On April 11, 2010, I traveled to Harrodsburg, KY where I met with my good friend, Howard “Buddy” Howells. Buddy is the only grandson of the famous Col. George M. Chinn, author of the five-volume series entitled The Machine Gun. The last time I was in Harrodsburg was in 1985 when I met with Col. Chinn and Buddy at their office. I was working for FN and went there to discuss the Mk19 and to get Chinn’s opinion on the maturity of the design and the producibility of the weapon using the drawing package developed by the Navy.

George Chinn had accumulated a wealth of firearm information through the years and was inspiration to many of us in firearm design. The Colonel made great contributions to firearm design and usage, and his historical reference book series is a classic of the last century. Buddy worked with his grandfather on some firearm designs and has an amazing memory of historical facts.

Buddy suggests we begin our meeting in the office used by George M. Chinn. Upon entering I can’t believe what I’m seeing. Chinn’s favorite pictures, letters, commendations, and other memorabilia still adorn the walls. Pencils, Rolodex, pads of paper and reference material are out on his desk. It was if the old master would return at any moment. Unable to resist the urge, I sit in the Colonel’s chair. Now was a good time to begin the interview.

George: Before we talk about George M. Chinn, could you give me a little insight into the Chinn family history.

Buddy: The Chinn’s are an old pioneer family with roots in Mercer county Kentucky. I know you remember my grandfather joking about being Chinese, but our ancestry is French. George’s Grandfather Jack was into horse racing and even owned a Kentucky Derby winner. Politics, farming, and Calcite mining were also family businesses.

George: So, as pioneers and frontiersmen, the Chinn family must have been around guns all the time.

Buddy: Actually, they were familiar with both ends of a gun. Back in 1900 Kentucky elected William Goebel as Governor. Just one day before his inauguration, Goebel was standing on the capitol steps between his two bodyguards, one of them Chinn’s Grandfather Jack, when a shot rang out. A sniper shot Goebel, fatally wounding him. Following his passing and true to the Kentucky sense of fairness, for the first time in U.S. history, a dead man was sworn into office. George: What about George Chinn? Did he have an interest in firearms when he was a youngster?

Buddy: Chinn’s father was the warden of the prison in Frankfort, Kentucky. This gave George many opportunities to disassemble guns from prison assets. Chinn had access to explosives too, from the family’s calcite mine. He led a charmed childhood and like most kids of that era, he enjoyed target shooting and plinking.

George: Tell me about George Chinn’s early education and his career plans.

Buddy: George went to a Millersburg Military Institute, a boarding high school where he was a member of the “Saturday Afternoon Tea Club.” That’s what they jokingly called the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) program. He graduated in 1920 in a class of nine. Since he was in ROTC at the close of WWI, he received a WWI victory medal even though he was never in theater.

George: I read where Chinn graduated from Centre College where he claimed to have majored in “football and penmanship.” What can you tell me about his football career?

Buddy: As a freshman George played lineman on the Centre team that won what would today be recognized as the national championship in 1921 after beating Harvard 6-0. It was a huge upset. The Centre team was coached by two of the greats in football history, Charlie Moran and Robert Myers. These men greatly influenced George. Their coaching style and football experience itself made a huge impact on his life. Also significant was the relationship he developed with Albert. B. “Happy” Chandler, a guy who was a kind of team “groupy.” Happy rode along on the football trips and in later life became Governor of Kentucky – twice. He also served as a U.S. Senator, giving George an important political connection during much of his adult life.

George: What did Chinn do after college?

Buddy: He coached football; assistant coach at Bucknell and head coach at Catawba. His coaching experience was very valuable throughout his career. He refined his coach’s instinct and he knew how to prepare a team for an “operation” by making sure his players knew what to do, how to do it, and had the right equipment and training to get the job done right. This mentality served him well in later years when he helped Naval aviators and Marines with the operation, repair, and maintenance of automatic weapons.

George: But he didn’t stay in coaching – what happened?

Buddy: While he was vacationing in North Carolina he had an opportunity to visit a tourist attraction there called the Bat Cave. The sight of all those tourists buying food, drinks, and souvenirs got him thinking. He owned a piece of property alongside the road near the Brooklyn Bridge that crossed the Kentucky River. So near this scenic river, George knew it would be a good place for a tourist stop except that the property was a sheer cliff: almost all rock, and nearly 150 feet high. Chinn had the perfect spot and all he needed was a cave. That part wasn’t any problem at all as he knew an explosives expert named “Tunnel” Smith and had him blast a hole at the base of the cliff. The tunnel went straight in about 20 feet and then veered to the left about 100 feet. At the front entrance he built a grill with a snack bar counter on the left and directly across from it was the bar. Chinn designed the bar in a particular way that discouraged people from hanging around it. George wanted customers to buy drinks, but he didn’t want to make a hangout for potential troublemakers. Out in front were tables for people to sit after they’d gotten their food and drink. Through the years there were several modifications, including a pair of columns that were made from the same stone as Chinn’s house.

George: This had to be during the depression. There couldn’t have been the same level of tourist traffic that Bat Cave had in those years, did he make any money?

Buddy: George did very well there. My grandmother made delicious sandwiches for what could be called a “giveaway” price. These were prohibition years; the real money was made from liquor and slot machines.

George: Slot machines?

Buddy: He had penny and nickel slots in the back part of the cave. Chinn was doing great until the law caught up with him. He was charged with running “a game of chance” at Chinn’s Cave House. In typical self-assured Chinn fashion, he defended himself and was able to convince the court that “you didn’t have a chance” when you gambled at Chinn’s.

George: It sounds like George has led a charmed life. Did this magic continue?

Buddy: Well, no. A life-changing event happened at The Cave House near the end of its operation. George got into an argument with the owner of the business across the road. Somehow it escalated to the point of violence when the neighbor entered the Cave House and shot George in the leg. George was wearing his .38 revolver at the time but he didn’t want this thing to escalate so he didn’t go for his gun. George’s wife, Cotton, however, tried to get Chinn’s gun away from him. It was all George could do to keep his wife away from that revolver. My grandmother was a crack shot and George was certain she would have killed the guy. Accompanied by his wife and daughter, Ann, Chinn went immediately to the hospital to get his wound cared for. My mother Ann, who was quite young at the time, recalled she had never seen so much blood in her life. Chinn got patched up and carried that slug in his leg for the rest of his life.

George: What did Chinn do after the Cave House?

Buddy: George was a pretty tough guy in his youth. His friend “Happy” Chandler described Chinn as, “That tough little river rat from Murdy’s Landing,” and hired him to be his bodyguard during his first term as Governor of Kentucky. Chinn also served as Sergeant-at-arms of the Kentucky legislature. You know, he had a flair for the unusual. Instead of buying a house in Frankfort, he bought an old ferry boat and converted it to a houseboat. George picked up other odd jobs too, like serving as Jack Dempsey’s bodyguard whenever he was in the area. (On the wall is an autographed picture of a young, rugged George Chinn standing with a group of men, one of them is Jack Dempsey. Jack’s inscription thanks him for his service.)

George: With a few exceptions, he seems to have led a charmed life to this point.

Buddy: George always said “I have lived my life in reverse.” He was too young for the First World War and lived a carefree life between the two wars, even though it was during the depression. In the late 1930s when our allies were looking to us to supply them equipment to fight the Germans with, Chinn took a job with the U.S. Government, as an inspector at Frigidaire in Dayton Ohio. He worked in the weapon section where the .50 cal. aircraft machine gun was in production. Through the years, Chinn had become even more interested in guns and collaborated on a book with his cousin, Bayliss Harden. (Buddy points to a framed letter from J. Edgar Hoover thanking George for the book, the Encyclopedia of American Hand Arms, he had received from Chinn.)

George: George was pretty old when the U.S. entered WW II. Did he try to enlist?

Buddy: He did. Prior to the war, a military recruiting train came through Harrodsburg taking applications and collecting résumés, and George submitted his, but he was already 37 years old. He knew he was not likely to be called up, and he wasn’t.

George: So, how did he get into the U.S. Marine Corps?

Buddy: He called in a political favor. His buddy “Happy” Chandler had moved on to become a U.S. Senator. Happy was not at all in favor of Chinn entering the military at his age. Chandler told him: “George, you are too big and too old to get into the military now. You’re going to get somebody hurt.” But Chinn insisted, and with Chandler’s help he enlisted into the Marine Corps, graduating from Aviation Ordnance School in 1943. (Buddy motions me over to a photograph on Chinn’s wall. It’s George’s graduation photograph from Aviation Ordnance School with our star graduate obviously older and substantially heavier than the other grads.) You know, George thought the whole thing about his weight and age was all very funny. Almost monthly, a Navy doctor would notice him on base and order him to come in for a physical exam. You see, any Marine perceived to be out of shape was a reflection on the competency of the Navy medical corps.

George: So it’s World War II, Chinn is an Aviation School graduate. Where is he assigned and what does he do?

Buddy: Most of the time he’s at Patuxent River Naval Air Station, but he was on something akin to a permanent TDY (temporary duty). He traveled around to various military installations checking out problems with guns and seeing if he could help with a solution. Whether it was a tool, a muzzle device, an operation or maintenance issue, or a design change, George was on the spot to help. His work was obviously appreciated as he received a number of commendations and promotions as a result. Chinn had a priority card that let him take flights and bump other people whenever there was a gun problem he was called in to review. Others had cards with higher priority but he told me he used that card for many years and only got bumped once; by the Manhattan Project Oppenheimer’s people.

George: After the War, Chinn is still in the military, and Korea starts up. What does he do then?

Buddy: Again he served as a troubleshooter for field problems. He traveled a lot, solving field problems, developing gages, tools, and helping with designs changes. He was called in to help with an engine flameout problem on the F7U aircraft caused by the ingestion of gun gas. The test pilot was none other than John Glenn. Chinn designed a muzzle device that solved the problem and was ultimately patented. Chinn is remembered in John Glenn’s memoirs for this brilliant and expedient solution. George had befriended John Glenn and baseball great, Ted Williams, as well, as they were both fighter pilots during the Korean War. (Buddy digs through a box of parts and retrieves a sample muzzle brake and shows me a copy of a patent that is framed and hanging on the wall.) It was also during the Korean War years that the Navy Department got George started writing The Machine Gun book series.

George: Let’s talk about The Machine Gun book series for a moment. I’ve always wondered how Chinn was able to get so much design information on all of those weapons – especially the foreign ones. It was before the information age and there was no internet to help him.

Buddy: Chinn made extensive use of the U.S. Patent Office. Patents on various guns, components, and feed mechanisms gave him a wealth of information about the theory and the design approach because that’s what patents do. It turns out that foreign patents were filed in the U.S. Patent Office as well so the foreigners could protect their concepts in the U.S. Chinn had a whole team under his direction researching patents. During their research they ran into some patents they believed could affect national security and should have been assigned a security classification, like Top Secret, or at least Secret. Chinn, a Major at the time, reported their findings and was told by his commanding officer: “If what you are saying turns out to not be true, it will be your last day in the Marine Corps.” This had Chinn worried for a while, but he trusted his own judgment and that of his team. Sure enough they were correct and the security leak was plugged.

George: After he left the USMC what did he do?

Buddy: He was called back into the Marine Corps and went to work at the Naval Ordnance Station in Louisville. Bill Schnatter, Walt Cashen and George made up the design team that was awarded a patent on the Mk19 mechanism. He developed the 20mm/30mm Mk22 canon there too.

George: And after that?

Buddy: In later years, Chinn was like a guru for guns. People would come from all around to check out their designs with Chinn. Even the U.S. Government ran new designs by him to get his opinion on their viability.

George: Did Chinn ever get involved with hand-held small arms?

