Why did they use octagon barrels so much?

[MBTcustom]

It's a question that has bugged me for years, and I honestly dont have a good theory on this. I would like to know why so many of the guns from around the turn of the last century have octagon barrels?
It seems to me that it made the manufacture of the guns harder and more costly without aiding production in any way.
Where those barrels considered better for heat dissipation?
Was it easier for the rifling process?
I know that in this era, octagon barrels are just for looks, but what was the original reason?
If anybody has a definitive answer I would love to know. I have theories by the bushel basket, but I don't know why they did this, any body care to elaborate?

[sbowers]

Because the barrel blanks came in the octogan configuration from the steel makers and it was more expesinve to turn them to round than leave them as recieved and drill and rifle them.
Steve

[Uncle Jimbo]

I can only venture a guess same as you. I always thought that the quality of the steel at the time dictated more material around the bullet.
I can tell you this, I have and always will love the look of the octagon barrels on lever guns and some of the older style single shots.

[waksupi]

A carry over from forged barrels. It is a lot easier to forge an octagon barrel, than a round barrel. They were forged around a mandrel, which also formed the rough bore when withdrawn. As to why they carried over after more modern iron working methods were developed, I'm not sure. I suspect it was preference, and tradition. Barrel blanks never came as octagons, I've seen semi truck loads of barrel stock, and those truck loads turned into barrels. It's all round stock. The old ones were forged octagon, the modern ones are milled to shape after being bored and rifled.

[Chicken Thief]

Hammer forging.
First square then octagon.
Thus no hex!
Round is way more work.

[John Taylor]

A lot of the old gunsmiths were small back yard shops during the muzzle days. A barrel could be made from flat wrought iron and welded full length and at the same time be hammered into an octagon shape. A lathe for turning something round was not something a small shop would have. The barrel was draw filed to make the flats smooth. Bottom three flats were not draw filed usually. Tradition carried over to the more modern cartridge guns and a lot of people still wanted octagon barrels so most company went with what was selling. Something in the octagon shape seem to attract buyers. Even when Remington was making cast barrels they sold octagon barrels to the back yard gunsmiths to build rifles. Most companies making military barrels were large enough to afford the equipment to make round barrels.

[Longwood]

I have read a lot about hammer forging and hammer welding barrels. They came out round unless they were being forged from a block then drilled.
Hammer forging was often used to form blocks into long thin flat bars before the hammer welding process.
I never heard of anyone going to as much trouble as it would be to make a round barrel into an hexagon or octagon.
Most of the octagon etc, rifle barrels were in that configuration because that is how the steel came from the mills. I think the old timers also knew thy look better.
Have you ever seen a long rifle that has a flat filed barrel that looks like a long octagon trumpet?

[Jim Flinchbaugh]

First square then octagon.



Yup!
Octagon barrel is just a square barrel with the corners cut off :mrgreen:

[longbow]

While I agree with the hammer forging an octagonal barrel likely being easier than round there were also a number of round barrels produced in the hand forging days:

- fowlers both single and double barrel
- military muskets by the thousands like Brown Bess, Charleville Muskets, Zouave, trade muskets, etc.

The military wouldn't be too concerned with any extra work or cost if the round barrel was lighter of better but common folks would be as would the Indian traders yet I think all common smoothbore trade muskets were round barrel.

I used to think octagonal barrels were made to help index for rifling but any old wooden rifling benches I have seen do not require the barrel to be rotated, The rifling drum is rotated and indexed with pins or slots.

So I guess it is kind of obvious I don't have a good answer for this!

Now you got me thinking I better try to find out.

Longbow

[just.don]

A carry over from forged barrels. It is a lot easier to forge an octagon barrel, than a round barrel. They were forged around a mandrel, which also formed the rough bore when withdrawn. As to why they carried over after more modern iron working methods were developed, I'm not sure. I suspect it was preference, and tradition. .

+1
Read the foxfire book on gun making. very informative.

[L Ross]

Any of you fellers ever do any black smithing? Have you ever seen a swedge block?

Duke

[MBTcustom]

While I agree with the hammer forging an octagonal barrel likely being easier than round there were also a number of round barrels produced in the hand forging days:

- fowlers both single and double barrel
- military muskets by the thousands like Brown Bess, Charleville Muskets, Zouave, trade muskets, etc.

This was why I asked my original question. Throughout the ages, there have been guns made with either round or octagonal barrels, both by hand with a forge, and after the advent of steel mills and metal lathes.

