Tap both ends of the barrel, attach hoses and run water through it while pouring the lead. Use extreme caution to prevent water in the molten lead.
We have to find out - casting a barrel in concrete
- Thread starter davidjoe
- Start date
Yes, it's been done. I don't remember dates and such but I do remember reading about what sounds exactly like what you're describing maybe 20 years ago on benchrest central. It may have originated from a Precision Shooting article. To answer the big question though, it did not shoot well like that.
My 2 cents are simply that tuning is very much about MANAGING vibration but stopping it is an impossibility. You may succeed in reducing amplitude but while raising the frequency to be un-tunable...or at least to the point where it's not practical. I actually prefer a bit more amplitude because it shows me tune, or lack of it, more clearly than an ultra stiff beam. To me, if I can see tune, I can fix it but if it shoots just good enough to lose while somewhat out of tune, it's obviously harder to recognize and correct. A well tune rifle is a thing of beauty, though.
Not saying one way is right and the other wrong, but your theory is polar opposite of everything tuning related that we know to date. Stiffer bbls have been used for ages. They have their benefits but I think most experienced br shooters will agree that a LV contour can shoot just as well as a HV or even heavier contour..fwiw.
Nevertheless, I do appreciate anyone that thinks outside of the box and challenges the status quo. Sometimes it's the status quo for good reason and sometimes it's just the way things have always been, but not always the best. So, testing is how we know stuff. In the end, we may learn something but is it applicable if it can't be applied, practically? Either way, if we learn from it, we gained from it. Kudos and keep us posted.
JEFFPPC
Gold $$ Contributor
1st sentence....can't pronounce that word so throw that out.
2nd sentemce.....nope, I don't have any bullets that will fit.
3rd sentence....now your making sense buddy, I am just about to have the same thing. A good cup of drip coffee and Naomi's pumpkin pie made from fresh Sugar Pumpkins, no canned stuff.
PS Fuj Is it white up your way?
Killick
Transcendental Capitalist
Link doesn't work.Sounds like it has been tried.
Eliminate barrel vibration!
Member blkntann just posted about “Barrel pressure tuning” (https://www.rimfirecentral.com/threads/barrel-pressure-tuning.1306760/?post_id=13446308#post-13446308) which got me thinking. Not wanting to hijack that thread, here goes: We spend a lot of time understanding and dealing with barrel...www.rimfirecentral.com
I read this thread (which is way above my pay grade) and was thinking abputbthe physics behind completely deadening/eliminating all harmonics to the boint they are undetectable for benchrest standards (which are pretty god dammed high to be honest haha) and I am skeptical that it is physically possible, but its interesting. Sooo here is my thought: can we somehow deaden the muzzle and let the rear do whatever it wants to dissipate the force involved? Put the front in concrete or lead let the action move like the muzzle normally would?
Mr Ezell is correct, very well said! It is virtually impossible to stop the harmonics of a rifle barrel. In my thread on Reduce Vibes/Relieve Action, I clamped the barrel and left the action free-floated. This stock with 4 different 1.25 straight barrels has outperformed the conventional stock. However, there were a few problems to overcome. You will see that I commented about the action and scope vibrating, once the barrel is held stable. We made corrections to offset this, but you won't completely eliminate vibration. It is not in the thread yet, but we shot all four barrels at 1,000 yards and over 6 groups the best barrel (22 inches) had 6.17 inch agg in very good conditions. Avg agg for all barrel was still a rather good 6.48 inches. Conventional stock avg'd 7.5--8.00 inches. This is not going to set any records, but it proved a point that we could get a clamped barrel to shoot well.
High speed cameras and counting pixels can give an idea of muzzle movement. The target told us the same. With this said, you can do the same thing by understanding how to tune the barrel with or without a tuner. My little project did not prove that someone should use this concept.
