Weekly Whimsical Murder Machines

Sideblog to occasionally rant about firearms (I'm not some 2A kid-shooting nutjob I just think they're neat) The "weekly" part may or may not hold true in a court of law I am not responsible for any psychological damage done by this blog to other gun autists (gun featured in pfp is a poorly-cropped TKB-022PM of ambiguous model)

[weeklygunrants]

Hey you found a sideblog!

This is a sideblog of user @firstnamelastname5555 dedicated to guns and my eternal fixation with said guns, segmented from main for consistent theming and so half the platform doesn't permablock my main.

Every week I attempt I go down a rabbit hole over some niche and wacky firearm and post about everything I found out, and hopefully have fun in the process. All infodumps will be tagged as #gun rants or #gunrants or any variation thereof.

To spice things up, I may reblog and/or give light commentary and history to other acts of gunposting because I lowkey feel bad for only posting once a week here. All reblogs and rants under said reblogs will be put under #gun reblog or #gunreblog.

For some disclaimers (important text in red):

You read the title of this blog, firearms will be featured and displayed and talked about ad nauseum. If you have any issues or fears relating to firearms and discussion/depiction thereof, feel free to block this blog if the subject matter is uncomfortable to you. This is a sideblog because I'm aware that firearms are a loaded topic (pun intended) and I don't want to subject my main mutuals to a topic as controversial and devisive as firearms. Think of it like spiders, I think they're cool and I openly admit that they're cool, but I won't shove a brown recluse in my friend's face.

I am here to discuss firearms in a non-political vacuum. Politic surrounding firearms will not be mentioned nor regarded unless they directly impact the production, design, reception or reputation of a firearm. This blog is not an endorsement of any political organization or topic that revolves around firearms or uses firearms as a propoganda tool or dogwhistle. This blog is about the guns themselves, not the people that use them, nor the harm done with them.

JARGON WARNING!! Lots of important parts and components for firearms have specific terminology (demonstration, a firing pin strikes the primer on the cartridge, igniting the powder and propelling the bullet, firing the gun and allowing gas to cycle the action). If you're confused at what I'm talking about, ask and I'll be more than happy to explain what I mean or link to some helpful diagrams. I want this place to be as informational as it is shitposty, and guns are a very hard topic to get into considering all the misinformation and political posturing done with them over the years. I'm not a gatekeeper, I'm a fencehopper, a lockpicker, I'll smuggle you into my interests if I have to.

If anyone has any issue with the sources I cite or the way I use said sources, please bring it to my attention *ASAP*. This blog is done for fun and to spread awareness of firearm design and history, not to spread misinformation nor vitriolic propoganda. With a majority of the guns I talk about, sources are incredibly scarce and hard to find, and therefore prone to bias or misinformation. Bonus point if you can find an alternate source that dispels a claim I brought up, I don't mind reading, like 90% of my work here is reading and rereading 15 tabs worth of articles, websites and patent information, and blatantly stealing PNG's off the internet.

I will happily accept suggestions for future gun rants and take great pride in any asks I receive. I'm more than happy to accept any specific design, model, time period, classification, purpose, mechanical function, country of origin, manufacturer, etc. as long as it's not an exact repeat of a gun I previously did, nor far too similar to a gun I previously did (I can talk about the design differences between the M4 and the M4A1, but after that I'll be reluctant to make a post on the Mk. 18 CQBR or some other variant of the M4 unless there's something interesting to talk about). I prefer doing posts on niche prototype arms, yet I'm more than happy to shit-talk commercially-successful or military-standard arms as well, prototype stuff is just more fun to talk about imo.

Hope you learn something from here. I mainly made this because Tumblr's not well-known for firearm-specific content, unlike Youtube or Reddit and I feel I could fill a niche here and learn things simultaneously. Tumblr's main audience also means the few gunspaces on here are a lot less fashy then on other platforms, so I can finally interact with fellow weirdo's without having to do a """"roman salute"""" as a rite of passage. I deeply hope this blog lets you figure out why firearms are such an intriguing topic to me, and thanks a lot for reading all of this.

[weeklygunrants]

Aah shit lowkey forgot about this blog srry ;m;

Anyway, the gun for this week'll be a bit more standard and well-known, yet still very whimsical.

Give it up for...

THE DARDICK REVOLVERS!!!!!!!

The Dardick series of revolvers were a bunch of internal-magazine-fed doble-action revolvers loaded with "trounds" of various calibers, using a triangular plastic sleeve grafted onto the casing to facilitate what David Dardick, the gun's designer, founder of the Dardick Corporation, triangle enthusiast and rejected Batman Villain, called an "open-chamber design". This gun was effectively made as a proof-of-concept for the tround-revolver design and its potential in machineguns

The guns were in production from 1954 to 1962. Three distinct models of revolver were made: The small 11-tround Dardick Model 1100, the 15-tround barrel-changing Dardick Model 1500 (which 99% of images on the web are of), and the 20-round Dardick Model 2000 which feeds from two seperate magazine wells.

