What does recoil have to do with heat treating---or what does heat treating have to do with recoil?
Ralph Tremaine
I was hoping someone---anybody who knows more about this than I do would come along with a reply to my questions here (and go on a bit), because I am no way qualified to do it.
The first part is easy, there is nothing about heat treating and recoil that go together.
Steel, in this case the steel the guns are made of, has two, let's call them properties, which are impacted by heat treating; tensile strength and yield strength. We can call them kin for all practical purposes, in that both of them are enhanced by heat treating. Pretty much all I know about all this comes from a March 1,1934 letter from D.B. Wesson to a customer who's ordered one each of the Outdoorsman revolvers, and has asked about the heat treating of the cylinder on the .22. (There isn't any.)
From the letter--------"The steel that is used in the cylinder of the K-22 is identical 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. 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."
In other words, there was no need for any treatment for any of their products, but they did it anyway. That was then, when the 38-44 Outdoorsman was the big gun that came out of Springfield. It's worthy of note that the 38-44 Outdoorsman served as the test bed for the development of the 357 Magnum cartridge by Sharpe----and that some of his development loads scared the pants off Wesson (and far exceeded the pressures of the final product)-------and it stayed in one piece through it all!
And if you need to know the difference between tensile strength and elastic limit, ask Google---like I did.
Ralph Tremaine
