#Production

High Speed Gear, Inc. (HSGI) produces some of the most popular shooting-related accessories in the business. From belts to bags, holsters, chest rigs, plate carriers and more, if you’re looking for a piece of gun gear there’s a decent chance they make something you could use. The products for which High Speed Gear is best known, however, are their TACO pouches. These mag pouches are used by warfighters, competitive shooters, and plenty of others. Last year HSGI was contracted to supply the US military with more than 30,000 TACO pouches in conjunction with Heckler & Koch’s fulfillment of the Army’s SDMR (Squad Designated Marksman Rifle) contract.

SAR USA is the exclusive American importer for 140-year-old Turkish gunmaker Sarsilmaz. Although they are not a major household name in the US, their parent company produces a significant number of firearms for many countries all over the world. Their catalogue includes a dozen handgun models chambered in 9mm and .45 ACP, and as you might expect from Turkey, a line of shotguns. Their shotguns come in both semi-auto and break-open flavors. Sarsilmaz is also the sole pistol supplier to the Turkish Armed Forces.

In the comments section of my recent Brief Thoughts article regarding caseless ammunition, there was a discussion about whether the cookoff issues of caseless would also be problem for LSAT-style polymer cased telescoped ammunition. Based on conversations I have had with subject matter experts regarding polymer cased ammunition in general, I noted that a lower cookoff threshold is one of the challenges I would expect CT ammunition developers to face. However, after some back-and-forth in the comments, I decided to contact LSAT/CTSAS program officer Kori Phillips regarding this issue (as it was not something I covered in my three-part interview with her), and she kindly agreed to allow her comments on the matter to be published here on TFB. They are below:

Caseless: The ammunition designer’s holy grail, and the engineer’s worst nightmare. It would obsolete the cartridge case overnight, resulting in cheaper, lighter, and more compact ammunition. Weapons would be able to carry 50, 60, or more rounds in slim, inexpensive magazines, and expel them at a rate of fire much higher than current weapons are capable of – not only because the ammunition is lighter and therefore more could be carried to feed such thirsty guns, but because the extraction and ejection cycles of the weapons themselves could be eliminated.

Quick: What’s the definition of “assault rifle”? I’ll give you a moment to think about it.

The Firearms History blog has posted an anthology of sorts of different videos dealing with modern cartridge manufacture. The manufacture of ammunition is the critical characteristic of modern small arms – huge advances in technology would today be possible, such as caseless rounds or flechette projectiles – if not for the need to create billions of rounds of ammunition per year to feed millions of rifles in service around the world. Since this is the most important limitation government small arms technology, it is worthwhile to get a firm understanding of it. Below are some of the videos embedded in the post; first, a World War II-era short detailing .303 British ammunition manufacture in South Africa. The methods show are dated (especially the manufacture of cordite propellant), but much of it is still current:

The metallic cartridge case underwent significant – though difficult to see – changes in the period between 1860 and 1945. Case metallurgy, manufacturing methods, priming configurations, and even the basic configuration of the metallic case changed and matured during those years. One of the now antiquated methods for making cartridge cases is the subject of a recent Historical Firearms Blog post, featuring plates illustrating the process of drawing brass from a disk into a tubular cartridge case:

It’s often said that small arms technology has plateaued; that development of better kinds of weapons is essentially unfeasible for the moment, and that non-optic related small arms technology had pretty much reached its peak by 1965. It would be very difficult to cover the state of the art and how to improve it in-depth, so I won’t. Instead I want to take only a moment of our readers time to explore an often-missed element of firearms technology that is the key piece in understanding the technology “plateau” and how to end it.

In my critique of the M1 Garand rifle on Sunday, I noted that John Cantius Garand was not only a firearms designer, but a machinist as well. It was his intimate understanding of the world of the shop floor that made his rifle economical to produce, which is in my opinion by far the most outstanding attribute of the weapon.