Oh yeah, trounds, portmanteu of triangle rounds. There seems to be two versions of these, either Dardick-proprietary "telescoped" ammunition which interchangably used aluminum or "celanese fortiflex" plastic, or a simple "reusable" plastic sleeve you stick a conventional round into, although that was only ever for .22 caliber ammunition.

Fortunately for me, there's a lot of images and even old advertisements for these, even some patent-figures and diagrams. Sure it sunk like a rock, but by god it's a pretty and well-documented rock.

And here's an ad for one of these.

This actually gives a lot of insight into how this thing works, the diagram shows it feeds through a double-stack magazine, spring on the bottom, cylinder on top. Also mentions that the Model 1500 can swap between a rimfire and centerfire firing pin via a screw on the side.

And for a moment of your time, I found a really lengthy and high-quality photoscan of a magazine advert for the Model 2000 and the Carbine Conversion Kit. Unfortunately the site wants to scrape my email to download it, so I'll post the link instead.

( https://www.scribd.com/doc/69139200/The-Dardick-Handgun )

Highly recommend you give it a read, has a lot of diagrams on how these things work, and even a fuzzy pic of David Dardick himself. Spoiler alert, he look like Mr. House from Fallout New Vegas to a moderately-concerning degree.

Oh yeah, this thing has a carbine conversion, lovingly called the "Switch Hitter".

How it works: Magazine-fed open-chamber revolver. Unlike a true automatic revolver which rotates its cylinder with a recoil impulse, it instead uses an open cylinder design and funky-shaped rounds to feed ammo. Also a double-action.

A loaded round enters the main chamber and gets shot, the double-action trigger rotates the cylinder and ejects the spent round

How to load: Fed via stripper clips or by hand through a port on its side leading into an internal magazine.

For reception: Not good.

For one, it sold for around $100, in 1950's money. In today's money that's about $1,250, for a pistol. For further context, a Glock 17 Gen 5 usually goes for around $500- $600 (or at least for all the listings I could find for those that weren't $5 toy mockups, fuck you Google).

The non-aluminum casings use a really shitty plastic originally intended for disposable holders for nuclear reactor samples. It's prone to degrading over time and warping, it's just barely capable of not exploding from internal pressure, and no one wants a gun that shoots ammo with a shorter expiration date than a jug of milk. This gun also came about during the early era of 9mm becoming the standard pistol caliber, and near the end of the reign of .38 Super revolvers, so a whole new proprietary cartridge did not look good.

The weight's heavily imbalanced towards the rear of the gun, which can make recoil a pain. Absolutely massive for a pistol and even the semi-compact Model 1100 is as wide as a brick. Dardick walked so George Kellgren could briskly jog.

The revolvers themselves were canned in 1962 as Dardick Corp. went bankrupt and was forced to sell all the remaining revolver parts and rights to the highest bidder. But Dardick still wanted trounds, and trounds he shall have.

In 1972, the Salvo Tround was born (and later died soon after)

It was the ammunition used for Harrington & Richardon Arms Company's entry for Project SPIW (then called Project SALVO). (picture below)

It was canned due to being utterly fucking massive and overly complicated, two things that USAF hates with a burning passion. I'm surpised this behemoth wasn't featured in some obscure early-2000's Doom clone, looks badass.

In 1977 came Dardick's lucky break, with the Tround Terra-Drill.

It was a drillhead designed to shoot frangible ceramic darts into dense rock to break it up enough for the drillbit to get a proper foothold, theoretically extending the drillbit's life tenfold and allowing it to easily drill through dense rock. It also uses trounds, of course it uses trounds it's a patent by David Dardick.

Only issue is that there's only like one pic of this on the internet and it looks nothing like the patent, so I have no idea if the drill design was successful or not. I like to think it was successful, whether out of blind optimism or getting irrationally obsessive and passionate over a dumb revolver I'm not sure.

Overall, a gun ahead of its time, limited by crappy plastics, poor market understanding, and general overambition. Looks sick as hell though, and if it was made nowadays it would have a killer aftermarket scene.

[weeklygunrants]

SECOND POST BAYBEEE LETS FUCKING GOOOOOO!!!!!!!!

And for this week... (drumroll implied but left to reader discretion)

THE ANDREWS MACHINE CARBINE!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Big issue with talking about this thing is that there's barely any info on this outside of a fandom wiki page and a few blogposts, one coming from the official Forgotten Weapons website, another from a podcaster's news site. Due to a severe lack of info I will absolutely be wrong on a lot of things about this gun, and this will be like 99% paraphrasing and 1% calling this thing ugly.

