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.