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 …
This week’s Tour d’Horizon may actually publish on time. That’s kind of a big deal, as last week’s was finally published today (minus a few categories). You can read last week’s TDH at this link. (Link fixed, thanks to Brian Jaynes for the heads up -Ed.) Guns I don’t wanna work, I just wanna bang on my gun all day. Build …
Long-time reader and commenter Jim Hall wonders about a revolver that is connected, one way or another, to two Vietnam veterans. “What is it?” he asks, and we have to admit we don’t know. A pistol copied from, or at least inspired by, the Colt .31 pocket revolver of 1849, with cylinder flutes like Colt …
First, relax: there will be no 19th-Century chick novels, nor any zombies, in this post. The title lead with “Firepower,” right? It’s about guns. Guns, national pride, and racial or ethnocentric prejudice. It’s another thing that turns up reading old, old firearms books and magazines, and if you’re old enough you can remember hearing it from gun-store counter clerks and hangers-on …
One advantage you can get from reading out-of-date books is insight to what was current thinking many years ago. Looking over L.R. Wallack’s American Pistol and Revolver Design and Performance from 1978 (one of a series of four books Wallack produced beginning in the seventies: Rifle, Shotgun, Pistol & Revolver, and a combined sporting arms Design and Performance) reminded us …
Revolvers have been declining in market share for three decades, a decline which really only got going 30 years after the last major military revolver user (the UK), crawled into the 20th Century. (Actually the last major military revolver user was probably the US, which issued revolvers to aviators, and to military police men and …
In an entirely unexpected turn of events, ATF has reclassified completed and even so-called “80% lowers” with a fake auto sear marking as machine guns, depending on who makes them. Here’s an image of one such receiver the Bureau has taken custody of and ordered destroyed. The problem is that fake sear hole. Marking such a receiver …
There’s some good prices here on some presumably overstocked or about-to-sunset MagPul gear, including $10 AK mags (older model, sand color only)… …and $16.41 25-round G2 window mags for DPMS/KAC type 7.62mm ARs. This includes the S&W M&P10 and the Colt LE901, but does not include the DPMS GII. The mags work in the second-gen DMPS gun, but …
We’re told that “2017 is The Year of the Pistol-Caliber Carbine” was one of the themes at SHOT this year. Online, it’s probably best developed by Michael Bane in this article. This was, as I predicted, the Year of the Pistol Caliber Carbine. They were all over the place on the SHOT floor, and I …
