Originally Posted by rct269

Speaking of steel stuff, which I don't necessarily understand; but I'm betting "steelslaver" does, here's some rather interesting comments from D.B. Wesson in a 1934 letter to a customer inquiring about the heat treating of the cylinder on the .22 Outdoorsman he's ordered.

"The steel that is used in the cylinder of the K-.22 is identical in formula with that used in the larger calibers, but it is not heat-treated after machining as the great thickness of the cylinder walls do not demand any further strengthening. (This next bit is rather enlightening.) As a matter of fact, even in our larger calibers the steel as it comes from the mill shows a tensile strength in the neighborhood of 80,000 lbs., which does not make the additional strength gained by treating a necessity, but we do very much prefer the greatly increased factor of safety that is obtained with the 130,000 lbs. elastic limit that the treating gives."

I wondered about the difference between "tensile strength" and "elastic limit" the first time around, so I looked it up. All I can tell you today without looking it up again is there's a difference.

As an aside, this fellow asking the questions has also ordered a big Outdoorsman (.38/44)---and also knew about Sharpe's ongoing development of what was to become the 357 Magnum cartridge---and was using a big Outdoorsman as his test bed. Maybe he wanted to know about how far he could push his new .38/44 Outdoorsman. All I know is he could push it a whole lot further than what came to be the regular 357 Magnum cartridge. As I recall Wesson's comments in his Scrapbook, some of Sharpe's development loads scared the pants right off of him!

Ralph Tremaine