Actual vs Rough Barrel Weight

[ArtS]

I'm sure this has come up before, but I was giving the subject some thought while arranging for a barrel set to be refinished. I have three Parkers; a pretty light 16 DH, a 12 GH with short barrels and a 10 Lifter at about 10 pounds.

The 16 has very light barrels and a total weight of under 6 pounds. Rough barrel weight was 3 pounds even and the barrels now weigh 2 # 9 oz. Bore measures .664.

I don't have the exact weights in front of me, but the 12 has bores of .729 and the barrels weigh 8 oz less than the rough weight. The 10 has bores of .795 and the barrels weigh, again, exactly 8 oz less than the rough weight.

At first I was really worried about the 10 ga, since I wanted to have them cleaned up internally and was amazed at the bore size. I then measured the barrel walls and found them actually quite thick, That's when I measured the other two guns and found that all three guns with total weights of 6 to 10 pounds had barrels (within 1 oz) of 8 ounces of their rough weight. A whole evening searching The Parker Story revealed that the older guns were bored to work best with thin wall brass shells, and most of the 10 gauges had 9 gauge barrels. The 12's were generally 11's. According to the book, there was finally an official change noted in the late 1880's that the barrels would in the future be true bore size unless otherwise requested. If the larger bores were requested, they would be stamped with an "o" for old or overbored.

Examples were given of original guns with the bore measurements and the 10 gauge measured was in fact .795 or so.


My question is how much variation was there in this relationship? A lot of statements are made about how the workers adjusted weights and balance by removing more or less metal. However, the three examples I have would appear to support a system where, if there was a request for a particular weight, a set of barrels would be pulled from inventory which had a rough weight of 8 oz more than needed to hit the target weight and they were then all struck in a similar manner.

It would be interesting to know the results of a larger sample of guns to see if this relationship varied. Only barrel sets that still had close to their original bore size would be relevant.

I also wonder if when putting together low pressure loads for these old 10 gauges, it may be better than using 10 gauge shot cups to use 9 gauge felt and card wads.Asking a .775 plastic wad to seal a .796 to .800 bore at low pressure is asking a lot.

[mobirdhunter]

Arthur, the difference between unstuck and finished barrel weight has always been of great interest to me. Certainly, the craftsmen at Parker Bros. selected components based on requests regarding weight and handling, and the frame size was often what helped determine overall weight and balance. Having said that, I've examined my own guns -- those for which I have research letters specifying weight -- and compared the un-struck barrel weight to the finished weight and have found a rather wide degree of variance. It's clear to me that the barrel strikers could work wonders.

It is interesting that your 8 oz. (give or take a small amount) figure seems to come up with some frequency in my guns, also. My sample size is small in the grand scheme of Parker numbers, but at around 20 guns for which I have recorded weights, 8+ oz. is not uncommon.

I think quite a few guns have had their bores "cleaned up" over the years, and that obviously contributes to some barrel weight loss, but by how much, who knows?

An interesting question, for sure, but also a reminder of how much hand work was done on these "manufactured" guns.

[ArtS]

Regarding bore size and the comment I made about 10 ga loading, I remembered that I had bought a mixed lot of antique hand loading tools on eBay several weeks and had unpacked them and hardly looked at them. I dug them out and found there were reversible decappers/rams in 10, 12, 16 and 20, matching bases and a neat old tin shell holder that was reversable and fit both 12 and 16 gauge hulls with a funnel on each end. I have never seen one, but it looks like you insert the hull and dro the powder, ram the wad, drop the shot and ram the over powder wad using this as a guide. Pretty slick.

What intrigued me concerning this thread was that in addition there were several old (!) wad cutter punches included, and lo and behold they were in 20, 16, 12 10 and (drum roll) 9 gauge. They were stamped with the identifiers. Looks like this may have been a common practice. Parkers loading instructions for their shells reflects. With bore size wads, I would think you could load light 12 loads in the 10 gauge shell and have really low pressure loads with much less chance of bloopers. It would likely be possible to load some 12 gauge level loads in cut off 2" shells if desired.

[Dean Romig]

I few years ago on this forum someone suggested the “pre-struck” barrel weights were actually for the combined weight and the forend together.
I’m not endorsing this theory, simply reporting just one of the various opinions out there.





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[ArtS]

Anything is possible. In reading the description of the manufacturing process, I believe the barrels were assembled and then it says they were kept in inventory until being pulled out when needed and placed in a box with all the other parts for each gun. The picture shown was of a very rough looking assembly with the rough weight marked. No mention is made, I don't believe, of whether they were bored to finished size before or after this step. That in itself would remove quite a bit of weight. I personally would be hard pressed to believe the forend was inventoried with the rough barrels. There are too many instances noted where barrels of a different grade or type were used on a gun, but I have never heard any mention of a case where the forend grade didn't match the reciever. If the forends were included, every gun with mixed grade barrels would have the wrong forend iron.

