Last week in a thread about octagon to round barrel rifles one person said that it was totally unintentionally done because draw fiiling an true Octagon barrel was messed up and that's why we see swamped barrels
absolutely totally WRONG! It was primarily done for balance and ease of handling. I have two flintlock longrifles. One is the Traditions Pennsylvania Longrifle that I got back in the early 2000's, which has a 40¼" long straight barrel. There is no question that it is nose heavy and hard to mount, swing, and hold on target when shooting freehand. However, with a fairly long barrel it's easy to rest on a tree branch or other support. I thought that was how all longrifles felt until I bought my Early Lancaster (also in .50 cal. like the Traditions) from a private builder, who used a 44½" swamped barrel on it. The first time I handled it, the difference was dramatic.
Even though the barrel on my Early Lancaster was an additional 4¼" longer than the Traditions one, the balance point on the rifle is right where my left hand holds the forearm of the stock. Night and day easier to mount, swing, and especially hold on target. It wasn't until 1838 when Remington made the first successful barrel drilling machine with a hollow center supplying the front of the bit with oil or lubricant to keep the drill bit cool as it drilled through a solid steel blank that straight barrels were made. They gave up the balance and ease of handling for the lower cost and reduced time of making the barrel. The length of the rifles and their barrels shrank tremendously to help compensate for this nose-heavy design and half-stock rifles such as those used on the plains became the norm.
Prior to that ingenious design invented by Remington, the barrels were made by by hammer forge-welding a flat iron skelp around a mandrel. After removing the mandrel, they were then bored out to make bore of the rifle perfectly straight and reamed smooth. If they lived near a cannon maker, they could send the barrel to them for this "boring" process. After it was bored out, then it would laboriously be rifled. Typically took about a week to make a single rifle barrel. This boring out and rifling after removing the mandrel is why rifles made with the same mandrel would more often than not end up being different calibers. So much so that when you bought a rifle, the bag mold to make the lead balls to fit it was included with the rifle. During the Rev War era, most of these rifles were around the .50 caliber size but could be perhaps .48 cal. to anywhere as large as .54 caliber. So there were no "standard" size rifle calibers and lead balls to fit them. Rather it was a variety of sizes.
A gunsmith shop would usually have a number of apprentices and journeymen besides the master builder(s). It takes approximately 400 man-hours to make a single rifle using the materials and methods of the 18th century. Working 12 hours a day, that is more than 33-days, which would severely limit the number of pieces that could be turned out. Using apprentices for the beginner's skills such as starting the forge and using the bellows to keep it at temperature, while having journeymen work the brass, build the locks, do the carving, etc. allowed a gunsmith to produce enough rifles or guns (smoothbores) to stay in business. Additionally most of the locks were imported by the barrel-full from England before the war, which would reduce a major amount of labor. From records of some of the Pennsylvania gunsmiths, repairs were a big part of the business, if not the major part.
The octagon shape that you see on these rifles was much easier to make than a round barrel because you needed a thicker barrel to handle the pressures and, although they had spring board lathes for shaping wood, they had nothing powerful enough to lathe a perfectly round wrought-iron barrel. And contrary to the "draw knife" thoughts on forming the octagon, I had the gunsmith at Williamsburg in about 2008 tell me that they were hammered to shape and then filed or ground to make the nice flats and edges. He said a drawknife was a wood working tool, not a gunsmithing tool.
Typically now days, a swamped barrel will cost you about $200 or more than a straight tapered barrel. The barrel itself is more expensive and inletting the stock to accommodate swamp design takes longer than inletting a straight barrel. That's about the price of upgrading the wood used for the stock. If it comes down to either a swamped barrel or a prettier piece of wood, go for the swamped barrel. You'll absolutely love the way your new rifle handles with it. Below is a picture of my Early Lancaster Rifle hanging on the wall. You can easily see the swamped shape of the barrel as it tapers down to the middle and then swells up again starting about 14" or so from the crown of the muzzle.
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