This History of Remington

After a great dissatisfaction with the firearms on the market and convinced that he could make better guns, Eliphalet Remington II founded Remington in 1816. His decision had been made that year when his homemade gun was so highly admired at a shooting contest. After forging it himself, he had taken it to a gunsmith in Utica, New York to finish making it into an actual gun. The company actually started that very day with all the admirers placing orders with him to make their guns. Up to that time the available guns on the market were so bad that most people just made their own.

They fashioned homemade rifle barrels by simply heating and hammering iron strips around a metal rod. The result was sufficient at best and usually very crude. The founding of Remington had been a desire birthed in him in his youth by his father. His father worked as a blacksmith and wanted to expand his business into the rifle-making industry. After finally realizing the dream, he set up shop. It was not long before he was selling guns all across America. In 1828, he situated its final headquarters in Ilion, New York. At this time it officially became known as the Remington Arms Company. Read the rest of the story here.

They were known as Damascus barrels.

It was a well known technique and worked just fine with black powder.

It is very difficult to bore a straight hole down a long rod. The technique to do so wasn’t developed until about 1840, I think by Remington.

Cannon had been bored for perhaps a century before that.

Before the boring process was developed, most rifle barrels were formed by forging around a rod, then welding the seam.

Then the final bore was cut using the welded bore as a guide. Rifling was cut after that.

“...Weren’t early “Damascus Steel” shotgun barrels made of twisted steel, and subject to bursting if too powerful shells were used? ...”

“Damascus” pattern barrels were made of alternating strips of iron and steel. The number of times they were hammered flat, then folded and twisted, then worked again, and the technique in doing this, lent decorative variations to the wavy patterns produced in the metal, which was then wrapped around a mandrel and welded. Solutions of nitric acid were applied, which stained the metals differentially, allowing the patterns to be seen.

Any barrel will burst if the charge is big enough.

“Hammering iron strips around a metal rod??????

Well that sounds like an accident waiting to happen. ...”

It didn’t stop with the forming.

The steel strip was twisted into a helix around the central rod, which was called a mandrel. Then powdered lime and other chemicals akin to modern soldering flux were pushed into the narrow gaps where the edges of the strip now touched each other, along the primary axis the helix.

Then the twisted strip was heated in the forge’s fire, and - with the mandrel still inserted - hammered from the ends and along the exterior surface, pushing the edges tighter together and fusing them, after sufficient temperature was obtained. Called “jump welding:” quickest way to form a barrel blank if one has limited access to tooling - as did most blacksmiths at the time.

Remington company history had it that Eliphalet Remington made his first barrel blank that way, at the age of 16 or thereabouts (not mentioned in the the quoted wiki entry, which read like it was machine translated from Hungarian or Czech or Polish). He ground flats on the outside to create an octagon, the commonest barrel profile of the day. Then he took it to a gunsmith to get it rifled.

It did indeed require a fair amount of experience and skill to weld a barrel securely, and repeatedly. Most European countries had enacted laws requiring gunmakers to prove their products were safe by loading extra-heavy charges and then firing them. If the barrel split, that was that. If it didn’t, the barrel was proven safe for normal use, and stamped with a special symbol as specified by law. The mark became an assurance of quality, called a proof mark.

At the time, locks demanded the most skill to manufacture, and were produced in specialized facilities; in the first years of the 19th century, many were still being imported from Europe. The rest of the firearm was built locally: it’s not that the guns available in the early United States were that bad, it’s that few citizens were able to afford complete guns. So they made their own or had them done up locally.

WARNING

No damascus-barrel gun is considered safe to fire today. They were made in the black powder era and all are 100 years old or worse. The iron and steel react differently to the chemicals in powder fouling, corroding at different rates, creating gaps at the margins invisible to the naked eye. The heat and pressure of firing drive fouling ever deeper into these tiny fissures, rendering thorough cleaning impossible, hastening further corrosion.

Damascus barrels are thus prone to bursting without warning: doesn’t matter how good the surface looks. And no amount of smokeless powder should ever be used anyway: no matter how much the charge is reduced, nitro propellant produces higher peak pressures and a pressure-vs-time curve vastly different from black powder.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.