Anniversary of an amazingly enduring design

Wes sez "Of course that configuration isn't a tack driver but then the M1911 was designed for close in use. Longer distances, use a rife."

Good point, Wes. But an accurized 1911 or one of the new clones will "shoot" with a lot more accuactely than the average person can hold it.

Bob Swinney

Wes

Don,

Clue us in. I'm not familiar with the name "PO8".

JB had a gift! I have a few of his designs and I appreciate them. I have a P08 that is truely a work of art but hasn't the practicality, durability or ease of mfg. of the 1911. The bad side is that many of my handguns, especially the P08 are now too valuable as "collector" pieces that I'm afraid to use them. The last appraisal I had on the P08 was over $4k, I wish I had one to shoot!

designed for close

with a lot more

But you just can't drop it in the mud no more. ;)

Wes

No, Wes, it's in our past.

(and there's more where that came from)

Remember they had IBM and DEC computers for some of it. Slide rule was the fast track but reams of numbers can be generated overnight to be used the next day.

Mart> cavelamb wrote:

"Robert Swinney" wrote in news:HNKdne5Yf-ThezLWnZ2dnUVZ snipped-for-privacy@giganews.com:

The same is true with an "issue" M1911A1.

The "catch" is that a competition-quality piece won't function well when half full of dust, mud, and/or crud while a true combat weapon will.

This is true of any repeating weapon regardless of action type. [Even the "centrifugal" types sometimes discussed on this NG. ]

"Robert Swinney" wrote in news:bcWdnTC27qkQejLWnZ2dnUVZ snipped-for-privacy@giganews.com:

AKA "Luger" in honor of Georg Luger who designed the piece.

Mr. Luger borrowed heavily from the Borchardt design.

I assume that you are changing the recoil spring when you change ammunition :-)

But more seriously, when I was shooting in matches I don't remember that I was ever conscious of the gun "kicking". What was noticeable when going from say, my center-fire gun to the .45, or from a .45 match to a national trophy (hard-ball) match was the amount of time it took to get back on target.

Apparently that wasn't just my perception as in general discussion with other teams the usual excuse as to why someone didn't "leg" that day was that the hard-ball took too much time to get back on target.

However, a member of the team brought his brand new S&W 44 magnum out the range one day to show the boys. "Want to shoot it?" he says, and I thought I did. He graciously loaded the gun and handed it to me. The first shot seemed to have no more recoil then .45 wad-cutter loads. Ha! Thinks I, all the B.S. about the .44 mag must be just new shooters. The I fired the next chamber, Who! Ha! The damned gun jumped so far I though it was going over my shoulder.

Of course, what he had done was load a light .44 special load in the first chamber and an Elmer Keith load in the second. But he did convince me that the .44 magnum was powerful gun :-)

John B. Slocomb

That capability was available if needed. There were Frieden calculators, Kurta calculators, and FORTRAN became commercially available in 1957.

Very accurate and pleasant to shoot, but somewhat prone to malfunction. I don't own one. I don't own anything too precious to shoot.

I beg to argue, Don.

Even through the late 1960s, the term "computer" referred to a woman who operated an "adding machine". Even at NASA.

And - even I had a handy dandy slide rule. Mine is a Decilon

8 inch. I still have it and can still do (simple!) manipulations on it.

But FORTRAN, while in the universities before late 60s, was not widely used until much later. NASA was mainly doing "machine" (not even Assembly!).

Heck, I know a guy who almost invented time sharing Visicalc - but his boss though real computer time was to valuable for any such silliness!

At least that's the way I remember it...

I was really in to computers back then. After getting extremely good with fortran, I moved on to a new subject area at that time, industrial simulation with a program called GPSS. Just a bunch of fortran programs really. Anyway, I had this huge model of an auto assembly line and got computer time at 0300 to myself. On the way there, I dropped my monster box of keypunch cards in the wind and mud and lost them all. Took days to repunch all those cards. Shortly after, I decided "to heck with this graduate degree B.S." and got a real job.

Karl

Much of the design was done with the aid of real computers- analog. The moon landing simulator was 3 EAI 7800 consoles.

Kevin Gallimore

I have multiple springs for my .45; an Ace .22 conversion; a CO2 pellet conversion for shooting in the basement; and a .38 Super barrel from my short stint at shooting plates.

Yeah, that's about the way I've experienced it, too.

Fortunately for me, my first try with a .44 Mag was with a Desert Eagle. That monster really tames the recoil. Then I shot a S&W with .44 Mag hunting loads, and it was a different world. But it still wasn't painful or unmanageable. You just need a much looser idea of what it means to "manage." d8-)

On Mon, 29 Mar 2010 03:01:40 -0700, the infamous Gunner Asch scrawled the following:

And how long does it usually take to get that 2nd or 3rd round off? Chances are good that the first would stop most people or convince them to turn around. Those that wouldn't be stopped might not be stopped by the 1st .45 round, either, but why chance it? ;)

Do you have a better stat list than this one? The 63-91% stopping power variance on the 9mm seems awfully wide. I tend to think of stats being a somewhat fixed number, don't you?

-- Everything I did in my life that was worthwhile I caught hell for. -- Earl Warren

Of course you can! It just won't shoot afterwards.

cavelamb wrote in news:EL-dnTbhR-uE2S3WnZ2dnUVZ snipped-for-privacy@earthlink.com:

Your memory is faulty.

In '64 the tiny college in Kingsville, TX, was using an IBM 1620 (with an "astounding" 40K BITS of magnetic core storage) to not only keep the student records and the financial records of the institution but was providing the Celenese plant at Bishop, TX, with accounting services.

This was in addition to teaching students to program the machine in machine code, assembly language, Fortran, Fortran With Format, Fortran II, and FORGO (a compile-and-go variant of Fortran).

The "Business Schools" of the '66-'70 period often offered Fortran IV and COBOL programming "degrees" to their "students". Cobol, BTW, had already become the standard for business applications.

I signed on with the City of Houston as a beginning programmer in early '68 and envied the salaries of those at NASA in Clear Lake. (After all,

50% differential is significant.) While there was some assembler work being done (at both sites) the bulk of the activity was in COBOL with some FORTRAN activity remaining. (Most of the really cute code was already in production by then.)

I think the idea that a .45 is an elephant gun that will stop a subject with one shot and a 9mm is a pea shooter that couldn't stop a subject with a whole box of ammo is a bunch of nonsense just like Ford vs. Chevy vs. Dodge.

It's a big gentle pussycat with rubber grips.