doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Mythbusters- guns fired under water

I don't know how well they work UNDER the water, but I do know they are great for shooting fish that are IN the water. Especially when they come up and get trapped in puddles along the riverside after the river has gone down. Almost as easy as using dynamite in my buddy's pond. I always figured this was how the term watertable came about. "Using a shotgun to get the fish from the WATER onto the dinner TABLE." Whatta you guys think?

Seriously, I believe the watertable is compared to the waterline on a ship. It is the point where everything else on the gun is measured from as far as angles and measurements are concerned.

Not quite, Jimmy. The waterline (bootstripe) to which a vessel or boat sits is frequently (by loading and by design) not parallel to datum waterline[s} altho your second statement is correct so far as it applies to shipbuilding. I incline toward W.E.P.'s interpretation as "a projecting ledge."

jack

When I was working as a modelmaker every model I ever worked on had a "Waterline" as datum. Note this was in the "Aerospace" industry, not a single one of them was designed to go in the water. I have no historical reference, but always assumed this "Started" in the shipbuilding industry & originally meant just what Jimmy said, IE all dimensions were referenced from where it sat in the water. The fact that at some later point some designers purposely design a ship to sit different in the water is really immaterial, it was really just a design reference anyway. I have no idea why the gun industry chose table insted of staying with line, perhaps because it was in fact an actual flat on the gun & not just an imaginary line. Everyone has there hang-ups on some terminology I suppose, I try to simply accept what the actual makers use. I still note they "Don't" refer to cutting off a barrel breech section of brazed parts & inserting new bbl tubes as "Mono-blocking", they call it sleeving.
Had to voice my pet peeve!!

Pipes:

I'll concede "immateriality" to the waterline in more ways than just the lack of correspondance with the Load Water Line of a ship. Only a "line" on paper and still only a 2D plane once you understand that it references a section or slice thru a 3D object. Nothing particularly sacred about waterlines. Anyone who's fiddled with lift models knows you can slice up a model (or carve it out of stacked "lifts") on buttlines (vertical planes represented by lines parallel to the plan centerline) or on stations (vertical planes represented by lines transverse to the plan centerline). I worked on a few dozen "green" aircraft in the 70s and 80s, including a lot of Grumman Gulfstreams, Lockheed Jetstars, couple of old BAC-111s, small Canadian and Israeli jets. Every print I ever saw and every interior installation made just as much use of buttlines and stations as it did of waterlines. Hard to find your way around in one dimension!

jack

Watertable, waterline, watermark, hold your water..........why did the shotgun blow up while the rifle and pistol functioned well? I love "Mythbusters" but missed this one.

Without having any idea of what guns were used and without having seen the show, I'd say it was mostly a matter of bbl. wall thickness, vis a zis 'hoop strength', and how much air vs. water was inside the bbl at the moment of firing. If the pistol was a revolver then the pressure build up was relieved at the air gap between the cylinder and the bbl. If the long guns were lowered into the water before firing with their muzzles tilted ever so slightly downward some air cound be expected to have been trapped inside the bbl and if slightly tilted upward and given a few moments to 'vent' or 'bleed', then we could assume them to have been full of water to the cartridge. I have no way of knowing which was the case, but I suspect there may have been more air in the rifle bbl. than there was in the shotgun, but I DO NOT know that. If it was a semi-auto pistol the same logic may be applied as for long guns as to bbl angle vs, trapped air.

OK, I'm open for contra thots.

I may be getting senile, but I distinctly remember an episode of "Sea Hunt" where a
revolver was fired underwater. Lloyd Bridges had been doing some experimenting and
while carrying the revolver -which he had forgotten about- was attacked by the "bad
guys"; when he was about to be offed he remembered he was packing and got rid of
them promptly and at close range with his sixgun.

This must have been in 1959, :-0!

JC(AL)

If you take a .729" bore & just figure 25" ahead of the crimp, you have 6oz of water in the barrel. For a .308" bore it would take 23" ahead of the bullet to hold 1oz of water. As has been stated the rifle bbl walls are much thicker than the shot bbls. It is much more common to see burst shotgun bbls than rifle bbls. Quite often a rifle bbl with an obstruction will bulge but not actually burst. In this case though it is more a thing of having an excessive weight to move than an actual obstruction I would think. Julian Hatcher reported on a .30-06 03-A3 service rifle using a 152gr M2 service round @ 2800 fps, being placed in a tank of water, ensuring the barrel was filled & fired by remote control. There was only about 6" from the muzzle to the tank wall. Upon firing the bullet the bullet penertrated the 6"of water, 3/64" of steel tank wall, 4 7/8" soft pine planks placed outside the tank & then buried about 2" into a solid oak plank. The bolt had to be opened by tapping with a rawhide hammer. The case head behind the cannelure had expanded by .032", the primer pocket was expanded from .209" to .228", primer was pierced & black smoke observed escaping the water's surface near the breech. Though this gun was not equipped for taking pressures as the expansion was greater than that of a 70K psi test cartridge it was estimated pressures ran higher than 70K. It was noted there was about 385 grains of water in the bbl. There was no bulging of the bbl or other noted damage however, a testimony to the strength of the 03-A3. "NO" recomendations were given for firing a gun underwater, & that's "No Myth".

JayCee! Since when is Hollywood reality? We all enjoyed Lloyd as our kinda frogman .. smart, tough & American, but it was still the movies and as we all know anything is possible in the movies.

Erskine[sp?] on the TV show 'FBI' used to shoot the gun outa the bad guys' hands at a coupla blocks distance with his snub nosed .38!! He did it almost evey week. I don't recall that he ever missed. It musta been the studio ammunition, yes? ;-)