Straight from McIntosh, on Fox barrel-making: "But just as frames take time to file and finish, so do barrels, and the hand-work needed to strike a set of heavy tubes into a pair of lightweight barrels could eat up a sizeable chunk of company profit." Right . . . they just hammered away, costing the company more worker time, which = money. Why not just start with the correct weight tubes in the first place?
Hey Larry what do you want the workforce to do when they don't have the proper materials to do the job as efficiently as planned? Are they supposed to sit around on their butts waiting for the next batch of proper weight barrels to show up? Come on Larry think
TB, you're trying to make something fairly simple into rocket science. You yourself have suggested that Sterlingworths weren't custom ordered guns. Well, some of them were . . . but most certainly were not. Therefore, the guys putting them together had a simple solution available which did not involve spending a lot of time hammering barrels: If you have heavy barrels, match them to a stock with denser, heavier wood. Voila: heavier gun . . . but one that still BALANCES quite well. Reverse also true: match lightweight barrels to lighter stock wood. That is, unless you think maybe a whole lot of Foxes have really p*ss poor balance. (I don't.) Somebody special orders a light gun, I suppose it's possible they'd do some work on heavy tubes if that's all they had. Or they could wait (not likely that long, given the fact that, with the exception of one year, even during the Depression of the 30's they were making at least 2,000 12ga Sterlingworths/year) for lighter tubes.
The above is why I suggested you conduct the same experiment I have (weighing barrels and forend, comparing to stock and receiver), because it would clearly establish in your brain that you don't just mix those elements willy-nilly. Unless maybe you want, as a result, a gun with the handling characteristics of a 2 x 4. I don't believe that would've done good things for the guns' reputation.