Any of you fellers ever do any black smithing? Have you ever seen a swedge block?
I have done a lot of blacksmithing with a coal forge. I know what a swedge block is, but it could be used to make either round or hex stock fairly easily. That just makes the question even more interesting and the answers more vague.

I think the old timers also knew thy look better.
This could be the best answer.

[wv109323]

I saw a guy making modern day muzzleloaders at a fair.. The vise that he used to rifle the barrel clamped the barrel on the flats of the octagon barrel. To equally space four riflings( actually lands) in the barrel the barrel was rotated 1/4 turn or two flats of the barrel and reclamped in the vise.
The rifling machine that this gentlemen had cut one land at a time with a hook type bit. The mandel that held the bit was twisted with the desired rate of twist. As the hook was pulled through the barrel the mandrel was pulled through a stationary eye that caused the hook to cut a spiral land.
I don't know why a smoothbore would have an octagon barrel unless as already mentioned. Looks and a common shape to forge raw material.

[longbow]

Maybe you have something there. Like I said, I first thought that the flats were not only easier to make than round because you can rough hammer to shape while forging then draw file to smooth and even up flats. Then they make the perfect indexing for 4 or 8 groove rifling, but... so far I haven't seen a rifling bench that used the barrel rotation to index. Not to say it wasn't done or maybe that's how it all started out because it seems that octagon barrels were most common with rifled barrels rather than smoothbores. At least in my limited experience.

Now having said that, some smoothbores had part octagon and part round barrels. Doh!

Thin round musket barrels would be lighter for sure so easier to carry. Imagine a Brown Bess with a 75 cal. octagon barrel. Yikes! You'd need a winch to get it up to your shoulder.

The larger bores also typically run at lower pressures so maybe part of it is the need for thicker barrel for smaller bore rifles, wall thickness for dovetails for sights (hard to dovetail a thin round barrel and hard to drift a soldered sight), ease of forging, indexing for rifling... did I miss anything? Oh, good looks. I know I am grasping at straws here.

There has to be some good explanations because the old guys didn't do it just because.

Ease of manufacture, extra wall thickness for dovetails and indexing for rifling all make sense.

It may well be a combination of several things that made octagon easier to make then tradition that carried it on afterwards.

Look at Damascus barrels. While they look good, they are not as sound as machined from solid stock barrels yet after the days of hand forging and Damascus there were shotgun (not sure about rifle) barrels made with faux Damascus patterns to look like Damascus.

Okay, I will quit rambling here because I really don't know.

Longbow

[rockrat]

Yup, have a swedge block

[Longwood]

We have sort of lumped a few thing into one.
Hammer forging is mainly making a hunk of steel or iron into a different shape. I could be square or about any shape they wanted to make. Machines made round, hex and octagon with much cheaper machines than round stock. Square stock was the most plentiful but many mills made rods of more shapes.
Hammer welding which is sometimes referred to as Damascus is how they made thin walled barrels by wrapping bands of steel around a mandrel and hammer welding them together. For stronger and fancier looks, three or more bands would sometimes be twisted and hammer welded into one then wrapped and welded around a mandrel. The better smiths making more expensive barrels could do wonders with the process. I have seen where they did three into three into three rods into one flat bar before using it to make a barrel. That type of gun is in a museum somewhere. The man hours to make a barrel that way must have been immense.

[Longwood]

Not to Hihack the thread

I read a book years ago about some of the legendary Samurai sword of Ancient Japan.
They were made by drawing out then folding bars of steel back over themselves and hammer welding them together over and over, doubling the layer count each time until some swords had one million layers of steel.
They did it with three men on sledge hammers and one holding the blade. I saw a video once and it sounded like a machine making the sword.
Forging steel smashes the molecules together making the steel harder and tougher.
Some of the blades were not only legendary but had names and the few that survived our governments orders to destroy all of them, are collector Items worth millions of dollars.
One in particular was named the beard cutter because when they tested it on a prisoner by cutting him in two at the shoulders, it was so sharp, it also cleanly cut the prisoners long beard.
Another supposedly well documented story I read about the swords was when two rival Samurai met on the street one day. One cut the other one in two pieces up through the hip bone and out through the opposite shoulder blade "AS" he drew his sword. The move has a name and was practiced often on prisoners.

[longbow]

True enough. What we typically call "Damascus" steel is pattern welded steel and can be made to produce many different patterns by mixing material and twists then etching with acid after finishing to bring out the pattern. That is the artwork of Damascus and probably why faux Damascus was often used on machine made steel shotgun barrels.

