Jack, here's McIntosh's quote. I should've used "striking" rather than hammering: " . . . the hand-work needed to strike a set of heavy tubes into a pair of lightweight barrels could eat up a sizeable chunk of company profit."
TB, I'm not sure about KS, but up here in Iowa, we eat our pigs. We don't worry about teaching them to sing. If you didn't spend so much time giving vocal lessons to swine, you might develop a greater understanding of some fairly basic and simple concepts concerning shotguns. Like when the factory is turning out 40 or more 12ga Sterlingworths per week, it's not likely that all the barrels they're working with are all heavy or all light. From McIntosh, again:
"In a shop where guns are made largely by hand, the forgings may all be the same size, regardless of what size and weight the finished piece might be, but for production guns there is an obvious advantage in having components machined to several sizes. The nearer the components are to finished size, the less hand-work required." We talk about all the "hand-work" involved in building the American classic doubles, and there certainly was a good bit of that. But they were basically machine-made, hand-FINISHED guns. They came out of real, honest to goodness factories . . . unlike, say, most British doubles.
Joe, you could get barrels from 26-32" on any gauge Sterlingworth. And although each barrel length had "standard" chokes, you could custom order any choke you wanted, no additional charge. Certainly the vast majority of Sterlingworths were bought "off the rack", but from any of the makers of classic American doubles, you could custom order just about anything you wanted: specify a weight, nonstandard stock dimensions, etc.
