Good guns that never made it? Great ideas before their time?

C

Correia

New member
I love learning about obscure guns.

Do any of you know of any otherwise great rifles that just never made it? Or great ideas that came and went? What designs would you like to see brought back? What olden time evolutionary dead-ends should come back in modern guns?

I thought about this after reading about the reproduction Stg44 over in the Full-Auto forum.

Personally I wish that somebody would have kept developing the FG42 after WWII. There was a neat idea.
 
I was always keen on the Remington/Browning autoloaders, the Models 8 and 81. Lots of machine work and hand fitting, though, probably too expensive to produce in today's world. I have 3 of them right now, and they're a hoot to take to the range and put 20 or so rounds through per session.

Lots of folks lamented the demise of the Ruger .44 Mag carbines, too. The new replacement uses the Mini-14-style action, we'll see if it can fill those shoes.

Good grief, there's a bunch of them that were ahead of their time, or just too costly to remain in production! Lessee, the Dardick Tround revolver, The FN-49 (evolved to the FAL, guess that's ok), Remington 788, Remington 600 series, Savage 340, the Newton rifles, Colt Lightnings, Winchester Models 88 and 100, etcetera, etcetera. But nowadays, the fickle gun-buying public would probably kill sales even if some were reintroduced...
 
I no of a great rifle that was far ahead of it's time the Heckler & Koch G11 it fird a 4.7mm x2 caseless round from a 45 round mag at a bust rate of fire in excess of 2000 rounds per minut but it did not go well in the USA or Germany:( :(

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US NAVY SEALs HOOYAH!!!!!!!!
 
Maj. Patrick Ferguson's breechloading flintlock rifle. It was developed prior to the Industrial Revolution, and thus cost about three times the price of an ordinary musket. That's one of the reasons why it wasn't adopted on a large scale.
 
The " Whitney Wolverine" 22 autopistol! Modular construction, totally dependable, WAY ahead of its time! It was done in by a bad marketing contract! It was sold almost entirely by mail-order, even though both Sears and Ward's wanted to carry it. The original contract distributor refused to let anybody else in on it and a nice little low-cost, futuristic looking gun bit the dust!
crankshaft
paranoia is really the only sane policy when they really are out to get You!
 
I'll give you guys one to think about. The Remington-Lee Model of 1885 (I think that's right). It was a 45-70 bolt action, with a detachable box magazine and a positive safety. It was tested by the Army but the Ordnance Officers preferred the single shot Trapdoor Springfield - because those slovenly enlisted men would waste ammunition.

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Dave T
PCSD Ret
AMBUSCADE
Arizona CCW and Renewal Classes
Tactical Self -defense training.
ambush@theriver.com
 
Makes me think of the Spencer repeater rifle of Civil War fame. It had a 7 round magazine which was housed in the stock and spare ammunition tubes (yes, tubes for quick loading) were carried in a special cartridge box (Blakeslee Box). The .56 caliber Spencer was more powerful and longer ranged than the .44 Henry of the same time and about the time the war ended, roughly half of the U.S. Calvary was armed with Spencers and the other half Sharp's carbines. After the war, the U.S. Army went with the Trapdoor (a post-war invention). Why not? It's all they needed to fight off the Plains Indians. Right, Col. Custard?
 
The Dardick was an interesting gun, but offered no real improvement over a conventional autoloader. Like many other ideas, it was not so much ahead of its time as it was a solution in search of a non-existent problem.

The Gyro-Jet rocket pistol was another seemingly fine idea until someone figured out that it was useless at belly-gun range (the projectile had not built up speed and had no penetration) and inaccurate at longer ranges. Another great idea that had never been thought through.

Jim
 
Oh, I dunno, as an Air Force aviator, I loved shooting off those Gyro-Jets in survival refresher training, that was fun!!!
 
I was told that the Remington 788 (I have one in a 22-250) was the most expensive to make bolt action that Remington made at the time of its manufactor and also the strongest action they made.
 
<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by OkieGentleman:
I was told that the Remington 788 (I have one in a 22-250) was the most expensive to make bolt action that Remington made at the time of its manufactor and also the strongest action they made.[/quote]

Hmmmmm... I hadn't heard that, that it was the most expensive to make, before. I'd caught some `rumblings' that it was a `strong' action though. But... *If* they'd start making them again I'd probably buy another one (I like mine, in .222, so much and have shot it so much I've got it in being rebarreled. {GRIN}) just to have another one to switch off to so that the `first' one could cool down when I'm out on a `serious?' prairie dog shoot.




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Doleo ergo sum,
-HALFPINT-
 
Halfpint -- The reason the action is so strong is because the locking lugs are in the back of the bolt and the front portion of the bolt can "flex" and absorb some of the shock when the round is fired. The nine locking lugs(I think it is nine without looking at the rifle) have more surface area locking the bolt in place than the standard "Mauser" style bolt and the smaller amount of metal between the lugs does not leave room for "flex". The 688 also had to be milled to tighter tolerences than the "Mauser" style locking bolt.
 
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