Hand Skills
Well-Known Member
LW-50 is a trademark, this is known in the industry as SAE 630, or 17-4. It's different because it has the addition of Nickle. This helps the material deal with friction (among other things), and is one of the reasons nickle type steel (like L6) is used by a lot of saw blade manufacutres.I know (and have) LW barrels ,
They have their own stainless barrel name of the steel is LW-50.
From what I explore it has at least 2x barrel life vs 416 and similiar.
High speed tooling manufactures figured out tungsten works even better, but I doubt we will be seeing any tungsten alloys in rifle barrels due to the size and hardness of these carbides. They make machining a lot more difficult.