Category Archives: Weapons Website of the Week

Wednesday (backdated) weapons website: No Lawyers

Some overdue link love….

If you’re not reading Raconteur Report regularly, you’re stepping on your thing. With hockey skates on. And we don’t say that only because he’s a frequent (and witty, when not fully acerbic) commenter here. We say that because we know to put down the glass of water (or other healthy beverage) before going to his site. The good news: while it’s all stuff you’ll want to read, he doesn’t have a hectic posting schedule, and an occasional check in (if you’re a Luddite who can’t make RSS go) will do ya.

Here’s a taste, from a hilarious post about what happens when a Congressman’s kid shows up — unfashionably late — at your ROTC summer camp.

He arrived three weeks into our six week tour of duty at Camp Snoopy. It was an ever-so-slightly transmogrified version of BCT for enlisted men and OCS for officers. By which, one might understand, that in three weeks of instruction by our tender loving sergeants, we could march ourselves , under student command, from Point A to point B without causing howls of laughter from enlisted men’s platoons, or getting run over by traffic, or various other sins against good order and discipline. We could dress ourselves, clean a barracks, make a bunk, field strip weapons, etc. Or, at least, 75 of us could. Out of 76. No points for guessing to which side of that divide Candidate Clusterfuck belonged.

Okay, so he’s a slow learner. What can we expect, daddy is a multi-term congressman from some centrally located state. The apple clearly hasn’t fallen far from the tree.

We may be obtuse, but the kid in question reminds of of one lawmaking nepot, well, more of a scion, who had a political career worthy of Icarus himself, before cashing a $100M plus check from a TV network that wants you dead, but will settle for you groveling abjectly to their idea of what a god is.

Read the Whole Thing™. Put down the coffee, Dr. Pepper, or undergrad jungle juice first, or prepare to buy a new keyboard or laptop. You have been warned; govern yourself accordingly.

Along with the military reminiscences, there’s some hilarious behind-the-scenes movie stuff, too. It’s a reminder than not everyone who works on movies is numb neck-up. (In fact, in our one close brush with the film industry, we were stunned by how hard those guys work. You’ll never remember the name of an assistant director — unless you’re called to help, or in our case, pitch, one. That guy had a work ethic that gave nothing up to Rangers).

Now, Raconteur Report is not all hilarious, as he’s also got first-person reminisces of the terrible Northridge Earthquake. But it’s all good, written well and worth the time — that one most precious resource that none of us can acquire more of, however big our Congresscrawler daddies might have been — to read.

Since we never did get a W4 out yesterday (“work” is a four-letter word… so is “cash”), we’re belatedly naming Raconteur Report our Wednesday Weapons Website of the Week. For the sheer humor of it.

Wednesday Weapons Website of the Week: Guns.com Reviews

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We’ve featured Guns magazine before, but for its 50-year-old archive issues. This time, we need to say a few words about ~~their~~ the reviews on a similarly titled website.

CORRECTION: this is a different Guns than the print magazine, whose website is at gunsmagazine.com. They’re the guys who have the cool back issues. Thanks to Dan in the comments! -Ed.

Guns posts six reviews a week. Once a week, they post a video review. A typical review has a description of the gun, some photographs and the results of a brief range visit or two. The reviews are not torture tests, but the site is a great way to learn about new products.

The reviews are a good way to learn about something new, for example, this budget Uberti “Hombre” Single Action. (This review is of a .45 version… as God is our witness, there was also a review of a 12-shot .22 version there, but we couldn’t navigate back to the .22 review; it’s there somewhere). The reviews sometimes have magazine-quality photos, like this one of the Uberti from that review, which is a nice thing. They’re sometimes brutally frank, like this review of an unusual pistol that just didn’t work very well, or this scathing review of a French silhouette pistol. and occasionally they’re not even about guns, but about useful gadgets. For example, they wrote up this review of a round counter — kind of a fuel gage for guns, that counts down the rounds left in your 1911, Beretta 92, or AR magazine.

(Aside: the technology is being pushed by the military right now, but the military wants both “fuel gage” and “odometer” [cumulative count] capabilities. There are good reasons for the latter — review of engagement dynamics, desire to retire guns before they’re in the fatigue failure zone or become inaccurate — and a bad reason: to give evidence to the lawyers looking to turn every gunfight into an excessive force case. The model they review is not .mil ready because its invisible under NODs).

Do we have a beef? Yes. The reviews are not consistent in the information they offer. Most don’t mention product price, which is always a concern (even the wealthy like to get value for their money). And they occasionally use file photos instead of images of the actual gun reviewed.

