Stupid Question for Reloaders

Problem is, the usual Berdan primer for 7.62 NATO is a 5.5mm, .217" in diameter.
Yes, you can peen the edge of the primer pocket to hold a .210" Boxer after you eliminate the anvil, but it seems a little precarious to me. And slow.
 
NASA shot down lock washers in 1967, but still required them until 1986.
Government is particularly schizophrenic.

We were issued optics for many years that were metric, but all the literature and longer ranges were in yards... schizophrenic.

While most all military small arms are gauged in metric, velocity ratings are still mostly displayed as feet per second... schizophrenic.

NASA just lost a Mars probe a few years back because part of the programming was in metric & part in feet/inches...

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As for brass button manufacturers,
The manufacturers of buttons also made everything under the sun, from bellows for atmospheric pressure gauges (a SUPER long closed case) to extruded tubing, and everything in between, from clock parts to adding machine parts to trinkets.

Buttons paid the bills for the expensive processing machines.
Singer (sewing machines) made aerospace components, up to including the moon missions & nuclear bomb triggers...

Pinball machine companies made land mines & bomb fuses & triggers.

Ely Whitney made cotton 'Gins', separated seeds and seed pods/stems from cotton fibers.
Ely Whitney also made cannon carriages & gimbals, artillery sights, firearms locks, Sam Colt's early revolvers, pad locks & door locks, governors for steam engines, etc.

My little machine shop is mostly supposed to be welding & small batch widget making, while the bread & butter contracts are for the DOD/Navy, a far cry from welding up broken farm equipment and bending tubing, what I intended to do.
I don't like to be micro-managed or have hard deadlines, it interferes with my watching cartoons, jeep crap, reloading crap, going shooting or fishing...

My best seller when I started out and had virtually no equipment, believe this or not, was reproduction padlocks, circa 1870 or so.
Winchester, Wells Fargo, B&O RR, US Marshall, ect. stamped into the brass sides, riveted together.
 
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A guy I knew in the mid seventies owned an aluminum foundry in a garage sized space. He melted the stuff maybe by the halt ton and made sand molds. Every day he'd be out busting himself making custom small batch things. He made a better living than I imagined. Crazy hippie.

We had a tiny iron foundry here while the stuff was still made here and profitable. Maybe as big as a big grocery store, iirc. They made manhole covers and some small batch. Ironically, now there is another foundry a few miles away that creates bespoke iron grates, and good Lord, he wouldn't do manhole covers, how in the world could be compete with the overseas competition that sends them over in shipping containers at a few bucks on the pound?

People really put too much thought to transport costs. When an entire container can hold millions of dollars worth of plastic flip flops, it pays. A container full of Nikes pays off.since they are hauling so many lightweight loads of plastic trinkets, they must have many tons of heavyweight scruff to make the enormous ships move efficiently. When an entire container can be filled with $40 silk flower arrangements or $15pieces of trinket jewelry,it certainly doesn't add a lot to costs.

Scotch, Swedish vodka, genuine English beers or wines are shipped in hedge stainless steel vats and bottled with locally made small watch bottles from companies who make jars for salsa.

It's going to come as a real surprise that sometimes, a vat of scotch will arrive, small batches, with the bottles shipped separately. Those designs are trademarks, and the companies won't allow manufacturer on foreign soil. But the most important part is that it would be absolutely, out of your gourd insane to send a million dollars worth of $5,000 a case thirty year old scotch by box!

Almost every band and box label used for premium cigars is made by a company in Holland, that is just about the only company in the world equipped and capable of doing it. Would it be sane to make them locally in Honduras or Nicaragua? Let the Americans design and make the zillions of wine labels, even for costly foreign wines, the lots are too small to make it profitable.

This process uses the biggest possible ships and runs them so tightly that overseas shipping costs don't mean squat. Sometimes the best thing possible is to make things locally in small units and other times the only possible way to buy a flannel shirt is to have little Indonesian girls make them and send them over here to be sold at Wal-Mart.
 
"Singer (sewing machines) made aerospace components, up to including the moon missions & nuclear bomb triggers..."

And that has WHAT to do with brass drawing technology in the 1860s and 1870s?

