doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Pressure and steel

I'm a 32 year veteran of law enforcement. The recent postings by Ballistix on his failure reminded me of classes I attended a long time ago.

As a class project, we shot types of zip guns made to fire shotgun shells. One was made of iron pipes (can't remember the diameter) but it was a "slam fire" gun. It had been shot hundreds of times when I shot it. It was held in both hands and slammed. The point was to illustrate the falacy of guncontrol, or to show what could be done with a little ingenuity. In the Phillipines in WW II, they used gas pipes to make these guns.

The other IIRC was a 20 ga. fired with PVC as a barrel and chamber. These, I think, were made on site and were perhaps fired 30 or 40 times, but then discarded.

Point is either shotgun shells aren't over-pressured, or there has to be a catasthropic failure somewhere to cause a barrel to explode. These zippers were clean in the bore, but I have come to suspect bore obstruction as a main cause for failure.

I hope so. My Parker is probably unsafe to shoot (pitting) but I shot it 50 times already, and so far it's OK. God willing, I'll continue to shoot it.

Wow Gene. I bet that was interesting with the zip guns. Were you shooting light loads or something heavy like buck shot? You mentioned they made stuff like the Zip guns in the Philippines. Are you referring to the Japanese? I bet the Vietnamese made nasty stuff like that too out of nothing but junk too. War is awful. In terms of your Parker, I remember you sent it to have it put on face by a gunsmith. Did he check the bores for adequate wall thickness? If not you might want to consider that. After seeing what happened to our friend in the UK I don't think one can be too careful with these old guns. Take care, Buzz

I think this is a good point. I really didn't see Ballistix's problem as a catastrophic failure. Serious yes, but I believe that was a gradual failure that would have reared it's head before it became catastrophic.

No, I wouldn't want to take over and run his gun through a few rounds of skeet just to see, but that barrel certainly did not explode like it had an obstruction in it.

Apparently, the bulge in that Clarke 20 bore didn't show up until after the split formed, so it's no wonder it passed proof. Just a snap shot in time, nothing more nothing less.

Just thoughts.

No, the Philipine fighters made them. In Viet Nam, the VC and NVA were well supplied by Russia and China.

I don't remember what kind of shells we used through these self-made firearms, but I suspect cheap birdshot.

I do not reccommend doing this at home. I may be wrong about the PVC guns. It's been 30 years ago.

Have you tried Russian made Saiga 12ga with long barrel? Shockingly it handles better then most Parker Bros. guns of same gauge.

When I was a kid in the 6th grade I made a 12 gauge shotgun out of cast iron plumbing pipe with a piece of pine 1x4 I carved into a stock. I think the reason I'm alive today is because the barrel was quite a bit bigger then the shell, however it had a lip that the base of the shell was able to seat against. When the gun was fired the shell casing would burst inside the barrel and I imagine there was a ton of blowby past the fiber wads. I was also shooting target loads. Even though I tried to hide it, the shotgun finally "disappeared" and that Christmas there was a brand new shotgun waiting for me under the tree.
Steve

Early on, the VC had some pretty crude weapons. But things got upgraded a lot as a result of more "assistance" from the North.

In WWII, the OSS dropped some pretty crude pistols to resistance groups. The idea was fire it once, kill enemy soldier, take his weapon.

Those were called Liberator pistols. All stamped mfr. Saw a few over the years at the Great Western gun show in L.A.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FP-45_Liberator

I have seen one at recent show and the price almost made me faint. I realize most were destroyed but clunker is still a clunker.

The point is, they were dropped with 2 rounds and a sheet of paper with cartoon instructions: shoot enemy soldier, take his weapon and use it. They only had to work safely once.

They are serious collector items because they were disposable and were supposed to have been destroyed.