Barrels were also made by simply forging flat bar around a mandrel then forge welding at the seam which ran full length down the barrel. A process very similar to seam welded pipe using skelp strips around a mandrel. Nothing too fancy about that. I have to guess that was the "economy" barrel version of its day. Not sure if the seam was oriented to a flat or corner of an octagonal barrel. If to a corner then there would be a little more material there so maybe a little stronger?

Longbow

[halfslow]

I always thought it was because of the primitive tools used by most makers in the old days.
It is far easier to file a smooth and straight flat with a file you made this morning than turn a uniform taper without ripples. All you need is good and straight guide rails, and an apprentice with patience.
It became the way rifle barrels must be made.
All forged finishes I ever saw looked like a blacksmith made it with a hammer.

[perotter]

It is far easier to file a smooth and straight flat with a file you made this morning than turn a uniform taper without ripples. All you need is good and straight guide rails, and an apprentice with patience.


Also, some used to grind the flats with a grindstone that was water powdered. Basically they put the barrel in a guide and let gravity fed the barrel down into the grindstone. This was an old time automation method that was slow, but didn't require any labor.

[MBTcustom]

All forged finishes I ever saw looked like a blacksmith made it with a hammer.
No offence, but you obviously haven't spent much time with a mastersmith.
Even hypodermic needles were made on a coal fired forge back in the day. A mastersmith is capable of extremely even surfaces, round or flat, that need little more than a layer of carbon to be polished off.

[GOPHER SLAYER]

I have allways thought you could make a barrel lighter if you ground it in an octagon shape. Wasn't that the idea?

[Molly]

... A lathe for turning something round was not something a small shop would have. ...

John, haven't you ever heard of a spring-pole lathe? In a spring-pole lathe, the rotation was provided by a tough pole with a rope attached to the top, and the other end of the rope attached to the metal (or wood) stock to be worked. A foot pedal arrangement allowed the craftsman to step on the pedal to spin the metal (or wood), and the spring pole rewound it when the craftsman lifted his foot. It wasn't fast or high precision, but it was cheap, and most of those guys had a lot more time and ingenuity than money.

The same sort of arrangement could be used to power jig saws, drills, etc. They used what they had on hand to use, or did without.

That reminds me of a story I heard of how one guy ground the flats on his octagonal barrels. The guy was also a miller, and owned a water powered mill. His mill had an arrangement whereby a barrel was dropped into a slot at the end of the workday, and the mill was left running to turn a grindstone against the barrel. When the flat had been ground the entire length of the barrel, the barrel dropped free to hit a small lever that opened the sluice, and stopped the mill, thereby preventing excessive wear on the mill.

My hat is off to those old timers. I doubt if half of us could do half so well.

[John Taylor]

You might be able to find the video " Gunsmith of Williamsburg" at the library, it shows making a barrel by welding full length and talks about why octagon.

[paul h]

I have allways thought you could make a barrel lighter if you ground it in an octagon shape. Wasn't that the idea?

That is incorrect, the lightest possible barrel will always be round. You have to have a minimum wall thickness to contain the pressure in the barrel, and in the case of an octagon barrel, that will be the thickness across the flats.

http://etc.usf.edu/clipart/43400/43452/8c2_43452_sm.gif

Hence the round barrel with the same minimal wall thickness will be lighter than an octagon.

[KCSO]

Your other consideration is the ease of inletting an octagon barrel with primitive tools. It is easier to let on in square than a round barrel, you sure can't put a square across a round barrel and see if you are square. Same with dovetailing, try and put a dovetail square into a round barrel without a jig sometime. Remember your old time gunsmiths did it all by hand with planes and scrapers and hand drills.

[Texantothecore]

The octagon barrels have a lot of extra steel in them because it was assumed that any new rifle would be occasionally rebored to a larger caliber to eliminate pits and problems in the original bore. Which they did on a pretty regular basis. Many men owned their grandfather's flintlock and they worked fine for their lifetime and were handed down to their kids.

Most rifles of that period that measure .36 or so started out as .32 squirrel rifles.

By the way, an 8 groove barrel required 276 set ups on the rifling engine to cut the rifling. Really expensive. Which may explain the deep grooves in the rifling. The grooves would not have to be recut if the bore was enlarged.

[Texantothecore]

Their tools were extremely manual. They used hand planes to inlet barrels, etc. Many of the gunsmiths were also furniture makers and if you look at their probate records it is very difficult to tell if someone also made guns. The most reliable indicator is probably a rectangular billet of iron (not steel) and perhaps a part in a box from a broken lock.

[MBTcustom]

That explanation needs explanation!

