and yell at the screen. Other night had the chance to see an episode where they tried some firearms stories and a 'can hammers break each other' . Usually I wouldn't go into this, but there were a couple of things that I have to comment on(No, I'm not going to their website and posting on it; I'm sure the points have been brought up, except for maybe the last).
On firearms, they tried to shoot through a scope with another rifle from 100 yards, I think(missed the first minute or two) trying to duplicate that one scene in Saving Private Ryan. They repeatedly hit the scope, but no shot made it all the way through to hit the head of the 'shooter'. I didn't hear them say what caliber the rifle they were shooting was, or what kind of bullet used. The one case of this happening I've read of involved Carlos Hathcock firing at a VC sniper using a 91/30 Mosin Nagant with a PU scope. Hathcock was using a .30-06 firing a 172-grain match bullet; the PU scope has a fairly heavy steel tube. I'd like to see the test done with that setup.
The thing that irritated me here was when their sniper 'expert' said that WWII was the first time scoped rifles had been used in war. Which would be a real surprise to the German and British and other snipers who used them in WWI.
I'll throw in something on ballistics that made me groan in the SPR scene: the distance of the shot. The guy with the Springfield said the German sniper was about 400 yards away, which meant there's no damn way he could have shot lengthwise through the scope to hit the man. As we all know, a bullet travels in an arc from muzzle to target and that arc gets higher over distance: the arc of a .30-06 bullet over 400 yards would mean that- at best- the bullet could hit the eyepiece of the scope on the trip to his head.
On hammers, the question was could a hammer head fragment explosively if struck with another hammer? That testing was fine, but at the end they decided to try to make the hammers as likely to break as possible, so they decided to heat them 'as hot as you can get them without melting' and quench them in used motor oil- "...which is full of carbon..." because that would 'put more carbon in to the hammer head and make it more brittle' and kept referring to it as case-hardening.
I know, I'm being picky, but that's so damn stupid(especially coming from people with something of a science background) and it pissed me off enough that I had to write about it.
When you heat steel that hot, you enlarge the grain structure(bad) and when you quench it you do harden it, but how much depends on the carbon content and the alloy in the steel. A medium-carbon steel, especially with some alloys, will harden but not become brittle. Big thing here, though, is that no matter how much carbon is in the oil it doesn't 'go into' the steel. You actually lose carbon from the surface when you heat above about 1500F, but you cannot raise the carbon content by quenching in dirty oil. The steel cools below the point at which actual case-hardening is possible almost instantly and with in an open atmosphere the carbon has no chance to penetrate.
And I'm even more pissed on this because a: people will believe this crap because Jamie of Mythbusters said it and b: they had already talked to a blacksmith about hammers and he could have told them the facts. So could a lot of others(machinists for example).
The last was when the cast some minie balls for a test involving Civil War-era rifled muskets. They were pouring the lead into the mold and then dipping the mold in water! BAD! BAD Adam!
Aargh.
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