Cannon making mateials!

[Capt Thighbiter]

I just came into some bar stock, 4-1/2" OD x 2-1/2" ID alloy steel 4140 , already NDT'd by the Navy. 10 feet of it.

Enough to turn 4 swivel guns or 3 carriage guns, or 10 hellacious thundermugs. Any ideas, folks?

[HarborMaster]

A thunder mug sounds good , and so does an old English 1/2 scale 12 pound mortar. Youll need to bore to 2.68 in order to fire cans filled with concrete. Then build a sub chambered breach plug 2.69 ., freeze the plug and heat the barrel to do a seat fit with interference. then lathe turn the design and build a propper trunnion bar with nice welds on the plug. Its possible you could do a rev Daniel King Howitzer No#2 That would be nice . ., To use tube for anything you'll really need to sleeve the inside or band the outside to meet the 1 caliber rule . For example ., sleve the dom inside with a 2.55 X 1.5 bore sleeve ., then you would have your 4 1/2 outside diameter and a 1 1/2 bore ., then you could turn out some 1/3 scale british 18 pounders ! Lots of good things can come from that stick of DOM. Good luck.

HarborMaster

[Capt Thighbiter]

Ahoy HarborMaster!

A guy over on Greybeard Cannon site says that welding 4140 is very difficult and needs pre and post weld HT to make a good weld. Have to look into that.

Another gent there used the same tubing and makes a threaded 2-5/8 end plug, with a smaller 1-1/2 powder chamber machined into it, so using a sleeve or band wouldnt be needed ( those are way out of my production means anyways).

First step is to figure out how to cut this stuff! A hand hacksaw would take me a few weeks to cut 1x through!

Kinda funny, when the company who gave this to me delivered it ( by fork lift from next door). The President of our company saw it and said " What the hell is he making NOW???".