Buddy: Because of his vast experience, the U.S. Army JSSAP (Joint Service Small Arms Program) tried to get him to work on a new military rifle. Chinn wasn’t real excited about the idea but the JSSAP people kept after him, even sending down representatives from the Navy at Crane and their top gun guy in Washington DC. I guess they figured if the Navy asked, Chinn might work on it. All of his life Chinn had worked on bigger guns and there is a difference between guns fired from hard mounts and guns fired from the shoulder. He finally conceded, going along for a little while to see where it would lead. In considering the new rifle, George decided to use recoil operating cycle rather than a gas drive. George knew that recoil operated weapons didn’t have the guns gas residue and erosion problem and plus you could fool with the operating cycle and maybe even reduce the recoil. For his prototype he started with an old Remington Model 8 recoil operated rifle originally chambered for .35 Remington. First we converted it to fire 7.62mm and made some other modifications. When we had the design completed, we went over to Ft. Knox to demonstrate it. Due to time constraints and our limited manufacturing resources, we decided against converting our sample to fire full auto. Instead, we bought one of those inexpensive BMF activators – you know, one of those hand crank devices that attaches to the trigger guard and pulls the trigger multiple times for every rotation of the crank. We went out to the range and unexpectedly found our friend Bill Schnatter. He was there demonstrating the Mk19 and we were requested to share the range to demonstrate our rifle. We shot it semi-auto for a while and the gun worked perfectly. Then we decided to show the “full auto” capability, even though the rifle only had a five-round magazine. We spun up that BMF and cranked off a 5 round burst. Bill Schnatter looked up from his test site and yelled out: “Looks like the Colonel has done it again.”

George: Buddy, as you think back on your grandfather’s long association with machine guns, who did he admire most?

Buddy: Without a doubt, he most admired John M. Browning. He had met members of the Browning family and was presented with a medallion from Val Browning, John’s son. This plaque was one of his most cherished possessions. Chinn was more than dismayed by the lack of progress made in gun design since Browning and was often heard to say: “We ought to dig up John M. Browning and see if he might have left us another gun design in his vest pocket.”

George: I seem to recall a similar comment he made about German machine guns.

Buddy: Yes, it’s in one of the books in The Machine Gun series where he compared our development programs to the German’s. He said: “True to the German military tradition, they sought to build tomorrow’s weapons today. In contrast, it has always been our custom to build yesterday’s weapons soon.”

George: George M. Chinn is remembered for his wisdom and sage remarks. Can you recall some examples so we can get a better insight into the man?

Buddy: That’s a tall order, but I’ll try. Even though George Chinn was not above calling in a political favor from time to time, he actually had no use for politics. He was incensed when politics affected the gun business and he’d say that it had no business there. Chinn’s success was characterized by a man who had a keen insight into knowing when to quit. Whether it was a business venture, horse racing, drinking whiskey, or pursuing a design approach, knowing when to pull up stakes and move on was a human character trait that served him well through the years – like his decision to give up drinking whiskey. Chinn believed that the proof of any good design was to put it into practice. He was known to remark: “I’ve never had a malfunction on paper.” That being said, he and his co-workers would make every effort to make their designs fool proof, but were always confounded by users who would still find a way to cause a failure or a malfunction. This led to one of his favorite expressions, though not original: “You can make something foolproof, but not damn fool proof.” George Chinn had a lot going for him but he never let it go to his head. He would jokingly say, “I am thought of highly in low places.” Of course, this was much earlier than the country tune with the same theme.

On our way to lunch, Buddy took me past some other buildings with Chinn connections. The old family house is possibly one of the oldest in Harrodsburg and was built from two log cabins that were merged into a single house where parents live. Buddy and his father have been working together restoring the house, room by room, starting with the living room where Chinn and his wife Cotton were married. Around town, construction sites mark the landscape of this historic city. A historic marker, near the war memorial, memorializes George M. Chinn for his contributions to the field of small arms.

Late in the afternoon, Buddy and I drive a winding road that leads to the Brooklyn Bridge and the Cave House. As we near the river, the road hugs a sheer cliff on the left that faces a lush riverbank on the right. A chain link fence marks off the grounds and prevents intruders from entering the remains of the cave house. It is evident that the roots from a number of large trees have lost their grip on the thin soil in the cliff above and have come crashing down into the Cave House compound. Buddy and his son have been clearing them out. Even in its present condition the Cave House is impressive. Buddy: (Buddy points to a large storage box at the Cave House entrance.) When Chinn was working on the Mk19 he leased the Cave House to the Navy for a dollar a year. They did their testing inside and stored their ammo in that box at night. George: (Fast moving vehicles slow to rubberneck when they see the two of us – and me with a camera – examining the Cave House.) Do you suppose they’re looking for a sandwich or a little slot action? Buddy: No, I’ll be answering a lot of questions from the locals. Around here, there is a certain mystique about George Chinn and amazing rumors have developed surrounding the Cave House and Chinn’s home. There are people who believe George had machine guns mounted on his roof and other outrageous things.

As the sun sets over the Cave House, I feel a bit guilty of taking up so much of Buddy’s day. I thank him for sharing his insight into the life of a man we have long admired.

1 August, 2007, Dayton, NV

David Edward “Dangerous Dave” Cumberland was born 18 November, 1932 in Fairley Farm, Virginia. He married his wife Elsie in 1955. Dave was Interarmco’s man in Thailand in the 1950s and one of the early machine gun and cannon dealers in the US. His company, The Old Western Scrounger, was renowned for helping shooters around the world get their odd ammunition needs filled. This author has known Dave for thirty years and we caught up with Dave at his home in Nevada, where he was pleased to sit down and recap many of his experiences for SAR’s readers. A lot of Dave’s experiences interact with a number of our other Interviews, and help “Fill in the blanks.” – Dan

SAR: When was the first time you were around firearms?

Dave: Right about the end of the Second World War, and that was just a 22 rifle. It was Mossberg 42MB, which was the last thing that Mossberg was making that the public could buy: they gave their all to the military. It was the only Mossberg rifle you could get around the end of the war. We went out plinking and hunting with it, go out to the dump and shoot rats. I lived in a small village in rural Virginia so that was pretty much expected of young boys. My father had a C96 Mauser pistol with a massive stock, and he never shot the gun to amount to a hill of beans, and he never knew much about guns. He wasn’t a hunter or shooter really, but I was fascinated by that gun. I finally figured out how to get it apart and back together again. Must have been about 18 years old at that time. Later I’d purchased a Trap Door Springfield Carbine and, why I bought this next one, I don’t know, but I had a Remington Derringer, 41 Rimfire. There was no ammunition for that but I just had to have it, it was so interesting.

SAR: Did you have any experience with machine guns early on?

Dave: No, not a thing. Not cannons either. Didn’t really have any interest in them, oddly enough for where I ended up. However, I made my share of pipe bombs and a good time was had by all.

SAR: You joined the service in…

Dave: In 1952. I was 20 years old and turned 21 when I was in San Diego. I was an electronic technician in the United States Navy. Traveled across the Pacific; headed for the Korean War. The first ship I was on went to Yokosuka, Japan and that was when they just did normal fleet operations for six months. It turned out we were only there for about two months and we got word to pull hook and head for Haiphong, Vietnam. So my ship turned out to be the command ship for the evacuation of the refugees from the communists, and the French army from Hanoi and Haiphong in French Indo-China, what you guys call Vietnam. That was mid to late 1954. That was the largest civilian evacuation ever, hundreds of thousands of refugees: they called it “Operation Passage to Freedom.” We brought the guy who was the 100,000th refugee and his family down with us on our ships. We didn’t take anybody else on our ship; we were strictly a command ship. We brought he and his wife down, everybody else came on LSTs and supply ships and what have you. We also evacuated the Tachen Islands between Communist Mainland China and Taiwan. The Nationalist Forces were cornered there by the Chinese Communists and we moved them to Taiwan. I was in the Navy for four years. I checked out in San Diego with my wife and we went to visit my parents and her parents on the East Coast.

SAR: When did you go out for the nuclear tests?

Dave: That was before I got out and before the Indo-China refugees. I think it was in March of ’54. It was the second series of bomb tests on the hydrogen bomb and our ship had been in the first one called “Operation Ivy.” The second one, “Operation Castle” was the name of it. They’re available on videotape of all things. Our ship was the USS Estes. It was a communications force flag ship. It’s one big floating radio station that’s used to consolidate an amphibious landing, for example. Our sister ships were the USS Mount McKinley and the USS Mount Olympus. Mount McKinley was at Iwo Jima and the Mount Olympus was at D-Day in Normandy. We were all out in the Pacific, headed back to the states we thought. We had about 600 people on board and we took on food and supplies we needed for about four or five months and we sailed from the South Pacific. We got sidetracked to Bikini Atoll, which is where they hold the bomb tests, explaining why all the extra stores were needed.

SAR: So, on your way home, boys, why not stop off and watch the Nukes? (Laughter)

Dave: Yeah, that’s about it. Eniwetok Atoll is where they had all the scientific personnel and civilian engineers and stuff like that, plus they had an airfield there. It took us about ten days to get down there. It was just beautiful. There was a wrecked Japanese freighter on one of the little islands. That little island was also a recreation island for us, where you could go and swim. We’d go over there with an M1 Garand in. 30-06 so they could shoot sharks if they got after us. The first bomb test was supposed to be, I can’t remember exactly, but I think it was 15 or 16 megatons. They said it was less than 20 megatons, I do remember that. It turned out to be 40 megatons when the damn thing finally went off. It was unreal. We could see the shock wave coming along the water, approaching at the speed of sound, of course. I had a friend who was down in the engine room on watch at that time. He said that when the concussion hit the ship, it rocked the entire ship over. We could see that, ’cause we were up on the deck, which was pretty intense. He said it blew flame out of the boiler inspection ports ten feet all the way across the inside of the engine room. The back pressure from the shock wave back-flushed all the ventilation systems on the ship. That hadn’t been done since the ship was built in 1944, and you wouldn’t believe the piles of crap that came out of those ventilators all over the ship when that pressure wave hit us. Then we went to what was called a “Purple 2 alert,” which meant an atomic attack was in progress. We stayed there in general quarters for about 30 hours because you couldn’t go up on the flight deck, you couldn’t go topside because there was too much fallout. We had the sprinkler systems on all over the ship. That was also when the Japanese tuna fishing boat got caught in the fallout and it killed all the crew, it was the “Shot” called “Castle Bravo.” There’s no fresh water on those islands out there so, at the time this bomb was going off, they were bringing out tankers full of water to hose us down. The tanker got caught in the fallout, too, and they turned her around and sent her back to Ford Island in Pearl Harbor and dropped the hook out there. When we came back in several months later, she was still out there with atomic radiation signs all over the ship. It was pretty well toasted. They gave you a chance to do your part in all of this by spending time on the decontamination team. On the decon team you put a plastic suit on, and just imagine what the temperature’s like at about 100º outside. We’d get these plastic suits on and go out on the deck of a contaminated vessel and use a high-pressure steam hose, and do that for 20 minutes. Then you come back and wash off for ten minutes in fresh water, and present yourself to the guy with the Geiger counter. Put your hands up in the air, and he checks you everywhere for fallout. If he found anything, he took a little high-pressure hose and squirts the area down. For that, you got a free steak dinner that night. [laughter]

SAR: Have you experienced any problems from the fallout?

Dave: No. It’s interesting. When I first went to the Veterans’ Hospital in my old place up in Northern California, the first thing they asked me was if I was exposed to atomic radiation. I said, “Yes.” And they checked this little red block on the thing. I don’t think I have anything as a result of that Atomic testing, but I have Parkinson’s disease, and as a veteran, they pay for all of my Parkinson’s medicine.

SAR: In 1955 you were in San Diego. You signed out of the Navy, and then you took off to visit family.

Dave: Elsie and I bought a new Volkswagen Beetle for $1,500 and we drove that turkey across the country and back. We headed up to San Francisco and that’s where I went to work for the California National Guard on the 90mm batteries. The Bay Area in general had four batteries. It had two batteries of four guns each for anti-aircraft, using M-33 fire control radar. My job was to keep the radar and computer running. There were also two Nike missile defense situations in the same area. They were both on the hill to the north of the Golden Gate Bridge. I was there about a year and a half. I had to join the National Guard to get that job and when the time came for a new job, I went to Korea. I was teaching the U.S. Army how to keep their radar equipment in operating condition.

SAR: That was the post-Korean War era, while there was still a real tense situation on the demarcation line.

Dave: I have some pictures of me sitting with my feet up on the desk of the North Korean general’s negotiating chair in Panmunjom. I was shooting different weapons now. The Navy would allow us to shoot aboard ship “at the discretion of the Captain.” We used to shoot off of the fantail at a towed target. I had that Trap Door Springfield and a Broomhandle Mauser. That’s the first place I really got a chance to shoot a machine gun. I shot a 1918A2 BAR and a 1919A4 .30 caliber Browning from the ship’s armory. The 1919 was on a ship’s mount of course. To this day, machine guns don’t really turn me on that much. I like the big stuff. If I had a choice in a machine gun, it’d be a 3″ 50 automatic.

SAR: [laughs] Well, you have had a lot of machine guns, right?