The octagon barrels have a lot of extra steel in them because it was assumed that any new rifle would be occasionally rebored to a larger caliber to eliminate pits and problems in the original bore.
I don't see how having an octagon barrel gives you any advantage over a round barrel of the same diameter as the measurement across the flats, especially because the barrel flats do not "twist" with the rifling.

Most rifles of that period that measure .36 or so started out as .32 squirrel rifles.....Really expensive. Which may explain the deep grooves in the rifling.The grooves would not have to be recut if the bore was enlarged.
I've never heard of this as being definite fact, but I'll take your word for it.

By the way, an 8 groove barrel required 276 set ups on the rifling engine to cut the rifling.
Could you elaborate on this a little bit? I know what a rifling bench is, and I assume that the "rifling engine" is the automated sort that was driven by the overhead mandrel in old factories. I have studied the rifling process lightly, and I was under the understanding that cut rifling required one set up to align the barrel with the axis of the cutting rod, and simply rotating the barrel to cut each groove a few ten-thousandths of an inch deeper each time. I would not really call each time the barrel is indexed a "set up" as it required nothing more than pulling the indexing pin and rotating the barrel 45 degrees and repeating the cutting process. If you are referring to some process other than using a sine-bar rifling bench, I would like to know what it is and how it works.

[Wayne Smith]

I'm guessing, Tim, that each time paper was added to the rifling jig to deepen the cut is what he is calling a 'set-up'.

[waksupi]

I'd have to question some of the information, too. I've built several hundred muzzle loaders, and never used a plane of any sort to inlet a barrel.

The more I read those previous posts, the more BS I see in them. Where did you get this stuff? Throw that book away.

[Idaho Sharpshooter]

www.schifferbooks.com has this neat book by John Rice Irwin called "Guns and Gunmaking Tools of Southern Appalachia". $14.95.

Page 28 has your answer, a sort-of anvil called a Swage Block or Gun Anvil.

They date back at least 400 years, in Europe; and likely came here as early as 1720 with settlers like the German/Moravians, etc.

They are generally square or slightly rectangular, with up to ten or twelve octagon or round or square notches cut around the edges. There are also a number of cutouts inside the block of varying sizes. It was probably used to insure a square or octagon barrel was straight, before pulling the mandrel out. Some sizes were to make mandrel rods for different calibers. One pictured has a slight curvature on one side, to make and repair the iron hoops on wagon wheels.

Rich
Knowledge not shared is knowledge lost.

[Texantothecore]

That explanation needs explanation!

I don't see how having an octagon barrel gives you any advantage over a round barrel of the same diameter as the measurement across the flats, especially because the barrel flats do not "twist" with the rifling.

I've never heard of this as being definite fact, but I'll take your word for it.

Could you elaborate on this a little bit? I know what a rifling bench is, and I assume that the "rifling engine" is the automated sort that was driven by the overhead mandrel in old factories. I have studied the rifling process lightly, and I was under the understanding that cut rifling required one set up to align the barrel with the axis of the cutting rod, and simply rotating the barrel to cut each groove a few ten-thousandths of an inch deeper each time. I would not really call each time the barrel is indexed a "set up" as it required nothing more than pulling the indexing pin and rotating the barrel 45 degrees and repeating the cutting process. If you are referring to some process other than using a sine-bar rifling bench, I would like to know what it is and how it works.

First of all, the barrels were not steel but iron, very soft fully annealed iron. They needed more mass to contain the explosion successfully. Many shooters would use two balls and twice the charge if hunting deer and they were able to do so without any problems.

As far as the rifling engines go, they were made of wood and had multiple grooves cut into the wood to guide the cutting iron. The cutting iron was made of steel, rather soft by our standards but adequate to the task of cutting the grooves rather gradually following the grooves on the rifling engine. The cutting was done by hand, not using water power or other power sources and was a lot of work.

The first groove was cut.
The rifling engine was either turned or the cutting tool was moved to another groove on the rifling engine. After eight cuts (on an eight groove barrel), a small sheet of paper was placed underneath the cutter deepening the groove slightly for the next eight cuts. This continued until the rifling was finished.

Lots of set ups. On the other hand, these guys worked very quickly and it probably took less time to groove a barrel than we would think these days.

As far as the octagon barrel is concerned there are many arguments in its favor involving the manufacturing process. You can simply file the flats, no machinery required and it is easy to file the flats to the point that the bore is in the center of the barrel. And because they didn't have any machinery other than the manual rifling engine. I mean No Machinery whatsoever. Just hand tools. As I stated in a previous post, most of the gunsmiths were also furniture makers and their equipment listed in probate records are mostly furniture manufacturing equipment. Many of the gun known gunmakers also have been crossferenced to furniture and gunsmithing advertisements in the local broadsheets.

