Receiver materials

Receivers have evolved a lot over the past century.
We went from steel, to aluminium and plastics, and how we even have fiber reinforced plastics.

It is obvious that the receiver is one of the most important parts of any gun. It keeps all the vital parts of the firearm together and thus becomes a vital part itself.

Different weapons have different receiver shapes and functions. Take for example the AK. The receiver has a top cover that can be easily removed and allows easy cleaning and maintenance. While the AR has split it's receiver into two entirely separate parts.
Different guns are made for different purposes and are differently shaped, thus different guns require different materials and even different production methods for the same material.

ITT: Post guns that use different materials for the receiver and discuss their pros and cons.

Attached: test1.webm (856x480, 14.63M)

The Leader T2's receiver is literally just a steel beam, you can't really get simpler than that.

And now for something different: is there a reason precision aluminium casting wouldn't work to make, say, an AR-15 receiver? After all, the process and the material are good enough for engine blocks, and I can't really think of anything that has to deal with more vibrations than an internal combustion engine that has to withstand thousands of small explosions every minute for years.

It can be made to work, and in fact has: there used to be a few boutique dealers selling cast lowers on the US market. Casting just doesn't really have any advantages over forging where the AR lower is concerned, and there's a high start-up cost, so there's really not a lot of incentive for companies to offer cast parts.

I really am glad to hear that.
Did people think of them as the equivalent of "Saturday night special pot metal trash", or were there no problem with the amnufacturers openly admiting it?
Well, the lower was designed from the beginning as a machined part, therefore it is to be expected.
Although I'm yet to dig into this subject, but I suspect that with the prevalience of 3D printing and the laws here that treat the receiver as a piece of metal -until those nice EU bureaucrats fuck it up somehow- it's theoretically possible in most European countries to outscore this job to aluminium foundries and spend less money on the short and mid terms compared to setting up a CNC workshop. Of course, in the long run it might be better for an established firearm manufacturer to build it's own foundry.

Just not a lot of demand to justify the costs. Forged alloys can't be cast out of the box, so you have to do your own materials science research to find a castable alloy with properties similar enough to 7075 aluminum to be usable. And even if that research has already been done, and you don't need to reinvent the wheel, those alloys are less common and more expensive than the ubiquitous 7075, but are only at parity with it for durability. On top of that, there are many people who will only buy something if it's "mil-spec." Of the ones who don't buy "mil-spec", most will only spring for something that's demonstrably better than the vanilla option. So any company that has invested in tooling up for cast receivers has spent a lot of money on molds, a foundry, and a somewhat obscure alloy so that they can sell to that subset of a subset of people that will pay more money for a different part purely because it is different, and not because it's better.

Yeah, there's a niche for this kind of thing at the small scale, here in freedomland I think we have some DIY kits for making your own cast lower. So, speaking purely hypothetically of course, if you wanted to start up your own basement receiver foundry for non-practical scientific research, casting your own could be an option.

Oiled and maintained, a steel or aluminum receiver could be just as good now as 500 years in the future. Besides aesthetics, wood and steel provide a combination that can last generations, making heirlooms and prized pieces, functional pieces at taht, in the current development of small arms auto loading weapons of the 1950's and on might never go obsolete and could be very useufl for centuries perhaps.

Shooting classic 100 year old or older guns isn't just a thing, its a commonality that takes place all the time. Modern gun steel is only better, meaning modern guns could last even longer after even more rounds of high pressure firing. Made of old wood and steel, the old heavy materials don't just soak up recoil, they create a long lasting advantage or threat.

Polymers are nice now, but what about later? There is potential for failure and problems in the extreme long term. In 100 years from now, while some guy is shooting a 200 year old triple lock S&W 44 revolver in original condition, what kind of shape will your 100 year old Glock be in? Will the plastic hold up? If no one makes new receivers, if you don't have a 3d printer, ect., will that old antique Glock still work, will you be out of business? While one family is shooting great great grandpas ol steel frame guns, your posteriety might be looking at a wall mounted piece that doesn't function after the frame plastic finally goes bad just from age, age alone.

In certain ways, this helps, niggers with old plastic guns 100 years from now can't use them if they can't get a supply of new parts, essential parts needed for the weapon to function. Helps make strategic disarmament of certain groups easier. At the same time, it means your personal weapon might need replacement parts just to work, and it could be a PITA. Means that if you buy used guns decades form now, you will have to sit around wondering about the receiver on your new old gun, wondering if the damn thing is going to fail on you as the plastic rots away.

Composites are the future. Ceramics for durability, backed by metal for temperature conduction and flexibility, backed by fiber for toughness per weight.

As soon as someone figures out how to layer it cheaply, it's going to explode and revolutionize every single construction industry.


I think they already do.

If they don't, it's because retards have a fetish for anything "milled", like stamped or cast receiver isn't going to be just as good.

