A couple weeks ago I visited a manufacturer in Texas and spied this pallet of four, 14,000-round drums of Winchester M193. Apparently there’s a whole lot more where this came from, too, stored above their test firing range.
They aren’t a huge manufacturer as the firearm industry goes, but in the course of test firing their guns they go through about a million rounds of ammo a year.
It’s one of our most popular posts on the @Guntruth Instgram feed, so I figured I’d share it to TTAG Actual here, too.
Seen at the same manufacturer was the first of two DMLS (direct metal laser sintering) machines for “3D printing” their new suppressors. Layer by layer of titanium dust — almost 2,600 in total — the laser sinters (melts) each subsequent layer to the previous few layers and builds a suppressor about three-and-a-half thousandths of an inch (0.0035″) at a time.
The end result is a monolithic silencer with a grain structure that’s even more uniform than machining from a billet of material, and with internal features such as hidden gas passages that would be physically impossible to make via traditional means.
Any guesses which manufacturer I was visiting?