No damage to you, your weapon or the rest of the muffler. I would call that a win. Nice work, just some small modifications left to do. It’s been years since I was in the machine shop but I believe there was a 417 ? stainless, maybe had better tensile strength.
I checked the other metal shop down the road. They had a small pile of stuff in a back room. There was stellite, titanium, inconel, etc… The only 17-4 they had was too small. I grabbed a piece of nitronic 60. It is supposed to be almost twice as strong as 304, so it should work fine.
it was all the same price. A lot of it was unknown material, unfortunately. Kind of mixed. There were numbers painted on some pieces, but very few got hits on google. The 60 was clearly marked.
I made a new baffle and it seems to be holding up well. That “Nitronic 60” is some hard stuff but it cuts beautifully with the right tooling. It’s hell on hss and inserts though. Brazed carbide was the go-to stuff. I did make the hole a little bigger than it originally was just to help bleed off pressure and I clipped it. I shot about 5 rounds tonight and I’m pretty sure the bullet was the loudest part. I was shooting off the deck near my mother in law’s room. She was sitting in her chair reading with her window closed. She didn’t even know I was shooting. I think that makes this project a huge win.