There is a lot of information that is lost now. For instance, with all the information in "The Parker Story" there is no definitive history of the Parker made barrels. The company is quoted in the late 1870's as stating they were then making barrels as high in quality as the English laminates. In 1882 their catalog had a writeup as to their barrel making process. This was after, by all accounts of the dates, they had quit making barrels. In my reading, it looked to me like a very carefully crafted article that described making any type of composite barrel, but left the impression that they were Damascus. I have tracked enough posts here to locate a significant number of D graded guns with Parker laminated barrels to make me think it was not accidental. Given the reported number of these barrels supposedly made (if the numbers I were given is true) even this small sample would be a significant part of their total manufacture. For myself, I am somewhat convinced that the company at that time really considered these barrels to be a form of Damascus and not the typical laminate in the L grade guns. This would explain a number of inconsistencies and the lack of general information on the subject.

However, at this point it is moot. Unless some lost documents emerge or a record of the entire subject, we will never know.

[Dean Romig]

Charles A. King testified before congress that they had brought over some British barrel makers to show their employees how it was done. I believe King said that those barrels were Laminated. Those barrels, though I don't remember any particular quote, were made in segments of approximately 16" - 18" or so. I have two guns with those Parker made barrels, one a 12 and the other a 16 and it is easy to see where these segments were joined, about halfway along their length.
King also testified they only made these barrels between sometime in 1877 to sometime in 1879. Parker discontinued this practice due to the cost of producing them as being about three times the amount the British were paying their employees... it simply was not cost-effective to continue producing them when the British variation could be purchased in bulk much more cheaply.

We find some guns with Parker-made barrels well after the production of these barrels had ceased. My 16 gauge ( 18719 ) was made in 1880 while my 12 gauge ( 14056 ) was made in 1879.

Pictures of the segment joints shown below. 16 first with 12 below it.

In the Serialization Book there are no guns listed prior to 1877 with a L in the GRA column and the first one after the beginning of 1877 production is 10638 , well into the year of 1877.
A total of 103 guns are listed as LX until the end of 1879 and an additional 114 are listed to the end of 1881. There are more L guns listed in 1882 and beyond but these could been imported from England or Belgium.
There may be Parkers with imported Laminated barrels before 1877 but they were most likely listed with a D, grouping them with other types of composite barrels.



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[ArtS]

Dean

Your 16 gauge was one of the guns I mentioned. The research letter you showed in another thread states that according to the order book it is a Damascus gun but according to the stock book it is an L3. I recently bought a 10 gauge that looks absolutely identical to your 16 and was made in 1880 (18479) also. It is marked D3 on the frame but Laminated Steel on the rib and the P on the flats. The research letter also confirms this. Interestingly, your gun was ordered early in the year and delivered the end of August. The one I purchased was ordered in early August and delivered a week before yours. Yet the 10 gauge has a serial number about 200 lower. In jumping around the threads for about 15 minutes I found another 4 to 5 that followed this pattern. Some of these, such as the two listed here, are outside the reported serial number range of 10000 to 16000.

I have been told by another member here that he estimates there were less than 100 of these barrels made. I don't know what this is based on, but given that there were only a little over 2000 L guns documented, this isn't unreasonable at all. From all the examples I found in just few minutes, I suspect that a number of these Parker barrels were sold on Damascus guns. maybe more than were sold as normal L grades. At the time the Parker Company was likely quite proud of them and maybe considered them better than the purchased laminate or lower grades of Damascus.

One thing I have wondered and never seen explained when the Senate Testimony story is related was what the reason was for this testimony in the first place. The way it is told always sounds like there was some federal question as to whether Parker was involved in barrel making.

[Dean Romig]

Art -

When I first became interested in the Parker-made Laminated Steel barrels I had originally believed they were restricted to the higher grades, such as grade 3 and higher. But I have since discovered this not to be the case. In the serialization book I count about 201 guns with the L designation. But we see among those serial numbers many, many gaps of missing serial numbers. One that I know and have handled personally is serial number 14081 - a beautiful 16 gauge D-grade Lifter, missing from the Serialization book but definitely with Laminated barrels.

In any case, while tabulating the guns in question with Laminated barrels in the years 1877, 78, 79, 80 and 81 I count two Grade 5 guns with Laminated Steel barrels, five Grade 4 guns, thirty-seven Grade 3 guns and amazingly, one-hundred, sixty-six grade 2 guns and the very last one I counted in 1881 was a solitary Grade 1 gun with Laminated Steel barrels.

A gun with the water table stamped with both a D and a 3 is simply two characters indicating the grade... not the barrel steel type.

It is my supposition that any guns with a serial number higher than 16,000 that has Laminated Steel barrels isn't anything strange but rather, the Laminated steel barrels were simply languishing in stock until either discovered or needed.

I believe that an estimate of some 100 guns built with Parker-made Laminated Steel barrels is way off the mark. I believe that taking the 201 guns I found in the serialization book with a L designation and extrapolating for missing serial numbers and the possibility of misidentifying the barrel steel in the factory records, the number could be as high as 250 or so.





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[ArtS]

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.