General GunTuber thread

[Corn Flakes]

That is what the ears are for but the way the design is now any catastrophic failure leads to the end cap and pieces of the lower (namely the ears) shooting straight back into the shooters face. Your U-shape on the lower is sort of what I'm thinking. Having the two ears be connected in the middle by a bock of steel that the end cap sits flush with (kind of like a break action). I do still think that the ears do need to be beefed up though, just to lessen the chance of them shearing off.

Stiffening the two halves on the lower can also be achieved by this welded block which is important because in the second test the ears didn't shear off but two halves of the lower did bend allowing the cap to go straight back.

This wouldn't change the primarily function of the ears but would make them and the lower better able to deal with this type of failure.

My question is always what is the receiver going to do if the cap decides it wants to go somewhere really, really quick. Because I have a feeling that even with that beefed-up breech-locking block we're thinking about, all that's going to happen is the receiver is going to break off at the joint under the barrel and fly backwards as a whole unit.

You can see it on the video itself, the receiver splits in half and breaks off, falling to the ground, while the cap... I think that's what breaks that piece of cinderblock on the top right of the wall. I don't know if it just went in that direction by itself, or if it bounced off something (possibly even the ears). If the receiver were solid enough to retain "control" of the cap as it flies backwards, the worst case scenario would be whole assembly striking/embedding itself into the shooter. Gruesome.

 

[Fools Idol]

My question is always what is the receiver going to do if the cap decides it wants to go somewhere really, really quick. Because I have a feeling that even with that beefed-up breech-locking block we're thinking about, all that's going to happen is the receiver is going to break off at the joint under the barrel and fly backwards as a whole unit.

You can see it on the video itself, the receiver splits in half and breaks off, falling to the ground, while the cap... I think that's what breaks that piece of cinderblock on the top right of the wall. I don't know if it just went in that direction by itself, or if it bounced off something (possibly even the ears). If the receiver were solid enough to retain "control" of the cap as it flies backwards, the worst case scenario would be whole assembly striking/embedding itself into the shooter. Gruesome.

I would imagine that we would see more forward movement of the upper. It sounds strange but getting hit by the whole lower might be preferable to being hit by the cap. The most dangerous part of the design is the ears shearing off as they basically turn into shrapnel.

 

[Corn Flakes]

I would imagine that we would see more forward movement of the upper. It sounds strange but getting hit by the whole lower might be preferable to being hit by the cap. The most dangerous part of the design is the ears shearing off as they basically turn into shrapnel.

Good point.

Either way, as much fun as it is to think of these things I have a feeling Scott's little near-death experience will be relegated to "freak accident" and not result in any sort of redesign to the gun. Still, Scott's later testing did show it handled overpressure rounds well enough (I think even a bolt action would have complained about the energy required to emboss the headstamp onto the breech), so I do believe the design is safe. I wouldn't get one myself, but that's more because I while I think firing .50 BMG, is fun, owning a gun in that caliber feels... kinda dumb.

 

[Lupo Akane]

Maybe I'm just a baby or what not but the whole idea of the RN50 just unsettling and yes I know any gun could go boom if not handled right or the ammo but that thing just looks like it's going to kill ya at some point.

 

[Sleazy Car Salesman]

I love this goddamn thread, we shitpost and make playground insults at people one moment and then have a bunch of actual discussions about mechanical engineering, literature, and business, as well as politics without totally sperging. Russel is in the thread and unlike most other Persons of Interest he's actually a decent guy and gets along with our retarded asses pretty well. And then when we're done having actual nice conversations we go back to calling youtubers stupid fuckheads again without missing a beat.

 

[WhoBusTank69]

I just don't feel comfortable with the crappy two-piece receiver. While in the intentional kaboom it separates safely without turning itself into shrapnel that's obviously not consistent. The "wings" are for headspace, sure, but I agree they're very much possible projectiles in the worst case scenario.

You can see it on the video itself, the receiver splits in half and breaks off, falling to the ground, while the cap... I think that's what breaks that piece of cinderblock on the top right of the wall. I don't know if it just went in that direction by itself, or if it bounced off something (possibly even the ears). If the receiver were solid enough to retain "control" of the cap as it flies backwards, the worst case scenario would be whole assembly striking/embedding itself into the shooter. Gruesome.

