I have realized that I made a misleading statement in my previous post. The six hours that I stated that I spent at the forge making my barrel, was ONLY the time spent welding the riband coil into a solid barrel tube. The six hours does not include the time spent making the damascus billets, drawing the billets into rods, twisting the rods, welding the twisted rods into a riband and winding the riband around a mandrel to form the coil.
300 heats to weld a barrel might be slightly on the high side; but perhaps not exceedingly so. There are many variables that determine how many heats will be necessary. Blacksmithing isn't an exact science and the smith rarely keeps track of the number of heats he needed to complete a forging. It takes what it takes, depending on how the work is progressing.
How long it takes to bring a given section of material to heat is also quite variable. Temperature of the material when placed into the fire, efficiency of the fire and how well it is managed, mass of the material, whether it is a welding heat or a lower temperature shaping heat, etc. Along the length of a barrel tube, the heats may be as short as two minutes near the muzzle and as long as 15 minutes or more at the breech end. Picking a very short average of 3 minutes per heat, times 300 heats, calculates to 15 hours that the barrel was just setting in the fire.
All of these variables are what causes me to hesitate to put into print a statement of how long it took to make a damascus gun barrel. The best I can do, is to calculate the minimum number of heats that I believe the work could be accomplished in and multiply that by a calculated average of time to heat.
The barrel tubes standing against the wall were quite possibly staged. I wouldn't be surprised if many of them were taken off of the scrap heap of useless forgings. I am certain that not all barrel forgings were completed successfully. Things go wrong and some pieces are lost. Even in modern manufacturing, some percentage of product defects and wastage are expected.