NOT. THING. ONE.

Stick to the time frame in question.

And regarding your comments about "Bessemer Process" steel being made in the United States, as far as I can tell, any such innovation in Pennsylvania involving blowing air through the iron to make steel was of extremely limited impact, had almost 0 market presence, and puddling remained the dominant method of steel manufacture in the United States until the introduction of the ACTUAL Bessemer process AFTER the Civil War.

Air blowing to reduce carbon content in molten iron has been known since the 1100s, possibly even earlier, but the results it produced were never consistent, and the process never provided enough output to make steel useful for anything other than highly specialized items. What Bessemer did was make a process that was highly repeatable and precise.


In any event, I've reached out to a friend for some more information on the supposed use of steel barrels in Sharps Civil War era rifles. He should know, or he should be able to point me to someone who knows, considering that he's the senior curator at the NRA Firearms Museum.
 
I know there were air forced (kilns) to liquify iron in the 1100s,
Ulfberht sword steel & Toledo sword steel prove it.
Simply couldn't have produced the steel from iron ore without the forced air kiln and charcoal or coal for fuel.
The issue was batch size, usually less than a couple pounds.

Very early steel rivets in iron plate boilers (steam power) prove a somewhat reliable process for 'blow pipe' steel as early as the late 1700s.

Producing hundreds of large rivets would have taken a blow pipe process to produce the volume used before modern electrical arc welding was invented and in wide spread use.

Seems more logical that Sharps would have obtained his steel billets from eastern PA, where the richest & largest iron ore strike up to that time had been made and was being production mined,
Along with huge coal strikes & hundreds of smelters processing both ore into pig iron, along with coal being cooked into coke and being used to process that pig iron on an industral scale.

The first Sharps rifles were produced in Philadelphia, PA, and virtually all iron & steel in the US came from PA from after the revloutionary war to ramp up for WWII.

I believe the super high iron content PA iron ore strike is still the richest ever in the US history,
While the great lakes strike is about 12% iron the PA strike ran up to and sometimes over 50% iron content often.
Depleted now, mostly by two world wars, but incredibly rich strike which also produced nickel content that was very high...
There is a reason the US is the only country in the world (at the time) to issue a monetary coin (5 cents) in nickel instead of copper or some other (metal) hard currency.

Not general knowledge, but some educated metal workers know this,
'Black Smith' was a guy that worked with 'Black' metals, IE, Pig Iron, sheet iron and cast iron.
'White Smith' was a guy that worked in nickel, silver, tin, ect.
'Gold Smith' is self explanatory...
There are also 'Copper Smiths', usually worked in copper & copper alloys.

I perfer to take the common sense approach rather than the armchair historan approach...
Super rich iron ore, steady supply of high energy fuel, hundred of iron/steel produces in the area all experimenting with iron to steel processing in reliable industral production quantities...

Blow pipe processing was around, for glass making, for 50-70 years before the blow pipe steel processing started, so no reason at all to say ONE particular guy 'Invented' the process, since it was readily available technology for 50-70 years before one particular guy decided to use as pure of oxygen as he could get at the time instead of compressed atmosphere...

Everyone knows a good idea when they steal it!
The big innovation with Bessimer was the ability to produce higher oxygen content, via a chemical reaction process (which he didn't discover either, just applied to existing processing of iron to steel).
 
You left out a very important Smith. The tinsmith. The guy who kept all of the cookware holding water. It also involved the tinkers, very few of whom were named Smith, who kept iron pots fixed before tin became common. As the world moved from iron, to tin, to steel, the thinkers were left behind, generation after generation. Despite common phraseology, their livelihoods were being eroded, and they actually did give a damn.

In fact, a little known event took place near allenville (later to be known as Allentown.) It's known as "the tinker's rebellion". Over a thousand unemployed tinkers took up their tiny tinker hammers and marched on a large group of steel workers. The steel workers were better armed and the uprising was quickly squelched. The thinkers "picked up their tinkertoys" and went home in disgrace. Many of the surviving tinkers relocated to wheeling, putting their tiny little hands to work at cigar factories, making the famous "wheeling stogies".

You don't have to take my word for it. We have the internet and the truth is out there.
 
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