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on 03/03/2011 at 11:07 AM
You missed an anniversary yesterday. It was the 175th anniversary of the signing of the Texas Declaration of Independence.
The Republic of Texas existed as an independent sovereign country, a distinction no other U.S. state can claim, from 2 March 1836 until Texas annexed the rest of the United States in 1845.
And if I had my way we’d go back to being an independent republic…
Drew .. Better to show my ignorance and learn something then stay silent and remain dumb.
What is the “stovepipe” referred to in the comments section of the 9mm?
I have never heard that term. Come to think of it, there’s lots I haven’t heard.
Peiper - a stovepipe is a spent case that fails to eject properly from a semi-automatic pistol.
In a revolver, the cartridges sit in a steel cylinder. Once they have been fired they stay there, until you open up the gun and dump them out.
A semi-automatic is called a semi-automatic because it is self-loading. (If it were self firing as well it would be fully automatic, ie a machine gun, called machine guns because they load and fire ... like machines!)
To be self loading, and having only a single chamber to put any given cartridge in, the old fired cartridge has to be disposed of. Almost all semi-auto pistols cycle their actions by having a large chunk of hollowed out metal on top slide back and forth. On firing, the barrel, which has locking gears of some kind on it, uses the recoil impulse to either rotate a little or drop down a little, and unlock itself from the top bit of metal, which is called a “slide”, because it does. The slide is on springs, and has a small hook thing built into it called an extractor. The hook end fits over the groove at the end of the cartridge and holds it in place. When the gun is fired, and the action is unlocked, the slide slides backwards, pulling the spent case with it. Halfway along the slide track, another bit of metal is sticking up that is mounted to the body (ie the receiver) of the pistol. This little stump is called the ejector. It’s often mounted off to one side. When the slide pulls the case back over the ejector, it’s like driving your car into a tall curb. Since the extractor is hooked onto the opposite side of the cartridge case, impacting the ejector flips the case out of the top of the pistol sideways. It’s goes spinning up and away like flipping a coin. The slide then slides back a bit more, and picks up the next live cartridge from the top of the magazine, grabs it with the extractor hook, and slides forward again, chambering the new cartridge, locking the barrel and the action together, cocking the firing pin mechanism (which is also built into the slide) and readying the pistol to fire again.
To bounce that spent case out of the top of the gun requires two things: there has to be a good size hole in the slide for the case to jump through, and the timing has to be correct. The hole you can see - it’s that cut away area in the middle of the top of the gun. The timing is the relationship between the strength of the recoil spring used, the mass of the slide, the amount of travel that the slide has, the recoil energy of the cartridge, and any minor variations in the length of the brass cartridge case.
Still with me? Good. Sometimes when you use lively ammo, or when the recoil spring is too weak, or when the brass case is a little too long or a bit too light, the timing will be off. It doesn’t take much - a few ten thousandths of a second - but if the slide starts coming forward significantly before the old fired case has had time to bounce out, the back edge of the hole on top (which is actually the breech face of the firearm; the place where the firing pin is) will catch the edge of the fired case’s rim and jam it between the breech face and the back of the barrel.
This jammed case sticks out of the gun at right angles, often pointing almost straight up. It looks like a stovepipe sticking out of the roof of a house, and that’s where the name comes from.
This is a bad situation to have if you are in a gun fight, but the gun itself is not seriously jammed. “Whack and Rack” is the solution shooters practice - slap your other hand back over the top of the slide to smack the stovepipe out, while grabbing the slide and forcing it to cycle manually. You will lose the round that was just chambered, but you will have a properly chambered round afterwards, and can go back to shooting. Granted this is an emergency procedure. When target shooting you have all the time in the world to do what is needed ... and sometimes that even cleaning the gun, because dirt can be the cause of ... literally gumming up the works. Sometimes these things are caused by faulty magazines which don’t position the new cartridge properly.
(note the extractor, which is that thin bit of metal on the right side of the slide)
http://www.ehow.com/about_6651699_stovepipe-pistol_.html
This situation can not happen with a revolver, which is why many folks choose that style of pistol when their lives are in the balance. Not that revolvers are totally foolproof either ... just mostly so.
Good read drew. I’d never heard of a stovepipe before and I’ve been around alot of guns and gun people all my life. I guess an old dog learns something new every day.
Kinda funny tho. I have a .380 and a .40. I want a 9MM.
Ill bet Ann Cloulter has nothing on you in a sexy slinkey bowlinjg shirt Drew,,,,,,,,,,,
I’d like to have Ann Coulter in my bowling shirt.
Which, BTW, is usually a worn out, 12 year old shirt I got from an EDS Global Volunteer Day event, but I keep because it has a painted hand print on the front and the slogan “Making My Mark”, and that’s a good bowling philosophy.
I used to wear their Cat Herding shirt, but their font and my physique makes everyone misread it, and I got tired of fielding questions about “Cat Heroin”.
Still, either shirt beats the “I haff loss many frenns to da es-quirrels” ad they did on TV.
03/03/2011 at 02:11 PM