But in any event, no matter how well you know guns, there’s always something new coming down the pike, and chances are, it’ll show up in Guns magazine’s reviews. While you’re over there, don’t forget the back issues from fifty years ago, and throw some love to their advertisers so they can keep doing this for all of us!

The W4 this week: Guns Magazine Reviews.

Wednesday Weapons Website of the Week: BBTI

Ballistics By the Inch — BBTI — is a website that does something we really like: tests and develops actual data about basic firearms facts. Like some of the other sites we’ve linked to over the last year-plus, it’s a myth-buster and a fact-finder. We do like that.

Some of these things have been extensively tested in the past, but three problems exist with these historical tests. First, the instrumentation available today tends to be more accurate than that available in the 20th or 19th Century, thanks to the computer and microprocessor revolution.

But the two other problems usually mean that those tests that do exist often are not on the net. One, perhaps they were done by government authorities that normally publicize data, but executed and recorded long before the internet’s event horizon of circa 1995. That means that they are only likely to be archived to the net if the agency cares enough to go back through its paper or microfiche archives and do so.

And two, perhaps they were done by some entity that did not care to put the information in the public sphere. Most foreign governments don’t, and companies conducting proprietary testing don’t.

BBTI’s Jim Kasper, Jim Downey and gang explain that these are only data points, and like any tests, BBTI’s have their bounds and constraints:

As we’ve noted previously, we have no illusions that our data is comprehensive. It is meant to be indicative – giving an indication to the general relationships between barrel length and velocity, or the effect of a cylinder gap. It would be impossible (for us, at least) to test all the different ammunition types available, or all the different firearms – particularly so when manufacturers of ammunition and firearms are constantly tweaking and improving their products. So use the data here to get an idea of what to expect, and perhaps as a jumping-off point for your own research.

via BBTI – Ballistics by the Inch :: Home.

Examples of the phenomena the site has examined include the effect of the cylinder-barrel gap on revolver velocity, the effect of shorter barrels on handgun velocities (starting with a long barrel and cutting it down), and comparisons of revolver velocities to equivalent-length, uninterrupted pistol barrels.

This is good data, it’s documented, it’s free, and it’s on the net. So what’s not to like? Well, apparently some people bitch about this or that. They bitch because he hasn’t tested Glocks (that’s coming). They bitch because they don’t understand the data. They bitch because… well, their psychologists could probably tell you. It’s data. It’s good. It’s free. What’s to bitch?

But with that said, we do have one quibble. In any aerodynamic or real-world ballistic experiment, you don’t have really comparable data unless you correct for atmospherics. This is usually done by correcting the data to an International Standard Atmosphere (ISA). The calculations are simple arithmetic, but you have to record the altitude, ambient pressure, and ambient temperature so that data can be normalized to an ISA (altitude Mean Sea Level, pressure 29.92 in/hg, temperature 59F). It’s possible they are doing this. This blog post, for instance, notes that they’re recording ambient temperature back in 2008. And this .pdf shows that they were thinking about pressure, but not pressure, when they originally conceived the tests. And there’s no question that they now how – Kasper’s a physicist, after all (and every drag racer figures this out — it’s not rocket surgery). It would be nice if they noted whether these are ISA value data, or provided us the ambient atmospherics so one of us readers could make the calcs.

But that’s our only quibble. Lots of information there, and more promised this spring.

Wednesday Weapons Website of the Week: Captain’s Journal

This is not entirely a weapons site, but it’s worth checking out. Herschel Smith has long been an interesting read on COIN and the long war. He was a Marine Captain when he started the Journal amidst the first flowering of milblogs.

We don’t always agree with him (or anybody else) but we often find good things on his site. The Captain’s Journal – check it out.

Wednesday Weapons Website of the Week – Lone Sentry

“Jap Infantry Weapons.” Period poster. Click to embiggen.

We have no idea who the “Lone Sentry” is, but he seems to be a military buff and/or scale modeler with a great interest in World War II.

There’s some news about new model releases, a field that doesn’t interest us all that much (is it just us, or is modeling dying out demographically even as a computer and injection-molding revolution makes higher and higher quality models available?).

But what gets us at Lone Sentry is the variety and range of original World War II documents published there.

For instance, this is what the Department of the Army thought about the MP40 — in 1954, nine years after the last one was made. (Why? It was still widely in use then, and lasted until the late 1980s with second-line formations, like the Norwegian Home Guard, and until the early 90s in strategic caches).

That poster of Japanese Infantry Weapons that illustrates this post is a pretty good cheat-sheet for the advanced Imperial Japanese collector. It came from Lone Sentry. Forty years ago, you could have got all of these but the field guns dirt cheap. Today, not so much.

