Barrel boring bench

[Matt Maier]

Feel free to move/delete if this is the wrong forum for this post. I am interested in making tools for building traditional fowling gun barrels. Information seems to be lacking on the boring bench though. Has anyone built one and would be willing to provide photos or details?

 

[rich pierce]

Look up Toad Hall gun shop. They have plans. Or “Bevel Brothers”.

 

[Matt Maier]

Unfortunately, the Toad Hall website seems to no longer exist.

 

[plmeek]

...I am interested in making tools for building traditional fowling gun barrels. Information seems to be lacking on the boring bench though. Has anyone built one and would be willing to provide photos or details?

I have a question as to what you mean by "boring". Back in the 18th, and probably into the 19th, century the use of the term "boring" was what we would call reaming today. Barrels back then were forge welded with strips of iron around a mandrel. The mandrel formed the hole through the barrel or the bore. The barrel would be straightened by sighting down the bore. Then in would be placed in the boring bench and reamed with long reamers. The reamers were changed out to slightly larger sizes until the desired bore size was achieved.

For fowler barrels, the exterior dimensions including the octagon section and the round section were ground to shape against large grinding wheels in the large boring mills and probably filed to shape in small shops.

The modern term "boring" generally means drilling a long hole. For gun barrels this is usually done on special deep hole drilling or gun barrel drilling machines with special drill bits that are hollow for the circulation of cooling, lubricating, and chip clearing fluid.

Which type of boring are you referring to?

Steve Bookout of Toad Hall Rifle Shop retired several years ago. It does look like his website had been taken down.

His friend, Hoot Al, still has a website and still offers for sale the Rifling Book that he helped Steve Bookout write. Here is a link to it.

http://www.hootalrifleshop.org/purveyors_links.htm

This book is primarily for building a rifling machine, which isn't needed for fowler barrels. I don't know for sure, but it might cover the reaming process because I know that Bookout used to hold classes on how to hand forge a barrel, and he probably included the rest of the process to rifle it. You could contact Hoot Al and see.

 

[Matt Maier]

Hi plmeek. Yes, by "boring", I mean the process of enlarging the hole present from forming the skelp around the mandrel (in my case, I want to spiral weld barrels for a side by side shotgun).

 

[Bo T]

Matt, My hat is off to you. Are you going to use 1008 or 1010 steel to mimic the old wrought iron barrels?

 

[plmeek]

Have you watched the Colonial Gunsmith video on YouTube? It shows Wallace Gussler hand making a longrifle. It has several shots from different angles of the boring bench or table used at Colonial Williamsburg. The boring part begins about 3:50 minutes into the film and lasts until 8:50 or about 5 minutes.



Here is another similar video.


This is probably Williamsburg.

Here is another one shown on Gary Brumfield's website.

http://www.flintriflesmith.com/ToolsandTechniques/barrel_making.htm

More pictures from Colonial Williamsburg here.

https://sites.udel.edu/materialmatt...fle-gun-gunsmithing-at-colonial-williamsburg/

 

[Matt Maier]

Matt, My hat is off to you. Are you going to use 1008 or 1010 steel to mimic the old wrought iron barrels?

I'm going to use 1018 to substitute for wrought iron and 1095 for the higher carbon steel.

 

[Matt Maier]

plmeek, I actually have that on DVD. I think its time I watch it again.

 

[Bo T]

I'm going to use 1018 to substitute for wrought iron and 1095 for the higher carbon steel.

You're also forging and shaping your cutting tools? I am interested in following a work in progress.

 

[1950DAVE]

Foxfire #5

 

[Matt Maier]

For curiosity sake, now I am wondering what tools gunsmiths from 1842 (the Springfield M1842 being the first musket made with truly interchangeable parts) onward would have used to bore out barrels. The aforementioned reaming bench did the job back in the 18th century, but would a lathe have been used going from the mid 19th century onward?

 

[plmeek]

The armories were using machines. Initially, powered by water, but by mid-1800s steam engines became practical for factory settings. Lathes were being used for making screws and actually shaping stocks, but probably not quite for the boring process, yet.

In this image showing operations at Springfield Armory at the beginning of the American Civil War, from a popular magazine, the boring of the inside of the tube that formed the musket barrel was accomplished with powered machine cutters.

Harpers Weekly, September 21, 1861

After polishing the bore of the musket barrel, a few grooves were cut into its inner surface along the length of the bore that twisted about a full turn from one end to the other. These grooves, or rifling, caused a fired bullet to spin, thereby increasing accuracy.

Harpers Weekly, September 21, 1861

This link shows more machines, including the the Blanchard Lathe stock carver.
https://www.nps.gov/spar/learn/historyculture/machines.htm

 

[Matt Maier]

So not very different aside from the tools being mechanized.

 

[krshade]

Try googling John Sites, Jr. He had a gun shop in Arrow Rock, Missouri in the mid 19th century. There is a youtube video which shows the reaming machine. There are pictures of the rifling machine on another site.

 

[Matt Maier]

Alright, what I have gathered from this is that the process of reaming barrels did not differ significantly between the XVIII and early to mid XVIIII century, up into the very beginning of the cartridge era. Ergo, Purdey would likely have used the same methods to bore their ml shotgun barrels as Lefaucheux did to make his pinfire guns (which I will not go into detail here as it is the wrong forum).

 

[plmeek]

Matt,

Yes. Up to the middle of the 19th century, rifle barrels, musket barrels, and shotgun barrels would have been "bored" with the technology shown above that goes back probably to the 17th and maybe 16th century. The situation with cannons is a little different. They did use very large lathes to bore cannons where the cannon itself was turning and the boring bit was stationary. Early in the development of the steam engine, they used similar lathes to bore out steam cylinders, also.

I suspect the old technology was used for the smaller barrels because it worked satisfactorily. It wasn't until a practical method of making large quantities of steel at a competitive price was developed in the mid-1800s that we start to see new methods in making gun barrels. There were probably two reasons for this 1) better steel tools were made that were stronger and tougher for machines and 2) steel became abundant and affordable for making tools, machines, and barrels themselves. Lathes could be made of steel and the cutting tools could be made harder and tougher to withstand the forces they were subject to. You probably noticed in the "Colonial Gunsmith" video that they commented on how many boring bits they broke. Advances in steel making and metallurgy led to all kinds of new innovations and inventions.

 

[Bo T]

plmeek,
Just so I understand a little bit better about this process, when you 'boring bits, are you referring to reamers and hones for opening up the barrels forged around a mandrell?

 

[plmeek]

plmeek,
Just so I understand a little bit better about this process, when you 'boring bits, are you referring to reamers and hones for opening up the barrels forged around a mandrell?

Yes. The period boring bits were more like reamers. The bit itself was steel that was forged square or some polygonal cross-sectional shape, then twisted to form cutting edges and recesses for cuttings. They often looked like the image below. They were forged welded or brazed to iron rods. The bits themselves were heat treated to harden, then tempered. The ones shown in the Colonial Gunsmith video had tapered points to guide the bit through the irregular hole formed by the mandrel.



In the final stages, a square reamer was used to put a fine finish on the bore and bring it to final bore ID. This particular reamer had two sharp corners as cutting edges and two rounded corners to guide the tool.

Remember, these simple steel tools were used to cut softer wrought iron barrels.

For a musket or shotgun barrel, this might be the final step for the bore. For a rifle barrel, the rifling would be cut next on the rifling bench.

 

[Matt Maier]

Would these tools work for mild steel? More importantly, would they be able to cut through the harder, higher carbon steel found in Damascus barrels?