As far as lapping out a muzzleloader to repair the bore, it was done all the time. These were lifetime guns and many of them were handed down over the decades to children and grandchildren as working guns, not novelties. Many of the cap and ball guns that we see these days started their lives as flintlocks and were modified to accomodate the cap and ball action if the owner wished.

My comments are based on an interview of a very elderly man (95) who was a gunsmith in the early 1800s and possibly a few years in the 1700s. The author died in the 1920s at an advanced age due to a blow up of one of his old guns.

[MBTcustom]

I have seen the rifling benches that you refer to as "engines". The ones I saw operated on the same principle as the sine benches did (ie the barrel was indexed in its holder). Yes it was fairly labor intensive, but the sine style cured much of that. The real hard part was grinding the cutters in such a fashion as to get the most life out of them.
I believe that the old smiths knew exactly what they were doing, and had better understanding of machinery than the average jo. Think they couldn't figure out how to make a sine bench? cast your gaze a little rearward of the barrel, and observe the lockwork. I don't mean just the simple chunky flinters, but also the multi-barrel double trigger jobs. Not trying to question your friend or you, but I just don't get how a gunsmith would be so cleaver with lockwork and delicate mechanisms, and yet be so crude with the rest of the equipment of his trade. I know that the wooden benches existed, and were probably used by poor gunsmiths, but I also think that there were gunsmiths that had advanced equipment. I think it was just like it is today. Most gunsmiths are armorers (ie parts changers), and then there are a few who have what it takes to build from scratch. I would think that a local gunsmith back then would make a fairly good bit of profit from reborring barrels for folks. However, making the blanket statement that "most of the gunsmiths were also furniture makers and their equipment listed in probate records are mostly furniture manufacturing equipment. " is a bit simplistic. I think that some communities had no metalworker so they had to make do with what the carpenter could come up with, but I believe that there were many communities that had a fully fledged gunsmith operating with apprentices and everything. If you knew how to work metal, and had aspirations of being an armorer, you went to the big city to find employment. Just like today, if I want to work on state of the art defense equipment, I have to move to the big city for both the education and the job.

[Texantothecore]

I am sure that you are right. /Out.

[KCSO]

I saw a barrel channel plane in a German book on gunsmithing and built one and it works fine on the right wood. I will try and find the book again so I can post a drawing. I also have a fore stock shaping plane and scraper.

As to recutting a barrel that is a simple operation that does not require a rifling machine. You cut the grooves deeper with a cutter let into a lead lap cast in the bore of the rifle. Each pass you add a piece of cigarette paper to deepen the groove. After all grooves are the same depth you then cut down the lands with a reamer and a lap.

[MBTcustom]

KCSO, I would love to see pictures of that stuff!
Texantothecore, please don't go away mad, I meant no disrespect or harm. I was just thinking out loud. I'm trying to get my head around the your point of view, but its coming hard because it contradicts other things I have learned over the years. I have changed my opinion on many different subjects here on cast boolits by throwing what I know on the thread and letting it get torn to pieces until I find out which end had the bone in it.

[Texantothecore]

Ok, I'll come back in on this discussion. No offence taken.

Just think of how you would make a flintlock with:

No electricity

No water wheel to power your equipment. Water mills were expensive to build and probably ran in current USD say, 500,000 to 1,000,000 to build and involved buying a least an acre of land for a pond above the mill to allow them to regulate water flow as well as an exit area below. Investment capital was very difficult to come by and usually whatever capital was available was family money. In otherwords, not much. Guys who were already rich built water mills, not young gunsmiths.

Steam was unavailable and the steam hammer was not invented until 1808. Took a good decade to make them commonly available.

Iron is very soft and at least one report I have read is that the gunsmith could cut the flats with a steel edged drawknife. Very possible as pure iron is apparently softer than aluminum.

Most of the examples we have in our museums have English, Dutch or French locks on them and it is thought that this was quite normal. Making a lock without power by hand is a bit difficult. The locksmith smoothed out the action and mounted the lock but that was about it. Appalachia, however, had some locksmiths who made their own locks. I believe the Peeples or Peebles family did their own locks. The lock distribution industry was quite large and it stretched from New York to the smallest trading posts in the West. Tens of millions of locks passed through these distributors over the years. Which was part of the problem with Bellelisle's work. He didn't know about the lock distribution system in the US and apparently a lot of the records still exist.

Making a flintlock is not really a high precision pursuit. Everything was adjustable and they were adjusted to be reliable shooters. View cameras are the same. A fixed back camera such as an SLR is quite high tech, view camera can be made with the tools in your garage.

