Informed and helpful comments are most welcome.
"it is pretty unlikely that any of our American gunmakers utilized barrel steel from actual steel mills in England that were operated by Henry Bessemer" would be neither.
This looks like more butt-hurt Drew. I prescribe this product. Hopefully it will soon be sold in 55 gal. drums.
However, many of your incorrect comments in your series of non-double gun barrel threads refer to Bessemer steel, and you act as if that blanket description is accurate.
It is therefore safe to assume there are lots of U.S. single and double barrel shotguns still in use with Decarbonized Steel barrels; making this all relevant to a DoubleGun forum.
And this looks like you need more butt-hurt salve too. But I believe this is an overly emotional response to my question about which Winchester DOUBLE GUNS had
Stainless Steel barrels... which you have not answered.
I still haven't seen any evidence here that most American gunmakers used steel exclusively or predominately from Henry Bessemer's mill in Sheffield, England. I'm sure I would be wrong to say that none ever did. Sorry if you took it that way. I should have worded it differently. Bessemer licensed his process to a number of steel producers in the U.S. and Europe. These were known as Bessemer Process steels. The furnaces used were called Bessemer Converters. Early production tonnage was much lower, and mostly consumed domestically, just as steel from Bessemer's mill in Sheffield It is natural that U.S. manufacturers would buy steel that was produced domestically in Bessemer Process mills due to lower shipping costs, and even tariffs. There has been plenty of discussion here over the years naming many of the U.S. steel companies that sold steel to U.S. gun makers.
There is a wide range of both content and quality in Bessemer and Bessemer Process steels. All are decarbonized. Contrary to your incorrect statement in the Winchester thread, all are alloys. All steel is an alloy. There is no element called steel anywhere on the periodic chart. Decarbonization is the very heart of Bessemer's invention. Bessemer initially did a partial decarbonization, attempting to stop at the correct desired carbon content. And Mushet found it better to remove almost all of the carbon, and then add the correct amount back into the heat. But there was a fairly wide range of carbon content, and impurities as well. The range of carbon content was at first accidental. Later, it was mostly intentional, to produce different percentage carbon steels for different applications. These various mills used iron made from different ores, and different sources for coal or coke. As your copy-and-past research has noted, even different furnace linings affected the final analysis of the steel. The Bessemer process was too fast to do any real accurate testing and refinements or adjustments during a heat. In fact, before Robert Mushet's improvements on the Bessemer process, even Henry Bessemer's close friend William Clay described his steel as "rotten hot and rotten cold"
Before adopting Mushet's improvements, Bessemer was forced to buy back the rights of four makers to produce his steel for 32,500. This was after he had been paid 27,000 for those rights. In other words, it was so bad that he was forced to pay damages.
A couple samples of barrels will barely begin to tell the story of Bessemer Process steel, considering the literally thousands of heats that were produced during experimentation, development, and production runs. I can confidently say that a couple chunks of Winchester or other barrel steel, whether plain carbon steel, higher alloy steel, or stainless steel sent to your met lab isn't going to produce any Holy Grail for content in the barrel steels of our guns. An analysis of steel from a gun barrel will tell us what steel is in that one barrel. Attempting to apply that analysis to another gun produced at a different time is little more than conjecture.
But if self-loathing and the acid in your soul makes it too stressful... just make notice that comments from me are not ever welcome in your copy-and-paste research. I'll still comment, but you might feel a bit manly.
