Chrome silicon steel for firearm recoil springs

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SHAME on you, this is rec.politics.bullshit group :)

Stranded wire springs aren't new. My MG42 (German WWII weapon) uses them.

karl

German? That figures. Well, they were new to me.

Joe Gwinn

Thanks, that was interesting. I'd never heard of "rocket wire" either.

I spent a little time trying to find out exactly what rocket wire is.. Was pretty much unsuccessful other than finding info on the TOW missile.

Dan

Dan, this is the best that I could find:

Actually, that may be exactly right. TOW missiles drag a very fine steel wire behind them, over which comes control signals. I always thought this would be music wire, but wasn't sure that music wire would be strong enough. I suppose the quickest way to know is to call CSS and ask.

Now days, a glass fiber is used instead of the wire, so there is enough bandwidth to send a TV picture back, so the operator can stay at the bottom of his foxhole while guiding the missile.

Joe Gwinn

The recoil spring in my 1911..is composed of multi strands of wire.

Both are in fact.

They look like springs made from multistrand wire cable.

Gunner

Do you know if it's necessary to keep them oiled? I wonder if there's friction between the strands.

Ive always given them a bit of TriFlow. They havent seemed to have lost any tension over the past 20+ yrs. I should pull em one of these days and check em. They are supposed to be 18lb springs

Gunner

Don't have a lot of experience with guns, but I understand that the

1911 has a pretty good reputation. I know that engineers look for simplicity in design, but this spring must be an exception to the KISS principle.

That's some weird shit, Maynard. I'd never seen that before. Cool.

Well...Ive fired at least 100,000 rds with that spring in it..so reliablity and durability seems to have been adressed quite nicely.

The original recoil spring should be changed at 2,000-3000 rds

Gunner

Hmm ... the TOW had two spools of a very strong wire (at least strong for electrical purposes). The spools are wound with the wire in a pattern so they will pull off without the spools needing to rotate, and the wire is held layer to layer with some kind of airplane cement which peels off easily. Those wires go from the missile to the launching tube to carry commands to fire small downward and sideward facing rockets to bring it back on course and adjust for droop. (You really don't want to be walking through a field where one has been fired without good tough boots to keep your legs from being cut by the wire.

Whether this has any relation to the "rocket wire" which you were trying to look up I don't know, but you now have what I know about the wire as used in early examples of the TOW.

Enjoy, DoN.

My metallurgy teacher swore up and down that the Tow missle wire was simply-very-clean 1020 carbon steel. It was the material they found that could be hard drawn to the strength needed. Can't remember the details but seems like he visted(?) the factory where they draw the wire out in Ohio and the length needed for the operation was long... so the place was huge. LOL :)

It's -very- special stuff, its strength is about as high as steel gets. ...or something like that? xD

Richard "Curley" Hastings metallurgist

Took his class for the fun of it and it -was- fun alright! :)

Alvin in AZ

I give them a drop of oil. In Sigs, those springs "wear out" when the center strand starts too far protrude from the strands that surround it. If one strand breaks, the entire spring doesn't instantly and completely fail.