My 2 cents worth... I think all this worry and fuss we put toward friction, lubricants, rollers, silky smooth feeling locks etc. is largely for not. If I'm not mistaken, the siler with the roller bearings etc. was not all that fast, though it certainly felt pretty smooth. I think that by far the largest factor is torque on the tumbler or in other words mainspring strength. My gut tells me the next thing is cock throw. I think that influencing factors get pretty small after this. What would be really interesting, but perhaps difficult, would be to design a set of experiments in an attempt to isolate and rank features of a lock that contribut to speed or lack there of. Here's something else that has run through my mind. Take a siler lock, get rid of the fly, drop the full cock notch a little to decrease cock throw, and put an extremely powerful mainspring on it and see what the times are. I think you could get down to the original Manton lock times or perhaps better them depending on how powerful the spring is. This is of course just me running my mouth, gut feel, and speculation though.
Jim,
Your comments made me think back to the original purpose of the experiment. As these discussions develop it's easy for me to forget what I was doing this for.
My original goal was to use mechanical speed to see if one lube or lube class would stand out above the others. My premise was that if a lube was significantly better, it would show up in mechanical speed. I commented after the testing was done that I did not feel that we would find that lube.
One question that remains unanswered is how well the lube stays in place as opposed to being wiped off. I think one would have to run many more trials to see if times gradually slowed. After what I went through here, I don't want to tackle that.
So what did I learn? IMHO there is not likely a lube well above the rest with regard to friction. Is there a lube better than others as far as staying in place. Could be. I don't know. Will a lube make a lock significantly faster. No.
To your point about increasing lock speed, I agree. Reduction of mass and increased spring strength would be important. Geometry, especially relating to the tumbler/main spring contact would have a lot to do with torque applied.
Regarding the bearing Siler, is wasn't super fast. (It wasn't slow either.) It was very consistent however - I guess smooth doesn't hurt. BTW I think Sam told me the springs on the bearing lock are milder. It might be interesting to replace the springs on the bearing Siler with a spring set from one of my Deluxe Silers just to see what would happen.
As always, I appreciate your comments, Jim.
Regards,
Pletch
