New to the forum, but am familiar with Damascus technique, and the proud owner of a George Barlow Coach Gun from the old days. After I bought it at auction, I did a bunch of research in Damascus metallurgy, and inspected the barrels - in pretty good shape for an old black powder gun, actually. I did buy and test with black powder 12 Gauge shells, and it passed the test. But I would never put a smokeless round in it under any circumstance. The pressure profile is different enough that the stress profile would be well outside what the gun was designed for, but the very nature of Damascus barrel construction means that each one is absolutely unique. Successfully shooting 1,000 of exactly the same gun make and model successfully is absolutely not statistically relevant with a one-off item like a Damascus barrel. Let me put it this way: if you had a jar of jelly beans on the coffee table and you knew one of the beans was poisoned, would you eat any? The nature of Damascus welding is such that a flaw within the steel, opened to the barrel by a corrosion pit, is a distinct possibility because of the unpredictability of galvanic corrosion rates in these hybrid metal barrels. The only possible way to know for sure the condition of a tube manufactured in this manner is by Magnaflux and x-ray - Magnaflux for surface flaws and x-ray for subsurface.
