Christoph, Hawksworth and Harding

Patentees of methods of producing iron and steel tubes and gun barrels.

Louis Christoph of France. William Hawksworth of Gartness, Scotland. Gustavus Palmer Harding of Chiswick, London.

1861 Patented a method of producing steel tubes by drawing, rolling, or drawing and rolling.

1862 Report of experiments at the proof-house of the Gunmakers' Company, Whitechapel on a fowling-piece and rifle barrel made by the new process of solid cold drawing, of which Messrs Christoph, Hawksworth and Harding were the patentees

1863 Description of patented process for Drilling, Drawing and Rolling Metals

1864 'DRAWN STEEL TUBES. On Thursday the patentees of the Patent Steel Tube, &c., Company, Mr. G. P. Harding, of Paris, and Mr. W. Hawksworth, of Linlithgow, conducted a series of trials to illustrate the advantages of drawing steel and other metals cold, at the works of Messrs. G. and W. Almond, 67, Willow-walk, Bermondsey. The principle object of the company is to apply machinery to the manufacture of gun barrels and ordnance. The machinery employed for this purpose is simple but, as some of the trials proved, exceedingly effective. By this process, as was shown on Thursday, can be drawn from solid pieces of steel, in a cold state, tubes, without weld or join, of any size within the limits of known requirements, producing tubes with one-sixteenth of an inch thickness of metal suitable for surface condenses [condensers?], and others of any required thickness suitable for the largest guns. All unserviceable guns can also brought into use, thus effecting a large saving in the ordnance department. The peculiar metal from which these tubes are made is manufactured by Messrs. Hawksworth and Co., Linlithgow — firm who have given special attention to soft steel for a great number of years. The patent is actively at work at Paris, where, we understand, the necessary machinery is being erected for the carrying out of a large contract. The Emperor of the French possesses sporting gun and rifle the barrels of which were manufactured by this process.
The Times, alluding to this process, says:-
Steel tubes are one of the difficult problems of our hardware manufacture. They are very costly to produce, and very unequal in their tenacity when they are turned out, the weld, when the tube is joined down the middle, always proving its weakest and almost its unsafe part. Steel wires, however, of any thickness or of any fineness, are drawn every day, and by a very simple development of the same process a machine has been invented by which steel tubes of any thickness or internal diameter can be produced with the same certainty. In a few words, it may be said that the new method consists of substituting the slow, equal, but irresistible force of hydraulic pressure for the ordinarily rapid but somewhat uncertain steam power of the wire drawer's bench. The whole machinery consists of a hydraulic press, with double cylinders placed vis-a-vis with a single piston, which as it leaves one cylinder enters the other, and which, at its junction between the two, carries a powerful collar or flange of iron. To this flange the steel tube to be drawn out is secured in a die or gauge of the requisite shape, while down inside the tube itself passes a steel rod, which fits into the circle of the die or gauge, just allowing the requisite aperture round its circumference to regulate the size of the tube drawn over it. Thus, when once the machine is set in motion by its pump, the tube, held by its outer collar, is slowly drawn over the inner rod, which, according to its thickness, reduces the tube by pressure against the outer die to any fineness and therefore to any length that may be required. Several tubes were thus drawn on Wednesday in the presence of a number of engineers and scientific gentlemen at Mr. Almond's works, Willow-walk, Bermondsey, and the results, both as to the mechanical trueness of the tube and its perfect homogeneousness throughout, were in the very highest degree satisfactory. Nor is it circular tubes only that can be drawn by this process. By altering the shape of the outer die and inner rod to square, triangular, or octagon, the same form of tube is produced with equal certainty and equal strength, though in order to avoid distressing the metal it is only reduced 1-16th of an inch at each passage through the machine. The movement is so slow that the tube comes out almost cold, yet burnished like the finest steel inside and out. The great pressure, however, to which it is subjected has a tendency to harden the metal, so that when many reductions of size are necessary it has to undergo annealing to keep it at the required toughness. After being drawn to whatever shape or length is required the finished tube can be tempered to any degree of hardness, or annealed down to its strongest stage of toughness as may be wanted. The whole process is neither an invention nor a discovery, but simply a most valuable development of our present means of manufacture, and one which we think will as prove lucrative to its patentees as it will undoubtedly be most useful to our steel-producing districts. Just now, however, when our improvements in artillery have taken us to a point at which wrought iron can help no further, and when all inventors are looking for steel lining to their guns, this new process is likely to be regarded with unusual interest. If, as the patentees claim, their process can draw homogeneous steel tubes of 8 in. and 10 in. diameter, the long vexed question of trying to make wrought-iron guns to stand their rifling would appear to be near its settlement. The perfect ease and immense strength with which common rifles and fowling pieces can be lined with steel tubing is shown at the works at Bermondsey. What a fine steel lining would be to the weapons of Volunteers, armed as they now are with the Enfield, so soft in its barrel that nothing but the most careful handling can keep it from dent and fatal injury to its efficiency as a true long-range rifle. The patentees of the machine intend putting up at once a press and dies, by which taper steel barrels for the Enfield rifle can be drawn in one piece. More, however, is to be gained by drawing steel tubes for artillery, though neither guns nor rifles open up such a field of profit as is likely be found in the everyday mercantile wants of Sheffield and Birmingham. Steel tubes, badly and expensively as they are now made, are still an everyday want in the hardware districts, and it is only their cost and the uncertainty of their production which puts a tolerable limit on their use. If in this process they can be produced of more than double the strength of the present steel tubes, and at the same price as the most common cast-iron piping, their uses in manufacture would seem to almost endless. For tubing to boilers alone there is enough work to be done to keep all the hydraulic machinery in England, if fitted to draw tubes, going for the next twelvemonth.'

See Hydraulic Tube Drawing and Steel Ordnance Co for application of tube drawing patents.

US Patent 80057, 21 July 1868 for improvements in apparatus for drawing metals.

See Also

Loading...