The commentary on Bowen's site, states that the pistol barrels were a composite of a fluid steel liner and an thin overlay of English gun tube material. This suggests to me that an old damascus tube was applied to the outside of the liner material. This overlay could be silver soldered in place, or could simply be fitted using Acraglas. The downside to this process, is that it would be difficult to have much taper in the barrel tube. Note that the barrel on the Colt and also the barrel on the Vaquero appear to have very straight profiles. Too, for the damascus barrel purist, the liner would always be visible at the muzzle. I don't mean to be negative about the Bowen barrels. I think they have created beautiful guns. Just pointing out how they would differ from an entirely damascus barrel tube.
I am curious if any barrels were ever made by the Warner process. Or, was the patent just for the concept of making them. As a blacksmith, I see some challenges to forge welding that assembly of materials. Not that it couldn't be done; just might be difficult.
I talked to Bill Fiorini several year ago. We didnt discuss all of the ways that he had welded, or attempted to weld damascus barrels. But at the time, his process was to wrap a riband of damascus material around a solid steel rod. Before wrapping, the riband was shaped to an elongated diamond profile. The edges of the riband were overlapped as it was wound around the rod. While this is a workable method, it is difficult to control the amount of overlap. Variations in the overlap will affect the damascus pattern significantly. There would also be a limit to recreating the old gun barrel damascus patterns by the overlapped riband process. Several of the old patterns, could not be made with an overlapped riband.
Heinz Denig made at least a couple of damascus pistol barrels. It appears to me that Denig used a very similar process to that of Fiorini's.
None of the old gun barrels that I have examined show an indication that the riband edges were overlapped. The riband had square edges and the connection between the turns was a butt weld.
Below are a couple photos of Fiorini doing a barrel welding demo.
