Looking To The Future, Darkly
Get the guys from Marlin to help with the feed ramp design. They’ve made so many .444 and .45-70 lever rifles over the years; these guys are masters at getting fat blunt cartridges to feed properly.
Figure out the weaknesses with the original Colt design. Maybe building it from modern steel instead of cast iron is enough. Maybe the action needs to be made a couple percent bigger to handle the longer cartridge. Maybe it needs some kind on internal lockup, either the Winchester 94 way with sliding bolts, or the Browning way with a rotating locking boltface. Whatever, I’m certain that a fix can be made to triple the strength of the rifle compared to the originals. Hire some firearms engineers .. with the new NY laws, Remington Arms in Ilion NY might be laying some off soon.
Build the HD carbine to weigh roughly 7.5 pounds. This is about a pound more than it needs, but that absorbs lots of recoil. A heavier barrel and a thicker magazine tube make the gun a better club too. I’d consider putting battle sights on it too: an M1 front sight and ghost rings in the back. Fast target acquisition, needs almost zero training.
A friend of mine made a nice tidy sum years ago when he bought a mini-mill and started producing a unique gun sight no one had ever considered before. It took all of 4 months before a major gun maker bought his “registered by date with a Notary Public “ idea for $3500 bucks. Think about it.
BTW, I would buy a rifle like that in a second. Send that info to Bob Owens.Adter you document it that is.
Fun project. Get a grant by convincing some lefty group like the Ford Foundation that it’s a design project for the sake of gun control and let’s get to work.
Did I mention that I used to be in manufacturing and I like playing with guns?
Gee, look what happened in Ohio Today:
FAIRBORN — One man was killed and another shot in the leg when they, along with three others, allegedly participated in a home invasion Monday evening where the residents fought back.
Police said Tuesday that it is still a bit unclear what prompted the five individuals, ages 19 to 23, to force their way into the Victoria Avenue home while brandishing a fake plastic gun.
Moral of the story; Never point plastic at a Real Gun cause someone just might get asked to take a dirt nap,Heh.
Full story here:
http://www.daytondailynews.com/news/news/crime-law/fairborn-police-investigate-shooting-on-victoria-a/nT8pZ/Cool! Here’s another approach.
Other things those nimrods haven’t thought about:
1. Instead of one pistol with a 17-round mag, I’ll just carry two with 10-round mags.
2. Or maybe I’ll pack a couple of 8-round revolvers (here and here) (BTW - moon clips are available for them for fast reloading.idiots…
Interesting ideas, but I think I’ll just use what I have for what they’re intended for if the time comes, rather than work my way around new rules, as much as subversion is fun. I have a lot, but not much of it isn’t in a military caliber.
Check out this little non military caliber. The 22TCM puts out a 40 grain slug over 1,900fps.
Mighty tiny bullet Doc. Speedy, but that’s a .22 LR bit of lead. I like ‘em a bit heftier, but as they say, any gun is 1000 times better than none at all.
There are many ways around whatever laws may be made. I just did this exercise to show that whatever the rules may be, we can follow them and create a potent weapon. But we have all these millions of other weapons already, and at this point most aren’t going to bother adhering to the law. This is how the underbelly of society has been acting for years and years, but it is now spreading upwards to the middle classes. When there are too many laws, everything you do is illegal, so why bother trying? And also, there just comes a point when you say Enough. And that’s where we are right now: millions upon millions of law abiding citizens looking at the future and deciding that they will no longer obey the law, whether it’s Obamacare or Obamagun. Such a thing really does put us at the very cusp of a violent social earthquake.
Drew, get it built and I will buy one whether this crap passes or not! I just like the idea.
I have an old pump action 22 that pops bought me when I was 4 years old ( 1961 ,Remington,had the factory make a new firing pin) so ya, get that new toy built, Its a cool gun idea Drew, Make it so Obi Wan.
Please God, let all who visit here click this link so as to let them all know that the world is truly safe from the retards who think they can get our guns:
http://touch.latimes.com/#section/-1/article/p2p-74211487/
Just a snippet:
California authorities are empowered to seize weapons owned by convicted felons and people with mental illness, but staff shortages and funding cuts have left a backlog of more than 19,700 people to disarm, a law enforcement official said Tuesday.An excellent example of, Genius at Work. And that is no joke.
