Fun Stuff > MAKE
Gunsmithing (no politics)
Caspian Sea Monster:
I don't necessarily take umbrage at that, because I think we are looking at - and appreciating - different things, maybe.
[It worries me a little bit how much the following post reveals about my personality.]
I am a natural-born and obsessive tinkerer. If something has a large number of moving parts, I'm going to want to take it apart and put it back together again and figure out how every bit of it works. I'm good at working on cars (two years of drivetrain maintenance school, hello) but have very little actual interest in them - they are everywhere and kind of struck me as passé as a kid. I tend to be drawn more to working on isolated engines outside the context of cars. Airplanes and helicopters are much more my style, I'm a huge aviation fanatic, but as a hobby it is prohibitively expensive. Clocks and watches are fun, but the parts are very tiny and difficult to manipulate and are not particularly robust. Guns have near the complexity of time pieces without the fragility and with the added benefit of dangerous amounts of heat, noise, and pressure (did I mention I also like jet engines?) Yeah, they're weapons - I'm very conscious of this fact, I know all about using them as weapons and it's something I take into consideration with regards to owning them, but my actual interest in firearms as a hobby? Unadulterated geekery. When I look at guns, this is what I see:
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That Hartman and Weiss rifle Garand posted has a certain level of sex appeal, yeah, but honestly the engraving and gold leaf and fancy wood grain and case-hardening coloration just aren't my bag of tea. I'm interested in the engineering and mechanical aspects of gun design. In that vein, yeah, the AR-15 - what you get when you ask a team of Cold War aerospace engineers to design an infantry rifle, very innovative in terms of weight reduction and balance correction - is right up my alley.
I may or may not have also spent the last week obsessing over how much better Ruger double-action revolvers are than Smith & Wesson's product line. Diehard S&W fanatics sneer at Ruger because they just don't have the same pedigree; S&W has been making almost the exact same hand-ejector design, with minor improvements, for 118 years. Sturm, Ruger & Co. has been in business since 1949 and has only been making hand-ejectors since 1972 - only about a third of the time that S&W has. Let the S&W snobs sneer all the want. Ruger came to the drawing board with none of the stubborn prejudices of the old gunmakers and designed their revolvers from the ground up, ultimately coming up with what is just plainly speaking a better design. The attitude about maintenance presented by S&W is more or less along the lines of, "Don't you dare try to perform your own internal maintenance you ham-fisted prole. Be a good kid, just clean the cylinder while it is still installed in the gun and drip some oil down the hammer opening and pawl slot. We're not going to tell you how to take the side plate off because honestly you'll just screw up the insides if you do, and if you try we will all laugh at how stupid you look with screwdriver pry marks on the side of your gun. In the inconceivable event something actually needs replacement or modification, take it to a trained gunsmith." Then Ruger comes along and designs a revolver that comes apart for cleaning and maintenance by the end-user not unlike a military rifle. In 1979 they design the Ruger Redhawk's new cylinder locking mechanism, an order of magnitude stronger and more wear resistant than S&W's contemporary two-point design (S&W did come out with an improved locking system - the "Triple Lock" - in 1908 that is on par with the Redhawk design, but they only produced it for four years before going back to the original.) Smith & Wesson, it's been fun, but I'm breaking up with you.
Unadulterated geekery.
GarandMarine:
I love it when you talk technical like that.
I find I strongly appreciate both aesthetics and the sheer mechanical sexiness of a firearm equally important. I appreciate the AR's mechanical design, I personally find is aesthetically appealing in general as well. Super purdyified guns, but I would rather have a rugged design, with a very fuctional system behind it. Pretty can then be added, like the gilt on a sword.
That's why the M1 is a beautiful weapon to me, the design is very well done, and the rifle itelf is very visually appealing especially if proper maintenance is taken care of on the stock.
Caspian Sea Monster:
Emoroffle made sure to tell me in not so few words how stupid she thinks the classic AR carry handle looks.
GarandMarine:
I love the classic AR carry handle, it's useless for carrying the weapon in any meaningful way, but it's match grade sights are perfectly integrated into a stable, secure platform that way, and it lines up nicely with eye level. Eventually I am going to put together an M16A2 pattern AR just because the 20" barrel, fixed stock, and sights on the classic carry handle just /work/ for me. That bad boy lets me smack head sized targets with a good group at 500m using military green tip rounds. That's pretty goddamn awesome. I actively dislike the M16A4 in comparison because I have to rely on the ACOG rifle scope. While Trijicon makes an excellent product I found I didn't group or shoot nearly as tighly and accurately when I was using irons.
Grognard:
--- Quote from: GarandMarine on 23 Oct 2013, 12:28 ---I love it when you talk technical like that.
--- End quote ---
:-D Ditto :-D but then I'm a Sturm & Ruger fanboy.
I actually prefer THIS: (Ruger Ranch Rifle in all its beauty)
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over THIS: (Standard M14 with gorgeous stock)
(click to show/hide)
but then, I'd prefer either over a M-16/AR-15 clone.
In reality, it has less to do with the mechanics than the aesthetic of wood and steel.
*editted to conform with forum rules*
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