For history, the gun was designed an Australian gunsmith, no surviving records mention a first name, but we know their last name is Andrews (hence the name). The design was submitted to the Birmingham Small Arms Company, who made a batch of prototypes under a private contract. How many? We don't know.

The prototypes were submitted to the British Ordinance Board in 1943 and it was tested against other Commonwealth submachineguns of the time, stuff like the Sten Mk.4 or Owen Mk. 2, but it did not fare well in the slightest. According to the articles paraphrasing said reports, it was dogshit.

The barrel was liable to bend, the safety barely worked, a lot of internal parts were fragile and prone to break, there was a mag-as-stock attachment that was wobbly and prone to fall off mid-fire, it jammed constantly, it was miserable to use, and it was an ergonomic nightmare.

No surviving prototypes exist, none were kept track of, sad fate that a lot of prototype arms go through.

Yet this is a weird case for a gun. On the outside it's wacky and whimsical, on the inside it's pretty boring.

For one, the rear grip can fold.

In this configuration it looks more like an overly-complicated pen than a firearm. This angle also lets us know that this thing has two guiderods and recoil springs working in tandem.

Unlike this pic, the topmost one accentuates a weird seam in between the front and the rear of the main body, which also holds the magwell. From all that I could read, this could be some kind of dust cover, where it can slide back when there's no mag inserted to block off the bolt and prevent gunk from entering the receiver. It also helps that there's cuts to make it fit snugly around the trigger assembly.

For some reason, the guide rods have screwcaps and the barrel's threaded. I'm not sure if this is some testing model that could quickly replace recoil springs, or if that's how you fieldstrip this gun.

For another, this image exists.

Frankly, I have a lot of questions about this image in particular. For one, the mag-stock isn't present on any other image of the AMC. For another, the grip looks entirely different and absent of any wood. Third, there's a long strip of... something across the trigger assembly housing, and coincidentally the backplate and safety indicator are both missing. And finally, if you squint enough you can see some rudimentary iron sights on the front of the main body.

Frankly, I have no idea what this image really is. Were there alternate models of the AMC? Was this an attempted Mk. 2 design? Was this some initial prototyping sketch? Was the AMC one of the first ever forays into modular military weaponry? Is this pic even real?

Doing some snooping, this pic's attributed to a site called firearms.96.lt (which is linked in the image), a site likely ran by a singular person in an effort to catalogue basically every single submachine gun and self-loading rifle from the advent of the Great War to the 1970's. Site's still a WIP and there's an email, and I'm half tempted to mail them asking for where they sourced this pic and hoping that'll clarify what exactly this image is.

How it shoots: Standard open-bolt straight blowback, similar to a Stengun. Trigger unlatches the bolt which flies forward and shoots a round, the recoil pushes it back and ejects a round, again and again until there's no bullets left. The guiderods retain recoil springs which slow the bolt's forward travel, allowing it to properly feed rounds.

How to load it: Shove a Sten mag into the magwell mounted to the side and pull the charging ring on the back. When the mag's dry, press the big button, slide the mag out, rinse and repeat.

Reception: As previously stated, not good.

Closing remarks, I deeply wish there was more info on this piece. There's a lot of questions posed, yet few answers. Who made this design? Why was it made under private contract? Who was it for? How many of them were there? How does this thing even look? There are stats listed on the fandom wiki, yet no sources from such so I omitted them out of fear that they're completely made up. But through this hunt, I found a new blog to follow, so this wild goose chase wasn't completely worthless.

For a closing oddity, an AI Slop channel covered this gun, and as expected, failed miserably. I won't give links out of fear it'll give that channel publicity it does not deserve, but it's stuck on search results like a tumor. In it, a tiktok voice says the vaguest possible bullshit with trap music in the background and the same 4 images spinning around. The description implies it made it into service, which no the fuck it does not. It also goes on a weird tangent where a gestapo officer and british agent do some Death Note-tier mindgames over this contraption, and then suddenly segways into dissing the AMC halfway through its sentence. That fucking vid's lowkey frying me; If infinite C# scripts were given infinite plagiarized articles and infinite dumbasses to farm training data off of, one will eventually produce comedy gold.

[weeklygunrants]

For the first ever post on this blog, THE GUN IN THIS BLOG'S PFP!!!! :D

THIS FUCKING MECHANISM! UTTER CONTRAPTION! GIZMO-CORE DOOHICKEYCEL! FUCK MY CONVENTIONMODER FUD LIFE!

The TKB-022PM, designed by Russian Gunsmith German Alexandrovich Korborov in The Year Of Our Lord 1964. If you recognize that name (or if you don't, I'm not asking), you'll also know that man as the Soviet Answer to George Kellgren, including the unmitigatable urge to bullpup everything. Man's been cranking out bullpups since 1946, absolute legend.