I’m just curious as to what rpm the bullet will explode upon leaving the barrel?
“That gives us a SF/M number far above what the bullets were designed for.”
Exceeding the designed sf/pm? Not a good idea.
Posted by harleycowboy58
01/31/2013 at 09:26 PM
Thanks for reading closely Harley. Yes, it’s done that way on purpose. The bullet companies tell us simple users (when they bother to tell us at all) that their products are designed for use between X and Y feet per second. This is not really a precision answer. SF/M is a precision answer, because it deals with the interrelation between spin rate and velocity.
You can shoot a pure lead cast bullet at 4000 feet per second and it will not fly to pieces, yet nearly all lead bullets, including the modern super-hard cast kind that are worthless for hunting or personal defense (they are made from linotype and shatter on impact), are said to be used below 2000fps. In his superb loading manual Mr. Lee debunked that claim and showed how cast lead bullets are actually only limited by chamber pressure. Use a large enough cartridge and you can get whatever velocity you want at low pressure. Jacketed bullets have their own limits, but because the gilding metal (a kind of brass) jacket is so much stronger than lead, they are not limited by chamber pressure. RPM is what does them in. RPM and SF/M are directly related.
A bit of field testing would be needed, but you can guesstimate things pretty closely: Brand X says their 182gr .401” pistol bullet is good between 800 and 1600fps. Ok, it’s for a 40 caliber pistol ... so you look up 40 caliber pistol cartridge specs at SAAMI and you find the .40 S&W and the 10mm Magnum. Those specs include the standard rifling twist rate. That twist rate is not law, but most gun makers stay close to it. So, increase the twist rate a tiny bit, 1 or 2 turns, and calculate the SF/M at max advertised velocity. That should give you the maximum rate at which the manufacturer feels that their bullet works as it should, and that means impressive mushrooming AND significant penetration. I’m NOT interested in significant penetration. I WANT the bullet to be nearly explosive on impact, making an enormous temporary wound cavity (elastic deformation) and leaving a huge wound crater that is only 6 or 8” deep. I want to blow the bad guys to chunks, just like hollowpoints on gophers, and I don’t want the bullets to exit and then fly through the walls ever. Imagine a surface wound cavity 9” across but only 4.5” deep, the size of half a bowling ball. Or one 6” across and 6” deep, the size of a 2lb coffee can. Pretty much a game ender. People really aren’t that big animals. You don’t need 24” of penetration to kill them. Look at those wound channel pics done in ballistic gelatin, and you’ll see that most of the damage done with a rifle bullet occurs at a deeper point than most people are thick, front to back. The upper limit for SF/M would be the rate at which the bullet flies apart in the air from too high RPM. We want less than that. But we want something much higher than what the designers had in mind, because we want to avoid excess penetration.
Example: In that online Terminal Ballistics/Wounding Theory paper there is a graphic of the wound cavity made by the .458” Hornady 350FN bullet fired at high speed (relative to the velocity it was designed for). It blows a hole in the sides of deer you can put both fists in, but it almost never shoots out the other side of the deer. This is a phenomenal hunting bullet that hits deer like Thor’s hammer. They bleed buckets (not really exaggerating) and die nearly on the spot almost every time. That’s the kind of wounding high SF/M can give you. My design uses a bullet of almost the same diameter at about the same velocity, but of almost half the mass and of lighter construction. People are usually thinner than deer, so that ought to be Ok.
The bullet was designed for the low velocity .45-70 rifle, which has a 1:20 twist rate and would shoot this bullet at about 1300fps. To get an impact speed of ~1900fps it’s probable that it was fired from a .458 Winchester Magnum, a rifle that often has a 1:10 twist rate. Thus a much greater SF/M. I’ve been in contact with the author for years, and we’ve agreed that twist rate has a great impact on penetration and mushrooming, but running his tests on every available twist would bankrupt him.
The core of my idea is to make a gun with light recoil and low cost that would have the terminal clout of a shotgun when fired at across-the-room distances. A big fat bullet works, but makes for lots of recoil. A tiny speedy bullet works, but usually penetrates far too much. So a large bullet that reacts excessively seems to me to be the answer.
I hope that clears things up.
01/31/2013 at 09:35 AM