Dave: Yes, I sure have. You asked what I like, and it’s always been the cannons that I’ve really enjoyed the most.

SAR: How long were you in South Korea for that job?

Dave: About 14 months. I was at the 7th Infantry Division in Seoul. They would give me a Jeep and say, “Go here. Go there,” to different places where they had repair facilities for radio equipment. I would go there and check out the systems and make sure the guys knew what the hell they were doing and that everybody was happy and that things worked the way they were supposed to. It was pretty good duty. When my time was up there, I came back to the United States and they wanted me to go out again. They said, “We only have two openings for you right now.” First was in Chile on top of a 13,000 foot mountain as part of the Vanguard tracking satellite system. I said, “No way in the world. It hasn’t rained down there in 30 years.” They gave up on that and said the other place was Bangkok, Thailand. Knowing a bit about Southeast Asia, I thought “That sounds a lot less bitter,” and I headed on over. That was 1958. Flew over this time, on a DC-7C Super Constellation, which went all of 265 miles an hour. Flew to Pearl Harbor, then to Wake Island, and on to Tachikawa Air Force Base in Japan. From there, I flew down to Manila and on to Bangkok. Of course, this was all MATS flights (Military Air Transport Service) so you took what you could get. A guy would go there with his orders and plead with the guy behind the counter to get on the quickest flight. It took a long time to travel, but you got there.

SAR: What was the situation when you got to Bangkok?

Dave: It was a little tense. It was not going full bore in Southeast Asia like it was two years later but, they had me in there going upcountry or down country and teaching the Thais how to keep their equipment running. While I was in a little place called Nakhon Si Thammarat in southern Thailand, I ran into a very wealthy Thai gentleman who owned a series of hock shops in Bangkok. There was a little Japanese airfield down there and there was a golf course. The greens were all fine sand. I used to play golf with him down there. He was a shooter, and he gave me an Eley cartridge display board that I sold two years ago for $8,000. He always had custom things – Holland & Holland made him a double size Swiss Army Knife. Interesting guy. We went hunting once together, for tigers, even though that was illegal. I shot one of those wild red bulls with an 1874 Sharps.

SAR: You went hunting on other trips around Thailand?

Dave: Oh yeah, many times. Got ambushed by Burmese bandits in the highlands once.

SAR: Dave, ambushed by Burmese bandits in the Thai highlands?

Dave: (Laughs) You heard me right. We were out in the middle of the jungle with a Thai hunter who was kind of interesting. He was just a plain old, everyday gentle person except his rifle was a Model 70 Super Grade, in .375 H&H. I couldn’t believe that. We had two elephants we rode, and the Thai fellow who was our hunter. He had his son along as a camp-watcher. We would go out and hunt all day and sit in the jungle at night and get bitten by mosquitoes. We slept in Jungle Hammocks, by the way, which I think is the only way to sleep in the jungle – up off the ground. This one evening about the third or fourth day we were there, we were sitting around the campfire. We had just finished eating, and I was smoking a cigar or cigarette. Jack and I were getting ready to turn in for the night. Some people came walking into the camp and we didn’t speak any Thai. We gave them tea, and we had a pound of Prince Albert tobacco. We gave them some Zig-Zag paper so they could roll smokes and have tea. They were talking with our guide. We had a Thai military phrase book and we finally got the idea that they were going to come back and kill us because we had too much stuff around that was just too saleable. Jack said, “My God, we’ve got to get out of here.” I said, “Wait a minute. Let’s find out what the old man wants to do. He lives here. He knows what’s going on. We don’t know where these people even are right now. They could be taking us in their sights right now.” He asked, “Well, what are you going to do?” I said, “I’m going to wait and see what the old man does.” The old man, he finally said something to the kid and the kid starts putting things together. He and the kid had been sleeping on the ground with the ants going over them, that didn’t make any difference to them. He cut some bushes and he put them into the two jungle hammocks. They were tied to one tree at one end and a tree here on the other end. Jack and I were in arm’s reach of each other pretty much. I had a 12 gauge. I took that and loaded that with buckshot. Jack had a Model 12 pump gun in 12 gauge and he put buckshot in that as well. We took up a counter-ambush position about 15 yards in the jungle. It was pretty thick right in there. At just a little after midnight, maybe an hour or two later, the old man reaches over and pokes me on the arm. He puts his cigarette in front of his lips and he points. You could see them in the moonlight, four of the five people that were in camp earlier. They had single-barreled shotguns when they were in camp before. Now they didn’t have the shotguns with them but they did have these big knives about two feet long. They each took up a position over one of the dummies that the kid had put together. I had these two guys right in front of me who thought they were going to hack us to death. Jack had another guy down on the end. The old hunter had the fellow in the middle. I only had two shots for two guys, and when that .375 went off next to me, I pulled the triggers and I got both of them, one with each shot. I shot them in the back as they started to hack what they thought was me, to death. Jack, who made it clear he didn’t want to shoot anybody, once it started he ended up hitting his guy about three times before he hit the ground. “Well,” he said, “this could be the end of my career.” I said, “It could have been the end of your life, you dummy. Good thing you did what you were told and followed this old man’s instructions.” The next morning, the old man and the boy stripped the bodies, put all their stuff on one elephant and put all of us on another elephant. He sent the one elephant back somewhere. I don’t know where he went, probably home. At about 3 o’clock in the afternoon, we were making another camp and here comes the elephant back with the kid on it. We hunted for another week and never saw anything to shoot except monkeys. I shot a monkey and we ate that just to taste it. It was tough as hell, but it was edible. It was much better while it was stew than it was when it was fried or anything else. If you had to eat it, you could. The kids there used to make Figure 4 traps. There were big lizards that lived in the ground. They weren’t monitors but they were pretty good sized. These lizards would come up and they’d stick their neck into this Figure 4 trap and choke to death. I’ve got that on film, pulling the stick out of the ground with the lizard thrashing away on one hand and me with the 8mm movie camera on the other hand. That was very good. We tried some kind of a great big hornet, as big as your little finger. The larva from these hornets were quite tasty. The hunter found one of these things and he fired up his pipe and he blew the smoke down the hole. We dug it up and we cooked them up and they were pretty good.

SAR: Did you see any modern military weapons or any unusual antique machine guns or anything while you were in Thailand?

Dave: Not in private hands. Remember, I spent three years working the surplus arms deals there for Sam Cummings. One of the museums in Bangkok, it’s part of a temple, had something I’d never seen anywhere. It was a Model 76 Winchester in a full-length case, highly engraved and gold-plated, with 50 cartridges, a loading tool that’s gold-plated and all the goodies. Very fancy wood. There’s a plaque on the lid of the box that says something like, “Presented to His Royal Highness,” and then all his titles and “for assistance to the United States.” There was a big hurricane they had, or a typhoon. It washed a US Navy ship ashore and the Thais helped out. That’s about the time that Perry was over there, I think, and it was commemorated later. They presented this rifle from the President of the United States, and I’ve never seen that written up in any book at all. This museum also had a 1″ bore solid bronze, including the barrel, pinfire revolving cannon. Now that’s something to see. The hammer is a dragon’s mouth and it comes out, and the cylinder is about a foot and a half around.

SAR: Any other exotic hunts?

Dave: On that hunt where we were ambushed, about the second day out, we split up into three groups. The other Thai guy who was hunting with us came running into camp and he’s screaming, “Ngoo Yai, Ngoo Yai,” which means “big snake” in Thai. I grabbed a double-barrel 12 gauge and put in some #4 buckshot and we ran up there where this “big snake” was. We got up where there was a little savanna of maybe 100 yards, 150 yards diameter. It was full of grass that was about two and a half feet tall, about knee-high. He worked hard to make me understand that there was a snake in there, that it was a big one, and that it would come after me if we went in. I smiled and said, “Yeah, go ahead and do what you want to do.” I got ready and I was looking around everywhere I could see for the bush to move for where that snake was going to be. Cobras, incidentally, are vindictive. They will defend territory. The guide cut a piece of bamboo that was about 12 or 15 feet long. It was pretty skinny and he trimmed all the leaves off the top except at the very end of it. He left a little bunch of leaves up there. Then he got alongside and a bit to the back of me and he indicated that I should walk along with him just to his right. He was going to sweep the grass with this piece of bamboo and I was going to shoot the snake. Well, we were just going to see how well this works out. [laughter] So, at any rate, we were walking along in there and I got in there about 30 seconds into the grass when I heard what was like a bottle of gas going, “Ssssssss,” a hissing noise. That damn snake came up out of the grass about four feet high and looked me right square in the eyeball. That just scared the shit out of me. [laughter] I had no idea, I mean NO idea, how big a King Cobra could get. I pulled both triggers and turned around and ran for my life. When I got out to where I could see if that snake was going to follow me or not, I was reloading the shotgun in a hurry. I looked around for my assistant and he was over there with his big knife, chopping. He finished the snake off with that knife. I just blew some of the head off and he chopped the rest of it. That was more than a little exciting. We brought it back to camp and skinned it out, but none of us knew anything about what we were doing and we didn’t preserve it properly. Unfortunately, I lost the trophy. That was a six meter King Cobra, over 19 feet long. I think the record on Kings is 22 feet long.

SAR: That’s an incredible snake, too bad you didn’t get the trophy.

Dave: In those days, it would have made quite a stir. As far as firearms go, I did make a trade with my Thai friend and one of the gunsmiths that had never been out of Bangkok. They’re all on one street, Boorapa Road. I’d been there enough that they all knew me after six months or so. This guy said, “I want you to take a look at this combination gun I’ve got. I can’t get any ammunition for it.” I looked at it and he brought out a combination double rifle Drilling. It was 9x57mm rimmed for the rifle barrels and 24 gauge on the shotgun barrel. The interesting thing about it, I’ve never seen this since, it had selective automatic ejectors on it which is very unusual on a Drilling. On the little ejectors themselves, they have a slot cut in there and a spring-loaded tooth so that you can put the smallest cartridges in there. The spring would depress as they went down. If the cartridges went in, the bottom of the case would depress the spring and then, when it got to the end, it would snap into the extraction groove of the cartridge. It worked just great. I bought some 500-grain soft-point bullets for another gun, for my Sharps. I kept looking at the Drilling, and 245-grain soft-point bullets I could get there, and I had a friend in the states who didn’t mind taking a few chances. Later, he got a few pounds of powder and mailed it to me along with primers and I made up the ammunition. It worked just fine. Anyway, I had to have this gun so I said, “What do you want for this?” He said, “I don’t want to sell it, I want to trade it to you. I want one of those new .44 magnum carbines because I just can’t get them over here.” I ordered one through the PX, and sure enough, it came through and I did the trade. After I had it about six months, I told the colonel in charge that carbine was going to be shipped back to the states and I gave it to this guy instead and took his Drilling. I had a Dutch friend who lived where the Bridge on the River Kwai was. We went hunting down in that same area where there’s an abandoned railroad track in the jungle and they keep just enough debris off of it to where you can take a section car and make it out over to these little jungle villages. Our host down there was a Dutchman, about 85 years old, named Captain Charles Brie Dubrow. I’ll never forget it. He gave us this treat of gin while we were there, warm gin, which is bad news. The Captain was just getting married for the second time. “That’s nice,” I said, “Did you have to get married?” He said, “No, I wanted to get married.” I was joking around with him and asked if he had any kids. He reflected and said, “No, not yet, but there’s one coming.” I laughed and said “You’re quite a man.” He said, “Actually, when I was looking for a woman, I got this matchmaker to look for a woman for me and the matchmaker said, “The only thing wrong with her is that she’s just a little bit pregnant.” [laughter] The Captain says, “My friend, at 100 meters you could tell she was a little bit pregnant. But at my age I don’t care, I liked what people might think!”

SAR: It’s 1959 and you were in Bangkok.