I spent 35 years in manufacturing and I became fascinated with the wonderful machinery the Victorians invented during the 19th Century. They were very innovative and much of that machinery, except for the addition of that new fangled electrical engine thingie, is much the same.

So. Another .02 for the info mill.

[MBTcustom]

I suppose I was thinking of 1700s and later.
My experiance is coming from building my own forge and using nothing but hand tools to produce flame hardened steel knives and tools. Even a piece of cold rolled steel or iron will become refined and infused with carbon if it is folded several times and welded in a coal forge. I have studied hand craftsmanship extensively and I have made many tools and knives by hand with a coal forge. Why? because I literally could not afford better tools. I made my first smoothbore caplock pistol when I was 13 years old, using only hand tools (OK I cheated and used a hand drill to drill the bore) and I made another when I was 14. I came to the conclusion that there is little to no money in handforged knives and implements, and decided to go to school and learn how to make things with modern machinery. I worked my way up through the trade, and at my last job I was running the wire EDM department (3 new machines as of 2006) and the heat treat department (5 ovens, one nitrogen purged). This whole time I continued to stay involved with gunsmithing and saw the value of merging my education over a coal forge with modern machinery.
I say all this to say that I know very well what hand tools are capable of, and hand operated machinery. That's why I am having trouble seeing why they would have trouble with some of the machinery that I mentioned earlier (although admittedly, I may be taking certain modern conveniences for granted).
The early rifling benches were made of cast iron and were driven by hand. Its just a more efficient method of doing the same work as the wooden rifling "engine" (which constitutes a "machine" by my estimation). It is true that iron can be scrapped by hand with a hand plane (its basically a single edged file), and I don't doubt for a minute that they used such an implement to make the flats on the early barrels.
I didn't know about the locksmiths being a specialized trade unto itself. Interesting information, although, I can tell you that pure iron is harder than aluminum, but they didn't have any such material back then.
Henry Maudslay invented the modern, geared head, screw cutting lathe in 1797, so what century are you talking about? What I suppose I should have said, was that I was wondering why they cut flats on the barrels when they obviously had metal cutting lathes long before Henry decided it would be useful to gear the apron to the head and make it possible to cut screw threads (by the way, Maudslay's lathe was made of iron, not wood.)
What is the advantage? Why go to all the trouble?
By the way, thanks for coming back into the discussion!:drinks:

[Longwood]

I saw a barrel channel plane in a German book on gunsmithing and built one and it works fine on the right wood.

I have only done two stocks from scratch.
I made a little aluminum plane and it worked well for parts of the job.
I made it with a block of aluminum that had a rounded and flat edge and a blade that was ground to work on either side.
It was a pain to use in some ways and needed to be redesigned.
These, would be nice to own.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/14pcs-Mini-ebony-Japanese-planes-wooden-wood-planes-woodworking-hand-planes-/170886227563?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item27c99ce66b

[uscra112]

I've been to the Williamsburg gun shop. I first heard there that most of the steel cutters were made from worn-out files, annealed, cut, forged, filed to shape, then re-hardened and stoned. Files in colonial America were almost always imported from Sweden or England. I've since read that same thing in several places. The steels used for making these files are said to have been pretty good, from the hardness standpoint.

I've always assumed that the old handmade barrels were octagon because that was easier to hand-forge and hand-finish (by draw filing) than a round barrel would be.

[Flinchrock]

Right interesting thread fellows.

[MBTcustom]

I spoke to my father about this, and he said that he had heard from an old gunsmith, that the earliest gun barrels were made by hammering a piece of iron flat, then wrapping it around a mandrel and welding it together. They had problems with the welds breaking, so they wrapped the barrels with wire to improve the strength a little, (I have seen an example of this before in a very old Indian flintlock). Then, they figured out that it was better to pierce the bore into the blank as that produced no weak spots from the welds. At this point, I called BS and told him that "there was no way in heck that they were going to pierce a 40" hole in a piece of iron". He gave me that "don't be stupid" look and told me that they started with a lump of iron, pierced a hole in it and drew it out from there on a mandrel between a hammer and an anvil. The really high end guns were finished round, but most of the time they just left them with the flats that were hammered into the metal in the drawing process. This squares with how I was taught to draw metal into round shapes. You hammer it square, then you hammer the "corners" voila, eight sides. I just never thought of it as a barrel making process, more of a way to make pins and rivets. I can easily see how this would be done, and it definitely explains why they are all eight sided barrels. This makes total sense as a practical solution from a blacksmiths standpoint. Couple that with all the other information here, and it has been one heck of a read.
By the way, here's a picture of one of the cappers that I made with handtools when I was a kid. Tools used were a hack-saw, fieriers rasp, hand drill, drill and tap for the nipple, and a whittling knife. Believe it or else, I shot this pieces several hundred times! It was fairly accurate at close range with semi-wad cutters. (at least they started that way, I stole them from dads guncabinet and would dig them out of the ground and smoosh them back round with a pair of pliers, and shoot 'em again.) Good times.
http://i1120.photobucket.com/albums/l481/goodsteel/IMG_1149.jpg

