October Memes

This is one of the reasons that I don’t have a housecat.

 

Identify the Tank(s)

2 tanks above – 1 below

 

I saw this and said – “yeah”

It’s not about the vaccination. It’s about the forced nature of the vaccination and the fact that whether or not you’ve had it, you still must wear an obedience mask.

 

Revolver

Manufactured c.1597 by Hans Stopler in the Imperial free city of Nuremberg, later passed into the possession of a Norwegian general.

.30 caliber black powder revolver, 8-shot manually indexed cylinder, snaplock mechanism. One of the very first revolver designs we can account for, more than two hundred years before Samuel Colt invented the single action. This firelock pistol had a large cylinder rotating around a brass collar, holding eight chambers each with its own flash pan for priming powder, covered by eight spring-loaded brass pan covers.

The use of brass was probably to avoid sparks from setting off any chain reaction. This meant for each shot, the person firing the gun had to half-cock the gun, index the cylinder, open the flash pan, pull down the frizzen, cock the gun fully, and then fire. This increased the fire rate mostly by negating the need to reload until after all eight shots were fired.

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40 COMMENTS

  3. We have a cadre of barn cats, keeps the invasive critter population at bay. No indoor cats…but they are cute when little, and they learn to go in at night lest they become bib at fare.

    Pistol- thats interesting…proves ideas are rarely invented, only redesigned or repurposed.

  5. Agreed, that pistol is indeed a work of art and I’d love to handle one, though actually shooting it would be out of the question. While I’ve fired some antique arms, none were manufacture before 1870.

  6. The relief in front of the cylinder indicates the designer was familiar with the risk of crossfire. I also wonder how flame proof the sliding covers are, but a really impressive piece for sure.

    • My sense would be that the sliding covers would prevent against flash-over. I shoot my Colt’s Dragoon (second model) and use a thin coat of vaseline over the front of the ball to prevent flash even though the ball is wedged into the cylinder. It only works in cold weather. It gets runny once it gets warm. Bear grease was used by early operators of that weapon. Better choice.

        • True. It is messy, though, I found out the hard way. “What is dripping from my holster?”

          I know of people who use unrendered pig fat. Not popular if you’re a Mohammedan or a Jew (and I am neither) and I’ve never tried that. Bear grease would seem to be the way to go.

      • Crisco is even worse, although with the low flame temp, each shot looks like you are shooting white Phosphorus. I tried it one time in an 1851 Colt Navy repro. When I pulled the wedge and went to clean the barrel, I pushed out a near perfect carbon casting of the bore.

        Along about that time I bought (at a gun store) a tube of Chevron F3 vegetable base grease. IIRC, it was for machinery in the food canning industry. It worked great for greasing my b–, er, projectiles in my percussion revolvers. I have no idea if it is still available.

        The only percussion revolver I have left is my Ruger SS Old Army. I cast 255gr Kieth style flat nose bullets to .454 diameter and then run them through my lube/sizer. I had the gun’s rammer machined to match the nose of the bullet.

        And now I see that Hodgdon is shutting down their black powder plant.

        • We may be down to homemade FFFG before long. Frankly, it’s been coming. I don’t know who the next President will be or if we’ll call them a “Dear Leader” or what. The components to making a Munroe or Neumann effect charge can be purchased anywhere or you can ‘find’ them. Explosively formed penetrators (EFP), also known as an explosively formed projectile, a self-forging warhead, or a self-forging fragment, was used to great effect by America’s enemies in the recent wars in the Middle East and Asian Subcontinent. Some were mass-produced but there was a lot of cottage industry involved too.

        • Re: FFFG. Foxfire book 5. I recall reading long ago about U.S. Army procedures for testing black powder before purchase. One such test was to burn a “pinch” on a piece of copper sheet, then scrutinize the rings of color left in the copper. I wonder if that info could be found in a dusty old ordnance manual somewhere.

          • I’ve heard or saw it demonstrated (mumbles the year or decade) ago but I don’t recall the details. We’ve forgotten a lot institutionally that may need to be re-learned.

  7. Tank question from someone who knows little about tanks. Does the way the Matilda designed turret make it vulnerable to a hit anywhere in the front around the rifle?