The Dragunov(Yes, the same guy) MA used a glass-infused polymer for a receiver. Its light weight means it's harder to control and the material gets very hot very quickly.

Attached: Dragunov MA.jpg (550x205, 11.5K)

a) casting isn't nearly as precise and will cause you to have to remelt a lot of parts
b) casting is a lot slower than milling. You need to pour the material into the shape and wait until it has solidified again
c) casting causes difference in material strength throughout the material, because the inner areas cool slower than the outer areas. This can cause problems with material fatigue and crack development on the outside
d) you have to inspect each and every cast part for casting errors. Due to the increased complexity you would use for cast parts this takes more time
e) you have to not only buy the metal, but also melt it yourself. This takes a lot of energy, which costs a lot of money in Germany at the moment, because MUH NUCLEAR EXIT, AND FUCK COAL TOO, GREEN REVOLUTION

Also: unless you use some super fancy titanium aluminium alloy you will run into fatigue problems after 10.000 rounds, because aluminium is shit for fatigue.


As I said: aluminium is shit for fatigue. It loses half it's strength after 10.000 stress cycles, and continues to drop unlike steel, which levels out somewhere in the millions.
As for your point about plastics or fiber reinforced plastics, it really depends on the plastic and how it is treated. Plastics can't really rot unless you design them that way, so even if the barrel rusts away after a thousand years of it being stuck in the mud of Verdun, the plastic receiver would still be there. Unless you drop it in the sea, or leave it out in the open, where the water and sand will slowly chip away small parts of it until it has dissolved into microplastics.

Polymers are also fairly fatigue resistant, fiber reinforced plastics are even more so, but again it depends on the plastics used. They have to be built to actually withstand the shooting, instead of being slowly worn down with every shot.

In regards to AR-15's and the aluminum, its the barrel that takes the brunt of the stress and not the receiver itself. Now straight up making perse a mauser receiver out of a block of aluminum is just a bad idea due to it being the main pressure bearing point.

In most automatic guns the area where the recoil spring is positions in the receiver will take most/all of the recoil force. Of course the sides of the receiver only guide the bolt carrier/bolt, but if you want to build the entire thing out of one piece, you will need to make them out of the same material as the recoil spring point.
The G36 actually had a very nice idea to fix this.
It uses a back plate made from a slightly more pressure resistant material (Bodenstück) the recoil spring (Schließfeder) is attached to that. The back plate is inserted into the rear of the receiver and transmits the force of recoil into the reinforced stock by being the connection point between stock and receiver.
The back plate can only be removed once he trigger assembly is removed, so there is no chance that it would fall out, even if you fire with the stock folded to the side.
As much as people like to shit on it for being inaccurate (it isn't), it really does contain many super smart concepts. All it would need would be a more solid connection between the barrel and the optics would have solved the one "problem" it currently has. And that is that the zero tends to shift if you treat it roughly.

I really don't see how could you justify the increased complexity of production. Even if it does reduce the weight significantly (which I somehow doubt), you will now need to work with 3 completely different kind of materials, all of which will require their own machines. Even if we ignore the potential increase of costs, it will surely increase the production time. And just imagine how well you will have to harmonize production to avoid bottlenecks.

That really is something I will never understand. I always feel bad when I have to machine off 90% of a chunk or bar of metal to make some fidely bit, because it's a waste of time and material. That of course will increase costs.


That is why you should outscore this to foundries full of people who deal with this every day. They deal with all the problems for you and deliver a finished part, and they will have to do it for a competitive price, lest you will turn to an other foundry. And you are free to scale your production based on demand, because if you order less they will just start casting other products.
That's not a problem here, as we are starting to build the second block of our nuclear power plant. Of course with the fucking Russians, so the whole business is twice as corrupt as usual, and the usual level is already way too corrupt.

Most firearms have a "lifetime" of 10 000 rounds, therefore I don't think it's that great of a problem. Besides, you can design the weapon with this in mind.

Lowered construction prices, which are bound to happen. Look at how ridiculously complex silicon circuitry is, we're working at nanometer levels of precision. Yet a machine can spit out chips that cost $15 each, all day.

As far as I know nanomaterials make use of all kinds of chemical bonds and whatnot both for production and shaping. But how would you do that at a much larger level? You can't make a receiver grow out from a crystal matrix. Either you build it up layer-by-layer, or you make a ceramic-metal-fiber sheet. In the former case you still have to "make the gun thrice", in the later you just have a fancy alternative to sheet metal.

Silicon chips are built layer by layer, but that's just an example of complexity not a suggestion how this should be done.

I don't know how composite manufacturing will change in 10 years or 50, but that change is coming.

Energy can be incredibly cheap in the US, in some places it can be around 6 cents per KwH. In the wrong places in the US there can be brownouts and very high prices, but certain markets are dirt damn cheap. Ruger casts steel for its revolvers, inferior to S&W's forged and milled, but they do so to cut costs and be the cheaper competitor.