Object 1 is probably the cap, deflected by dumping energy into and splitting the receiver in half before slamming into the brick.
Object 2 I first thought was the cap, that was the piece that punched through the plexiglass to the side. No clue what it could have been but it's semi-circular.
I'm beginning to doubt my initial assessment because of your observation but with all this considered the entire thing turns into a frag grenade with nothing to even begin to contain it; while it's incredibly resilient, it's got nothing else in case of emergency and KB definitely showed with his first incident that it may be needed.

 

[Sleazy Car Salesman]

I just don't feel comfortable with the crappy two-piece receiver. While in the intentional kaboom it separates safely without turning itself into shrapnel that's obviously not consistent. The "wings" are for headspace, sure, but I agree they're very much possible projectiles in the worst case scenario.


View attachment 2998620
Object 1 is probably the cap, deflected by dumping energy into and splitting the receiver in half before slamming into the brick.
Object 2 I first thought was the cap, that was the piece that punched through the plexiglass to the side. No clue what it could have been but it's semi-circular.
I'm beginning to doubt my initial assessment because of your observation but with all this considered the entire thing turns into a frag grenade with nothing to even begin to contain it; while it's incredibly resilient, it's got nothing else in case of emergency and KB definitely showed with his first incident that it may be needed.

Where I come from we'd call something that looked like that a pipebomb.

 

[WhoBusTank69]

Where I come from we'd call something that looked like that a pipebomb.

Considering it's named after Royal Nonesuch, that's very accurate.

 

[Corn Flakes]

I just don't feel comfortable with the crappy two-piece receiver. While in the intentional kaboom it separates safely without turning itself into shrapnel that's obviously not consistent. The "wings" are for headspace, sure, but I agree they're very much possible projectiles in the worst case scenario.


View attachment 2998620
Object 1 is probably the cap, deflected by dumping energy into and splitting the receiver in half before slamming into the brick.
Object 2 I first thought was the cap, that was the piece that punched through the plexiglass to the side. No clue what it could have been but it's semi-circular.
I'm beginning to doubt my initial assessment because of your observation but with all this considered the entire thing turns into a frag grenade with nothing to even begin to contain it; while it's incredibly resilient, it's got nothing else in case of emergency and KB definitely showed with his first incident that it may be needed.

This is why I said I want to see tests done with that ridiculously overpressure round in a bolt-action and in a a semi-auto. I'm not denying that the RN-50 is unsafe under these loads. It clearly is. We know that empirically: even if the ears shearing off were a freak accident, it did happen in the real world and we have documentation to prove it. But this whole situation makes me very curious to see how more common actions handle overloads of that caliber.

I've seen plenty of popped guns on the internet, even a couple guns on the range that tried to munch on rounds a little too spicy for their actions (or a squib). But nothing as extreme as what happened to Scott, either in terms of relative or absolute overpressure. So I'd like to see more. Unfortunately, that's never going to happen because those guns are very expensive (one of the reasons why I think owning one is pretty daft). Scott only did this because Serbu sent him a new gun. Barrett Firearms Manufacturing sure as shit aren't sending him a M82 and telling him to go for it and record a whole episode on how he turned their shiny new gun into shrapnel.

 

[HumptiDouji]

Now the real question is where did those counterfeit rounds come from and who has been making them? KB certainly has enough contacts he might be able to get to the bottom of it or find a lead.

We'll never ever know.
As gone over before, .50 SLAPs are collectible and even genuine ones get passed around as loose singles all over the place, and who knows how well that was stored. What's to say that the group of 20 you buy at some gun show hasn't had its cartridges sourced individually in part or in full at some point, and how each of those were stored? That's before you even get into potential counterfeits, where someone just throws something together to just look right, assuming nobody would shoot these (because most people don't).
Most of the cartridges from that batch exhibited pants-shitting overpressure signs, a few of them behaved completely normally, and one of them had even grenaded a rifle, I think there's no question that these cartridges have not been together as one group throughout the decades, they were not consistent.

People have blown up nice rifles shooting SLAPs in the past, so it's not unprecedented. If there's grenades counterfeits going around, which I think is entirely plausible, whoever actually made them could very well have been dead for 20 years at this point.

The fact that the 190,000 PSI he had made failed in the same exact manner tends make me lean towards the hot round theory.

