The way to listen to classical music.

All them barrels

were toast when they had finished that show, did you notice how red some of them were?. When I was a lad I worked on the weapons systems of F-105 Thunderchiefs in Asia. The F-105 had an M-61 Vulcan in the nose of it with around 998 rounds in spiral fee drum close by the gun. Pilots and gunners, for that matter, love to dump whatever number of rounds they have without any let up of the trigger, seem lots of the aftermath. Whenever they do it with a gattling gun, the barrels come back to the folks who maintain them White and crystalized, in other words Toast or having lived their useful life.

Is it any wonder we can't get barrels when we need them? :mad:
 
M-134 as mounted on Huey's (all of them) have a burst limiter of 6 seconds. They all had two firing rates. Low at 2400 rounds per min, high rate at 6K per. I have had many come back and seen the white on them. They were not damaged in anyway. The reason on the M-134, is due to the stellite liners in the tubes.

They sound better when you set three feet away out the door of the Charlie or Mike model on a rocket run and you do full fire with your M-60 free gun. It adds a lot of feeling when you have eligibles running in the rice paddy. I saw a guy cut in two separate pieces from about two hundred feet above, looked just like digging a trench in the mud (he was doing his low crawl moving towards a channel). being a crew chief and a 45J20, these were daily fare for me for two tours.

The good old days. All the ammo for free, lots of thing to shoot up.:D
 
I have seen a lot of white hot barrels, even on M16/M4's, M240B's, etc. During a live fire exercise many years ago, M16 barrels were so white hot, you could see the streak as a round was fired. Being concerned about this, the company commander and I (platoon leader) had the weapons sent off and inspected, every one met spec and no decrease in accuracy was noted. I couldn't believe it. I have seen M2 barrels so hot they drooped and were bad. It's amazing the rate of burst that can be kept up with mini-guns and the old ground based Vulcans without damage. Awesome to witness. Got to fire a Vulcan just before they were DEMIL'd....put a smile on anyones face...unless your on the receiving end.

Hovis
 
M-134"s

I was at the Nationals last October in Phoenix and heard a racket a couple of shooting bays away from where I was reloading. My curiosity got the best of me and I had to go see what it was. The Dillion Aero bunch were in the bay shooting an M-134 mounted on a flatbed truck. They were piling up brass and links on the ground like there was no tomorrow! Pretty damn cool!!

Best,
Dan Batko

"Where are we going and why am I in this basket?"
 
Must be

Barrels of the 60's were not what they are today, eh? Or we were overly cautious. We always changed em when they got white.
 
The Tech School I attended

HovisKM said:
I have seen a lot of white hot barrels, even on M16/M4's, M240B's, etc. During a live fire exercise many years ago, M16 barrels were so white hot, you could see the streak as a round was fired. Being concerned about this, the company commander and I (platoon leader) had the weapons sent off and inspected, every one met spec and no decrease in accuracy was noted. I couldn't believe it. I have seen M2 barrels so hot they drooped and were bad. It's amazing the rate of burst that can be kept up with mini-guns and the old ground based Vulcans without damage. Awesome to witness. Got to fire a Vulcan just before they were DEMIL'd....put a smile on anyones face...unless your on the receiving end.

Hovis
Click to expand...

Was @ Lowry AFB in Denver. The test for rather or not the gun worked when we assembled it was to fire it. Even though there weren't many rounds shot,10 or a dozen as I recall, that sound is one that a person will never forget. I have seen them fired and heard them in film and it is impressive.

Several years ago the Hiram Maxum Society here in Maine use to have a big shoot every summer. At the last, among other things, was a fellow with a quad 20 MM outfit on wheels. He struggled to keep all four going but when they all did go, dang! I can't imagine how much he must have spent on ammo that weekend.
 
Pete Wass said:
Barrels of the 60's were not what they are today, eh? Or we were overly cautious. We always changed em when they got white.
Click to expand...

The M-60 from Saeco were all stellite lined barrels. This started with what was know as the XM-16 subsystem which had two pylon mounted M-60 machine guns mounted on two pylons one on each side of the UH-1 B and C helicopters. This was prior to the mounting of the XM-21 subsystem (M-134).
:D
 
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