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 booklet at archive.org includes reprints of several Machinery articles from the First World War period, describing the industrial manufacture of rifle barrels at the time. The complexity of the task and its many operations are clear, plus, of course, there were various methods of cut rifling, but no other method of rifling, because button, cold forging, …
This week’s Tour d’Horizon is publishing half a day or so late. The problem was it was just not coming together, and time was running out, and the Saturday run schedule was blank. So we dropped the blocked post, and did Saturday stuff instead. This’ll backfill. We have never actually experienced the neurotic mindlock called “writer’s block,” but …
General Mark Milley spoke recently at a conference on what the Army of the Future might look like. Urban warfare is the next battlefield frontier, and the Army will have to rethink both its command structure and soldiers themselves in order to adapt, the service’s top general said Tuesday. This is nothing new. We’ve been …
The US Naval Academy, bastion of 19th-Century traditions, producer of all our admirals for good or ill until after World War II, cradle of innumerable Navy and Marine heroes, has come to a milestone in its last decades of cultural decline: it recently threw an institutional wobbler over an opinion expressed by one of its …
We’re under unprecedented schedule pressure here, and would like to apologize for delays in the posting schedule, comment approval and responses, and getting Kirk’s symphony-length opuses out of the comment cooler. It doesn’t help that we’ve got to work with crappy satellite internet, which has made us rewrite this post three times. Bear with us …
Here’s another amazing find by Fred, in an auction catalog that AFAIK hasn’t come to Hog Manor yet in the treebark edition. but is already online. (Uh, we just realized, thanks to a comment, that while we were sleep-writing this post last night we confused Rock Island, whose catalog we do subscribe to, with James Julia, whose …
This is a classy memorial to Ike. Naturally, it wasn’t what no-class Gehry had in mind. (It’s in a traffic circle in Bayeux). We’ve written before about the shambling zombie calamity of a memorial that the talentless po-mo society architect Frank Gehry designed for the Eisenhower Memorial. Which is how we get to Right by …
Alas, poor Akbar Salubiro. Akbar went out harvesting, but never returned to his Indonesian village. His friends began to retrace his steps, beginning at his back door. But what they saw from there told them they did not need to go far. Village secretary Salubiro Junaidi said: “People had heard cries from the palm grove …
A European website has a reprint of an excellent article by Vern Briggs of Ruger and Professor James Higley of Purdue. We’ve discussed the various ways of rifling barrels; we thought you’d appreciate Briggs’s and Higley’s deep dive into the process and technology of the most capital-intensive form of barrelmaking, cold hammer forging. (Actually, it …
John Bolton, former US Ambassador to the United Nations, is known for blunt, straight talk. But people forget he’s also a career diplomat with an instinct for diplomatic solutions — even if he’s more practical and less deluded than the median for the breed. Bolton has written an interesting essay, arguing that the best outcome …