There are hundreds of different formulations for concrete/cement, whether for ambient temp/surface work like a driveway or high temp such as oil wells, etc. With these various recipes, you will have a big change in Young's Modulus (elasticity) which in turn will exhibit how the material resonates. Firing a rail gun on a concrete bench will even cause the bench to resonate, although slightly. If the large slab of concrete is large enough, it could very well reduce muzzle movement and achieve what OP is looking for. Not sure what would be learned from the experiment over what we know with a rail gun and a 1.450" barrel. I noticed where a rail was built with 3 barrel blocks with very little barrel protruding. I may be wrong but I think it is Lester Bruno's gun. Not sure how much it has been shot, but that would be another side by side comparison, so far as muzzle movement is concerned.
46and2
Silver $$ Contributor
Engineers' perspective on the Remington 700 VTR triangular barrel
CR Riddell, PE posted a comment about the Remington 700 VTR triangular barrel and I thought it deserved its own blog post:I am a professional structural engineer.In 1977, I was granted a patent on a structural system that uses triangular cross-section members with a circular cross-section hole...
www.thefirearmblog.com
Remington did it...didn't last that long.
Infrequent Shooter
Gold $$ Contributor
Seems this would cause more stress on the receiver or bolt, because the energy otherwise released by the barrel flexing or vibrating has to go somewhere?
LOL.....Oobleck is some crazy stuff. if Naomi has cornstarch on the shelf
she could make it easily. the kids were making it for a science project. It's
a soupy mess, but when it receives a shock, it turns hard, then goes back to
being a soupy mess. Hey, might work for Dave's test and have a secondary
effect for barrel coolng.
White stuff ?? Yeah it's here and coming down steady.
SWAG here..
Couldn't you pour the lead then drill it to fit barrel?
I believe something similar has been tried in the form of a huge barrel block.
At the 2003 1000 yd Nationals there was an experimental heavy gun that required two people to set it up due to the weight of the barrel block.
IIRC the gun was not competitive at that match.
At the 2003 1000 yd Nationals there was an experimental heavy gun that required two people to set it up due to the weight of the barrel block.
IIRC the gun was not competitive at that match.
This is a very interesting issue. Bolt thrust against the lugs is occurring as the high pressure spikes and peaks between the back of the bullet and the inside of the case head. The bullet tries to drag the barrel with it testing the tenon joint with the same force the lugs experienced. By the time the bullet crowns at the muzzle, pressure is already significantly lower.
Before the bullet crowns the muzzle, that pressure “bubble” of expanding gas contained within the rifle is going to push as hard on the lugs as on the bullet, (as well as outwardly on barrel wall and case wall in all directions) because pressure maintains equilibrium. Bubble is probably an appropriate word because the rifle is containing the gasses. During this time of containment, the bubble is going to exert ifs forces the same way even if the whole rifle is moving backwards in a vehicle so fast that an observer outside the vehicle being passed by the vehicle would see the fired bullet as momentarily stationary with respect to him, while in the barrel (consider a clear barrel where the bullet is seen for an instant standing still). Similarly, it’s not harder to get a bullet going towards the end of the barrel in a fighter while it’s going forward at Mach 1.5.
If this is all right, then there seems to be an internal equivalency on the effects of pressure and metal stress/stretching/wear whether the barreled action is going forward, backward, or not at all, with free recoil effectively being the same as extremely slight backward acceleration, imperceptible at the speeds high pressure finds equilibrium. I believe that other energy like suppressed harmonic tendency is actually allowed to escape the barreled action and doesn’t damage it because the structure set up to dampen the barreled action absorbs and now has to deal with it.
At exit, I would contend the equal and opposite principle applies to equivalent magnitude of force in both directions, (bullet / rifle) but what that energy is now pushing against is very perplexing, - the muzzle crown? It’s already been pushing against the bolt, and that’s now on steep decline. (If we were to spin a riffle so fast - like a propeller on a shaft or strapped to a blade, - such that it expelled the bullet at the same speed as when fired, it will also recoil at that moment of separation by the same amount as if fired, save the powder’s weight).
Last edited:
Well, I happen to be an actual physicist who is recently(ish) retired from a gig at a university destructive testing lab for civil engineers, building various reinforced concrete specimens up to 20 ton then bending and breaking them with up to 1 million pounds of hydraulics. Of course we also had hundreds of sensors (strain gauges and string pots) measuring movement inside and outside.
