doublegunshop.com - home Forums Thread Like Summary - american made fluid steel barrels

trojan, vulcan, special, titanic, etc...

are they really different formulations or are they pretty much all the same material, fabricated from the same bar stock?

Drewbie-- The Late Gun Writer. author (Guns and Gunning- 1934 as well as Field & Stream's gun editor back in that era pre-WW2- was Paul A. Curtis. I am lucky to have a signed copy of his first ed. that book, and my Nash Buckingham books (all 1st ed.s.--) are the touchstones of my gunning library. So, dare I ask, whom is, or was, this A.P. chap? Gracias-- El Zorro

A barrel is typically a deep hole with steel wrapped around it. A rifle barrel has some spiral grooves to impart spin to the projectile to stabilize it.

Your copy-and-paste research confirms that barrel makers used a lot of different steels to make perfectly usable shotgun barrels. They range from low carbon 1015 to much higher carbon 1045. And there was wide variation in composition, even in barrels used by the same manufacturers, over time. That kind of confirms my statements saying that your very small sampling and metallurgical testing tells us very little at all.

But I suppose it looks impressive to those who know nothing about steel, and next to nothing about rifle barrels.