[Bret4207]

Back tot he original question of why so many turn of the century guns had octagonal barrels- If you read any of the writings of the old timers of the day, say Ned Roberts "The Muzzle Loading Cap Lock Rifle" or "New England Grouse Shooting" by Frank Forster (IIRC) you'll see tradition played a major part in what people used and bought. If you had the $$ to go and buy a gun you bought status too, if you could. Same as the people today that buy $50K pickup trucks or $2500.00 ARs. If you could do it, you bought what appealed to you and for the most part, based on surviving examples, catalogs and writings of the day, the octagon was just considered "correct" in most centerfire arms. Military rifles of the day seemed to have gone for round- the Trapdoors, early bolt guns, etc. That might have been a manufacturing expedient, or maybe for weight reduction. But for the most part, what I've seen says the tastes of the day leaned towards octagons for looks as much as anything else.

[Wayne Smith]

Barrels were long made by welding a piece of metal around a mandrel. Research how Damascus shotgun barrels were made even in the 1880's. In Williamsburg the last time I talked to the gunsmith (years ago) he was not making his own barrels but did have a demonstration of how they were done. For what it's worth, swamped barrels were made with a piece of metal that was thicker on the ends than in the middle. This saved weight and allowed a reasonable sight plane, according to him.

[Black Jaque Janaviac]

To resurrect an old thread . . .

I realize that the octagon shape could not be any advantage in indexing with a 7-groove rifling tool.

But, could the flats serve as an aid to hold the barrel in place while the rifling is cut? It seems that to cut the rifling you are putting a lot of torque on the barrel. Smoothbores don't have this issue.

If there is no advantage in having an octagon barrel while cutting the rifling, then I can't imagine there would be any practical advantage whatsoever. Which is what Wallace Gusler claims in "Colonial Gunsmith" (search Youtube).

Roundbarreled guns were common during the same time period - the only correlation seems to be that rifles were octagon, and smoothbores were round.

[freebullet]

I have never picked up an octagon barreled gun and not wanted to take it home, have you?

[starmac]

Just thinking, but could it be that the thinking was more weight out front was better to hold steady off hand.
Scopes were pretty much nonexistant, probably glasses were not as popular either, could the flat have been percieved easier to sight down? What was or is the thinking of the ventilated rib on shotguns?
I like them for the looks, but I am sure that was not the thinking in the early days.

[oldred]

Whatever the reason I'm sure happy that someone thunk of it!!! :mrgreen:

[bob208]

as some one said a lot of tradition. 7 groves for the 7 days of the week. a fish inlay is a christen sign and they old guys wanted all the luck they could get in the rifle. in the muzzle loading era it was to save work they only had to finish the top 3 flats. in the center fire era it was to make a heaver barrel. if some one ordered a rifle with a heavy barrel they got an octagon if they wanted a lite rifle they got a round barrel. look at Winchester carbines all have round barrels

[oldred]

Winchester carbines all have round barrels


That's another good point, seems as if by far most of the octagon barrels were long barrels and it was hardly ever used on a carbine. I know it's just a matter of taste but as much as I like the octagon style it just doesn't look right to me on a short barrel (except for some pistol barrels).

[country gent]

It was also thought that the octagon barrels were stronger and stiffer than round barrels. Another thing to remeber is back in this time period most machines were made in house by the shop. An octagun profile that looked good and symetrical to the eye was easier to produce with simple tools. Alot were profiled by hand after being made with files by hand.

[Ballistics in Scotland]

I don't think there is any question of octagonal barrels originating in the shape of blank rods supplied from the steel mill. Both in Europe (fro the days of the wheel-lock) and in colonial America, barrels were forged and draw-filed or planed octagonal when iron and steel simply didn't come in long, thin billets, and an ingot or a heavy part-rolled billet was about as much as you could hope to buy in.

Yes, metal-cutting lathes existed surprisingly early. But they were expensive and rare. While the small gunsmith might well have a lathe, it would be about as simple as modern wood-turning lathes, and probably without any kind of screw-operated slides. It would be quite a difficult job to turn a long barrel round that way, without noticeable transitions and ripples. so a draw-filed octagonal barrel was just as easy.

