followup to Gary's post - by the 1790s there were iron furnaces beginning to crop up throughout the southern Appalachians - from Virginia, southward into Tennessee and western North Carolina and beyond - iron was even made in Kentucky before 1800.  These furnaces used using local resources to produce the iron. 

This is also the period from which we begin to see surviving examples of iron mounted rifles turning up more frequently than prior to 1790.

Guy

[The other DWS]

I know I'm coming into this forum late and maybe I'm just revisiting topics that have been long hashed over and settled.  if so, and this is repetitive, I wish someone would PM me and let me know and direct me to the older discussions.


let's face it gunsmiths were in it to make a living. Some were indeed much better artists and craftsmen than others.  (I suspect some of our perceptions may be skewed by the surviving example we have access to----but thats a whole different discussion I'm sure)

  But since the name of the game was to make a living, that means working in the most profitable efficient manner possible.  Why would one forge one's own barrel if a barrel was available at reasonable cost to be purchased, modified as needed, and installed; same as for locks, and probably a whole lot more furniture than is commonly thought.  Don't we pretty much accept that many/most locks used were commercially made?

Surely a properly trained riflesmith could create a complete gun from scratch, (including chopping down his own tree I suppose, for charcoal and the stock) and well may have had to as part of the apprentice training process. But why would he if it was more efficient/profitable to use pre-made purchased components that he then shaped and modified to his and his customers satisfaction.  I suspect that value added for the customer then as now was/is the wise selection of components and the quality of modification and assembly as well as the skill and art of the embellishment on the high end products.

[Dr. Tim-Boone]

Amen......

[dannybb55]

It could be that rifling wasn't set in stone as it is now. The number of grooves, depth, width, twist, wall thickness and length were probably debatable and a smith with his own opinion made his own barrel. Maybe they thought that factory made was junk and only hand made would do for their customers. Barrel mills were cited for cutting corners and using inferior iron. Maybe too, making a pile of barrels was no big deal, the trick is to invite a few friendly gunsmiths over for a hammer in when business is slow, weld up a bunch of tubes, bore them, straighten them and ream them ready for the customer's desires. Each smith would go home with a dozen barrels maybe. When a customer wanted a certain bore, then the barrel was finished.

[flintriflesmith]

... Maybe too, making a pile of barrels was no big deal, the trick is to invite a few friendly gunsmiths over for a hammer in when business is slow, weld up a bunch of tubes, bore them, straighten them and ream them ready for the customer's desires. Each smith would go home with a dozen barrels maybe. When a customer wanted a certain bore, then the barrel was finished.

You better stock up on beer and chips for that party because each hand forged, hand reamed, and file dressed barrel will take well over 100 man hours to produce!

The reaming is by far the most time consuming part of the process and that is why "boring mills" sprang up in any area with enough demand to support one. They were often run off the same water wheel as a grist mill or saw mill. There is an early 19th-century Lewis Miller print of a PA barrel boring mill burning down and his note mentions what a loss it will be to the gunsmiths he names. The print may be in Kaufman's book.
Gary

[KentSmith]

we are also constrained by the availability of surviving artifacts on which to base our observations.  Many southern guns were confiscated after the Civil War and destroyed.  Many others were shot out and used up.

With 90% of the population living on farms and by necessity a frugal consumer base, it would follow that gunsmiths took advantage of manufactured barrels, locks, etc. just as we do today, so they could produce a product in a workmanlike manner for sale to the customers at a price that was competitive in that market.  I am sure the majority of the people on this board, given the time and opportuntiy could learn to forge, ream out and rifle a barrel.  And that would be a great learning experience, but why would you do it for every gun you make when so many excellent offerings are available on the market at a fraction of the cost it would take you to produce the same by hand at a fraction of the time.  Some day someone might be saying about your gun "why did they use such exagerated profiles unlike those from the 18th century?"  "What was so special aboout 50 and 54 caliber when  .....?"

[dannybb55]

I do not think that the work was easy or short, I had in mind the corn husking parties or timber operations; a group with common interests gets together to accomplish a difficult task.
 At my job for a modern example we just replaced 4000 corroded bronze screws, 15 steam bent ribs, reskirted the transom, removed 160 square feet of planking and about the same amount of transom in the last month. That's six men working with hand tools and a boatload of clamps., One man, in his back yard couldn't have done that work in a year.
 If four men were forging barrels and two were reaming, then the tubes would pile up and when the iron was all forged they could dress and crop the tubes and share the burden of turning the great wheel. Maybe that's how the early barrel mills did it/ got started.

[The other DWS]

just a question here;  Can those of you guys who get a chance to look at a lot of originals tell from looking how the barrel was made?  Would a commercial  "mill-made" barrel appear any different from one that was manually forged by a smith and his apprentices?

On another note, has there been any discussion of how and why, and to what extent original rifles survive and how that impacts our current perceptions?  I think it'd be an interesting, and hopefully illuminating, discussion.  I tried searching the archives and didn't find anything but may not have quite the right terms

[keweenaw]

I have two guns with hand forged barrels.  They are pretty easy to tell especially with the barrel out of the stock.  On both of these the bottom of the barrel wasn't cleaned up completely by draw filing and you can still see some hammer marks and forge scale.  Also the barrels tend not to be so clean in their top lines as the current barrels are - that is to say there are more undulations in them.  Draw filing in great for cleaning a surface but it doesn't take out those background undulations unless one works very carefully at it for a very long time.  My later, straight barrels are very uniform and I suspect were surface ground at the mill  using a large wheel to remove the undulations the rollers would have put into them.

Tom

[flintriflesmith]

just a question here;  Can those of you guys who get a chance to look at a lot of originals tell from looking how the barrel was made?  Would a commercial  "mill-made" barrel appear any different from one that was manually forged by a smith and his apprentices? ...

There are two answers to this question: (1) Boring mills, at least in the early days, were just that. The barrel forger took the welded tubes to the mill to be reamed. (2) Later more elaborate boring mills also included large grinding wheels for dressing the barrel flats. When those marks survive on the bottom of a barrel ithey tell us that barrel was finished by grinding but no not tell us who welded the tube.
Gary

[dannybb55]

I bet the rough undersided barrel's inletting was not perfect either, adequate, just not machine perfect. It seems like I saw a southern rifle that sported hammer and scale on all eight flats, and I have seen a few rifles worn completely out that had visible welding seams. Cold shut seams must have passed proofing but not a viewing at a factory. Somewhere in one of C P Russell's books he discusses rifles manufactured for the Indian factory system that were turned down because of visible flaws because the tribes would not accept them ( must have been used to British work ).
 To bring it back to full circle, a thick tube with a small, low pressure bore can work with some welding flaws. There are three ways to check the weld, how it feels under the hammer at the moment of welding, by eye and how she rings. After that the proof is in the powder after a lot more work.I would love to give it a try once or twice before I retire my anvil.

[buttplate]

Corrosion might be one idea but I have another. Early Ky's had long and rather slender barrels with large calibers. The barrel length was associated with the slow-burning gunpowder of that time. The longer the barrel gave the slow-burning gunpowder time to build up add'l compression to drive the ball. As gunpowder improvements were made, it burned faster, thus permitting the barrels to become shorter and heavier. Another reason for heavy barrels could be their use as "beef" guns, or target rifles. This was a popular sport in the rural areas in the 1800's. Check the tangs to see if they were drilled to fit a sight. I have seen one Huntingdon County target rifle that weighed 19 lbs.

Calibers also dropped with the disappearance of deer and other large game. Squirrels replaced them as a source of food.


Buttplate