Gyroscope is a remarkable rigid body, and all the explanations that I have found, that describe its motion, are in terms of angular momentum and torque. An exception to it is the Feynman lectures on physics, which tries to give an explanation without appealing to angular momentum, and using more elementary concepts of force and acceleration (see Figure 20.4 in the link http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/I_20.html) .
But Feynman's explanation is not very detailed, as he spends just a paragraph on it. Moreover, when coming to the more complex phenomena of wobbling motion of gyroscope, he goes back to the notion of torque. This is not surprising, as the notions of angular momentum and torque are defined to conveniently deal with rigid rotating bodies and to `coarse grain' the complicated interaction of particles which are constrained to be moving as a single rigid body.
Question: Is there a complete explanation of the motion of a gyroscope purely in terms of force and acceleration? If it is too complex a task, then is there a paper that has been published on this matter?
I am not sure if such an explanation would tell us anything more about gyroscope than we already know, but I certainly hope that it does.
