I finally fired a .50 cal!
And it had NO recoil!
.50 caliber dart gun, that is. This is what wildlife biologists use when they need to put the animal to sleep for a while so they can do stuff to it. Don't ask me what stuff....there's lots of stuff you can do to a sleepy animal, like measure the size of its teeth, for example.
Wish I had a pic for you guys; it was pretty cool. The guy I was with (and I think he knows) said it was a Remington 580 stock and action (single-shot .22LR). The barrel had been cut down to about six inches, and then tapped at the cut end to take what appeared to be a bolt with threads on both sides of the head. For reasons that weren't readily apparent, a barrel-like tube was added AFTER the bolt went into the original barrel. This projected a couple inches past the end of the stock and was stopped with yet another bolt.
The original barrel was drilled and a gas-tube added to feed the dart-barrel, which was mounted above the original barrel and had an action of it's own. There was a bleeder hole in the dart barrel right above the gas tube, and a disk on top of that with four settings for how much gas to bleed. These ranged from none to lots.
The dart barrel was rifled. The rifle was scoped with a 4X scope.
To operate the thing, you put .22 blanks into the original rifle action and put your dart with sleepy-juice into the dart-barrel, and it was ready to fire. The blanks that were stored with this rifle were VERY OLD (30 yrs?) .22 power-tool actuators in strength levels of 1, 2, and 3 (I don't really know what this means, but without earplugs, #1 was rather quiet, #3 made quite a pop and the boxes they were in suggested that you could get up to a #12.
There was one proper dart with the rifle. Picture a miniature syringe with a plunger that doesn't move. The thing that functions as a 'plunger' in this device is in the form of a cylinder of metal within the dart that slams forward at the moment of impact, injecting the juice into the animal. The one we saw appeared still to have some dried meat stuck in the end of the needle (this dart-gun had obviously been stored for many years when we discovered it).
There were also a number of training darts (things of the right shape that had no chamber for anesthetics). We shot them at boxes at about 30 feet. It appeared to put darts in about the same place every time, but with three strengths of cartridge and four settings on the gas bleeder, we didn't do a rigorous analysis of its accuracy. It had a pretty nice trigger. I couldn't see any rifling marks on the training darts we fired and recovered.
Here's a very small picture of a product the Pneu-dart company is marketing today. The one I shot had no magazine (as I said, it was a single shot), but the basic design looks the same.
.50 caliber dart gun, that is. This is what wildlife biologists use when they need to put the animal to sleep for a while so they can do stuff to it. Don't ask me what stuff....there's lots of stuff you can do to a sleepy animal, like measure the size of its teeth, for example.
Wish I had a pic for you guys; it was pretty cool. The guy I was with (and I think he knows) said it was a Remington 580 stock and action (single-shot .22LR). The barrel had been cut down to about six inches, and then tapped at the cut end to take what appeared to be a bolt with threads on both sides of the head. For reasons that weren't readily apparent, a barrel-like tube was added AFTER the bolt went into the original barrel. This projected a couple inches past the end of the stock and was stopped with yet another bolt.
The original barrel was drilled and a gas-tube added to feed the dart-barrel, which was mounted above the original barrel and had an action of it's own. There was a bleeder hole in the dart barrel right above the gas tube, and a disk on top of that with four settings for how much gas to bleed. These ranged from none to lots.
The dart barrel was rifled. The rifle was scoped with a 4X scope.
To operate the thing, you put .22 blanks into the original rifle action and put your dart with sleepy-juice into the dart-barrel, and it was ready to fire. The blanks that were stored with this rifle were VERY OLD (30 yrs?) .22 power-tool actuators in strength levels of 1, 2, and 3 (I don't really know what this means, but without earplugs, #1 was rather quiet, #3 made quite a pop and the boxes they were in suggested that you could get up to a #12.
There was one proper dart with the rifle. Picture a miniature syringe with a plunger that doesn't move. The thing that functions as a 'plunger' in this device is in the form of a cylinder of metal within the dart that slams forward at the moment of impact, injecting the juice into the animal. The one we saw appeared still to have some dried meat stuck in the end of the needle (this dart-gun had obviously been stored for many years when we discovered it).
There were also a number of training darts (things of the right shape that had no chamber for anesthetics). We shot them at boxes at about 30 feet. It appeared to put darts in about the same place every time, but with three strengths of cartridge and four settings on the gas bleeder, we didn't do a rigorous analysis of its accuracy. It had a pretty nice trigger. I couldn't see any rifling marks on the training darts we fired and recovered.
Here's a very small picture of a product the Pneu-dart company is marketing today. The one I shot had no magazine (as I said, it was a single shot), but the basic design looks the same.
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Oh man! .50 cal dart gun? That's false advermatising! I was ready to read all about the bone jarring recoil, the liquifying target, the smoke, the ringing in the ears, the GRANDEUR!
Now I need a cold shower.0 -
quote:Originally posted by Ba Sardo
Oh man! .50 cal dart gun? That's false advermatising! I was ready to read all about the bone jarring recoil, the liquifying target, the smoke, the ringing in the ears, the GRANDEUR!
Now I need a cold shower.
uhhh....sorry.0 -
I'll get over it... some day. [:D] 0
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