I've heard this is the other big reason why Ruger revolvers are larger, have more complexity to their frames, thicker material, have to use high quality alloy, to compensate for an inferior technique. I've read somewhere that a S&W N-frame is just as strong as a Blackhawk and stronger than a GP100, despite Ruger's marketing and Ruger fanboi's claims. Milling forged pieces is still the best method for the best possible method and product.

As for plastics, perhaps throwing them into the ground and covering them with mud might be fine for certain materials, but how many advanced plastics still have issues with breakdown under sunlight? I know I should be keeping up with new developments better, but from what I remember many plastics suffer from dry "rot" as the polymers age and UV exposure. Since many advanced plastics are only so many decades or years old, we don't know how they will age in good storage over a century. Sunlight can damage wood, too, but not to the same extent, and it can be quite resilient with coats of oil, over coats that can be reapplied to refresh the exterior of the wood.

I should do a lot more research on the subject again, they keep making advancements, while wood stays the same. Also quality wood stocks seem very resilient, are repairable, and I much prefer the way they grip and recoil than any plastic/fiber. When you think about it, qualities of all materials considered, wood is actually a great material for stocks. Just that its expensive and very limited compared to plastics. I put a G3 set of wood furniture on my PTR-91, simply superior in feel in my opinion.


Bullshit. I know lots of civilian shooters who put way more than 10,000 rounds through a single firearm in a lifetime. I've put 6,000 rounds through my S&W M-22, a revolver I don't even carry almost ever and is a shooting safe queen, in a matter of just couple of years. Other serious handgun shooters might put 500-1,000 rounds through a gun in a weekend if they have the cash or the time to reload. My C93 was being fired 10 shots a day for the first two years I owned it, you are going to tell me I have to throw away my rifle every 3-4 years?

To many serious shooters, today and espeically the old school guys and hunters, might spend a lifetime wearing out a good barrel with 5,000 shots. To those of us who reload and shoot for cheap, or to those who have the cash and the time to shoot a lot, 10,000 rounds and a ruined gun come pretty fast in some cases. S&W K frame magnums are known to have frame cracks after 10,000 rounds of 357 Magnum, and people know this not because of factory tests but because people have ruined great guns by putting that many rounds through them. Its considered a major problem and a big worry. You end up with people with a revolver they put 30,000 rounds of 38 loads and 10,000 rounds of 357 Magnum and they bitch to high heaven their gun broke after 40,000 rounds and 'should have bought a L or N frame I guess" because they wanted to keep shooting it.

To the right people, yes, they will never put a "lifetime" of 10K rounds, but there are many who intend to do 10 times that.

It looks like you misunderstood me. I didn't mean the lifespan of the user, but the "lifetime" of the gun. Which is counted in shots, not in years, hence the quotation marks.

Depends entirely on the material you pick.
There are thermoplastics, thermosetting polymers and elastomers.
All of these materials can melt, however only thermoplastics will re-solidify properly.
The higher their temperature and radiation resistance the higher the price.

PEEK for example only melts at 300 something degrees Celsius. It can even resist extreme gamma radiation, but fails under UV light.
PAI is highly chemical resistant, and also rather strong. There have been attempts to use it to build a engines out of it.
Both are at the very peak of high performance thermoplastics, but so are their prices.

Thermoplastics are softer than thermosetting polymers, which are probably your best option for firearms design. They are harder, and keep their strength up until their dissolving temperature, while thermoplastics become softer and softer before they properly melt.
Bakelite for example is a Thermosetting polymer, and it's quite resistant to UV and IR radiation.

Perhaps you misunderstood him, Hungary. His second sentence after "Bullshit" was,
>I know lots of civilian shooters who put way more than 10,000 rounds through a single firearm in a lifetime.

But then he wrote things like this:
All of these suggest to me that he doesn't disagree with the statement that the average gun lasts for around 10 000 rounds, but he thinks I mean nobody will shoot that much during the less than ten decades of their lives.

I would like to chime in on the whole lifetime of a gun this that I seem to have started accidentally:
Many military guns are used far longer than they were intended to be. Mosins and Mausers are probably the two most famous example.
But I remember from my time in the army, I had a gun as old as myself. We still probably have some of these old converted MG42 somewhere, and use it regularly too.
It all depends on how well the gun was designed. Some form cracks simply because the designer wanted to save some metal, or the manufacturer wanted to some money on the material, but most of the time it' simply sloppy or inexperienced design decisions. A well built gun can last centuries and only ever need replacement barrels and new springs every couple thousand of rounds. And if it's a bolt action, I doubt it will ever need anything but a new barrel and a stock to shine like the day it was sent off to war against the gnadsis/boHOHOLsheviks.
The receiver should (in any properly designed and manufactured) never be the problem.

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