Did it even? The ears deformed rather than shearing off that time, so I figure the pressure of the accident round may have been even more.

Also, the two 'safety' ears really need to be re-thought. If they had more material connecting them to the lower, say not making the cut on the lower so that the ears start from the rear and end at the breach.

Or people can just not shoot an (expensive) type of .50BMG of generally unclear history and known for catastrophically destroying rifles. You don't see people clamoring for better safety in 9mm Parabellum pistols because there's people out there making 9mm Major loads.

It sounds strange but getting hit by the whole lower might be preferable to being hit by the cap.

I don't think that's strange, you'd already be supporting the lower with your shoulder and hand, and if it remained in one piece you're looking at way more mass and way more surface area. Not that it wouldn't still lead to injury.

The most dangerous part of the design is the ears shearing off as they basically turn into shrapnel.

Which Scott couldn't even properly replicate having made a bullshit round with three times the normal operating pressure. The safety margins may be thinner compared to most .50s, but if you buy normal commercial ammo, or if you're a handloader who isn't special needs, the rifle won't endure even close to even a 50% increase in pressure, not to talk about the +300% of the accident.

This entire thing is someone learning the very hard way to not shoot ammo of unclear origin.

 

[Iceland Heavy]

Or people can just not shoot an (expensive) type of .50BMG of generally unclear history and known for catastrophically destroying rifles. You don't see people clamoring for better safety in 9mm Parabellum pistols because there's people out there making 9mm Major loads.

Tbf, isn't this exactly what happened with Beretta 92s getting redesigned because of a few anecdotal examples of slides launching back into SEALs' faces?

 

[Corn Flakes]

This entire thing is someone learning the very hard way to not shoot ammo of unclear origin.

That's the real story here, yeah. Never fire ammo of questionable provenance.

Even when you know the provenance, you have to know if it was stored properly. I've got a full box of 7.62x39 here that I found in my father's garage years back that I'm never going to use because I know it was stored in a damp place with lots of temperature fluctuations through the years. Not that I'd use that stuff in the first place. Those are some really rough-looking Wolf rounds, probably some of the first to be imported here.

Tbf, isn't this exactly what happened with Beretta 92s getting redesigned because of a few anecdotal examples of slides launching back into SEALs' faces?

Yes, but that was the slide flying off with normal, commercial or milspec loads. Not a specialized, possibly counterfeit, and very likely degraded high-pressure ammo that's completely out of spec. The former definitely requires a redesign, the latter requires the shooter to have enough common sense to not load it.

 

[likeacrackado]

Part 2 of Garand Thumbs PSAK74 saga

Oh wow PSA is so good they fixed a gun for a massive influencer. A gun that only failed because of their dogshit QC and corner cutting.

Side note: If I see another YouTube comment defending PSA by saying "their mission is to get guns into the hands of everyday Americans" I'm going to get MATI.

 

[White Devil]

Side note: If I see another YouTube comment defending PSA by saying "their mission is to get guns into the hands of everyday Americans" I'm going to get MATI.

That's been their marketing BS for so long now. "A gun in every American's hand, no matter how likely it is to blow said hand off."

 

[Archie_Kimkicker]

Part 2 of Garand Thumbs PSAK74 saga

Oh wow PSA is so good they fixed a gun for a massive influencer. A gun that only failed because of their dogshit QC and corner cutting.

Side note: If I see another YouTube comment defending PSA by saying "their mission is to get guns into the hands of everyday Americans" I'm going to get MATI.

I do get somewhat annoyed by GT's false modesty, his insinuation that PSA would just ignore a "nobody" like him. Motherfucker, you are a textbook gunfluencer with millions of memelords who tune in each week to look at guns and setups they hope will make them cool, which would seem to be a sizable chunk of PSA's market of late.

 

[likeacrackado]

I do get somewhat annoyed by GT's false modesty, his insinuation that PSA would just ignore a "nobody" like him. Motherfucker, you are a textbook gunfluencer with millions of memelords who tune in each week to look at guns and setups they hope will make them cool, which would seem to be a sizable chunk of PSA's market of late.

I've watched a lot of his videos since the original psak74 video. I dont think theres a single one where he runs interference for the company as much as this. Acting like PSA didn't have to do anything and that they "didn't owe me anything" along with complaining about people trashing PSA, telling the community to be better(aka not call out repeated mistakes when we see them).

