Barrel joining on Stevens 311 and derivative models

I do believe that those are soft soldered, quick test is to take a pointy thing and scrape between the rib and barrel,if it brings up a shiny silver like curl it's soft soldered. I would probably treat it like it's soft soldered anyway just to be sure. Is there a way to maybe add a thick pad to your dent raiser shoe and get a better push with it?

I have a Ranger O/U which was gifted to me. Pretty sure it was a Sears model back then, and was most likely made by Stevens. I looked at the muzzle end and the two barrels are joined by a silver-bearing soft solder. (I know how to tell because I made surgical instruments with many solders/brazes. Scratch test, essentially.) The solder is covered by a couple of thin steel "gussets" which are blued, so that the solder is not visible except at the very end of the barrels. Regarding the dents, this one had a dent on the upper barrel (you don't want to know how it got there) before I got the gun, so I made an expanding dent remover (mechanical) and using light hammer taps was able to remove the dent, over some time. I gave away the dent remover to someone on this forum (I think in 2015). No heat of any kind involved. Just a fair amount of time and caution with a light brass-faced ball-pien hammer. I'll try to post a pic of the barrels' muzzle end if my short-term memory doesn't fail me.

Let us know how you fix the problem, always up for learning something new.

BBBBill, if you used the tapping technique with the hydraulic dent raiser, that may be why it didn't work; The tapping simply was passed onto other metal without doing anything, because it (the dent raiser) is hydraulic, and distributes the forces. The expanding mechanical dent raiser I used (made) doesn't allow the forces to dissipate. I could see my progress as I went along, tapping. But eventually you'll get it done, hopefully without any heat. I really considered the hydraulic dent raiser, despite the cost, then thought, WTH, I'll try the homemade mechanical one instead first. And it worked.

I finally got my leetle gray cells to get the pic of the muzzle of that Ranger O/U shotgun.