A curious little project you have in mind. Presumably you have the forklift/crane you'll need to make this happen.
One option is casting it inside a steel pipe, maybe an old well casing, with concrete in between the two. Use a concrete vibrator (alternatives exist) to get all the air out. I'd probably weld some lifting eyes onto the outside of the pipe before hand. Screw a section of picatinny rail to the pipe for mounting a scope.
Or just go with the round concrete forms for making concrete posts. A few sticks of small rebar around the perimeter an inch below the surface will be helpful. Alternatively, there's a kind of reinforcement that's just a bunch of small wires mixed in with the concrete. At home I use old nails.
I would not have the muzzle protrude. It's the motion of the muzzle that matters most so I think you want to keep the muzzle constrained.
Got plans for instrumenting this thing? Seems that you need at least a 3-axis accelerometer near the muzzle to prove this is doing what you want (not moving).
A curious little project you have in mind. Presumably you have the forklift/crane you'll need to make this happen.
One option is casting it inside a steel pipe, maybe an old well casing, with concrete in between the two. Use a concrete vibrator (alternatives exist) to get all the air out. I'd probably weld some lifting eyes onto the outside of the pipe before hand. Screw a section of picatinny rail to the pipe for mounting a scope.
Or just go with the round concrete forms for making concrete posts. A few sticks of small rebar around the perimeter an inch below the surface will be helpful. Alternatively, there's a kind of reinforcement that's just a bunch of small wires mixed in with the concrete. At home I use old nails.
I would not have the muzzle protrude. It's the motion of the muzzle that matters most so I think you want to keep the muzzle constrained.
Got plans for instrumenting this thing? Seems that you need at least a 3-axis accelerometer near the muzzle to prove this is doing what you want (not moving).
I really need ti look up and settle for my peace of mind what the legal distinctions are, if any, between the firearms we carry and something mounted on wheels. I don’t want to inadvertently create what might be misconstrued as an artillery piece, mortar, or anything that may require a filing, license, tax stamp and so forth.
Steel oil well pipe, 4 or 5 inches in diameter would be perfect to cast a barrel in lead, then the whole piped barrel in reinforced concrete.
It looks to me like the bottom of the familiar metal 5 gallon bucket will slightly press fit perfectly into the top of another, as a form. This could produce an attractive finish surface the concrete forms might not, allowing for staining the concrete.
~2-1/2 of these lengths with the lead/steel core we are talking about and a base structure to prevent roll would target 600 pounds, with the base permitting unlimited additional headroom.
Minimal protrusion of the muzzle, maybe .3 inches, only because true, uniform flush could be messy and fairly tricky to do with poured lead was my thought. Lead and concrete could be flush to display all the components.
Attachments
HVAC place may have, or could make, a nice piece of duct work to use as a form.
fwiw, seems like the test I mentioned earlier used about a 18" square of concrete with the bbl cast into it and the muzzle protruding maybe a couple of inches. Later, I'll see if I can find a link or article about it. It'd be easy to form something up to cast the bbl in.
Was it in Vaughn's book? Can't remember for sure where it originated but I do recall the discussion on brc with pics.
Was it in Vaughn's book? Can't remember for sure where it originated but I do recall the discussion on brc with pics.
Upgrades & Donations
This Forum's expenses are primarily paid by member contributions. You can upgrade your Forum membership in seconds. Gold and Silver members get unlimited FREE classifieds for one year. Gold members can upload custom avatars.
Click Upgrade Membership Button ABOVE to get Gold or Silver Status.
You can also donate any amount, large or small, with the button below. Include your Forum Name in the PayPal Notes field.
To DONATE by CHECK, or make a recurring donation, CLICK HERE to learn how.
Click Upgrade Membership Button ABOVE to get Gold or Silver Status.
You can also donate any amount, large or small, with the button below. Include your Forum Name in the PayPal Notes field.
To DONATE by CHECK, or make a recurring donation, CLICK HERE to learn how.