Dave: Yeah. The Vietnam War was starting to heat up a little bit. I met Sam Cummings in Bangkok, the president of Interarmco. He made me an offer to work for him as a moonlighter. He was in the Air Wong hotel which was the best hotel in town at that time. He was on an around-the-world trip for his honeymoon. He came by our little apartment and, in addition to helping out, he said, “The general said that you know about antique guns.” I said I did, and he started asking about what I had seen in Thailand. There were a lot of cannon there and he ended up getting all the cannon. They had a couple of beautiful Gatling Guns. There’s a museum there today, the Royal Thai Army Museum in Honour of HM The King, that’s never been opened to the public, and they have a lot of these beautiful guns on display there. Anyway, Sam made me a deal to act as a representative to buy and sell for him and Interarmco. It was 10% of whatever I did, and a monthly paycheck of $600. I was still holding military ID which got me into any of the places I needed to get into. The Immigration Department was looking for me of course. My wife had gone home already when her visa ran out. They knew where she was, but for some reason, they couldn’t find me. We had two children born over there, by the way. When they finally did find me, they said, “You’re going to have to leave.” I had a lot of stuff that I didn’t really want them to look at because it was illegal in most cases. I got a hold of my friend, Boon-aek. He was the Chinese pawn shop owner. Boon-aek said, “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of things.” On the day I had to leave, I had my passport, my ticket on the MATS flight, but I had to go through entire Thai Customs to get on the MATS flight. This Cadillac limousine pulls up out in front of my apartment. My friend was in there, with the Colonel who was the head of the Thai Arsenal. We got out at the airport and I gave him my suitcases and passport, as I was told. He said, “Get in the car,” and we drove out over the blacktop to the plane. They shook my hand, and I got on the plane and I asked where my passport and baggage was, and he said, “It’ll be right behind you.” And it was. He got me out of the country without any trouble.

SAR: What was the stuff that you had that wasn’t legal?

Dave: That combination Drilling was one thing because it hadn’t been properly registered, no papers been filled out on it. I didn’t have any proof of owning it, and even at that time in Thailand that was trouble. Oh, yeah, and I had a statue of Buddha about 18″ tall. It was an old one from Ayutthaya from about the year 1350.

SAR: Just happened to have a statue of the Buddha in your suitcase?

Dave: (Laughs) Yeah, guess that sounds out of context. Religious items like that were definitely not to be taken out of the country, even back then. A friend of mine, he had purchased this thing for $30,000 in cash from a dealer in upcountry Thailand, in the name of the Cincinnati Museum of Art. I was just the one that was supposed to smuggle it out of the country. I had it wrapped up in a towel in my suitcase. When I got to Pearl Harbor, the customs guy asked if I had anything to declare. I said, “Nothing except I got a rifle here that I neglected to have signed up before I went out of the country.” He said, “Well, you can fill this form out and swear that it was yours, then that’s okay.” I said, “I’ve got this other thing here in the towel.” He said, “What’s that worth?” I said, “Oh, maybe $30,000 or so.” He decided to impound that on the spot. I couldn’t have that happen since I’d promised to bring it, so I started in on how this was important, for the museum, and if there was so much as a scratch on it his ass would be in such a bind. He started getting nervous, and even though it was 3 o’clock in the morning in Cincinnati, Ohio at that time, he called up the director of the museum, got him out of bed and finally he hung up and he said, “It’s yours. Take it with you and get moving.” I had a couple of pistols, a baby Nambu, a Papa Nambu, and one of the palm firing “squeeze” pistols.

SAR: How long were you working for Sam Cummings in Thailand?

Dave: About two years. I didn’t come back to the states at all during that time. Found a lot of great stuff. There was a bunch of the little 50mm Krupp guns like Dolf Goldsmith purchased from us. They were beautiful little guns, and I still have one, it’s serial number 1. We found about 25 small cannon, one of which was very unusual. It was English and it was a breech-loader. It had two barrels, side by side. The breech block had a handle. You pulled the handle up and it rotated. Then the breech block pivoted out to the right side from one barrel, and the other pivoted out to the left side. It took a bag of powder with a ball in it and loaded from the breech end and fired with two percussion fuzes. It was very unusual. We got the cannon back to the States. Actually, Tom Nelson was in charge of that deal after I left. I’d been in business in California about a year and a half by that time. He called me up one day and he says, “You got any money?” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “You want to buy some cannon? The Thai stuff’s coming in.” I said, “Hell, yes I do!” I never did know who actually finalized those deals, whether Tom did it or somebody else did it. I never asked him, but I bought some cannon. There were Gatling guns and a couple of Nepalese Bira guns. Those look like big, ugly, pan-fed Gardeners. We were not interested in those, so we didn’t buy them but we bought all the rest of the cannon including the little bronze rifle breech-loading pieces. Really, these little guns were about the size of a two-pound Hotchkiss gun. We had some two-pound Hotchkiss guns, no wheels. We had to have wheels made. There ended up being about 35 of the little Krupp guns. There were quite a few thousand 8x50R caliber rifles that were made on a contract by the Imperial Arsenal in Koishakawa, Tokyo. It was a 98 Mauser bolt-action style, and an excellent rifle, sometimes called the “Siamese Mausers” or the “Type 45.”

SAR: You did the Armalite AR-10 project to the Thai government for Sam.

Dave: I got a letter from Sam which said, “We have information that leads us to believe that the Thais are going to have a weapons testing with the FAL. We would like to compete with the AR-10. Would you like to get into this?” As usual I said, “Hell, Yeah!” Sam said he’d make me a good deal if I could pull this off. The test was on a Saturday afternoon. I think it was 1959 or ’60. Interarmco sold me an AR-10. There was no trouble to get it. They just simply mailed it to me through the U.S. mail, and it came in by military mail at the G.I. Post Office in Bangkok. I had the gun, two magazines and a bayonet. It was an Artillerie Inrichtingen, an AI Dutch gun. A nice rifle, it had a wooden forend instead of plastic, and the bayonet had a combination tool like a Swiss Army knife built into the handle. That is what people call the “Sudanese AR-10” today. I went out to this test with this AR-10 that I didn’t know much about. I wrote in to the Thai government and I got permission to bring the gun, and they were very lackadaisical about the fact that I had a machine gun. I guess they figured, if he’s got it, it must be legal. They fired the FAL, which is a nice rifle as well. While the FAL shoots well, that AR-10 is a helluva lot more controllable with off-hand fire in particular. I had a Lyman bullet puller, and a hand-seating tool in .308. I pulled five rounds of the ammunition in .308 and dumped the powder out on the counter. I took a knife and just slipped half of the powder off on the floor. I did the same thing with about 20 rounds for the FAL. The FAL malfunctioned three times and my AR-10 didn’t malfunction at all. I did that right in front of the Thais, showed them that even if there was an inconsistency in the powder, the AR-10 would still function. Their response was positive. I was working with the Minister of Defense. The first thing he did was to put his hand on my shoulder and say, “I hope we can do business.” And I was thinking “My money’s made.” He then asked “How much money do I get out of this deal?” I negotiated with him, and he was supposed to get about 11/2 or 2% commission. There was another guy in the Ministry of Defense and he was supposed to get $25,000 US. Right as we were finalizing, I got this letter from Sam that said, “Discontinue AR-10 deal. Lost the manufacturing rights with the Dutch.” That was the end of that. There were about 10,000 AR-10s in the deal, at about $160 USD each. By the time it was all added up, it was about $7 million including the cost of the guns, ammunition, armorer kits, spare magazines and bayonets. I never did find out what the whole deal was; I figured it wasn’t my place to ask. Gene Stoner never came over while I was there on the AR-10 project.

SAR: Any other experience with assault weapons or machine guns in Thailand?

Dave: No, but I did learn how to charge the cylinder on a Pack 75 Howitzer. The Thais had a couple of those. They loved the older guns and they had a pile of ammunition for them, too but they never fired the Pack. I was watching this Thai working on this gun and I asked what he was doing. He spoke pretty good English and he said, “We’re trying to get the gas recuperative system charged up from the nitrogen bottle, but we don’t really understand what the terminology is.” I took the manual home and read it that night. The next morning I said, “Let’s put this thing together.” I said, “But we have to test fire it after we get through to make sure it works.” He said, “Well, of course.” So we fired about five rounds down the road and it worked just fine. The Pack 75mm is a neat little gun. They had a very interesting gun in the Thai Arsenal in Bangkok. It was an open-tracked vehicle very similar to a Scorpion, with an anti-tank gun, basically a tracked armored vehicle with a freestanding gun. It looked to me like a new German 88 mounted on there but it could have been something else. Sitting next to it, the most interesting cannon I’ve ever seen, was a pair of Bofors artillery pieces. They were over and under barrels. These were fed by hand. The Thais had a lot of neat cannon.

SAR: When you came back to the US, you got you involved in the regular firearms business?

Dave: I always wanted to be in the gun business, and that all started well before Thailand. I was in Mare Island Shipyard, and the ship was in for repairs. My wife-to-be was there, in nursing school. I’d known her before in college at the University of Virginia. I found out where she was and we dated and ended up getting married after two or three months. I was down at Mare Island one time, I’d been there about a week, I guess. I was taking the bus and I looked out the window and here’s this sign, the Old West Gun Room, a gun store. I pulled the chain on the bus and got off. I looked at the store, and made friends with the people in there. After a short time, I said, “George, if you ever want to sell this business and I’m in a position to buy it, I’d like to know.” That was the Old West Gun Room, in El Cerrito, California, which had started in 1952. George Repaire, the owner, was a Colt collector extraordinaire. He had bought the Sultan of Turkey’s Dragoon. It was the most elaborate, privately owned, engraved Colt in existence. The only other one was in the Hermitage in Russia. Actually, they were both supposed to go to the Czar as a pair but Colt needed to make points with the Turks so he gave the Sultan of Turkey one of the two guns they’d made for the Czar. Colt encased them both in very fancy cases, the whole ball of wax. Some years later he donated that Dragoon to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. He had turned down a $5 million price on the gun. It was 1955 when I first went into the Old West Gun Room, and I was hooked.

SAR: Did he have machine guns?

Dave: He had an old Colt Potato Digger with the leather case, and a Maxim MG08 on a sled mount. George had some old submachine guns, but everything was a Dewat. Those “Deactivated War Trophies” didn’t have to be registered at that time, that didn’t start until 1968 of course. I met George Repaire before I went to Thailand. When I was coming back, he wrote me a letter and he said, “My health is bad. I’ve got to move to Arizona. If you want the business, I’ll sell it to you for $10,000 down and the balance as sold. The $10,000 was for the goodwill and then he consigned a lot of guns to me to help me out. The Old West Gun Room had started in 1952, I got it in 1961, and as we’re talking today it’s still in business, being owned by my former manager Bob. Aside from the fact that we were living on cash flow, things were pretty good. Everybody thinks that it’s all big money in the gun business, but lots of times it’s hand-to-mouth for anybody with a gun shop. It was tough. The only thing that saved us was the building that the gun store was in; it was an old grocery store from about 1910. It was about 50 feet wide and about 25 feet deep, with a 12 foot tin ceiling. The three bedroom apartment attached to and behind the building was where we lived. If it hadn’t been for that I’d never been home because I stayed open until 8:00 o’clock at night. If I went to work I just opened the door in the wall and walked through and there I was in the gun shop. I sold that gun shop in 1984.

SAR: Did you start getting involved in the unusual firearms right away?

Dave: Of course! I went back east and my father-in-law gave us a ’52 Buick four-holed wagon. It had the four holes in the side of the fender. I put a rental trailer on it and went down to Interarmco and I bought a 25mm Hotchkiss, a 25mm Puteaux anti-tank gun and two cans of ammunition for each gun. There were eight rounds in the can. I put them in that trailer and then we put in mattresses and the furniture that her parents had given us and anything else we could get in. I took off and it took me a week to drive across the United States. Drove across on 80. I can’t remember the name of the damn mountain over here, the one right by Lake Tahoe. Coming down on the California side, the brakes started to go out on that old Buick. I told my nephew, “If I say ‘jump’, you open up the door and jump out into the ditch and I’ll put this thing up against the rocky wall and scrape it to a stop.” I did manage to get the rig stopped, but then it wouldn’t start up again. It was overheated. We finally managed to make it but we were worn right out. Then I didn’t have enough money to bring Elsie out so it was another month and a half before she could join me.

SAR: Did you shoot those 25mms right away?

