Dean
I agree totally that there may be unaccounted for barrels. That was what I was getting at in a roundabout way. What I think is impossible to know is the real number of Parker laminated barrels made and where they ended up. First off, counting laminated barrels in the serialization book doesn't really indicate how many guns were ordered and listed with Damascus barrels which were actually built with the Parker Laminated barrels. THe gun I just bought falls into that category, as I believe your 16 gauge does. Without looking at both the order book and stock book, these guns would be cou ted as damascus, and I located through past posts several which fell in this category. The other problem is that just because the gun is listed in the serialization book as a laminated grade, it doesn't mean it was a Parker made barrel just because of the date of manufacture. I am sure Parker had and continue to purchase some less expensive import barrels during this same time period. Without an exact count of both how many barrels Parker made and how many lamainated barrels were purchased, there is no way to tell exactly how many existed.
If you take the listed high grade guns shown with Laminated in the time period and assume that the lower (grade 2) laminated guns were actually the cheaper import guns, the lowest likely number would be around 50 guns. This number is obviously too low. If you put in an adjustment for higher grade guns that were shown as Dasmascus but shipped with laminate the number very likely would double. Inthink this is the basis of the 100 number. However, as you pointed out, it is obvious that some of the barrels were left over and used wherever they could but there is no way to know because there was never a differentation between the Parker and import laminates. I think the number was very likely more than the 100 but probably less than the 250. Unles someone finds a long lost record from the short lived barrel making department, we will never know.
|