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.
I opened up the clips enough to get rid of the hiss and now it is very quiet. My wife and son both shot it and said it was very quiet and didn’t bother them at all. It works at least as well as any other can that I have heard.
I checked zero today with the 22-250. It was a little low and left, but the rifle shot just as good as it ever did. This group was a mix of my hand loads and some factory vmax. Both shoot to exactly the same poi. Factory soft points shoot a half inch right. 6 shots through the can and it was too hot to hold onto, but I could still touch it. That’s just fine with me. I just need to be able to put a magazine through it before it cools. This group would have been one single round hole if I had been at a bench instead of laying on the driveway.
Thanks. It’s really quiet. My son just ran a full magazine (4 shots) through it and said it didn’t bother him at all.
Good move going with a WNMG style insert. I think they're great for anyone that's a hobbyist or just trying to be thrifty. Lots of usable edges on those carbide inserts. Since you're new to indexable insert tooling, I should probably mention that's a serious rabbit hole to go down LOL. Carbide grades, coatings, radius sizes, chip breaker styles... having the right insert for the job makes all the difference in the world. But really if you're cutting a little bit of everything, having just 3 styles around is good enough. One rated for aluminum, a general steel one, and one for stainless steel. An insert designed for aluminum will work great on plastic, a steel rated insert is fine for brass/bronze, and one designed for stainless steel will usually work for other gummy materials like copper.
I moved back and forth between tools depending in what I was doing. Some hss, some insert, some brazed carbide. I did burn up some tooling, but I was able to regrind or swap inserts. I did break a threading insert on the nitronic 60 muzzle adapter because it hardened when I drilled it. The drill got a little dull near the end of the hole and that was all it took. The first threading insert broke and I ran another with very light cuts to get through the hard stuff. The thread came out perfect.