Dave: No, I was having fun but doing business. There were two brothers that came in to the Gun Room. One was about 18; the other was about 21. They decided they had to have one of these 25mm cannon. Those guns were selling at Interarmco for $50 a piece. They were retailing them for $139 or something to that effect. I put $199 on them. These brothers decided that they had to have it so I sold them the gun for $199 and I sold them a can of ammunition for $2 a round, and I showed them how to work it. About a week later, I get a call from the Richmond Police Department. “Did you sell Joe and Bob Smith a cannon?” I answered that I had. “Well, where is it?” I said, “Hell, I don’t know. They probably got it. Go ask them.” They said, “We can’t find them.” I said, “Well, I’ll give you their address, at least the one that they gave me when they bought the gun.” So, I looked it up on the 4473 and the police headed out to find them. Turns out what these two had done is they’d gone down on Point Richmond where there used to be an old pistol range on top of a hill right by the old Kaiser Shipyards. That’s where the guards used to practice. They drive up there one Sunday on the top of this hill. You can’t see them from the bottom. There’s an island out there off the Richmond Bay Bridge, the bridge up in Marin County that crosses the bay. This island is called Red Rock because there’s a red rock sticking about 150 feet straight up, just a big knob right there in the middle of the bay. It’s about 1/4 mile from the bridge. These turkeys were firing at this little island out there. [laughter] The cops come up there and they said, “What are you doing?” They said, “Oh, we’re having a little target practice, officer.” “You can’t shoot a cannon here.” One of the brothers says, “Well, why not?” The cop told him “You just can’t.” “Is there any law against it?” And the cop scratches his head, he says, “I don’t think so but I’m just saying you can’t do it. It’s not safe.” That was a pretty crazy thing for them to be doing but at the time, Destructive Devices didn’t exist. It was just a firearm like any other, and they were just out target shooting.

SAR: Did you start getting any machine guns in or start doing any work with the movie industry?

Dave: Oh yeah, a lot. We moved into another location about 100 yards up the street. It was an old nursery, with a nice concrete building. By that time, Elsie and I had saved enough money where we could buy a home out in Pinole. We moved the business up there and started looking around. Just before we moved into the new place, I met Bert Jacques. He came into the store one day. He had this International Travel-All, with a special trailer made up for it that had hydraulic brakes that connected to the hydraulic brakes with slave pistons on his car. He could adjust the trailer so if he had a lot of weight in the trailer he could put more braking power on this. It worked pretty well, actually. He would go back to Interarmco and would buy a million rounds of beautiful 9mm ammo. I can’t remember who made it but it was gorgeous stuff. Interarmco had purchased several million rounds of the brass and they had it loaded. It was 2 cents a round in bulk. Bert would get his trailer loaded with this ammo. He’d start on the East Coast and he would sell ammunition as he proceeded to the West Coast and he’d just buy and sell as he went. By the time he got to the West Coast, he’d turn around and drive back and do it again. He came in the Gun Room and said, “You ain’t doing anything in machine guns?” I said, “Nope, never really thought about it.” I got to know him pretty well after a while. I had another friend whose name was Tom Phair and another friend by the name of Hal Ross. All these guys, we were all looking to go in together and get something but none of us had any money. We decided we would get together and we would call ourselves the OSS, Order and Supply Service. That we did and the first thing we got into was when Bert went up to somewhere in Sacramento. We had six Winchester BARs, World War I, high-polished finish – they were original Model of 1918 BARs. Semi- or fully automatic, just beautiful guns. We paid about $200 a piece for them. Bert said, “I think I can get about $450.” We said, “Boy, now that’s a good deal.” We were turning the money around for a fast profit. We kept on doing it. One day we got a phone call from a guy in Canada that Bert knew. He said, “We’ve got a Maxim machine gun up here that you might want to buy. It’s one of the guns that the U.S. Army used in the trials. It’s a .45-70.” I didn’t know anything about this because I’m not a machine gun addict. Bert on the other hand, said that we better go take a look at it. We bought a ticket and shipped him off to Montreal. The guy wanted about $2,500 for it. He had the tripod and some belts and miscellaneous odds and ends. It was in really nice shape but we didn’t buy it because we decided that it was too much money. A week or ten days later, I was having dinner with Bert down at a local restaurant. I looked at Bert and I said, “Bert, you know what I was thinking?” He said, “Yeah, I bet I was thinking the same thing you were thinking. We should have bought that goddamn gun.” I said, “Yeah, you’re right.” I said, “Do you know if it’s right or has it been put together?” He says, “I don’t know.” I said, “I don’t know either but one way or another, we ought to find out about it.” The next day, Bert called the guy up and he had sold it. As I recall, they made two of those.

SAR: Wish I knew where that was now.

Dave: We had a pile of machine guns go through the shop, but that was definitely “The one that got away.” We sold those BARs, and I got in a Potato Digger and they de-milled it by welding the barrel at the muzzle. We sawed a 1/2 inch off the muzzle, loaded it up and it worked like a charm. [laughs] We shot the heck out of it, then we welded it back up again and ended up selling it to a collector. That was when Dewats didn’t have to be registered, but people would activate them and de-act them pretty much at will.

SAR: When did you run into Dolf Goldsmith?

Dave: Now, that’s a whole story on its own…

Join us in Part II of the Dave Cumberland Interview in the next issue of SAR. Dave talks about the deals with Dolf, the Thorensen Affair, doing business in the Sixties, the movie gun deals, “The Old Western Scrounger,” Gardner guns, the Rock Crusher press and much more!

A village near Bangkok, Thailand, 11 November, 2007: SAR caught up with the intriguing and somewhat elusive Dr. Dater as he was making a pilgrimage to the site of the original Bridge over the River Kwai in Thailand (Doc Dater is a rail enthusiast as well as a military historian.) We joined him in an unsuccessful search for a mutual old friend, Don Walsh of 1970-80s clandestine weapons manufacturing fame. Don had left the US and joined the Thai Ex-Pat community in the 1980s, and Dr. Dater and I had discussed a reunion of sorts since we were both in SEA on defense related projects. Neither of us had contact with Don in a long time, and unfortunately, we did not find Don and that will have to wait for another day. We did manage to sit Dr. Dater down for a cheap glass of local white wine and the most in-depth interview ever done with a man who is considered by many to be one of the most innovative and perhaps the most copied suppressor designers of the last half century. – Dan

Dr. Philip H. Dater was born in the latter part of April, 1937 on Manhattan Island in New York City. He has two brothers, Tom and Sheldon, and a sister Emilie. Dr. Dater has two daughters from his first marriage, Diana and Valerie, and one daughter Julie with his wife, Jane, whom he has been happily married to for over thirty years. He is one of the brains behind Gemtech, and his private consulting practice with Antares Technologies has done a lot behind the scenes for the modern small arms community.

SAR: Phil, you were born right in the middle of the Great Depression, and started school just before World War Two.

Dater: That’s correct. I went to grade school in New York City, and when I was 13, we “escaped.” My mom moved to Kentucky, and I went to a military school for a year. The family moved to Wichita, Kansas, where my mom remarried, and I went to Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire for a couple years. I graduated from Wichita High School East. I went to the University of Kansas for two years, followed by the University of Wichita for two more. My major for three years was mechanical engineering. Then I switched to pre-med and went to McNeese State College in Lake Charles, Louisiana, for three years, graduated from there, and then went to Tulane University School of Medicine for my M.D. degree.

SAR: Those are two recurring themes in your life, mechanical engineering and medicine. What about firearms?

Dater: Clearly the mechanical interest drove me into firearms, like it leads some to cars or other machines. My first handgun was a German Luger; I paid $15 for it from a store in Exeter, New Hampshire. I was 14 years old.

SAR: You were able to walk into a gun store in 1951, at 14 years old, and buy a handgun?

Dater: Of course. That was perfectly normal. There were no restrictions on it. No problems in society from it either.

SAR: When did your interest in automatic weapons come in?

Dater: I got my first exposure to real full auto when I was about 15. One of my classmates at Exeter lived in upstate New Hampshire, and he had a Russian PPSh-41. We’d occasionally go up to his place for the weekend and shoot that, and his 45-70 lever action. That was 1952. No one knew there was an issue about registration, so I don’t know if it was registered or not.

SAR: When did you get your first automatic weapon?

Dater: I purchased an M1 Thompson in 1955, when I was a student at the University of Kansas. Over the next couple years, until probably mid-1957, I ended up purchasing approximately 14 automatic weapons. I had a 1918A2 BAR, an M2 carbine and a Sten MK II. I also had an FG42 that I bought from a police officer. I don’t remember if it was a first or second model. None of it was in the Registry, we really didn’t know about the registration being needed. You could buy them fairly easily at gun shows. I bought my Thompson from a private individual in Kansas. We had been chatting, and I had expressed an interest in machine guns, and one of my friends there said, “Oh, my uncle has a Thompson, and he’s not interested in keeping it.” And I said, “Well, I’d sure like to buy the thing.” I paid $75 for it.

SAR: You didn’t even know what the National Firearms Act was?

Dater: No, I did not know what it was at the time. It was easy to find machine guns. Most salespeople at gun stores would provide contact information, and you could find them at almost any gun show – there weren’t many shows then, either. A lot of veterans had brought guns home and they were considered alright by everyone I met. There was no big deal about it; nobody was really concerned about it. Nobody cared. In fact, when I first moved to Louisiana, I lived for the first year in a little town called Oberlin, which is about 50 miles north of Lake Charles. The sheriff of the Parish and I would go out together, and we’d shoot turtles with machine guns. He’d take his department’s Reising M50 out and I’d take my Thompson or my Reising. We could buy surplus GI 45 ACP ammo for about a penny a round. It was cheaper than .22 long rifle, and we’d go out and shoot turtles. He never mentioned any machine gun registration. The captain of that district of the state police had his own 1928 Thompson, and he’d come out shooting with us. In fact, I would clean his Thompson. At one point, his gun wasn’t working, and I just swapped firing pins out of my M1 Thompson with it. They all had personal machine guns, no one ever mentioned anything about a “Registry” so we just bought and sold them like regular firearms. Eventually, these were taken from me. A friend of mine I’d done some trading with heard about this need to register machine guns, so he wanted to register everything, and he went to a local police department in another town in southern Louisiana to find out about it. The police department called the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax Unit from the IRS to find out how to go ahead and register this guy’s collection, because they didn’t know either. This guy had Maxims and everything else. The agent from the ATTU came out and confiscated his entire collection. One of the things they asked is, “Well, where did you get this, and where did you get that?” They were interested primarily in whoever had stolen some originally from the US government or if someone originally imported it illegally. A number of machine guns that we had were converted from what were then called “Dewats” (Deactivated War Trophies), which in those days were pretty easy to buy and sell, and to reactivate. Dewats didn’t require registration in those days. The Reising that I had was originally a Model 60, and I had built the complete conversion on it to a Model 50 Reising. The agent came and knocked on my door, I was 20 years old at the time. (Of course, in those days, the age of majority was 21). He just came in and said, “I’m here about some machine guns, we just picked up your friend, and he had done some trading with you. I need to see what you have and where it came from.” Then, they took my machine guns away.

SAR: Let me recap that. It was over 50 years ago, and nobody really was paying attention to any requirement for registration, none of the police departments knew anything, many actually had their own unregistered weapons personally, and they went out shooting with non-LE. As soon as your friend found out about it and went in to register, the government came out and confiscated his firearms collection then hunted down everyone he knew?

Dater: Exactly. I didn’t really know that they were illegal for private ownership, or that there was such a thing as a Registry or National Firearms Act until the agent paid me a visit from ATTU in 1957. It was in 1968 that Congress recognized that so many guns were not registered in the NFRTR that with the new laws they had to have an Amnesty and publicize the registration requirement. At that point in1957 though, I realized that there was a serious issue about machine guns. I learned more about it, and in the early Sixties when I wanted a Sten, I wanted a Dewat because there was no big deal on it, no registration needed. I bought one from a guy up in Wisconsin, mail order, he had advertised in Shotgun News. It came with some registration papers. I called him and said, “What is this?” He said, “Oh, registration is voluntary on Dewats.” Of course, that turned out to be a valuable asset when 1968 came and went. The first registered working machine gun that I bought was in 1976, and it was the little Military Armament Corporation Ingram M11 in .380. I’d just seen the movie, “McQ,” and I went into a local sporting goods store and said, “Boy, I just saw a neat movie with a neat little machine gun. Are there any dealers in town?” The guy in the sporting goods store, sort of almost like back in the ’50s, he says, “Yeah, go see Sid McQueen at S&S Arms,” and gave me the address. I went over to Sid’s, and he had about a half dozen of these and a bunch of other things hanging on the wall. And I thought, “Gee, that is cute,” because it was so tiny. I bought it, and I bought the silencer to go with it. The Form 4 took a whole three weeks to go through. Anything that went over three weeks, everyone started to get really antsy about. The funny thing was at that point in time, when the paperwork was in on that, I got a call from ATF. This is, again, in ’76. They said, “Are you the same Philip Dater who used to live in New Orleans and had a registered Dewat Sten? Did you know that you were supposed to notify us when you moved?” And I said, “No, I didn’t know that.” They said, “Well, we’ll take care of it, we’ll amend the Registry to show that.” I said, “You know, I don’t even remember where the paperwork is on that Sten,” and they said, “Well, we’ll send you a copy of it,” and they did. They were very helpful in those days.

