Been reading a ton of historical stuff recently — I’m currently reading a book on pirates throughout history, I recently finished books about medieval battles, the kings and queens of Britain and, most recently, a look at Colt revolvers from the start of Samuel Colt’s first company up until the Peacemaker. A good bit of my reading material over the last few weeks has been in that latter category, firearms. Maybe some of it is driven by the Supreme Court’s ruling overturning DC’s gun laws being in the news for a bit, but I’ve always had a thing for machines, both simple and complex, benign and dangerous alike. I’ve always been a collector of various things, so surely that has a lot to do with it, too.
I’ve been looking at the engineering aspects of some antique guns (“antique” is loosely defined here as anything WWII and back, though that differs from the more accepted definition, which is more like pre-smokeless metal cartridge weapons), and some of the complex ones have caught my eye — Lugers, some cartridge conversions of old percussion revolvers, John Browning’s Model 1911 design and others. I imagine I’ll be picking up an example or two as time and/or money permit. Maybe I’ll do a review or two if that happens. 😉
More later.