An archive of Kevin O’Brien’s posts from the original WeaponsMan website he created in 2011.
Please excuse any typos and issues resulting from scraping the old site. Posts might be out of chronological order.
This memo’s been around as a scanned, non-OCR’d .pdf for a long time. We’ve OCR’d the PDF, and double-checked the numbers against the original data. The PDF is here:M16 Serial Number List OCR[.pdf]. The complete text is below this editorial comment. We would add the following remarks: The first few Colt serial numbers (001-100) were …
This is a guest post by the Russian firearms expert and historian Maxim Popenker, co-author (with Anthony Williams) of several reference works1, and the founder and owner of the indispensable world.guns.ru website. some time ago, we mentioned in a story on the Quiet Special Purpose Revolver that the US had not pursued such technology, but the Russians had, and …
A couple of days ago we followed a link from The Gun Feed to the Michigan-based gun blog 248 Shooters.com. (We’re guessing 248 is an MI area code? The way the Workshop Eating Plane® will have “603” in its N Number?). Anyway, the article was a short and to the point gear review of an extended or enhanced …
A couple of years ago, the Army gave the lousy three-round-burst selector switch that was used on the M16A2 and successors, and the original M4, two in the chest and one in the head. There are still firearms with the bad trigger mechanism kicking around the services, but this decision was the beginning of the …
People ask about sniping all the time. Thing is, the basic standard for SF shooting is pretty high, and it’s kept that way by constant training — really, by constant shooting. It’s no longer 1980 where you have fifty rounds per man per year (and the teams illegally buy their own ammo to keep from …
Germany, Poland, the UK, and the USSR all developed anti-tank rifles and used them with mixed results (the Germans, in World War I, then all of them, in the early years of World War II) Other nations including Czechoslovakia, Switzerland, Finland and Japan built anti-tank rifles, essentially huge rifles that fired a kinetic penetrator meant to kill …
This week’s Tour d’Horizon is upon us. Too many tabs, too little time. UPDATE Guns I don’t wanna work, I just wanna bang on my gun all day. Colt Super-Sizes the Competition Pistol That would be .38 Super-sizes a pistol made for modern power-factored accuracy games. The blue grips are an acquired taste, kind of like goth girls with blue-koolaid hair. The …
If you go to a Civil War reenactment, you will see a remarkable thing: thousands of volunteers taking great pains to portray (and many of them, to experience, down to the taste of hard tack) the lives of the troops of the War Between the States. They have an eye for accuracy that stops just …
For many years after World War II, the aircraft of the war were just, “old.” In the heady Jet Age, wartime transports still had economical utility, but the combat types were quickly left behind. They were relegated to duties as instructional airframes for novice mechanics (“learn riveting on this, it’ll never fly again so you can’t screw …
Booooring, you say. Cheap copies of crummy comblock stuff, made by starving slave labor. Interesting only because of its sheer quantity. Soon to be the world’s first radioactive parts kits, imported by Century International, if Kim Fat Kid starts something. Not exactly. Sure, the Norks have copied all the usual stuff from their former Soviet and Chinese …
