Evolution of three steampunkesque Akins crank fire prototypes

[Bill Akins]

It's been a while since I last posted about my steampunkesque crank fire creations, so here's an update on my latest 3rd prototype that is convertible between being water cooled or air cooled in under a minute and showing it firing at the range. I used to use Webshots to upload my photos and videos to. But when they closed down, all the pictures and videos I had linked to there in my online posts, disappeared. I still have my pics and videos on my computer and saved to  disks, but they disappeared in all my online posts since they were all linked to Webshots. Now I use Photobucket as well as YouTube.

Here's a video I just finished creating showing the evolution of my crank fire dress up kit prototypes versions 1 through 3. The first one is air cooled only. The second one is (truly) water cooled only. But my third prototype is convertible in under a minute to be either air cooled or (truly) water cooled (no fake water jackets here). I learned a lot making the first two, and my 3rd prototype incorporates new design changes that I learned from making the earlier ones. In the last several minutes of my video you will see my latest 3rd prototype firing at the range using the new GSG 110 rd drum mag and it's really spitting out the rounds.  If I could get .22 tracers, it could shoot a Zeppelin down (seriously) although possible, I'd never do that because there are no Zeppelins left and certainly not any enemy Zeppelins, but if there were, it could shoot one down. Being a manually cranked gun, it is legally not a machine gun in the U.S.. Hope you enjoy the video. If not and if anyone doesn't like it because they don't like real firearms, please refrain from flaming and perhaps the best course of action would be to withhold any negative political or gun control related comments. I don't want to be drawn into any gun control related arguments by anyone who might be anti-gun. I am asking this nicely in advance so please respect this reasonable request.  Thanks, Bill.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSJi6rvNwIs&feature=youtu.be


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[MWBailey]

I just posted on your youtube video to the effect that the double handle seems somewhat superfluous if you have to crank it to make it fire, and that it seems to move around a lot when cranking away.

Also, have you had to change any barrels yet?

[Bill Akins]

I just posted on your youtube video to the effect that the double handle seems somewhat superfluous if you have to crank it to make it fire, and that it seems to move around a lot when cranking away.

Also, have you had to change any barrels yet?

Since at some point I plan to produce these as a dress up kit stock, the purpose of the double handle is to cater to both right handed people as well as left handed people. Plus in the future I plan to create for it a thimble thumb crank that will allow one to crank fire the gun with both hands on both grips while they literally twiddle their thumbs. That will be called "The twiddler". The gun wasn't moving around a lot on its own, I was moving it since I was firing on two targets because I had 110 cartridges which were too much for just one target. You'd be surprised how accurate it is when firing from the tripod. I can easily keep all my hits on a pie plate sized target at 50 yards. Guess I'll have to do another video in the future to prove that. When I fire it most of the time I fire it in the water cooled configuration and not the air cooled configuration. As a result, that has kept my barrel much cooler than if I fired a lot of rounds with just air cooling the barrel and thus my rifling hasn't degraded so I haven't had to change any barrels out.


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