SAR: You mentioned that you bought a suppressor in 1976 from Sid McQueen, but that was certainly not your first experience with firearm suppressors.

Dater: I had fired an original Maxim .22 suppressor on a rifle in .22WRF caliber, and had been involved with Amateur Radio since 1950. Hiram Percy Maxim, Sr. was the Father of Amateur Radio you know, as well as inventor of the Maxim Silencer, so I was familiar with his work. It was 1958 for my first crude design though. While I knew there was registration of machine guns, nothing had been said about silencers. I had a problem with some neighborhood critters when I was living in Lake Charles, Louisiana. The first suppressor I made went on a .22 Mossberg rifle that I had. I was looking for some way to couple the suppressor to the gun. I thought of the Rayovac flashlight that had a nice big head, and Thermos made a nice big cork that was about the right size to replace the lens and the bulb. I used an old Rayovac flashlight, and for packing material on it, I used corrugated cardboard. I carefully punched out with a paper punch some quarter inch holes, and then with scissors, I cut around an outline that would just fit into the flashlight body. I made that suppressor out of an old flashlight and a whole bunch of corrugated cardboard disks. Some were smaller than others, so this might be considered “wiped”. I certainly didn’t invent “wipe” suppressors, the Welrod and some others were before then.

SAR: So your first suppressor design was over fifty years ago? What was your second design?

Dater: The second design was actually a little more sophisticated. It was made out of some brass tubing for a drain pipe for a sink, and soldered in a mount with some threads on it. Actually, the first one didn’t have usable threads, it just had a hole and a couple of set screws to hold it in. I made a little cage that supported some fiberglass insulation. It was sort of along the lines of a glass pack muffler. That was probably about ’62. I was in medical school at the time, and there was a streetlight outside of our apartment that was a real irritant, shined in at night.

SAR: So you had to attend to that streetlight.

Dater: That’s exactly what I did. That was also the first time (1962) I wrote an article in regard to suppressors. My friends there said, “Gee, that’s neat. We’d like to get some.” I said, “I don’t want to build them, I don’t have time to do it,” but I sat down and wrote an article with some relatively crude mechanical drawings as to how to build one, and it was the glass pack muffler design, and actually gave a description of how it worked, and how the old Maxim worked, and why I thought the glass pack design was probably better than the baffled maxim. I got the idea for the glass pack from mufflers.

SAR: From car mufflers? I don’t remember ever seeing a suppressor with a glass pack in it in that time period.

Dater: I don’t recall seeing any others either but it became common in the Seventies designs. I used to do an awful lot of work on my old ’55 Triumph TR2, and it had a straight-through muffler in it that was basically a glass pack.

SAR: So you took automotive muffler technology and applied it to your sound suppressor to get rid of the streetlight that was keeping you from studying or sleeping at night, during medical school.

Dater: That’s correct. [laughter] The streetlamp itself was a big glass globe with a bulb inside. I don’t know what kind of glass it was, it was probably pretty good, but it made a little hole going in, and a fairly large hole going out, and the bulb itself was in the path of the bullet. I shot it out and the next day, I went downstairs, outside, to go to my car, and I looked at that and sort of laughed. Then I visually lined up the two holes from the globe, and there’s only one window that it could’ve possibly come from, and that was my window. They did replace the bulb, and I took that out a couple days later, but I used a water gun the next time. It’s amazing what a little bit of water on a hot light bulb will do: they shatter.

SAR: What about military service?

Dater: I went into the Air Force in September of ’65 as a general medical officer. I was in the Air Force for two years and spent the entire two years stationed in Roswell, New Mexico, at Walker Air Force Base, part of the 812th medical group. The commanding officer said, “We need a pediatrician. How would you like to do that?” And I replied, “That’s actually what I’d like to go into,” so I became a pediatrician at that point, and I had a board-certified pediatrician who was my supervisor. I had a wonderful two years there defending our country against the communist menace there in Roswell to the best of my ability. I don’t think there were any communists in Roswell; it was a very Republican county in New Mexico. I took care of the children of many of the military personnel who were serving in South East Asia.

SAR: Roswell is the place that they purportedly had the alien bodies. You were in the medical groups there at Roswell. Any comment on that?

Dater: No. We don’t talk about that.

SAR: (Uncomfortable silence) Uh, OK…. After your service, you were in the medical field, and you stayed in New Mexico?

Dater: I stayed in New Mexico. I started a residency in pediatrics at the University of New Mexico, which at that time, the hospital itself was Bernalillo County Indian Hospital. It subsequently became the University of New Mexico Hospital. I completed one year of pediatric residency, and then switched to radiology. My radiology residency was done in a private institution, Lovelace Bataan Medical Center.

SAR: Going back to the firearms and suppressors, in 1976 you were still in New Mexico, and you met with Sid McQueen.

Dater: Yes, and I ended up buying two other silencers from him. One was an integrally silenced Ruger MKI pistol by Military Armament Corporation. I forget the model number on it, but I remember the silencer tube was approximately six inches long; it was a relatively compact unit. The other was an MA-1 for the M16 rifle. It had the teakettle whistle type thing on the side for pressure relief. Interestingly, Military Armament Corporation had forgotten to put the muzzle threads in this and some others of this model suppressor. This suppressor comes back over the barrel, and was supposed to screw into the barrel threads in the center support, and then there was a split collet at the back that tightened to the barrel and kept it from unscrewing. The people at S&S Arms thought that you just put the suppressor on the barrel and pulled it as far forward as you could against that internal support, and then tighten it down with a pair of vice grips. Amazingly, we didn’t have too many baffle strikes doing that. I figured out what was supposed to happen, how it was supposed to mount, thanks to J. David Truby’s Silencers, Snipers and Assassins and the diagrams in it.

SAR: You and David Truby have been friends for many years.

Dater: That correspondence started a couple years later. Sid McQueen is the guy who invented the Sidewinder submachine gun. Sid’s store was robbed once and he shot both armed robbers, killing one and permanently disabling the other. He used a registered M2 Carbine, firing 15 rounds and he said the reason he only fired 15 was the gun jammed. His family lived in the back and there was no way he was letting them be threatened.

SAR: What was your first suppressor design in that period?

Dater: I had that MAC made Ruger and after about 500 rounds, it started to get awfully loud. I called Military Armament Corporation, and asked, “How can I rejuvenate this?” The gentleman I talked to there said, “Well, there’s not much that can be done. The weapon was designed for a lifespan of 150, maybe 200 rounds. 40 or 50 rounds for qualification, then it would be taken out on a mission and deep six’d at the end.” It was not designed to come apart; it was not designed to be rejuvenated. The basic design on it was a barrel that was Swiss cheesed with holes, surrounded by stacked screen discs, sort of like the High Standard, HD Military. Then it had a wipe in the front, because MAC liked wipes. I asked if I could send it back, they said, “No, there’s no way to do that, because there’d be a tax coming back, and a tax going back to you.” They were absolutely wrong on that, but nobody knew the difference at that time. So I thought, well, they put it together, it has to be able to come apart, and that turned out to be a very difficult process. But I did disassemble it, and I found a way to repack it. The repacking was done using a copper mesh material, the Chore Boy, (at that time it was Chore Girl), pure copper scouring pads, and I figured how to modify those to have approximately the same density as the original screen washers that were in the unit. I repacked that a couple of times; it brought the unit back to normal performance. I decided I could improve the design, so, I called Sid McQueen and asked if I could build under his Class 2 license; I only had a Class 3 dealer’s SOT with a friend. I built my first prototype in a machine shop in the basement of the x-ray department of Lovelace Clinic. They had a full machine shop down there that wasn’t being used for anything else. I figured I might as well build instruments of death and destruction in the hospital. This prototype became, eventually, the model RST suppressor that I marketed under the name of Automatic Weapons Company, and the MKII Ruger that was later built under the name of AWC Systems Technology. This design used the 4-3/4 inch barreled Ruger. Basically, the back part of the barrel was Swiss cheesed, and had the Chore Boy copper scouring pads packed in there. Then there was a little separator, and then there was just a tube with a bunch of perforated holes in it, and a little bit of fiberglass wrapped around it. It was very quiet. The disadvantage was every 4-500 rounds, you had to disassemble it and repack it, but the instructions told exactly how to do it, how to prepare the material for packing. To see if the instructions could be followed by almost anyone, I handed a dirty gun to my sister with a set of instructions, said, “Here, repack this.” She found a few places where we had to modify the instructions a little bit for clarity, but she was able to do it. I figured if she could do it, anyone could.

SAR: You started Automatic Weapons Company in 1976?

Dater: Yes, but it wasn’t my Class 3 dealer’s license. Initially, it was a Type 6 Manufacturer of Ammunition. I got a little Star reloader, and I was going out machine-gunning with some of my friends on Sunday mornings, a group in Albuquerque led by a psychiatrist who billed himself as New Mexico’s oldest and largest machine gun dealer. He was older than the rest of us and he was more corpulent as well. And, he was a lot of fun. I started loading ammunition for other people there and figured I needed a license to do it. In ’78, my partner in our Class III dealership, which was called Historical Armaments, ended up in some legal difficulties, and ATF “suggested” that I divorce myself from him. At that point, I changed the Automatic Weapons Company license to an 07 manufacturer, and paid the Class 2 SOT. I also was making integrally suppressed Ruger 10/22 rifles. That was also around when you and I started talking about suppressors.

SAR: There was one major suppressor manufacturer at that time that had a production quality line and my company was a distributor for him. Other than Military Armament Corporation, there was Jonathan Arthur Ciener.

Dater: That’s absolutely correct. Jonathan, as I recall, actually started around 1975, somewhere in that area. In my opinion he is, more than anyone else, responsible for the civilian interest in ownership of firearm silencers. He advertised everywhere. I know I saw his ads in American Rifleman. They were in a lot of the gun magazines. I think they were even in Popular Mechanics or Popular Science. Little, one-inch ads about silencers, and his products were cutting edge technology for the era. Many of his designs were using baffles, not packing material. Some of them were a little larger than what I was doing, but they worked extremely well. If it hadn’t been for Jonathan, I don’t think that the civilian suppressor market would be where it is today. He was a pioneer. Jonathan was “it” on the civilian market, the leader. For the military, Reed Knight and Mickey Finn were both early on, Don Walsh also. I didn’t meet Reed until the early ’80s, and I know he had been in the business for quite a while prior to that.

SAR: One of your most popular designs was the SG-9.

Dater: The SG-9 design itself came in, I believe it was ’78, possibly as late as ’79, and it was actually originally called the M-76, because it was for the Smith & Wesson 76. That was the first one. And the second one was called I guess SM2 for the Sten, and then subsequently it became the SG-9. The SG-9, which is made today the same way it was made in the late ’70s, used stamped baffles. The difference between the Sten version and the Smith version was the barrel and barrel mounting nut that was interchangeable in there. The interchangeability carried on to a little bit later in the early ’80s, either late ’83 or early ’84, when I designed what became the Mark 9 suppressor, that not only did I build under my Automatic Weapons Company license, but AWC Systems Technology ended up building also. That was a coaxial design, and the basic baffle stack, the basic configuration was my design on it. I had different barrel and mounts available for the Smith 76 and for the Mark II. Tim Bixler was working as the machinist for AWC Systems Technology. He took the design and made it into a very universal suppressor where all you changed was one little aluminum part at the back of the suppressor, and you could mount it on almost anything imaginable, including the HK weapons, the MP-5, which was coming up at that point in time, mount it on the Ingrams. The MK9 became a true workhorse. People still refer to it sort of as the standard of comparison for performance on 9mm sub-gun suppressors. Yes, it’s a little large. The original one was two inches in diameter and 12 inches long. About ’91, I redesigned it a little bit, came up with the MK 9K, which is still classed as a workhorse, and it too is pretty much a standard of comparison. We shortened the “K” up to where the overall length of the suppressor was seven and a half inches instead of 12, with more efficient diversion of the gases into the coaxial entrance chamber. The actual entrance chamber was surrounding the baffle stack.

SAR: The Bixler mount system, AWC Systems Technology had many different mounts for the MK9 series, for Beretta 12, MACs, I think there were about nine different mounts that you could get for it.

