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At the heart of the machine shop are the EDM’s (Electric Discharge Machine). These machines use electricity to cut our dies. We have both wire feed EDM’s and plunge EDM’s (otherwise referred to as a sinker EDM.) Because the dies are made of extremely hard material, some of them have an incredibly long life span.
The wire EDM sends an electrical current through the wire via electrical contacts in the upper and lower heads, which move independently giving the machinists the ability to cut very complex shapes. Below is an example of what the wire EDM is capable of. The machine was programed to cut a #1 on one side of a solid steel block and a #2 on the other.
The sinker EDM is used to machine various shapes into very hard materials. We use these machines to cut the shapes of the bullets nose or ogive as well as other applications in the bullet building process. This machine uses an electrode to burn its way into the material. The EDM’s can hold very tight tolerances – up to .0001 of an inch which is equal to the diameter of a human hair sliced lengthwise into 30 equal pieces. As an example of its capabilities, pictured below is an item produced by the Sinker EDM machine. This is a solid piece of steel that has been machined to produce a ball inside that cannot fall out.
All of this from the Barnes Bullet newsletter this month...........
EDM's are great for screws broken off flush on a gun or scope mount and can remove the broken screws without injury to surrounding metals. All kinds of uses for certain. I remember when they first arrived on the scene a simple EDM machine would cost way up in the six figure bracket. Now they have come out with duplicating machines which will make any part out of metal like a Xerox machine prints out copies. Seen some write ups on them and it is claimed it will make a lot of various machines obsolete. Start watching machinery sales and see what is being sold off. Some lathes and Mills can be bought for as cheap as a penny a pound. The future of machine parts is looking and growing fast. May negate a lot of gun controls schemes if some one can just drop a print of gun parts into the machine and get a complete ready to assemble gun out the other end. Interesting times. They have talked of putting such a machine or machines on the space station to make repair parts and replacement stuff. ATB
Using EDM to make rifled barrels. I seem to remember when Smith and Wesson started doing this there was a bit of talk about this process made the barrel so smooth it would not be possible to run a ballistic test for identification on a fired bullet. Supposedly the complaint came from the ATF and similar groups. I cannot remember but it seems Smith intentionally rigged the edm process to avoid making perfectly smooth rifleing because of the uproar over the EDM process for rifleing the barrels. Of course I could be wrong. Just a bit of trivia. ATB
Cliff wrote:Using EDM to make rifled barrels. I seem to remember when Smith and Wesson started doing this there was a bit of talk about this process made the barrel so smooth it would not be possible to run a ballistic test for identification on a fired bullet. Supposedly the complaint came from the ATF and similar groups. I cannot remember but it seems Smith intentionally rigged the edm process to avoid making perfectly smooth rifleing because of the uproar over the EDM process for rifleing the barrels. Of course I could be wrong. Just a bit of trivia. ATB
Now, that's interesting. Of course a lack of marks would itself be a distinguishing characteristic.
Sincerely,
Hobie
"We are all travelers in the wilderness of this world, and the best that we find in our travels is an honest friend." Robert Louis Stevenson
