Flow Formed Cobalt Barrels. The Latest Greatest Thing?

[fullautovalmet76]

Oh Bill,
You shouldn't have! And it's not even my birthday! 

[GI Joe]

I work with metal cutting tools. Cobalt drills exhibt the same performacnce, They withstand heat better than HSS.  A M42 coblat drill has about 8% cobalt content I believe. The manufacturing process is they heat the blank and twist it while hot to form the flutes so the barrel manufacturing process mentioned seems reasonable as does the performance gains.
I read an article somewhere several years ago about experiments being done with ceramic made barrels which ran very cool and cooled quickly and were light weight.

[tombogan03884]

I work with metal cutting tools. Cobalt drills exhibt the same performacnce, They withstand heat better than HSS.  A M42 coblat drill has about 8% cobalt content I believe. The manufacturing process is they heat the blank and twist it while hot to form the flutes so the barrel manufacturing process mentioned seems reasonable as does the performance gains.
I read an article somewhere several years ago about experiments being done with ceramic made barrels which ran very cool and cooled quickly and were light weight.

The material is to brittle to stand "Field use"  on its own.
My current employer has a bore mill with ceramic bearings, ultra smooth operation, extreme accuracy, but when one of the operators ran the head left, when he should have gone right  it cost $50,000 to fix. Well over 25% of the purchase price

[TAB]

Thats always been the issue with ceramic, extremely hard, but very brittle.