Dater: Well, it wasn’t an issue until ’86 that the ATF started having questions about suppressor parts, and the MK9 started late ’83, early ’84. Bixler, a very innovative machinist, came up with the interchangeable mounting system. It was a slight redesign in the entrance chamber, and also came up with the first practical 3-lug coupler and patented it successfully. It did not use any springs. In fact, he sold the patent to what has now become STW, and they’re producing that mount themselves. At Gemtech we’ve gone with Greg Latka’s mount, which is a push and twist and lock system.

For most of these early designs, I was living in Albuquerque, New Mexico, working out of my garage, had a lathe, had a drill press, no milling machine. What little welding I did was done with oxyacetylene, and it tended to be more silver soldering. My products were basically hand-built, one at a time. There were limits as to what I could do but it was a great stay-at-home hobby for a doctor. When you’re on call, you stay at home and build silencers. [laughs] Sometimes, when I’d be on call at the hospital and had to stay there, I’d just go down to the basement and I’d work in their machine shop, which I had a key to. Automatic Weapons Company went fairly slowly for a number of years. Around ’79 or so, Chuck Taylor wrote a little short piece on my work. The first major piece that was written on my suppressors was done by Peter Kokalis. He came out and wrote it in August of ’81. Peter at the time was a freelance writer, had a few items published in Soldier of Fortune, and he’d asked Bob Brown for an assignment to write about. “Oh, there’s a suppressor manufacturer in New Mexico, why don’t you call him?” Peter came out and spent a couple days with me, stayed at my house. We went through a lot of the designs. Bob Brown came down for the photo shoot and the product demonstration. Peter wrote a fabulous article on my products. It was not really what you’d call a puff piece, because he was very honest in his evaluations. One of the things I did respect very much about Peter was that he did not try to take any product, which of course worked very well for me, because, being as small as I was, I couldn’t afford to give away much. He did buy some products, but he paid full dealer price for it.

SAR: That’s entirely appropriate, respectable, and it has been my policy all along as a writer, and it is SAR’s policy. Robert K. Brown is an operator with real world suppressor experience going back to the Sixties. What was Bob’s reaction to your suppressors?

Dater: My recollection is that he was very pleased with what he saw, but it was Peter’s article so he just enjoyed shooting. We had the silenced Ruger pistol; we had a Ruger 10/22 rifle. We had a couple for the M16 and one for the Sten and the Smith 76. There were several for center fire pistols. Bob certainly enjoyed going out on the mesa and shooting. In Albuquerque, we used to be able to just go out on the edge of town and shoot all kinds of stuff. It was not nearly as developed as it is now. I did go to a civilian gathering; Peter Kokalis invited me to come to one of Dillon’s earlier shoots at S-P (ShitPot) Crater in ’81. That was the first time I actually met Mike Dillon. I met a number of the people in the Class 3 community. We camped out there at the crater and did the night shoot, and just had a lot of fun.

SAR: What was the end result of the Soldier of Fortune article?

Dater: I got real busy. [laughs] Soldier of Fortune magazine was really on the way up. It was a relatively new magazine at that point. It started in ’75 as a quarterly and it had just gone monthly. It’s called “Doc Dater’s Deadly Devices.” It was in November of ’81. Somewhere along in that period, I wrote an article on suppressor design for SWAT Magazine, and it was in the Volume One, Number Two issue, Chuck Taylor had asked me to write it. It was a 5,000-word article, and what I didn’t realize, of course, was they only paid for about the first 3,000 words, and the rest of it was just sort of freebies.

SAR: Writing has never paid that well. Your suppressor line in 1981 was fully developed, for Automatic Weapons Company. I had a number of pieces from AWC, and I’ll be honest, Jonathan Ciener was where I was buying most of mine. Your product was also highly respected by people. At that time, in the civilian market, there was the new SWD product line, the old MAC stuff, the old RPB items, but they pretty much stayed to the MAC suppressors, some .22 cans, and M16 cans. There were a number of shops in the early Eighties that turned out clone cans of the MAC styles.

Dater: That is about right; there wasn’t a lot of production work in this business. I stayed by myself until probably about ’83. At that point, one of my customers in Friendswood, Texas, was Lynn McWilliams. He had bought a number of items, and he wanted to buy more than I could produce. Lynn said, “Why don’t you let me take over the actual production and manufacturing? You just do design work and I’ll pay you a royalty on the products that you design, that I build.” That sounded like a pretty good idea. I think my sales, before I joined up with Lynn, had been right around $25,000 a year. Of course, those are in 1981 or ’82 dollars which is about $250,000 a year today. [laughter] He started doing the production, and Tim Bixler was his machinist. Tim worked out of his garage, but he was an outstanding machinist, and he was more oriented towards production. I still manufactured some of the parts, and I had the engraving equipment, so I did all the marking on the suppressors. They came out for a couple years under the name of Automatic Weapons Company in Houston, Texas. In about ’85 or ’86, Lynn changed the name of his company to AWC Systems Technology. We continued to work together, until probably about ’89, when he hired Doug Olson who had been with Mickey Finn’s organization, Qual-A-Tec, and started to produce some of Doug’s newer designs. We sort of went our separate ways around then. It was very amicable. I still think very highly of Lynn McWilliams, and I consider him a friend.

SAR: Up until the late 1980s, where you had split off from AWC Systems Technology, what were the development levels of your sound suppressors?

Dater: We still were producing the integral Ruger pistols and rifles using some of the late ’70s technology, which was the shredded copper packing material, and the fiberglass. These were systems that worked; all of the projectiles were kept sub-sonic. Because of porting, the weapons cycled well: the accuracy was phenomenal on some of those weapons. It had to do with velocity control and making the bullet run at a speed where it gave its greatest accuracy for the twist rate of the barrels. On the center fire suppressors, of course, this sort of technology didn’t work. Others were machined baffles, usually out of aluminum. Fairly shallow M-shaped baffles, and one of the first M-baffles or K-baffles. This letter description is the letter that the baffle most closely resembles when it’s cut cross-sectionally. An M-baffle is basically a cone with a spacer that is built integral to it. It’s a conical baffle and spacer that’s been integrated. That was difficult for me to machine with the equipment I had, there was no automation. What I had were strictly manual lathes. What was easiest for me was to just make spacers out of tubing, and then stamping the baffles. Originally I ended up getting fender washers bought at the hardware store, and then I bought a hydraulic press and I made some dies and formed the baffles into shallow cones. Then I only had to trim the baffles, because they wouldn’t necessarily fit in the tube correctly. Eventually, I started having the washer blanks custom punched with a specific inside diameter hole, and a specific outside diameter, so that when they were formed, the hole on the inside would expand out to the size that I wanted, and the outside would constrict in, just enough to where it would fit inside the tube, and I could maintain good alignment throughout the entire suppressor. One of the things we found at that point was that the sound levels varied with the diameter of the hole in the baffle or the aperture. The tighter the aperture, the more gas was trapped in the baffle itself, and the exit of the gas was delayed more. The problem is that there’s always a little bullet instability. When the bullet leaves the rifling, it starts to spin in free air, which in this case is inside the suppressor. If you have the aperture too tight, which some people do even today, then you’re more apt to clip baffles. There’s a definite compromise in there. We did some experiments at AWC Systems Technology on a .223 thread-on suppressor where we tried various apertures. We started with a quarter-inch, .250 aperture throughout the suppressor, did sound measurements, then increased it 15 thousandths, did some more measurements, increased it again 15 thousandths, did some more. We found there’s probably about a three-decibel loss in performance with each increasing of the bore aperture.

Throughout the ’70s and most of the ’80s, we all used relatively simplistic baffle designs, that tended to have a lot of symmetry. This helped with the accuracy of the system. Around 1980 I started thinking, “I need to know exactly what we are doing. I need to get some reliable method of trying to do sound measurements.” I’d read the Frankfurt Arsenal Report, the World War Two study, where they had done sound measurements out on the field with a big microphone. The tests I remember were on the Sten, with and without the Mark Two suppressor. Non-suppressed, they were measuring 124 decibels or something like that. On the suppressed, it was down in the 90-decibel range, give or take a moderate amount. They were using a microphone that was fairly large. They were recording it on high-quality recorders, then taking it back into the lab, and playing the recorders into oscilloscopes to try and get the actual sound pressure levels. They were setting the microphone; I believe it was something like five meters from the muzzle. Well, I knew that the sound measurements they were doing did not ring true. I knew that the sound levels were higher than that. My first attempt at doing sound measurements was like many people at that time, with a little Radio Shack $39 meter. It gave wonderful results. I mean, non-suppressed .22s were in the 120-decibel range, if you could estimate how high the needle was kicking, because it didn’t have a peak hold or anything like that. I realized that didn’t work very well. I was talking with Don Walsh or Reed Knight, I forget which one it was, and they said they were using the B&K 2209 with the 4136 microphone. The non-suppressed and the suppressed results I was getting were nowhere near believable. I couldn’t afford the B&K meter at that time. I was doing acceptably well practicing medicine, but there’s only so much of that revenue that one can divert into the hobby, and my feeling has always been that any hobby that’s being run as a business has to be self-supporting, and not depend on capital infusions from elsewhere. The next sound meter I got was a Heathkit. This was their new digital spectrum analyzer. It was an interesting device. I think it actually went up to something like a maximum input of 130 decibels, somewhere along in there. I figured I’d just space the microphone out. I would get the energy level at each half-octave. But I didn’t really understand the concept of rise time at that point. The rise time on that meter was not very good. So the results were not totally believable there either. If I integrated all of the spectrum, I could come up with an [absolute] sound pressure level, which I didn’t quite believe. It was still measuring too low. If I took just one specific frequency, it was 4,000 hertz, it was closer to what I would’ve anticipated. On some of my early measurements, I looked at that one frequency as being what the actual sound level was. I was talking with Reed Knight sometime in the late ’80s, maybe it was ’87 or ’88, and he said, “You know, this company, Larson-Davis, has a meter that may do the job,” it was the model 700. So I called Larson-Davis, and I bought one of the meters.

SAR: Model 700?

Dater: Yes, Model 700. It had some problems. It had kind of a slow rise time, maximum input was 140 dB. After playing with that for a couple months, I realized it wasn’t going to do the job. So I called Larson-Davis and said, “Here’s what I need,” and I went through the specs that I needed, which included the 20-microsecond or better rise time, that was in the military standard. They said, “What you need is our 800B, and you need this microphone.” Then they made a wonderful offer. They said, “Since you bought the original model 700 for this one purpose, and it’s not suitable, we’ll allow you, as a trade-in, what you paid for the model 700,” and that was really a dealmaker. I got the 800B. Of course, from that point, all of the readings were completely believable and completely consistent with what the B&K did. I really credit Reed an awful lot with guiding me on doing sound measurements. It was the late ’80s when I got the Larson-Davis. Some of the catalogs that Lynn McWilliams and I did as AWC Systems Technology, we put in sound measurements that we got with some of the earlier equipment that really wasn’t doing the job quite right. But we were proud of the sound measurements we were getting. We should’ve been proud of them. The numbers were pretty good. Reed called at one point and said, “Phil, I don’t believe you’re getting the results you think you are.” He was absolutely right.

SAR: In the early ’80s, you started having concern about scientific testing of sound. As a physician, at what point did you begin to get concerned about hearing loss and hearing damage from firing weapons?

Dater: It was around the same time. I hadn’t really gotten into knowing what was safe and what wasn’t safe. I hadn’t really studied that very much. But it was around that time that I began to realize that I was having hearing problems. I shot many tens of thousands of rounds through machine guns, through sub-guns, hunting turtles with the sheriff of Allen Parish, Louisiana, and with some of my friends, this sort of thing. “Real men don’t wear hearing protection” was what we thought. While getting ready for quail season or pheasant season, we’d go skeet shooting with my stepfather. You’re on a 12-gauge for 25 shots per round and usually run about four rounds. What was even more irritating was the ringing in my ears continuously, which has not gotten better, but fortunately hasn’t gotten a whole lot worse since I started using sound suppressors. Then I read that the VA spends on average approximately $4,000 per year per veteran in hearing damage claims. I know the kind of sound levels that some of those troops have been subjected to. It became a real issue and sound suppressors on firearms can definitely help.

SAR: You’ve written about sound testing, due to your concern about the misinformation that the whole industry had about sound suppressors.