The utility of these World War II documents doesn’t end on V-J Day (the 1950s MP40 article is an illustration of that!).
Russian road concealment TTPs… that would resurface in Indochina.

Here is an American translation of a German assessment of Russian summer camouflage techniques, from 1943. Figures 3 and 4 (right) shows means of concealing a road from enemy aerial patrols — something the Russians, often in a position of aerial inferiority, desperately needed to do. This identical technique was used on the Ho Chi Minh trail in the 1960s, as numerous reports from SOG, Project Delta, and other reconnaissance teams testified.

One thing we really like, is that Lone Sentry documents what original document his insights come from. We’re going to pluck some wisdom out of the posts here, and inflict it upon you shortly.

So that’s the W4 for this week: LoneSentry.com. Enjoy.

Wednesday Weapons Website of the Week: k_a_r_d_e_n

PKM rocking a Zenit forend with rail and co-witnessed EoTech

PKM rocking a Zenit forend with rail, angled forward grip and co-witnessed EoTech. From Karden.

So what’s going on in Russia? As far as small arms development is concerned? Some of the same things that are happening here. For example, Russian companies are rushin’ (couldn’t resist) to equip the arms of the former Soyuz with rails systems and the sort of modular capability we’ve had in the west since the late 80s. It appears that rather than reinvent a standard that works, they’ve just knocked off NATO’s open Picatinny Rail M1913 standard.

Of course sights need different calibration to work with Russian ballistics, but there’s a whole bunch of engineering that they didn’t have to do because they lifted it from us. (Fun fact: one other thing they lifted was Sikorsky’s rotor head design, which was copied in exact detail by the Mikhail Mil design bureau. Igor Sikorsky, a refugee from Soviet oppression himself, paid them back by stealing Mil’s design for windshield wipers. Turns out, a rotor head is a bear to design but a windshield wiper that works in the downdraft and vortices of a helicopter in flight is even harder).

TsniiTochMash SR-2 SMG/PDW with an embarrassing holographic sight. Via KARDEN.

But we’re more interested in things that go BANG here. (True, helicopters go BANG all too often, but it’s not a design requirement). And one way to keep abreast of how today’s Ivan brings the bang is the Karden blog, which a commenter turned us on to. He’s currently having fun with a catalog photo of a PDW (he doesn’t ID it, but it’s a TsniiTochMash SR-2 in 9×21 Gyurza, a caliber used primarily by Russian SOF) that some genius setting up the shot installed an EoTech on… backwards.

Bullpup PKM variant. Zenit photo via Karden.

His site also provided the photo of the rail-forend PKM, which has a rail and co-witnessed EoTech (and can also mount IR/visible laser unit) from the Zenit firm, and the interesting bullpup PKM. Ever see the bullpup PKM before?

If you’ve clicked over to the site, http://k-a-r-d-e-n.livejournal.com/, you’ve already noticed that it’s in Russian. But what if you don’t read the language of Chekhov and Tolstoy? Bozhe moi, you can read the site in half-assed Google machine translation.

If you do read it in Google translate, note that the native Russian site gives you two ways to read a blog entry. You can click the title of the entry, which opens (and translates) the entry as a single page. So far so good. Or you can click the “Read More” button, which does JavaScript stuff. But Google Translate doesn’t translate it if you do it that way… so get used to paging back and paging forward if you need the robotranslate crutch. Also, don’t expect Google to catch all weapons-technical terms, and it occasionally gets spoofed by a false cognate.

We really enjoy exploring the site (and, we confess, falling back to Google Translate more often than certain past professors would like to see. We found it handy to have po-anglickiy and po-russkiy in adjacent tabs). We haven’t had such fun with a Russian since Tom Lehrer sang about Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky, Hey! But that’s another story.

Update

This post has been updated. Material we intended to put in about using Google Translate was not in the original post, due to human error. In addition, we played with the formatting to bring a “missing” line out from behind an image. We regret the error and oversight.

Wednesday Weapons Website of the Week: Gunmartblog.com

We’re big believers in linking back the guys that link us, and lately several of our stories have been picked up in Gunmart’s Daily Firearm News update. Since they’ve been so kind as to deliver new readers to our humble web abode, we ought to be neighborly and return the favor.

Think of their Daily Firearm News posts as an even leaner version of what our friends at The Gun Wire put out. But while The Gun Wire is a whole page of curated daily gun news links, a bit like a gun-culture Drudge Report, Gunmart’s report is (1) not all they do, and (2) generally much shorter. (It doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to figure that those two facts are probably closely related).

