Forerunner Rifle

For several generations of American boys, the name Daisy evokes nostalgic memories of summer afternoons spent plinking tin cans with a BB gun. Daisy is still the big name in BB guns, but the company is now preparing to market a jet-age air rifle that is definitely not for small boys. Almost as powerful as the standard .22-caliber rifle, the weapon is nearly recoilless, virtually jamproof, and fires bullets without cartridges, primer charge or powder. Daisy is confident that it will be the forerunner of a new generation of weapons for both civilian and military use.

Perforated Walls. The revolutionary rifle is the brainchild of Belgian Chemical Engineer Jules van Langenhoven, a gun fancier who began to experiment with new propellants in 1951 in an effort to reduce the weight of cartridges. By 1961, Van Langenhoven had produced a derivative of nitrocellulose that could be ignited by a jet of hot air and that actually eliminated the need for a cartridge. Daisy President Cass Hough got wind of Van Langenhoven's experiments and flew over to Paris for a demonstration in an instrumented firing range near the Champs Elysees. Using a modified air rifle and pellets wadded with cottonlike propellant, the 6-ft. 3-in. Belgian squeezed off shots whose velocity was clocked at almost 1,500 ft. per sec., the speed of a conventional .22-caliber bullet. Hough was agog. "I couldn't believe it," he recalls. Hurrying back to his hotel room with Van Langenhoven's rifle and a supply of the propellant, he spent the evening enthusiastically peppering a thick telephone directory propped against the wall. Only after Hough had exhausted his ammunition and examined the phone book did he discover that the pellets had ripped through it, causing about $50 worth of damage to the wall behind.

Hough hired Van Langenhoven and moved him to Daisy's home plant in Rogers, Ark., where the chemist concentrated on perfecting a solid propellant while the company's engineers were designing air rifles capable of using it efficiently. After five years, their combined efforts produced a weapon of classic simplicity. The V-L (for Van Langenhoven) bullet consists merely of a cylindrical plug of solid propellant attached to the rear of a slug or missile. When the trigger of a V-L rifle is pulled, a powerful spring drives a cocked plunger into a cylinder, compressing and heating the trapped air to about 2,000DEG F. Escaping into the firing chamber through a valve, a jet of heated air strikes and ignites the propellant, which pushes the missile through the barrel (see diagram). Because the heated air helps the propellant to oxidize completely, there are no unburned traces left to foul the barrel. V-L test rifles have been fired up to 50,000 times without cleaning or other maintenance.

Compared with the V-L, the conventional rifle is a Rube Goldberg contraption. When the trigger is squeezed on a conventional weapon, the cocked firing hammer strikes a primer cap in the cartridge, setting off a primer charge. That in turn ignites the powder, which explodes and drives the bullet through the barrel but leaves the spent cartridge--and a trail of incompletely burned powder--behind. The cartridge must then be pulled out of the firing chamber by a bolt mechanism and ejected.

By doing away with trouble-prone extraction and ejection devices, says Hough, the V-L system "eliminates a lot of your hardware and a lot of potential malfunction problems." Further, instead of giving the lead slug a "punch," as the powder-filled cartridge does, the propellant gives it a "shove," reducing both recoil and noise.

Cooler Turrets. Although Daisy intends to confine its output of V-L products to .22-caliber rifles and perhaps shotguns the military implications are obvious. Daisy engineers have already shot V-L bullets at speeds as high as 3,000 ft. per sec.--well within the performance range of high-powered conventional rifles. V-Ls can be fired chemically and electrically, as well as with hot-air jets, making them adaptable to a large variety of weapons systems. Elimination of cartridges would also solve a troublesome problem in tank turrets, where hot shell casings pile up quickly during combat. And V-L ammunition would be ideal for aircraft cannon, which sometimes jam when high-G forces produced during maneuvers prevent the ejection of cartridges.

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