Coming up:

Consider this a thanksgiving resolution.... as soon as I can lay hands on my digital camera (lord knows where it's gone to), I'm going to go through my handgun collection and, with photos, go over every item with an eye to engineering.... whys, not just whats.

Except the Nagant pistol. I've already gone over that before :)

Mechanical insanity

This is an idea that started brewing in my head quite a while ago, and I'm bringing it to light now.....

Ok, take your average single action revolver. Where the pin holds the cylinder in, replace that with a rod, and redesign the rear of the frame so it goes all the way through to the hammer. At the front of the rod, run a tube along the bottom of the cylinder and port at the end. Viola, automatic six shooter.

Cock, pull trigger. Gas acts on rod, shoves hammer back. You'd better be using a fannable action though, since that's what's going on... it's an auto-fanning hammer, the rod knocks the hammer back, rotating the cylinder, it locks, finger's still on the trigger so the hammer falls, there's the next gas puff and the cycle continues a total of 5 times. Yes, 5. Remember, you didn't use it for the first shot :)

With a little forethought you could have a disconnecter in there, I bet... and then you have the gas-op equivalent of a mateba in an almost correct looking package, except for the extra "ejector rod" under the barrel.

A side note....

You'll never find anything personal or political in this blog. Sorry. I have strong views and plenty to talk about, but not here.

This blog is for guns, and guns alone.

Now, to make this a legitimate post...
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I was pondering this move for a long time; finally the time was right. I grabbed a Superior Arms reciever, DPMS parts kit, and a used stock and assembled my very first AR15 lower.

ARs are, as Alston said, "Lego guns". It's simply brilliant and brilliantly simple, allowing me to do what I'd never even seen done before in about 30 minutes, though I goofed a bit and got the hammer spring legs on top of the trigger pin instead of on the floor of the fire control well. Trigger's heavy but smooth, I should look up how to stone the sear contacts without changing the angle or otherwise improve that.

Now, to further things, I don't have an upper. I've nicknamed this rifle 1-2-3, for an obscure reason.... A1 stock, A2 grip, and I want to get an A3 upper. To be more precise, I want an A3 flattop with low front sights a flat gas block, 20" barrel (thin is fine), 1:9 twist. From everything I'm stufying that would allow me to use bullet weights from 40 to ~75 grains, which is just about everything available that I'd run across cheaply. Optics or irons, I haven't decided.

Alternative uppers are available too, of course... pretty much for anything that will fit down the mag well. .22lr, .223, 6.5, 6.8, 7.62x39, 9x19, .40, 10mm, .45, beowulf, .50AE, I've even heard of a 20ga shotgun upper that was determined to be an AOW by the ATF. And it's all interchangeable via two pins and a different magazine. Beautiful.

Well, the system's beautiful, not necessarily my rifle. 1-2-3 is going to be a bit fugly, honestly, but it'll likely be a classic mutt.... wonderful in function and reliability at the expense of looks.

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An additional side note:

I was thinking of the other pistols I had in my collection wondering if I had anything strange or odd enough to inspire a line of thought, since I've been dry the last few days. I've got a Norinco 213... a Tokarev TT30/33 or Tokagypt clone. The hammer to slide contact angle is upright and the hammer's rather heavy, providing an initial resistance to recoil impulse, i.e. the hammer assists with timing.

Why not expand that and hame a hammer design that *determines* timing, perhaps with a gas piston system? The hammer falls and is locked into place until the piston returns and unlocks it, releasing the slide.... it'd be a heavy hammer due to the stresses involved but wouldn't be much weaker than a Beretta toggle, really.

Today in the lab...

An experiment showed that you can indeed, with great care, bump-fire an aging Marlin 60 .22lr rifle.

That is all.

Stranger things have been thought up...

Ok. Thoughtline.

Take up a .500 S&W cartridge. Imagine it being shortened to 1" case length. Install a ~330gr soft wadcutter. Fill the case with enough fast powder to launch at 700 to 800fps (barely sonic, if at all).

Call it .500 Bulldog.

Make a revolver, roughly J-frame sized in the grip with a larger cylinder just long enough to fit our new cartridge. 5 shots. Make it bulldog style, with the removable cylinder pin (mostly for nostalgia, partly for strength and inexpensiveness). DAO hidden hammer.

Voila, here's a really nice crookthumper.

I have much to learn, yes....

http://www.horstheld.com

An online "gun museum"... very unusual things going on there, just up my alley :)

here I go again, blowing my patent chances...

...but I really don't mind, this is all mental exercise for me anyways.

Tungsten. Very heavy, somewhat brittle. Dense. And has a 6000 degree (give or take 192 degrees F) melting point.

Ok, so you make a sintered tungsten (the only way to do it), or perhaps ceramic piece. What is it? It's the external chamber, throat, and first 1" or so of rifling of the rife barrel. It's designed so that the rifling will thread over a hammerforging die with very small tolerances. The throat and rifling of this piece is where the rest of the barrel mates to it, so it's like a tube with a wavy surface not unlike the core-loct series of rod bolts for high-performance auto engines (it provides a locked fit without introducing pressure points).

So the chamber/lead insert is threaded onto the forging die's rifling, the barrel is slid over it, and beat into submission.. err, i mean hammerformed, onto the die. The rifling is now perfectly matched from insert to barrel, and the unit is irreversibly one piece.

Thermal expansion isn't really an issue... Tungsten simply doesn't do it much, meaning at *worst* we're talking about the steel barrel expanding and changing the tolerance of the rifling.

Why not the entire barrel? Well, for one tungsten is fairly brittle, and for the other.... let's say we have a .30 caliber barrel with an outside diameter of .80" at the reciever and .6" at the muzzle, 24" long, straight taper for ease of calculation.... it weighs roughly 5.3 pounds, all by itself.

Room temperature tensile strength of tungsten in the raw ranges form 100,000 to 500,000PSI. It has a Brinell hardness of 2570, and that's not a typo.

Other applications could be breech block inserts for blowback designs, recoil buffers, anything that requires extreme density. You could have a tiny little hammer on a pistol with the same inertia as a full size steel spur hammer....

I don't have a specific point...

... but I figured I'd ramble on a few things anyways just to keep it "fresh".

Firstly, a thought occurred to me as I was running some free .32acp through my S&W 432PD. Yes, I know it's chambered in .32Mag, but i figured out a long time ago that it will also hold and fire .32acp since it's so close to the same diameter and has a very slight rim.

Why are there no .32acp revolvers on the market? You've got the very small NAA Minis, chambered in up to .22WMR, but the next leap brings you to the J-frames. Even in "accepted revolver cartridges" you pretty much jump from .22WMR to .32Mag. .32acp is a perfectly acceptable light defense cartridge, otherwise millions of Seecamps, NAA Guardians, PPKs, keltec P32s and the like wouldn't be out there.

So who's up for making a little birds-head .32acp 5, 6, or 7 shot revolver with the proper cylinder length so it's just tiny?

What else can shrink a revolver, hrmm.... briefly a long time ago I thought of something that would reduce the size of the cylinder. What's that? Not making a cylinder, but having discrete chambers on links, like a tank tread. Not very feasible.

In other failed ideas, it occured to me that if you tilted a cartridge at an angle to the bore axis, you could create a shorter magazine than the OAL of the cartridge, at the expense of width. But then it occurred to me that the staggered cartridges had no real way of orienting themselves forward, or if they reorient in the mags that it would have to be at least OAL otherwise they wouldn't fit. So much for the easy to hold .30 carbine semiautos...

Something to research: How much pressure management capability does a steel cartridge add over a brass one?