For example, the link for 20 February 13 has fewer than 25 links on it, while Gun Wire has dozens every day. Which one you prefer will probably be a matter of personal style and preference. We’re currently checking both, because we don’t have to choose just one. If we did, we’d probably lean more to the Gun Wire approach.

But the other, non-daily-list stuff on Gunmart is good too. Here’s a heartfelt little post for those of you who work in gun shops, for instance. And another one. (Like him, we really don’t care for being muzzled by anybody, but it’s particularly galling when it’s a professional that does it). Here’s an example of one of their reviews. (Hmmm. We were familiar with SIRT training pistols, but not this AR training bolt. Gotta get one and try it out).

PS… yeah, this was actually posted in the wee hours of Thursday and backdated.

Wednesday Weapons Website of the Week: SADJ

This shot of Afghan Police hardware is typical of SADJ content that’s not duplicated anywhere else. The original article breaks down the source, accessories and mods of each AK variant here.

SADJ is “Small Arms Defense Journal,” and it’s a sister website to Small Arms of the World, the website related to the MG collectors’ journal, Small Arms Review. The website is http://sadefensejournal.com/

While SAR generally serves collectors and technology buffs. SADJ is oriented more towards the industry — both manufacturers and end users of modern small arms. To give you an idea of the scope of the site, the current featured stories are:

Armalite AR-10A — this is the current one, not the old Hollywood/Holland one
Afghan Uniformed Police Weapons and summary
SHOT Show 2013 recap
Croatian VHS — not an old videotape, a new AR that looks externally like an Adriatic FAMAS
USMC Precision Weapons Section
4th Generation Glock — New Standards for Perfection (we like Glock as much as the next guy, but that surely smells of press release).

You’ll recognize the names of several of the contributors.

We think you’ll enjoy the site, and we thank the anonymous tipster who reminded us that we ought to flag it here.

Wednesday Weapons Website of the Week: GunCite

First, we apologize because this week’s link is not a technical site, but given the current political imbroglio, we’ve been deluged by lots of things, including pithy gun-rights quotes. You may recognize some of these as having clanged into your inbox this week:

Firearms stand next in importance to the Constitution itself. They are the American people’s liberty teeth and keystone under independence. –”Washington”

Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force; like fire, a troublesome servant and a fearful master. — “Washington”

The strongest reason for people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government. –”Jefferson”

The beauty of the second amendment is that it will not be needed until they try to take it.–”Jefferson”

Arms in the hands of citizens may be used at individual discretion…in private self-defense.–”Adams”.

There’s only one problem (well, we could go all grammarian on “liberty teeth and keystone,” a construction that would never have passed G.W.’s practiced quill, but…). That problem is that every one of these quotes is as phony as our monthly Assclown of the Ides’s campaigns with Baron Munchhausen. If one of these is in your .sig, you have been PWN3D. (The Adams quote is actually edited to twist the meaning; the others appear to be fabrications).

You can prove it here: Bogus [Gun] Quotes Attributed to the Founders.

That’s one of many useful pages at GunCite: gun control and Second Amendment issues. Perhaps you want real, non-phony Founder quotes? GunCite’s got ‘em. And here are some from important Constitutional commentators.

Need a better .sig line? Here’s a few of our favorites.

A strong body makes the mind strong. As to the species of exercises, I advise the gun. While this gives moderate exercise to the body, it gives boldness, enterprise and independence to the mind.,,, Let your gun therefore be your constant companion of your walks. – Thos. Jefferson, 1785.

Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed; as they are in almost every kingdom in Europe. The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword; because the whole body of the people are armed. –Noah Webster, 1787.

The right of self defence is the first law of nature: in most governments it has been the study of rulers to confine this right within the narrowest limits possible. -St.George Tucker, 1803.

The prohibition is general. No clause in the Constitution could by any rule of construction be conceived to give to congress a power to disarm the people. – William Rawle, 1829.

No freeman shall ever be debarred the use of arms. — Thos. Jefferson, 1776. (Note: Jefferson is the unchallenged king of having bogus quotes attributed to him, on any subject you care to name, but this one is rock solid, from his draft of the Virginia Constitution. The State went with George Mason’s competing draft instead).

The site has more than just quotes from old dead white guys, and you will find it worthwhile. We found this page particularly useful: it’s a handy collection of quotes, legal opinions and statements that you can deploy next time your sister rolls her eyes and says, “nobody wants to take your guns.” You’ll probably be surprised what a wide range of grasping little gremlins say they want to take your guns. (Mind you, it could do with updating. Because more people than ever want to take your guns).

GunCite has no flash (or Flash), no color to speak of, nothing but links and blocks of text, which make it an extremely high-density source of reliable information. Recommended.

WeaponsMan

Quiet Professionals, Noisy Machinery