doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com OT: Gun writing gone bad?

"A Damascus barrel, like a chain, is no stronger than it's weakest element, whether it is a faulty weld, soft or brittle metal, or a hidden slag incursion. Proof firing did not always reveal these defects. Indeed, there is room for suspicion that proof firing could open these tiny fissures invisible to the eye. These would slowly be enlarged by corrosion and the strain of continued firing. This undoubtedly explains the instances in which Damascus barrels hold up for years with magnum loads, and then burst with a light field load. This treacherous sort of behavior should certainly be noted by those who use only black powder loads in such guns...... "DAMASCUS BARRELS- BEAUTIFUL BUT DEADLY" by Lee Kinnett Gun Digest 1972

I remember Oscar Gaddy was familiar with this article and he agreed with it.

I am a long time admirer of the beauty of damascus barrels but also agree with this analysis. If you want to shoot these guns it's your business and your right but the above opinion is accurate. I have NO interest is rekindling the damascus conflict again but I ask all of you to consider the following:
Peter Dyson in Great Britian, has a stock of original and probably Belgian damascus blanks available. Does anyone think they could get ANY current double manufacturer to make up a new and guaranteed double gun for them using these blanks?
Jim

Jim,
Consider the following: Why the heck would any gunmaker "guarantee" a gun built from barrels of unknown origin, regardless of whether they were damascus or chromoly steel?

Take a set of Krupp tubes into H&H and ask them to build a gun and guarantee it. They'll show you the door, I'm sure. There's just no reason for anyone to guarantee something unknown by a gunmaker. And you telling them they are the finest Krupp steel isn't good enough any more than a metal saleman saying the metal supplied for a 747 is good.

From http://www.wwgreener.com/newguns.html
"Barrels - are made of the highest quality steel and bored to maintain the famous choke boring improvements, made by W W Greener in the 1870s, to optimise shooting performance, and to ensure patterns of shot guaranteed to meet customers' exact requirements whether for game, wildfowl or clay pigeon shooting. A few pairs of guns are being made with interchangeable steel and Damascus barrels."
These barrels are reported to be old stock found by Greener.
The Dyson barrels are from E. Heuse-Lemoine http://www.peterdyson.co.uk:80/acatalog/ORIGINAL_DAMASCUS_BARRELS.html

Mac makes my skin crawl. Not his writing-his posing in the pictures i've seen. I had to quit looking at them. I wonder how many times the photogs had to wait for him to get the pipe out.

Quote
"Consider the following: Why the heck would any gunmaker "guarantee" a gun built from barrels of unknown origin, regardless of whether they were damascus or chromoly steel? "

Chuck:
I agree that no manufacturer would make up a gun using barrels of unknown origin If someone just walked in the door with them. However I doubt if a manufacturer would have any qualms about ordering and using, for example, Krupp steel barrels, in a new gun and would procure them from the steel maker at the owners request.
Do you honestly think they would do the same with new damascus barrels even if they could be found? I suspect their,lawyers who control more of our freedom than I'm comfortable with,would be all over them in regards to liability.
And there certainly would be liability concerns even with all kinds of warnings to only use low pressure ammunition.
You blow up a 100 year old damascus shotgun by a long defunct manufacturer shame on you; You blow up a new damascus barreled shotgun made by a current manufacturer with assets shame on them.
The product liability lawyers would be gleefully rubbing their hands together.
Jim

MM loves those Foxes. However, his comment about the HE is beyond the pale. I have had them. They are unusually heavy, and the old steel is not up to modern standards. It is very common to find the chambers buldged from using modern 3" loads. The most prolific writer on Foxes advised me of this, and I discovered it was true. This does not condemn the words or writings of MM. It simply shows that he writes opinion articles which shows his opinion is sometimes WRONG.

Read Larry's post on the proofing of these bbls very carefully. He is absolutely spot on on this. I do not believe a single one of you can produce evidence that any flaw in a bbl, undetected by the proof house, has ever damaged a bbl. It is true that a few bbls which had passed proof have later failed. This is as true of steel bbls as damascus, incidently, possibly even more so. "Flaws" in a steel bbl are more apt to take the form of a seam, which may be undetectable from the surface, have just enough substance to stand proof & later through wear give way. A flaw in damascus is much more apt to be a localized area. I have fired a twist bbl with a known flaw (visable) going completely through the wall in the form of a crack approx ¼ long in a radial direction & about half that length in a longitudal direction with several 3 3/4de-1¼oz Rem Express factory loads with no further opening of this crack or any visable change to it's structure. When acquired, in the form of a parts gun, one side of this crack was dented in & the other raised in the form of a flap & you could look through it into the bore. An expanding dent plug was placed beneath it & the dent part raised & the flap hammered down til the crack was closed up & became barely visable. I don't recall the exact number at this point but several of these Express loads were fired from the "Firestone" via a long string. I did not really expect this bbl to "Explode" but did fully expect it to open back up with gas spewing from the aperture. This simply did not occur & was not even a trace of "Soot" on the bbls extremity.
I also read "DAMASCUS BARRELS- BEAUTIFUL BUT DEADLY" but do not recall any "Absolute Evidence" he gave to back up his opinion. It was based I believe in it's entirety on "Speculation" with the causes of the bursts he cited being un-determined. To me well over a century of Proof House experience carries much more weight.
PS; I do believe the "Flaw" in the above cited bbl was the result of being struck a blow on a sharp cornered object & then supsequently fired with the resulting "Obstruction" actually causing the crack to form. Never-the-less even with that much loss of integrity the surronding metal held up.

Jim and Jimmy--Note Drew's post, above. It would appear that Greener isn't too concerned about potential defects in their Damascus barrels.

My father retired as a John Deere production worker in 1970. At one point, he ran a machine called a Magnaflux. His job was to detect flaws in the steel used for various major tractor parts. That's pre-1970 technology. Would be interesting to run the same sort of testing on Damascus barrels, and on steel barrels from the same era.

I have great respect for the series of articles Lee Kennett did on proof in various countries for Gun Digest back in the 70's. Probably the best material available, although I don't think it was ever published in book form as Kennett apparently intended. But his expertise was as an historian, not as a metallurgist. Just as American shotshell boxes contain a warning that we shouldn't use them in Damascus guns, they also warn against long shells in short chambers--and we know that warning to be invalid, assuming the pressure developed by the shell does not exceed the service pressure of the gun in question. My guess is that in this case, Kennett was simply repeating the same warning that ammunition manufacturers had sounded for decades. And, if you take a Damascus-barreled gun built to withstand loads of lower pressure than generated by modern American shotshells (and most of them were, just as were most steel-barreled guns built prior to WWI), there is indeed good rationale behind the warning. But it would apply equally to a steel-barreled gun subjected to the same level of proof as a Damascus-barreled gun.