Total production for those years were approximately 600k as you state but pistol tubes were also included. At this time there were in excess of 50k workmen, workwomen & work-children. Around 1907 info suggest that the American market was strongly shifting to fluid steel.
Absolutely! While I agree with the calculations of man hours per rough tube for the barrel smiths, that would only be a fraction of the total time involved in the production of a finished set of Damascus barrels. And that remains the source of my amazement that these guns were made affordable to the average shooter of the time. Of course, final boring, reaming, chambering, striking, soldering, etc. would be virtually the same for fluid steel tubes. But for Damascus production, we would also have to factor in the hours of apprenctices and laborers who fired and tended the forges, plus a myriad of other support tasks, also going back to the man hours of the early rolling mills which supplied the rods and ribbands.
Steve's comment about forging good sections of rejected shotgun tubes down into smaller bore pistol tubes makes me wonder if some mill operator or smith wasn't the inventive mind responsible for using specially ground rolls in a mill to accomplish this task. The process of piercing a heated billet and rolling it to finished O.D. and I.D over a mandrel bar to make seamless pipe and tube goes back to the 1800's. It seems that a lot of that technology could have had its' roots years earlier in the gun production trade.
As always, a fascinating subject and a reminder of the ingenuity of some men.
