It is Tuesday and I’m back in my shop, turning tungsten….wait, what?

I recently upgraded my .22 pistol to the famous Pardini SP22. The gun is absolutely fantastic, the trigger, balance, feel and accuracy is superb, no wonder pretty much all Olympic shooters choose it.

However, there’s still room for improvement and this time it is the recoil absorption system. Pardini has a very simple mechanism built into the barrel shroud, six blind holes hosting metal rods and springs. When the pistol fires, the rods move and absorb some energy of the recoil, thus reducing the muzzle jump.

However, as I said, there’s a room for improvement. The standard rods are made from steel, but the Rapid Fire version of the pistol has tungsten rods. Sure, I could just buy them ($60 a piece and I need six of them!) but where is the fun in it? I have my mighty machines, so why can’t I make them?

Here’s why – because the only tungsten rods I could find were just a bit oversized. And, of course, they need to be cut to length. And everybody knows that tungsten is not really machinable. Or is it?

I found this video by Stefan Gotteswinter on Youtube. He was able to successfully machine tungsten carbide on his lathe (well, being Stefan Gotteswinter I think he’s able to machine absolutely anything, including neutron star matter). So I procured some CBN inserts and got to work.

Very quickly I realized that I’m not Stefan Gotteswinter. Not even close. Yes, it did the cut, but the surface finish was absolutely terrible. I tried different feeds and speeds and depths of cut but the results were very disappointing (as you can see on the top picture). Then again, it was pure tungsten, not tungsten carbide, obviously these materials have different properties. However, these weights are supposed to sit inside the barrel shroud so who cares if they look ugly, as long as they fit into the channel?

I finished two weights and installed them into my pistol. I will need to see if the effect is even noticeable before I proceed with making the rest of them.

Tungsten is also known as wolfram (hence its symbol W in the periodic table). And Wolfram von Eschenbach was a German minnesinger and an inspiration for Richard Wagner, who wrote an opera Parsifal based on Wolfram’s poem and also made him one of the characters in another opera, Tannhäuser. I think Wagner’s music is a very good match for this experience on this sunny Turning Tungsten Tuesday 🙂