Could you make a complete gun to modern standards without any iron or steel parts?
Like not just a shitty plastic gun like pic related, other types of metal would be far game too, could some other material replace iron for barrels and bayonets?
What kind of military equipment could you make if steel wasn't availible? Would vehicles be possible to make?
There was that brastil 1911, although I'm pretty sure the barrel and receiver were steel at least.
Maybe titanium could make a decent barrel receiver.
>>29194200
>brastil
What is that an alloy of again?
You can easily make a pistol or shotgun out of nonferrous metals. The only slightly hard part would be springs but that's not a big deal.
>>29194259
What would you make the barrel out of?
Receiver could be milled aluminum, I guess the trigger mechanism and all that would be aluminum? Does that work for that?
Bayonet could be bronze.
Could you make brass springs?
>>29194173
there are cannon barrels made out of LEATHER instead of iron, and they function.
The appeal of ferrous metals is low cost, since the steel industry is large and utilizes a market of scale.
The other half is that iron isn't very valuable per weight because it has little if any use in electronics, unlike metals such as copper or gold for efficient conducting of electricity.
Firearms have been built from these non-iron no-steel metals back before the demand for wire became this large.
>Gunmetal is one of the strongest types of bronze used to make guns. It dates back to the middle of the 19th century, when it was discovered that adding a little bit of zinc to bronze improves its casting characteristics. The British Admiralty gunmetal formula was 88% copper, 10% tin and 2% zinc, whereas the US Ordnance formula was 88% copper, 8% tin and 4% zinc.
>Interestingly, even though literature from the 18th and 19th centuries refer to brass firearms, many of these were actually made of bronze (i.e. alloy of copper and tin) rather than brass (which is an alloy of copper and zinc). Examples include the Henry rifle and several confederate weapons, which are often mentioned to have brass frames, when they are really more bronze than brass.
>>29194321
Gotta remember that black powder has a much lower pressure than smokeless.
>>29194321
I've been reading a book and their method of travel they use doesn't transport ferrous metals, so naturally my first reaction to this was wondering how one could make a gun capable of surviving this travel without dropping the barrel and springs all over the ground where you started your journey.
Thought it could be an interesting discussion.
The Gyrojet pistol was mostly made from Zamak. With a bit of creativity you could eliminate any steel parts.
>>29194348
Yeah...that's just lazy scifi writing by a hack.
No-metal projectile weapons could make an interesting discussion, but no-steel is simply "just use any other goddamn metal mixtures nd thicken areas"
>>29194342
If you want to oversimplify to just say "the most common mixture" then sure.
There's nothing stopping someone from having a different mixture composition of smokeless powder that burns more slowly and with less force on the chamber than black powder.
That kinda of dilluted low-force smokeless is just less commonly used because shooters usually value getting as much velocity as they can out of common steel barrels.
>>29194426
It's more fantasy writing, seeing as their traveling between parallel earths.
>>29194426
The OP said modern standards. I'm not sure if brass barrels could stand up to modern smokeless loads.
Maybe .38 special, that's a fairly low pressure round.
>>29194306
You could use bronze or titanium for a pistol cartridge or aluminum for a shotgun barrel. Some high-end sporting shotguns have anodized aluminum barrels.
Leaf springs can be fiberglass, tension springs could be rubber.
>>29194589
And compression springs?
>>29194173
Look up a metal supply company's product sheet until you find a white brass with a 100,000 psi rating. That is what you use to make your barrel.
>>29194692
Air cylinder and piston.
>>29194173
Red brass, they didn't call it gunmetal for nothing.
A shotgun would probably be your best bet, since I doubt any non ferrous material would hold rifling very well.
>>29194819
What about a titanium barrel?
>Air cylinder and piston
So could you make an AR work with an air cylinder and piston in the buffer tube instead of a compression screen?
>>29194173
Wasn't this an "option" for a FiveSeven? I think I heard something about composite/plastic everything and a ceramic (?) barrel, but it was long ago and I don't think I paid much attention.
What about the spring?
>>29194173
Here's my thought about those 3d printed guns: Why not just make them so that you can attach some commonly available after market steel barrel, like a pinned barrel from a simple blowback gun?
>>29195222
They do make that, most of the 3d printed guns that aren't entirely plastic take hardware store springs and glock barrels.
>>29195243
>glock barrels
The jokes, they write themselves.
