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Metals Used in Firearms - IV
In our last three posts, we looked at usage of steel and stainless steel in firearms. In today's post, we will look at the usage of alloys of another metal: aluminum.Aluminum is one of the most...
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Metals Used in Firearms - V
In our last post, we looked at the use of aluminum in firearms. In today's post, we will look at a more exotic material: titanium.Titanium is a metal, which like aluminum, has a very high...
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Metals Used in Firearms - VI
In our last few posts in this series, we've studied different metal alloys used in modern firearms: steel, stainless steel, aluminum and titanium. In the next couple of posts, we will study metals that...
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Metals Used in Firearms - VII
In our last post, we looked at how bronze was used for early gun barrels. In today's post, we will look at early barrels made of a form of iron called wrought iron.As was noted in our previous post,...
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Metals Used in Firearms - VIII
In our last post, we studied how a bloomery was historically used to produce wrought iron from the raw iron ore. The problem with bloomeries is that they weren't very efficient when it came to...
View ArticleMetals Used in Firearms - IX
In our last post, we looked at how blast furnaces were used to make an iron alloy called pig iron. While blast furnaces are good at extracting iron from the ore more efficiently than bloomeries, the...
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Metals Used in Firearms - X
A couple of posts ago, we studied about the blast forge and how it is used to produce pig iron. While blast forges are much more efficient at extracting iron from ore than bloomeries, they have the...
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Metals Used in Firearms - XI
In our last post, we saw how people converted pig iron (or cast iron), an alloy of iron useless for making firearms, to a more useful wrought iron, which is much more suitable for making firearms,...
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Metals Used in Firearms - XII
In our last post, we saw how a puddling furnace could be used to convert pig iron/cast iron into wrought iron, which is much more suitable for manufacturing firearm parts. Today, we will study some...
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Metals Used in Firearms - XIII
In our last post, we saw how wrought iron could be converted into steel, by adding carbon to wrought iron in a closed furnace, in a controlled manner. Recall that, in our previous post, we mentioned...
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Metals Used in Firearms - XIV
In our last post, we saw how crucible steel was manufactured after around 1740 or so, using the process invented by Benjamin Huntsman. While crucible steel was a significant improvement over blister...
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Metals Used in Firearms - XV
In our last post, we studied how the Bessemer process made it possible for the first time for steel to become as cheap or cheaper than cast iron. The quality of steel wasn't as high as the crucible...
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Metals Used in Firearms - XVI
Two posts ago, we studied details of the Bessemer process, which revolutionized the production of steel and dropped the price of steel to be comparable to that of iron. Today, we will study another...
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Metals Used in Firearms - XVII
In our last post, we studied the invention of the Siemens-Martin process to make steel. In today's post, we will study a type of furnace that was invented in the early 1900s, gained popularity around...
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Metals Used in Firearms - XVIII
In our last post, we studied one of the modern methods of steel making, the electric arc furnace. In today's post, we will study another method that is commonly used today, the Basic Oxygen Furnace...
View ArticleMetals Used in Firearms - XIX
In our last post, we looked at a modern method of manufacturing steel, Basic Oxygen Steelmaking (a.k.a) the BOS process. As we saw, this is based on the Bessemer process, except that we use oxygen...
View ArticleQuestionable Tactics
After that long series about different metals used in firearms manufacturing, might as well take a break from a dry topic and watch something else instead.Initially, your humble editor thought that...
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Forging Rifle Barrel Blanks in the 1920s - I
After all the stuff we studied about metallurgy in the last several posts, we will look at an ancillary subject today, forging of rifle barrel blanks. We have already covered barrel manufacture from...
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Forging Rifle Barrel Blanks in the 1920s - II
In our last post, we studied some parts of a factory designed to produce rifle barrel blanks. In today's post, we will continue studying the process. As noted before, some of the details come from a...
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What's the deal with Barrel Shrouds?
So what is a barrel shroud? It is simply a hollow covering tube that surrounds a barrel (either partially or fully). What does it do? Well, it protects the user of the firearm from accidentally burning...
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