Wanna see an M4 catch fire
NYT continues talking about military arms. With cool torture test videos.
8 Responses to “Wanna see an M4 catch fire”
Remember, I do this to entertain me, not you.
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January 15th, 2010 at 11:00 am
Ever seen the plastic Crapco handguards melt off an AK being bump-fired? Pretty cool.
January 15th, 2010 at 11:08 am
there’s that video of the guy with the AK MG where the wood catches fire.
January 15th, 2010 at 11:26 am
It appears that the article is about as factual as the NYT can get on something like a gun. Still, can’t they find someone with some real world experience to proof the article before it goes to print. This statement “The rifle is undergoing a test similar to running an automobile engine at, say, 50,000 or more r.p.m.s.” is completely wrong. Even F1 motors using compressed gas instead of springs to operate the valves don’t turn over 18,000 rpm or so. Then the heat created by the burning powder is absolutely necessary not an unwanted by-product. A couple of other errors and I begin to wonder about the whole article even when they’ve got video to show their point.
January 15th, 2010 at 3:23 pm
Alchemyst: But the point of the analogy, which is that it does not resemble real-world conditions is correct.
That heat is generated in normal firing is true – that you can fire it at normal (even “normal” firefight) rates and melt the barrel is something that they are quite correct to explicitly disavow.
That the author picked a bad number for engine RPM in his analogy doesn’t significantly detract from it – it just proves he’s not a car guy. As an analogy it doesn’t need the sort of fact-check that a factual claim would. Sure, no car runs at 50kRPM – but nobody actually fires 500+ rounds from an assault rifle in under 2 minutes, either.
January 15th, 2010 at 3:59 pm
Sigivald: As Dan Rather would say Yep, the point is correct. That doesn’t address my point that the analogy is wrong. I hesitate to use words such as impossible but at the current state of technology it’s damned close to impossible to rev an automobile engine to 50K rpm. But since they showed a video of firing 535 rounds in a minute and 51 seconds (or whatever the numbers were) it is fairly self evident that that could be done. The thrust of my post was that the NYT should do better when it comes to proofing their articles.
January 15th, 2010 at 5:50 pm
The entire article is suspect after the author claims the M4 is semi-auto and 3-round burst only. And while it does seem unlikely that a firefight would require a soldier to fire 500+ rounds in 2 minutes, some of the descriptions I’ve read of The Battle of Wanat make it sound like they could have come pretty close.
January 19th, 2010 at 12:08 am
The M4 is indeed safe-semi-burst, with a fixed carry handle. The M4A1 is safe-semi-auto, with the Piccatinny rail/removable carry handle.
January 19th, 2010 at 8:21 am
Damn cool videos! I have to say I’m substantially more impressed by the AR platform now.
Also, this was apparently an NYT blog post, not an article in the paper itself. I would be surprised if blogs went through much, if any, of an editing process.