Anyway, this was designed to replace the then-nearly-20-year-old AKM as The West was starting to adopt the 5.56x45mm round (aka .223, 5.56 NATO, or The Round Everything Longer Than A Foot Uses), making the shift from full-power .308 NATO Battle Rifles to smaller, faster, easier-to-use Assault Rifles.

The TKB-022 PM is a complete redesign of the TKB-022P (image below) (CW Vaguely Phallic)

As you could (hopefully) tell, the redesign was done to help with some (hopefully obvious) ergonomics issues. Because the "updated" version with the TKB-022P No.2 is basically a bullpup conversion of the gun above, including an external trigger bar that just makes it look somehow fouler.

There are three seperate versions of the TKB-022PM, known as the No.1, No.2, and PM5 No.1. The No.1 and 2 are both chambered in 7.62x39mm and use AKM magazines, while the PM5 shoots a wildcat 5.6x39mm cartridge, a precursor round to the 5.45x39mm cartridge used by the AK74 family of rifles (and every Russian standard-issue infantry rifle since the 1970's)

For some mystery, the only image of the No.1 I could find is this. (image below)

It looks different compared to the topmost image, with a different front sight, darker bakelite color and a ridged block in front of the trigger to act as a foregrip. I need to reiterate that this is the only No.1 pic I could find, it was posted on a fandom wiki and reposted on Reddit by someone falsely labelling it as just TKB-022 EVEN THOUGH THAT'S THE NAME FOR THE ENTIRE ENGINEERING PROJECT TO MAKE THAT RIFLE!!! WHAT'S NEXT U/YUXINWU00 THE FIRST EMPEROR OF CHINA'S JUST NAMED QIN??!!

That same fandom wiki lists the topmost gun pic as the PM5, the gun shooting that wacky 5.45 precursor. Yet I don't really buy it. Both the No.1 and the (supposed) PM5 use similar magazines with similar overall dimensions, hell if you look closely enough the two guns use the exact same mag, they just look different due to bad lighting. Collectively that specific mag's called the Bulgarian Steel Mag, after it's country of origin (Bulgaria), it's material composition (Steel), and it's intended function within a firearm (Mag). Everytime you see a generic steel AK mag, nine times out of ten it's Bulgarian.

So I have no idea if the topmost gun, the gun I'm ranting about, is the No.2 or the PM5. Either that fandom wiki got the pic wrong, there's a Bulgarian .220R Steel Mag that I have yet to find, or .220 Russian is compatable with 7.62 magazines and the PM5 is largely an internal change to accomodate the barrel. There's no data to support any of those conclusions, so unless someone decides to clarify I'll just assume that the topmost gun is the No.2

For function, it's fucking weird. (Vid below as a visual aid) (credit to the fella responsible for the vid below) (there's also a model of this on world of guns, there's like 50,000 vids on this gun that are really just WoG gameplay with some extra editing. The model itself is presumably the No.2 as it shoots steel-cased 7.62, either that or WoG got their facts wrong)

How it cycles: A gas-operated short-stroke piston helps to both shove new rounds near the bolt and to chuck spent casings out the front. Only issue is that the case-extraction alone looks like an eldritch horror and basically uses a second barrel and a hodgepodge of spring-loaded pistons and clamps I'll call a pseudobolt for brevity. An extractor lever on the back of the gun pushes casings upward, letting the pseudo-bolt shove them into the brass tube so they may atone for their sins.

How it shoots: Three words, vertically moving breechblock. Pivots up to seal a round in the chamber, pivots down to let the casing out. The Wikipedia article labels it as a bolt, which it simultaneously is and isn't. It's weird, everything's weird, you clicked on this wanting weird, I hope you get your fill from this.

How to load: There's a charging handle on the side that reciprocates with the pseudobolt (#fuckthelefthanded) and pushes the bolt down via something that looks vaguely like a pair of tweezers. Aside from that, standard operation procedure, shove the thing into the thing, yoink the thing, turn the thing, bangbangpewboom.

Reception: I don't know :(

The only mention of this thing that doesn't concern function is a brief blurb on Wikipedia that lacks any citations. It states that it functioned well and was very accurate for its size. Take that with a grain of salt though, could've been made by Koborov's Ghost's alt account

The weird-hybrid-extractor-pseudobolt bullshit also gives it the distinct honor of both having the greatest barrel-to-overall-length ratio out of any automatic rifle that I'm aware of (525mm overall, 417mm barrel length), and it's also one of the few real-world instances of "where the bolt go?"

The Soviet Military, echoing a sentiment familiar to anyone that knows about the USAF's favorite hobby, ditched it, not because it didn't work, not because of some major malfunction but because it was a bullpup and it had a plastic body.

One must imagine Comrade Koborov happy.