Quote:
Originally Posted by Icelander
In our world, bronze was from two to six times more expensive than iron or low-quality steel at the time those guns were being made.
Was the actual labour of welding and boring iron gunbarrels easier than casting bronze ones or was it just more economic because the materials costs were so much lower?
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That is the kind of question which would take real research to answer (Tatterton just describes four or five methods of making and finishing gun barrels which were all used in South Asia between the 16th century and the 19th ... he is not interested in the economics, and the smiths who made the guns lacked the concepts).
Casting long thin-walled things, like a sword blade or musket barrel, is difficult because the bronze cools as it flows through the mould and bits of coal from the crucible can get stuck as the mould narrows. In the case of gun barrels, you would also have to get rid of the core (I think for great artillery they sometimes used a wooden core and burned it out, but I have no idea what they settled on by Gribeauval's day). If they still made a few brass-barrelled pistols or blunderbusses in the 18th century, someone may have described the process (check Diderot's
Encyclopédie), but again the workers and shop owners did not necessarily have the education and numeracy to analyse the economics of their business. This is long before Taylorism.