The patient was on the stretcher. The computerized axial tomography machine was ready. And then the advanced medical imaging technology went to work.

But it wasn’t imaging a human, or even a veterinary, patient. It was imaging a clone of an HK 23E, a 5.56mm machine gun similar to the 7.62mm HK 21 that will evoke a certain nostalgic era to veterans of a particular US special operations unit.  Both the before and after pictures are found in this blog post, and they came from a unique site, XRayGuns.com.

It all started when a package arrived for one of the guys at the imaging center — a guy known as a gun collector. A couple of co-workers thought they’d “read his mail” and wound up with a beautiful image of the hardware inside. They sent it to him and afterward, an idea was born: this could be art! Hangable art. Wearable art. And now it is, and you can buy prints (suitable, naturally, for framing) and t-shirts at the site.

 

The same Michael’s Machine HK 23E clone. We took it for an HK21 at first glance!

The pictures look like the X-Ray images doctors view of your kid’s leg after he plunges from a tree (or of your leg after an ill-advised hook turn at the end of a parachute jump, but that’s another story). Except the hardware in the images is not broken.

You should take the time to look at every page of the site, as there are more intriguing gun images there.

The t-shirts are rather clever. They have an image of the weapon in question on the front — M4, HK, AK, MAC-10 — and its specifications — in its native language — on the back (we did see one translation error, we think. Just one… this is not a robo-translation but done by hand by someone who knows gun argot in multiple languages). And you have to love their guarantee:

While it will certainly hurt  our egos, if you feel the shirt or print you receive doesn’t meet your expectations….we will gladly refund your entire purchase amount (minus shipping) upon receipt of the unused product.

Wrong size? No problem. Mail the shirt back with a brief note and we’ll exchange it for you.

We know exactly who needs an AK shirt for Christmas. We just have to figure out what size fits a 13-year-old.

Hat tip: GunSpec.com via The Gun Wire, which you need to be checking every day (it’s the Drudge Report of the gun culture).