I should go buy a Mk 12 version as it is best of the rotary designs. But given up on plastic frame guns… so would be another project I don’t need making an aluminum frame version. Just not worth it as it would have to be billet machined rather than forged blacks… lost my ready access to forging dies and a forging company to support. Also lost my contacts at Alcoa… all retired or dead. to get new materials developed last two of which started out as 500 lbs alloy lab samples runs of multiples for engineering testing inventory, rather than 2000 lbs size used in production… which I convinced Alcoa to make as re-drawn bars Alloy 6020… and Excalibur Alloy 6013. Over about two months they produced me a whole range of bar sizes for my test sample, as end of production lot runs of standard 6061 alloy. The later of the two developmental alloys was instrumental to Army’s Excalibur Guided Artillery round cannot remember but Jack Sacco the head of that program at Savit, and formally of Picatinny Arsenal, oh perhaps 15 years ago, or maybe more, asked me what I was using for my RAF cases as he had similar problems with the 155 mm projectiles I suggested the 6013 and engineering contacts at Alcoa… he later said, they call it Excalibur Alloy… we’re using some of your initial runs overage of bar stock… then Jack, ‘I don’t what sounds a perfect name for our Excalibur program’… I replied, ‘see you adopted it already’ … ‘ya, perfect makes all the difference’. Amazing all the things came out of the bar runs I had produced at least 15 years before that, some still in the lab inventory. 6020 was originally designed as a short chipping equivalents to 6061 for screw machine manufacture but ended up as an impact extrude and forging alloy for automotive and aircraft parts. The Excalibur 6013 was intended as a forging alloy but ended up as a bar alloy due to my initial run samples being used in many things… automotive transmission valves, air bags, and various aircraft and artillery projectile uses… similar high and hot strength as 2024… but with the rarest property for an aluminum - near equal compressive and tensile yield strengths like steel. Aluminum in every other alloy has about 1/2 the compressive strength as tensile strength…. Things really necessary in ordnance but hard to achieve.