    • Yes.

      They were a VERY slow pre-war construction tank – referred to as an Infantry Tank because the top speed wasn’t much over 10 MPH. That said, the British deployed them to the end of WW2. They sent about 1,000 to Russia where they were pressed into service against the Germans by the Red Army.

      It’s tempting to compare designs like the Matilda I and II with other tank designs that came out subsequent to them and it’s not fair. They had very heavy armor for their day and were very effective against Italian tanks in N. Africa.

      The Valentine (also in the picture) was a pre-war tank that wasn’t stellar, but they were there when they were needed and they were good enough. By the end of the war with up-armor, better guns, better engines, etc. they were a pretty good tank. But that came after years of trial and error.

      • Yeah, a million bullet traps on the Matilda turret face. On the bright side, the mantlet was pretty thick, for the era.

        Still, it even embarrassed a lot of German tanks in the early desert war; it’s poor speed didn’t hurt it as much on the defense, and the 2-pounder had a longer effective range against early Pz III and Pz IV models, than their 37mm, short 50mm, and short 75s did against the Matilda. Also a very good RoF.

        Obsolete quickly, but it has it’s moment.

        -Kle.

  8. Too bad the Matilda II was a victim of its own armor, and couldn’t be up-gunned with even a 57mm capable of firing a variety of ammo instead of the 40mm non-HE firing gun.

    Stupid Brits. Their whole tank production was controlled by how wide British Railway tunnels were. Which the Brits believed in only shipping whole tanks. Thus restricting the width of tanks, thus restricting the size of the turret ring, thus restricting the turret, thus restricting the gun carried.

    Only late in the war did some smartass figure out if they took the turret off and the bogies and the skirts and tracks that they could just ship the bare hull, and assemble the whole thing once it reached port. Which is why the Brits had to have Shermans in order to carry a really big powerful gun.

    And why there was the interesting Brit design choice of one short-barreled howitzer equipped tank per group of regular gunned (only firing AP ammo) tanks.

    • The British made fun of the Shermans, but they were the best things that the British had going during those mid-war years after they figured out that the Germans had them out armored and gunned all the way around.

      I’m not the least bit anti-Brit, but as you point out, some of their decisions when it came to early tanks made absolutely no sense at all.

      • They proved, with the Centurion, that getting away from silly constraints due to railroad tunnels allowed them to field cutting edge world-class armored vehicles.

        All due to not putting bogies or the turret or the skirts on.

        I can imagine the ‘D’oh!’ moment when someone finally said out loud amongst the people who could actually do the change “Why don’t we leave the wheels off? How much wider and bigger can we make our tanks?”

        It’s not like they didn’t have the casting ability, which was one of the restrictions on Italian tanks. The Brits could and did cast larger armored castings than the Matilda II.

  9. Do you have any numbers for how many shots/minute that revolver could be do?

    How about reloading?

    These are always fun facts for the folks with “the founding fathers could have never dreamed of” whatever arguments.

      • I have no idea. As was pointed out (obviously), revolvers were around before Colt’s, but they were not mass-produced and they were slow to use. In the example above, you had more than one shot available but it took time to make the thing work. They were beautiful, handmade, and expensive. The idea of interchangeable cylinders that could be slid into battery and fired once your first six had been discharged was a long time coming. And when it arrived – genius, that stood on the shoulders of genius.

  10. We have pick-ups, 4 Wheelers, a tractor, and the neighbors have plenty of heavy equipment. But I’m thinking WE NEED A TANK!

    Months of LL’s tank pictures expounded on by those who “seriously know their armaments” may have something to do with it, the current insane state of affairs may have pushed me over the edge in my decision making.

    Maybe LL is subliminally getting us flyover deplorable’s well outfitted.

    Any suggestions for the layman? (Pretty sure there’s a basics operation crash course on YouTube I could watch.)

      • Was thinking it could do double duty instead of renting a skid steer, need to excavate a spot for a foundation…BLAM!, nice hole and the rubble is pre-pulverized.

        This could start a trend.

      • Oh, and when away, just park it at the end of the driveway as a “gate” blocking the entry, no one would dare trespass, not even the County Health Director or FBI or CNN checking on our vax status.

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