L.C. Smith Maker, Syracuse manufactured about 1,600 hammerless guns. Hunter Arms produced about 530,000 Smith hammer and hammerless sidelocks, and another about 80,000 Fulton boxlocks. If they made time-bombs with an intrinsic design flaw, one would think a plague of blown barrels would be apparent by now. Clearly THIS 110 year old gun had a manufacturing defect,
but would it have failed without an over-pressure load in a short chamber?A study complimentary to the Birmingham Proof House Trial was published in in
The Field June 6, 1891 by Horatio F. Phillips, a “staff experimenter” comparing brazed and unbrazed Steel and Damascus barrels
http://books.google.com/books?id=inQCAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA14&lpg"These experiments serve to show what a very large margin of strength there is in a good gun barrel, when ordinary charges are used. The (Damascus) barrels which gave way earliest...had withstood the strains of…about four times as great as the regulation proof; while the steel barrels (Siemens-Martin and English “Superior Barrel Steel”) were tested…
with charges averaging nearly five times as much as the ordinary proof-charge."
It would seem that this large margin of safety was what saved this gun until 2019. It is significant that there was
no microscopic evidence of low cycle fatigue - the pressures to which the breech braze and barrel was subjected was below the yield strength of the steel. The failure was initiated at an area with inclusions and a braze joint contaminated with "burned" steel.
It would be quite interesting to evaluate the braze on the left, but this would require destroying the left tube, which still has some value, and more money
Other reasonable opinions are most welcome.
