Hi all,
I'm a long time double owner, but new contributor to this forum. I think most of us with experience shooting Damascus know better...but for those who are still unsure, or who are prone to parrot wives tales, I would point to Sherman Bell's excellent series of articles in the Doublegun Journal entitled "Finding Out For Myself."
Using a bunch of rather junky old donated barrels, including fluid steel, Damascus, and twist...the testing was done by Tom Armbrust of Ballistic Research in Illinois. Larry Potterfield of MidwayUSA donated a large share of the barrels.
Basically, using insane proof loads they could barely damage any barrels with crazy PROOF loads! Tom told me the only way they were able to really damage the barrels was by obstructing them...leaving a jag in there...jamming a 16 ga shell in front of a 12ga...that kind of thing.
By the time they were able to get failures...the loads were RIDICULOUS, and as I recall the fluid steel barrels actually averaged slightly WORSE than the Damascus.
My personal belief is that when the world moved from black powder to smokeless, no one explained well enough to the public that the measurements were NOT one-to-one. So it took only a few people to load shells with smokeless in place of black powder using the same recipe, and ka-BLOOEY. Because the black powder/smokeless transition happened around the same time fluid steel was getting popular, I think people concluded the reason fluid was coming out more was because it was proven stronger...or that you NEEDED fluid steel for smokeless shells. Then it took no time for word to get around that Damascus barrels were weak. Just my opinion.
I want to stress that the barrels Tom tested with were, according to him, absolute JUNK. And they still held up. So consider how much better put together your gorgeous American Flag Damascus barrels on your high grade Lefever are!
The "Finding Out For Myself" series Sherman Bell wrote were done so over a bunch of DGJ issues...I'm sure they could be back-ordered. I know of no one else the, or since, who have put that degree of unbiased time and energy into actually testing Damascus strength the way Sherman and Tom did.
- Nudge