It's a weird feigning of ignorance for him to pretend that the average person would get the level of service from PSA that he has and that the failure in the first video wouldn't cause people to think twice about buying one.

 

[UVB-76]

Yes, but that was the slide flying off with normal, commercial or milspec loads. Not a specialized, possibly counterfeit, and very likely degraded high-pressure ammo that's completely out of spec. The former definitely requires a redesign, the latter requires the shooter to have enough common sense to not load it.

Still, the 92FS introduced the enlarged hammer pin which captures the rear of the slide in case it does break.
From an engineering standpoint, having a failsafe is preferable. If I was putting out a product I would be ashamed to have to come out and explain that I got scammed by my steel supplier or I had to fire Bubba because he didn't heat treat the parts correctly and now someone is disfigured as a result. Even if my customers are flat out retarded, get hurt due to using Uncle Joe's Pissin' Hot Gun Show Reloads and I trust half the internet is going to understand that it was their damned fault - the other half is going to think my guns are the problem.
To make a living one has to sell to retards too.

 

[Corn Flakes]

Still, the 92FS introduced the enlarged hammer pin which captures the rear of the slide in case it does break.
From an engineering standpoint, having a failsafe is preferable. If I was putting out a product I would be ashamed to have to come out and explain that I got scammed by my steel supplier or I had to fire Bubba because he didn't heat treat the parts correctly and now someone is disfigured as a result. Even if my customers are flat out retarded, get hurt due to using Uncle Joe's Pissin' Hot Gun Show Reloads and I trust half the internet is going to understand that it was their damned fault - the other half is going to think my guns are the problem.
To make a living one has to sell to retards too.

There is such a thing as a limit to the liability a company may have for these things. Your argument is like telling Ford to redesign the F-250 to be "safer" because some moron crashed theirs going at 120mph in the rain and then died. There is such a thing as operator error, and with something that operates on something provided by the user (read: ammunition), if the user is too far beyond spec it's on them.

Products have to be used within the manufacturers' recommended parameters, and book-ending said parameters are safety margins. Which are pretty large for guns to begin with. The RN-50 is chambered for .50 BMG, which has a maximum pressure spec of ~60,000 psi. Accounting for manufacturing variance, anything hotter than 10% of that maximum pressure spec stops being .50 BMG and becomes something else no matter what's stamped on the case or printed on the box. It's either a degraded round, a counterfeit one, or an unsafe handload. But you can't say you just "loaded a .50 BMG and the gun blew up". And Scott, who would have a great veiled interest in drumming this up as the RN-50 being inherently unsafe if he wanted to sue Mark Serbu's pants off, seems to understand that as well as he tried to reproduce what went wrong.

Meanwhile, everybody likes talking about how the AR-15 is inherently safe, but even that action will turn into a grenade if you load it with 150,000 psi 5.56 because you're operating it far beyond the tolerances of the gun and the cartridge. At some point you just have to ignore the retards on the internet. I'm sure more than a few morons out there have detonated their Mini-14s and been injured loading them with Uncle Joe's Pissin' Hot Gun Show Reloads, but we don't hear about it because they weren't "influencers" recording shit for youtube at the time.

 

[UVB-76]

There is such a thing as a limit to the liability a company may have for these things. Your argument is like telling Ford to redesign the F-250 to be "safer" because some moron crashed theirs going at 120mph in the rain and then died. There is such a thing as operator error, and with something that operates on something provided by the user (read: ammunition), if the user is too far beyond spec it's on them.

A car going 120 mph and crashing is going to look like it was driven at 120mph. A gun that blows up and ends up seriously injuring a guy gets pictures taken of it and ends up on the internet, half will say it was a squib/reload and the other half will say the gun is a piece of shit.
I just think failure analysis is neat.

 

[Mikoyan]

A car going 120 mph and crashing is going to look like it was driven at 120mph. A gun that blows up and ends up seriously injuring a guy gets pictures taken of it and ends up on the internet, half will say it was a squib/reload and the other half will say the gun is a piece of shit.
I just think failure analysis is neat.

Yeah. You could load a stick of dynamite in a Mauser and people would say "Yeah those things are notoriously weak".