Doverham,
I have to respectfully disagree here. There may have been "...a lot of art..." the first time it all came together, but now, it's more about copying versions of what worked (whether it's the heavy barrels for a duck gun or light barrels for an upland gun.

Barrels can be and without a doubt, are measured even by H&H (I saw that in the video), suitable steels for barrels are narrowed down pretty well to fractions of percentage of alloying agents.

I think a more accurate discription of building a good set of barrels would be: there's a lot of skill in replicating the processes to create them.

Last edited by Chuck H; 05/12/11 01:40 PM.