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1867 Bernard shotgun, decorated by Joseph Boussart from the Liege Museum of Arms

1887 Lefever with Boston damascus, from the Liege Museum of Arms

Drew,

There are a lot more of these images available on-line. Go to http://www.museedarmes.be/home.htm
Click on Catalogue
Click on Base de données du Musée d'Armes de Liège
Click on Connector
Click on Recherche en full text
enter Damas

You will get 26 items.

Pete

Reb87 has brought up a very important point. Ideally an Allen trapdoor double will surface. the words, Patented Nov. 25 1890 has been recorded on Hopkins and Allen shotguns. That date correspondes to patent 441395, issued to Martin Bye and assigned to Sullivan Forehand. Both patent and shotgun were toplevers. Allen died (1871) only 6 years after the trapdoor patent was issued. His successors , Forehand being one of them, continued on with the Worcester gun trade after his death. It would be very hard to concieve that Forehand and the others produced no double guns from 1871 to 1890...surely there were many, but again we are into lost chapter of American double evolution...the Worcester gun...I guess that makes all Worcester doubles suspect, especially the early toplevers (pre1890)...Wish I could be more definitive but I never got around to buying the book by Harold Mouillesseaux about Ethan Allen...maybe that book will yield some information or clues, if anyone has it...I'll take a picture of Torkelson damascus barrels and post it, but I think that's way too late.

You're killin' me Pete Moire, Bernard, Turc mine blanc, damas turc, Boston and a Purdey-what I wouldn't give for high resolution close up pics of those barrels!! Anyone with lots of class and money hitting the Musée d'Armes de Liège this summer?!

One of the Irish doubles with the high relief Rigby damascus recievers, that I mentioned in an earlier post, is a Joseph Harkom, 12ga, round action,front action hammergun, Jones rotary underlever, straight grip, with what looked like rolled damascus barrels to me. I think the gun now lives somewhere near Syracuse NY. So for good examples of late hand hammered Rigby damascus take a look at the Harkom rotary underlever reciever. There is little to no engraving, but instead the action is 100% high relief damascus.
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I once bought a caplock T. Mortimer, 20ga, fully engraved, str grip double, with high relief silver damascus barrels and raised proofmark silver soft plugs on top from Dutchman Woodworks for $300...I loved it for a few years and let it go for $375 to a friend from Batavia NY...wish I hadn't...I never knew much about that gun or the origin of the damascus. The main reason I bought it was because it was the only piece of silver damascus I had ever seen.

Unfortunatley, I think the Liege museum is still closed. They have been "refurbishing" it for several years.

Krupp "Nirosta" (patent 1912) is another stainless that may have originated at Poldi. At that time in the company's history, Krupp had enough money to buy anything he wanted like patents and whole armorplate companies simply for the technology.

Early on, A. Krupp's pride and joy was his huge steam hammer "Fritz". By 1864 he had 7000 men using it to make "fluss stahl" barrels amoung other things; by 1871, he had 10,000 men. When "Fritz" failed in the mid 1880's, Alfred Krupp installed a 5000-ton hydrulic press for his now 20,000-man workforce. It was no different in Liege, Gardone, Birmingham, Suhl or New Haven; the industrial revolution had hit gunmaking by the 1860s(It all started with Watt's engine in 1782 and was going "full-steam" in England by 1800). The British need us too, and came to America for mass-production rifle-making machinery from Robins and Lawrence of Windsor, Vermont and Ames Mfg. Co., Chicopee Falls, Mass. With it, they to equiped their arsenal at Enfield. There, by 1858, they were turning out 2,000 rifles a week. (Tate, 1997). Greener, himself, mentions using "17 different machines to shape stocks".

I could'nt help but think by the mid 1860's Damascus barrels were at least partially machine-made--ultimately, a dollar is a dollar; machines were cheaper and more efficient, then as now.

It still takes the touch of human hands to make a good gun, however, now as then!

Sorry for the late addition...this may help someone identify their damascus barrels maker.
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In 1894 a British patent was issued to Eugene Joris of Fraipont Belgium, who lists himself as a "manufacturer", seeking a patent for a new metheod of manufacturing damascus tubes. He prefaces his patent by stating that "damascus tubes in use up to the present time consists in rolling the steel band into a spiral".
His new patent damascus is comprised of 16 longutudinal rods, without a mandrel, that can be welded by rolling in a press or by hand hammering.
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the key info is that another damascus craftsmen has been identified including city of origin..the patent number is 1981, it was issued in 1894....And yes, there were still a few stragglers interested in hand hammering well into the 1890's... NOTE...Not to be confused with Belgian gunmaker Jean Joiris of Wandre Belgium...jor not joir

Rocketman,
To quote yourself "Carbon can't be mechanically driven into iron - it must "disolve" in a high heat environment."

I know what you mean, the carbon must be absorbed on a molecular level, but when you're standing there with the tongs in one hand and a hammer in the other, molecular injection is not the model the old timers had you thinkin' about. You layer and sometimes folded (rarely) the carbon (ground bone and charcoal dust) into your separate bars. After welding with heat and hammer, the single massive bar is twisted hot with borax and the remaining slag is driven out using heat and hammer.
Well at least this is the technique I was taught or maybe my perception of what I was taught.(30 yrs ago)
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Well I could sense that you weren't buying that concept, and it's easy to see why...I'm not in disagreement with you, I just didn't want you to go away thinking that I had my ass on completely backwards...so in defense of erred (maybe) concept, I would like to post his page from a book published by Johns Hopkins University press (1960's)


Maybe you can't mechanically drive carbon into steel, but we didn't know that, so we went ahead and did it anyway...My blacksmithing experiments, unlike my case color experiments, rarely resulted in defeat. Bob Chambers
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P.S. except for the common beginners mistake of forging the billet way too wide, I can think of no other reason to make longitudinal folds. The longitudinal folding technique allows the smith to concentrate the high carbon area at the cutting edge of the blade (in the crease). Wrong or right, that was the idea. Keep in mind that I learned farm implement smithing, the only kind still in existence in these parts. 100+ years ago, this technique was used when making implement blades out of regular mild steel. Nowadays most steel choppers just run over the cutting edge with some hardface welding rod and grind it sharp, the technology has changed, but the idea is the same.

RC - I have no issue with what you do/did at the forge, only how you describe it. To be effective, the carbon must be exposed to the steel at high enough temperature to chemically combine. By repeated heating, folding, and hammering, you "kneeded" the steel much as one "kneeds" bread dough to mix in a little extra flour. By making the steel flow in the heating, hammering, and welding steps, you exposed a lot of new surfaces to the extra carbon you added. This increased the amount of steel exposed to extra carbon and allowed for a much more uniform alloy. A ten pound bar of iron would need less than a tenth of a pound of carbon added (absorbed) to become a serious high carbon alloy. The trick is, of course, to carbon without burning out the carbon in the surfaces exposed to air.

I have no reservations as to admiration of blacksmithing skills.