The overall reading of your first post made it sound like all aluminium frames will fail eventually. But as you acknowledge now it's not all that certain and depends on the gun designers.
If you want to bring in the P1's then there's an excellent example of a use where aluminium was badly used. The eventual requirement for the steel reinforcing stud to correct cracking frames by using the steel to spread out the impact stress more so more metal could support impact and thus reduce the load at any one point is a fine case in point.
Also if could be wrong but isn't this sort of the same thing that happened with the cracking frames on the Beretta 96F's that finally was corrected and we now have the FS model?
So yeah, when aluminium is used in a gun's frame it needs to be used in a design that is attentive to these needs.
We saw the same thing with the shift from aluminium to steel frames in the bicycle world (another of my hobbies). They realized very early that you can't just replace steel with aluminium in a size for size sort of way. The frames would have folded like overdone spaghetti. Even with the realization of this there were some early teething problems related to the welded joints. A well known name for Cannondale during this time was "Crackn'fail" for the number of warrantied frames exchanged during the late 80's and early 90's.
Anyhow the point here is that I feel it's a bit of a disservice to make blanket statements about something like this since there's easily more well designed guns that use aluminium and do not have these issues.
If you want to bring in the P1's then there's an excellent example of a use where aluminium was badly used. The eventual requirement for the steel reinforcing stud to correct cracking frames by using the steel to spread out the impact stress more so more metal could support impact and thus reduce the load at any one point is a fine case in point.
Also if could be wrong but isn't this sort of the same thing that happened with the cracking frames on the Beretta 96F's that finally was corrected and we now have the FS model?
So yeah, when aluminium is used in a gun's frame it needs to be used in a design that is attentive to these needs.
We saw the same thing with the shift from aluminium to steel frames in the bicycle world (another of my hobbies). They realized very early that you can't just replace steel with aluminium in a size for size sort of way. The frames would have folded like overdone spaghetti. Even with the realization of this there were some early teething problems related to the welded joints. A well known name for Cannondale during this time was "Crackn'fail" for the number of warrantied frames exchanged during the late 80's and early 90's.
Anyhow the point here is that I feel it's a bit of a disservice to make blanket statements about something like this since there's easily more well designed guns that use aluminium and do not have these issues.