The sights weren't the only thing that were dovetailed into the barrel. So were the loops through which the muzzle-loader forend was keyed to the barrel. Fitting these was probably easier with an octagonal barrel. I know it was when I did it. Another consideration of which I don't think we have heard anything was that a long, thin forend was probably more liable to twist around a round barrel than an octagonal one. It is possible to make an octagonal channeled forend so tight as to be quite difficult to remove when the keys or screws are removed.

An octagonal barrel is indeed heavier than a round one of the same minimum wall thickness. I think we can assume that carbines are made for maximum portability. and round is best. But for a rifle, steadiness is better. Some military pistols were made of very large bore, and must have kicked viciously. For these an octagonal barrel's weight was probably useful, and likewise for dueling pistols, which required the greatest possible steadiness of hold. Just like a dress with vertical lines on it, an octagonal barrel, although heavy, probably didn't look as large as a round one.

I think all this turned into mere fashion in due course, when technological facilities made one about as easy as the other. But the simplest of facilities were all the early backwoods gunsmiths had. The wooden guide drum for rifling, for example, could have numerous points on the curved line marked out with pins, around which a thin wooden lath could be aligned to show where the guiding groove had to be cut.

Damascus originated in the softness of iron, and the tendency to have flaws in the ingots available in the 18th and early nineteenth century. If you simply hammered or rolled a barrel rod from the ingot and drilled it (which even a few backwoods gunsmiths later did by hand), that flaw would also be drawn out to considerable length, and the barrel might open up along that line. Draw it out into a strip and twist it into a spiral barrel, and the risk was lessened. But twist those thin strips before welding together, and bad metal would end up in such a complicated mix with good, that the strength would be extremely high. Steel, stronger than iron, could also be incorporated into the mix. Early improvements.

Then came Whitworth's Fluid Pressed Steel. High pressure applied by hydraulics to the partly-solidified ingot didn't really squeeze bubbles into nothingness, as was said, and some flaws aren't bubbles, but slag. The process, however, squeezed out the carrot-shaped hollow pipe, with lots of impurities etc., which had previously extended well into the interior of the ingot, due to contraction on cooling.

The first barrels made from this steel, such as Whitworth's drawn steel tubes, were at least expensive as good Damascus, which isn't a bad barrel material for shotguns. So this continued in use for its extraordinary beauty, long after solid steel was available. Conversely the cheapest non-suicidal barrels were twist, made mostly in Belgium, where labour costs were low, and more iron was used than in the UK. Virtually all US Damascus shotgun were made from imported tubes.

It has to be understood that Birmingham and Liege had no gold-rushes and no Western lands. I've got a Belgian shotgun, by the Anciens Etablissements Pieper, which was made in the 1920s, but unless they were extraordinary copyists, has engraving done by the same man as in their 1911 catalogue - and a lot happened in Liege in those years. If you Google "Congo Free State", which later became the Belgian Congo, you will see how little appeal it had for any Belgian capable of honest poverty back home. European workshops constantly used skilled labour where the USA had to substitute machines.

The reason barrels so often had an odd number of grooves was quite practical. The groove can be cut most smoothly if there is a land backing up the cutting head on the other side of the bore, rather than a land. Other than for cannon, I don't think anybody makes paper thin enough for the passes that had to be made in cutting rifling. Later rifling heads raised the cutter by means of an inclined plane, and I think this was probably done with the simpler ones of earlier days, adding paper as the end of the incline was reached, or if a wooden-backed rifling head wore smaller.

[Ragnarok]

My thoughts are that at least in the cartridge rifle era..the octagon barrel is just a up-grade. Like Winchester lever-guns. Carbines are more or less a utility gun and as a rule have round barrels...rifles usually have octagon barrels however you see quite a few round barreled rifles.

The rifles with octagon barrels handle nice..and have a flat sight-plain to sight down. So it's 1902..and you need a hunting rifle..you stroll into the hardware store and look at all the pricy rifles on the rack...some are beyond your budget of $20...however they have Winchester M1892 rifles in .44-40...but..but..the one with an octagon barrel costs a buck and a half more than the same thing with a round barrel! So what do you do?...You handle both M1892 rifles and decide the octagon barreled M1892 handles just a bit better and definitely looks cooler. So you buy the octagon barreled rifle huh?...But your lady came to town with you(this the family's once a month supply trip to town)...the kids need shoes...so you buy the cheaper round barreled rifle and a couple pairs of patent leather shoes..and get the heck outa town...