Keith, a 24 year difference in age and I would think the steels would be very close, maybe by now a little more carbon content as Chuck was saying.
Plus, the same weld/test could be done on a piece of yours.
Maybe, maybe not. As Drew notes above, even two guns made in the same week may have used rough barrel tubes from differing sources and materials. That's why I mentioned earlier that it would possibly be nice if you could recover the hacksaw shavings from this exact barrel. I'm sure it would be difficult or impossible to spark or hardness test steel sawdust by conventional means, but there may be other tests that could use a very small sample. I'd bet Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy could tell us a lot, but I have no idea where you could get that done or what it would cost. I used that method many years ago in Organic Chemistry Lab as a tool to analyze some very small samples of unknown crystals. It was something that only large universities had at the time. Still, other tests were often needed to confirm results. You don't have a buddy who works at an FBI Crime Lab or something, do you?
