Finally some babies appearing in these two GBs i drilled out the meristem on, my first time trying this on Cacti, i have another dozen or so that I will slice in half instead of drilling and see what happens. The drilling leaves a deep hole that can collect water, which is a death sentence for cacti.
Anyone else have other methods of premoting pups on barrels ?

It looks like you did good work on those two plants. You might want to keep them out of the rain for the next few years, if you aren't doing that already. I think what you did is basically how most of the extremely multi headed golden barrels were originally engineered. After all the new heads grow out there is less risk of the pond effect.

I had a n astrophytum capricorne lose its meristem due to sun and physicall damage. But no pups...

The same happens in nature! Not my photo...

Pretty good progress for 6 months!

How do people get so many offsets? The most i ever got was 3. Do you give them a lot of water and fertilizer at that time?

I only have one question: WHY? I have a couple where this has happened by accident but I have never wanted to deface a cactus on purpose.

DaisyI said:I only have one question: WHY? I have a couple where this has happened by accident but I have never wanted to deface a cactus on purpose.

@Daisyl most of the big golden barrel clumps with a dozen of heads are started this way.
Personally i've only done it on plants i wanted to propagate and have more of