Whipped Cream Difficulties

More random gun crankery.

I’ve written before about a couple of my silly gun ideas. I came up with another one a couple of days ago, and thought it’d be interesting to maintain a place to document them. Just in case I win the lottery or something. There’s no real point, or practical purpose, for most of these: they’re more “I think it would be amusing to have…”

• A Scout rifle build on the Browning X-Bolt Micro Composite platform. This is actually an idea that I think is both practical and useful: claimed weight for the X-Bolt is 6.3 pounds, so I’d estimate 7.4 pounds with a scope and sling. That comes in under maximum weight and the length is right. The only things I think are needed are a third sling swivel, and some way of mounting a long eye relief scope forward on the rifle.
• A 4″ revolver chambered in .17 HMR, built by Smith and Wesson on the Model 51 frame. Basically, a .17 HMR Kit Gun. (Of course it would have adjustable sights.)
• A N-frame or X-frame Smith chambered in .221 Remington Fireball.
• An old XP-100…rechambered in .224 Valkyrie. I’m not a gunsmith, but I’ve seen at least one XP-100 rechambered in .223, so this seems feasible. The .224 bullet is listed as 0.2245 inches in Wikipedia (I know, I know), while the .221 Fireball is listed as .224. .224 case length is 1.6 inches, versus 1.4 for the .221. SAAMI pressue is 55,000 psi for .224 vs. 52,000 psi for .221. The only problem I see is the base diameter: .221 is .376 inches, while .224 is .4207. On the other hand, instead of .221 Fireball, maybe you could go with 7mm BR: you’d have to change or sleeve the barrel, but the 7mm BR has a .473 inch base diameter. So maybe you could close up the 7mm bolt a little, instead of trying to machine out the .221 bolt? (I wonder if a 7mm bolt would physically fit into a .221 XP-100. Obviously, it’s not something that would fire without work, but do the parts physically interchange? Is it basically just the same bolt mechanism?)

I’m open to hearing other people’s ideas, if you care to leave a comment. I’m also open to comments from people who know more about gunsmithing than I do, especially comments along the lines of “You can’t do that, and here’s why…”

This entry was posted on Friday, December 13th, 2019 at 11:42 am and is filed under Guns. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.