Wrought Iron barrels

mooncoon

mooncoon

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I have be refinishing a antique percussion shotgun barrel over the last couple of days. Got quite a surprise because it appears to be wrought iron and that is something that I have almost never seen in a british barrel before.
Worth noting that the barrel does not darken worth a damn compared to damascus barrels that I have played with.

wroughtiron3b.jpg


wroughtiron2b.jpg


wroughtiron1b.jpg


just for comparison, the barrel below is french and was made in layers sort of like plywood.

Frenchlamination.jpg


the barrels below are english and made in the early 1800s

Greenwoodbarreljoinb.jpg


finally I tossed these ones in because the two barrels do not have the same pattern. The gun is an economy grade english gun.

IHollis.jpg
 
Welded barrels were certainly made with different patterns in the welds. Sometimes the method used was intended to produce a particular pattern for appearance's sake, other times, the pattern was coincidental to strip(s) of iron being welded to form a tube. Earlier barrels were single skelp, either linear or straight seamed. Later the different patterns of fine damascus had been developed. Pattern welding may have climaxed with the work of Zenobe Gramme in Liege.
 
Perhaps Mooncoon could describe the techniques he uses.
There were articles in The Double Gun Journal a number of years ago.
Depends on the desired result, but it involves browning, rust bluing, carding, boiling(or not).
Basically the different alloys in the barrel react differently to the finishing techniques, and can be brought out with contrasting results. Brown and brown, black and white, etc.
There was no point in doing fancy pattern welding unless the finish was to bring up the figure.
 
Expanding on Tiriaq's comments; some guns like the american P1842 musket were made with a single longitudinal forge welded seam and when refinished most of the metal came out uniform grey with a sort of smudgy straight line where the seam is. French barrels in the 1840's were apparently made of 3 layers welded together like pancakes or like plywood and the pistol barrel above, I am guessing may have been made from a damaged rifle barrel. I am calling it french because it is the system Delvigne with a small diameter powder chamber at the breach end. I have also seen smudge spots in the pattern where skelps are welded on end to end and annular smudges where tubes have been butt welded end to end.

I bring the pattern out using more or less the formula used and described by Gaddy in the Double Gun Journal several years ago. It is similar to the one in Foxfire 5 and both in turn are very similar to the solutions in Angier's book of firearm bluing and browning.

The solution is a mixture of mercuric chloride, ferric chloride, water and some alcohol. The chlorides are rusting agents and I think the alcohol is to reduce the surface tension and give better wetting of the surface. I draw file and/or sand the metal with lots of cutting oil then degrease with lye and wet the barrel down with the rusting solution and keep it damp for about 12 hours. I then wash it with very hot water and card wet with steel wool. I then wet it down with ferric chloride only for 15 minutes or more until the metal is fairly rusty and wash and card then back to the mercuric solution. I do this for 2 or 3 days and if the pattern is very tight, after the first one or two rusts I dilute the rusting solution considerably so that I don't loose the pattern. Very important to card wet or you will simply sand off the pattern. I finish up by washing in boiling water which is supposed to change the rust to a darker harder rust.

No two barrels are the same in their response; some the pattern just jumps out and some; nothing I can do will emphasize it. Most are somewhere in between

cheers mooncoon
 
My Nepalese Enfield "like" rifle has a Iorn barrel....I also have 2 or old economy grade project percussion arms that ive been tinkering on.....

Has me thinking....

:canadaFlag:
 
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