Joe, the two rifles that I can speak to are the Winchester model 1885 and the Sharps Borchardt. I have also had very good luck with Winchester M70s and Model 54s. The way this was achieved was through the machining method known as 
"Thread Milling" This is a Horizontal Milling Machine, setup with a powered index head thru gearing that is tied to table travel and table screw. This allows the machining of threads usually in one pass that is indexed to a specific feature already finished on the barrel. It could be a barrel flat or a dovetail cut, either would suffice. The milling cutter is shaped to the specific thread form desired. Now this is not to say that this produces the most accurate interchangable barrels. Winchester had a standard that called out how close to proper index the barrel would screw into by hand. they then used a barrel wrench and held the action in fixture and pulled it up tight and to the index mark. At this point the sight slots were correctly on top and the flats on an octagon barrel would be correct. All of the barrel work, flats, sight slots, spring mount slots underneath, and extractor cuts into the chamber were complete and finished. Sharps Borchardts were done in the same manner. Thread Milling is not widely known because it is expensive to setup and will only payoff when there is production enough to warrant. It has come back somewhat today with the evolution of Computer Numerical Machining. These machines can keep track of all aspects of cutter location and index thread start and end as required. Some of the Lathes in use today will even keep rotation of the spindle down to a few seconds of arc/angle. This allows them to rough and finish thread with very small infeeds but at high spindle speeds and it is all done with rotary encoders and digital positioning controls. No direct gearing is used at all in these new machines. Well I have gotten long winded here. If this does not answer your question let me know and I will try again. Regards, FITZ.

Joe, a basic fact. All materials are plastic. That is if you load them enough they will distort. Does not matter if it is compression or tension. Enough load will cause distortion. Now a Rifle barrel shank if pulled tight enough (tension) will stretch. In the Single shots I have worked on I have not seen any tight enough for this to be an issue. I have seen it in some Bolt actions. Springfields are notorious. Also some Jap rifles. And an occasional Remington although in their case it may be rifles assembled with locktight. I have wondered about Springfields if it was not a combination of tightness and thread form or dimension fit. They use a square thread and it is a tough operation to keep them in spec in production
operations. I do remember reading that the last Winchester M70 target rifles the barrels were chambered about .010 shy of correct and then they were installed in the recievers with permanant grade locktight and pulled up tight to 240 ft-lbs of tourque. This would stretch the chambers to within .005 or slightly less and then they were finish chamber reamed. An interesting side note was when the rifles were accuracy tested if they were not up to par Winchester would not try to salvage the reciever or the barrel, they destroyed them completely as they had found they could not disassemble them without causing damage. As for Pistols being pulled up tight enough to cause a constriction I would have to pass on that as I have no real knowledge. I could picture it happening if you could pull them up tight anough. But there really is not a lot of material in a revolver frame to hold onto for serious tourque such that you could distort the barrel shank. I would suspect that the reciever would distort first.
HTH and hope all is well with you. Regards, FITZ.