There have been several threads on repairing barrel damage over the last year. Based on some of the posts by experienced people, I would like to hear if they encountered a similar issue.
I have TIG welded a limited number of barrels. All were of homogenous (not damascus) steel, all from the 20's-40's. I beleive these barrels were made of what we would call "chromoloy" composition today, or very similar.
The issue I ran into was that they all had sufficent carbon content to self-quench harden when welded at ambient temperature. The welding rod used was mild steel (low carbon). I even encounted cracking of the welds on my sleeve job from the shrinkage/hardening.
I had to anneal all the welds or they could not be filed. It wasn't the center of the weld bead where the filler rod was, but it was the edges and into the barrel parent material where it had hardened.
Anyone run into similar issues?