Dater: I currently still publish a pamphlet on this. I wrote an article for Small Arms Review on Firearm Sound Testing (August, 2000). I had read the Mil Standard – 1474c – what it was saying about the equipment requirements. I also knew what levels were believable and what weren’t, and I would hear people say, “We did measurements and we’re getting 48 decibels reduction,” or some bizarre number, and I’d ask what the suppressed and non-suppressed was, and the suppressed levels were running a way lower than they should, or the non-suppressed were running a little lower than they should have. I could look at that data and explain, “Your microphone or your system does not have the rise time to actually catch the peaks.” In the mid ’80s, a friend of mine who worked at Sandia Labs said that even in 20 microseconds, you’re probably missing a good deal of the sound level peaks, because they’re of shorter duration than that. “We know, we blow up things, and we measure sound pressure levels. We have transducers that pick up sound impulses that have rise times of less than 20 or 30 nanoseconds, much less microseconds.” I said, “Gee, what do those transducers cost?” He said, “Well, they run about $1,000 each.” I said, “That sounds great.” He says, “Yeah, but they’re only good for one shot, and then they’re toast.” That, of course, was not practical.

There were, and are, a lot of people who try to promote their product, testing with equipment that just flat out wouldn’t do the job. The famed Radio Shack meter, or the meter by Quest that had, I think a 100-microsecond rise time, missed most of the suppressed pulse. During that period, Al Paulson was starting to do silencer reviews. Al and I talked a lot. Some of his very early reviews of some of our product actually used some of the data from my spectrum analyzer. Then he decided that, and rightly so, that he needed to get his own meter, and he got a B&K 2209. We worked together, comparing a lot of the test results that we got. Al got very good results. His results were believable and accurate, and Al’s a true scientist. I’d written something previously that Al ended up quoting in his book, Silencer History and Performance: Volume One.

SAR: A number of other people who were in the industry shared information.

Dater: In those days, you would be hard pressed to think of a suppressor designer who wasn’t willing to share non-proprietary information, to discuss the science with others. There really was a Renaissance of suppressor design from the 1980s-90s. It was an exciting time in this business. That was around the time I was getting ready to leave New Mexico. I still built a few things under the old Automatic Weapons Company name, which is a name I still maintain. I had incorporated in the meantime. The corporate name is Antares Technologies Incorporated, doing business as the Automatic Weapons Company. Originally, it was to be just the corporate structure for the building of suppressors, but it ended up becoming more of a consulting firm to the small arms community.

SAR: You’ve worked with a number of clients over the last 20-odd years, on firearm and suppressor design.

Dater: True, but my prime focus as a business is my partnership in Gemini Technologies; Gemtech. After I moved to Boise, Idaho, in ’91, I started to build again under the Automatic Weapons Company name, and sold a few items. I actually even ran a small ad in the old Machine Gun News, including an ad to do sound measurements for other manufacturers, because I knew that I was doing them correctly and could be of service. That’s why I was happy to get involved with the Suppressor Trials you ran for Machine Gun News in 1997, as well as the 1999 Suppressor Trials for Small Arms Review.

SAR: You were one of the volunteer testers – brought your own meter. Al Paulson did, Dr. Chris Luchini and Dr. Reagan Cole from the University of Arkansas were there as well, all running parallel meters during the 1999 trials. It really was like a Renaissance, with all the great information being shared.

Dater: The first one at Knob Creek in 1997 was right before Machine Gun News went under. Al Paulson and I were there, and we both ran our meters. Mine ran a little easier, because the Larson-Davis has the real beauty of being able to be driven and read by a laptop computer. I could assimilate and do the analysis on the data faster than Al could on his B&K, where he had to handwrite everything down and then do all the math. The results that we got were, between the two meters, basically identical, maybe a half-dB difference on the averages. We learned an awful lot in that trial. One of the things that we were doing was, and you were there, Dan, we had the ammunition out in the sun, and we started off early in the morning, running all of one manufacturer’s suppressors. It was about 50 degrees out and it was just miserably cold. By mid-afternoon, when it was up well into the 90 degrees, we were getting into some of the other manufacturers, which included some of our product, and the ammunition had been sitting out in the sun all day, the ammunition was physically hot, and the pressures were a little high, and the sound levels were certainly off on all of it. We learned that you don’t do testing of a given manufacturer, and complete all of his stuff, but as we did two years later at the 1999 SAR Suppressor Trials, you do categories of suppressors together. That way, you have less variation from the climatic changes that occur during the day, and of course all tests include the environmental data. One of the things I’ve learned over the years is that measurements made on a cold day are not necessarily going to be the same as those on a very hot day. There’s an awful lot of variation in actual sound measurements. When we did the test under the auspices of SAR in ’99, we were, I believe, a lot more accurate in that we were doing. With Drs. Luchini and Cole there doing spectrum analysis parallel to the B&K and Larson Davis meters we were seeing the time curves and spectrum curves. Unfortunately, Al had a bad microphone element. Regardless, because I was involved in the testing, allegations were made by a number of people that I cooked the results. John Tibbetts was standing there, looking over my shoulder at every single shot that was fired, no matter whose it was. John said, “There’s no way you could’ve cooked the results, I was watching your results too.” And a few of our things didn’t perform as well as we thought they would.

SAR: I’ve got to take some heat on this, because we never published the full set of results on the 1999 suppressor trials, and there were allegations that that was done to protect some manufacturers. Total baloney, it was my call. The fact is that the guys who were supposed to write this into a book didn’t turn in the coordinated end results for over a year. It was incomplete and had formula that didn’t work, and there was no way we could do anything with the information we had because it was incomplete and too easy for people to misread or misquote. Rather than take all those results and put them out as a skewed group with everybody picking at it, I chose not to publish it. The information was given to every manufacturer tested. They all had their own information, but we never published the entire thing, because of the timeliness of it. It was bordering on irrelevant as a body of work.

Dater: By the time all the data was available; a lot of people had progressed on to different designs in their production models. What was great about those two suppressor trials, the first one in particular, was almost everybody in the industry was there, with maybe one exception. Everybody who was making suppressors was there, and had their stuff out. Tim LaFrance was talking about all his experiences with people, and the newer suppressor manufacturers were getting hints from the older guys, and there was a real sharing of scientific information at that first one. The second one, there was a little bit more involvement, but there were some people coming in and trying to “trick” the tests, taking what was supposed to be a dry can and putting a little bit of oil in it, and you could see smoke coming out of their cans. There were people trying to skew the tests. That defeated the purpose of the whole event. There are a number of issues with some of the published testing results. We at Gemtech, and Lynn McWilliams at AWC have always been very honest in our test results even as we refined our testing methodology. There was a time, certainly in the ’80s, and maybe into the early ’90s, when we all published the dB ratings, but we stopped doing it for a number of reasons. One of them was that as we got more experience, we found there was a lot of individual day-to-day variation that went on; there was variation with the ammunition used, with the temperature of the suppressor and the weapon. We found that on an extremely hot day, like a nice summer day with ambient temperature of 110 degrees in the bright sun, nobody’s suppressor measures extremely well. Humidity makes a difference as does barometric pressure and altitude. There are just too many variables. The other thing is that when we would measure things, we would do a string of ten rounds, and we would take an average of the ten, we didn’t just pick one or two rounds, we didn’t throw out one or two, we averaged all ten. The results we would get today would vary one or two dB from what we get tomorrow, or what we got the day before. So, on a given day, at a given time, under given circumstances, the sound results are absolutely correct. The problem is that not everyone measures the same way we do. I’ve heard manufacturers say, “My suppressor is doing 38 decibels,” and I would say, “Did you actually measure it?” “Well, no, but I compared it to one that I measured previously, that I measured at 34 decibels, and it sounded like it was at least four decibels quieter, so this one is doing 38.” I don’t think anyone’s ear is that good – especially a shooter who has hearing loss like most of us do. The other thing is we had heard that there were groups or manufacturers who would run a string of 20 shots, and pick the one best shot, and say, “My suppressor does X dB reduction.” Al Paulson has always measured the string of ten rounds, and has published the average. Usually, he also has the extreme spread in there, and he does a good job. When you’re going to measure a suppressor, you really need to buy one off the shelf from an independent dealer. If you want a brand X suppressor, go to a dealer and buy the brand X from him. Don’t order it directly from the company, or don’t accept it directly from the company, because you don’t know that you’re getting a production item. You may be getting a tricked item. We have measured suppressors that have had some fairly wild claims as to performance, and we’ve never been able to reproduce those results. Other people that we know who know how to measure firearm sound have measured the same suppressor and not been able to reproduce the claimed results. So, the question always comes up: Was the unit that was set up “tricked?” Did it have an extremely tight aperture for some reason?

SAR: In the real end user world, that wouldn’t function properly.

Dater: No, or wouldn’t function with a moderate amount of full auto fire. At the ’99 trials, there were one or two manufacturers who claimed they were doing dry pistol suppressors, and you could see a stream of steam come out, and we actually started shooting the first shot through a piece of white typing paper to catch water or grease or whatever, to determine if the unit was “wet.” Almost any pistol suppressor is going to be 10 decibels quieter if it’s wet. It was depressing to me to realize that, from that first time that we tried it, where there really was this incredible exchange of scientific knowledge and mentoring, and just a great experience, by the second trials, there were people who were coming in, trying to trick the testers, trying to get better numbers instead of trying to find out what they were really doing with their suppressors.

SAR: That’s the reason I haven’t done another trials. I’ve been a bit frustrated because there are things that I call fan sites that are put up on the Internet, and they pretend to be objective, and they use bad science and they use inaccurate but flattering testing. We won’t give any validity in Small Arms Review to the sites that are shills for manufacturers. That’s just something that our readers and especially our government readers need to be acutely aware of, is that just because it’s on the Internet does not mean it’s true, and that there are some people who are skewing numbers, and putting up unscientific data, and pretending to be objective, and they’re not. We’ll have nothing to do with that, because procurement people and general customers are making decisions based on what amounts to baloney. Who suffers in the end is the guy on the ground with the gun. That’s unacceptable.

Dater: That’s correct. It was exhilarating to be part of those two Suppressor Trials, and I wish you could get a government or academic group to sponsor and provide oversight for another Trials, to take the baloney out of it. One later outcropping of the open testing environment we were having was that in late ’92 or early ’93, Jim Ryan of JR Customs responded to my ad in Machine Gun News about doing some testing. He and his partner, Mark Weiss, came over to Boise, and we did some sound measurement testing. He said, “What can we do to improve the product a little bit?” I said, “You might try a little bit of this, little bit of that,” based on my experience and what I was doing to a certain extent at the time. As 1993 progressed, Jim made the suggestion, “Why don’t we just join forces and make a new company?” Out of that, Gemini Technologies Incorporated was born, and it uses the trade name Gemtech, which has become almost a household word in suppressors these days. For the first couple years, Jim worked in Washington and I worked in Boise. Then about ’96, he moved to Boise, and we started working together on a day-by-day basis. We started to produce more and more product. I think the first year we turned about $15,000 in sales in the new company. In early ’94, Greg Latka joined Gemtech, from his company, GSL Technology. He had been corresponding with Al Paulson. Al said, “You ought to talk to these people at Gemtech, they have some good ideas, and you have some good manufacturing capability, and that sounds like a good match.” It certainly was. Greg is still with the company. We’re both actually classed as consultants, but we’re heavily involved in the day-to-day operation of the company.

I think the 1990s were the Golden Age of suppressor design. Just look at the groups that were out there – Knight’s, AWC Systems Technology, OPS Inc, John’s Guns, I don’t want to leave anyone out but the list goes on and on, and if you compare the before and after out of that decade, it’s amazing. When Jim Ryan and I started, we were using ’80s technology, using some fairly simplistic machined baffles. Greg opened our eyes as to the capabilities of CNC Machinery. He is a very innovative machinist, and is also a very good designer. It’s hard for me to say exactly who was responsible for which innovation that we made. Certainly, as a company, we made a lot of innovation. The so-called K baffle is not a new concept. It dates back to a patent in the late ’20s or early ’30s, which never went anywhere. Then some fine tuning that Doug Olson did when he was working with Qual-A-Tech, where he was using flat baffles with some strange geometry in it, and conical spacers instead of straight spacers, which had been the prevailing wisdom. Those two together, if you made them as one piece, was sort of a K baffle. We started using the K baffle in production, and we were the first of the suppressor companies to use it actually as a production item. We made our changes to the way gases were diverted in both the Olson design and some of the earlier designs, in that we were using scoops instead of slanted sidewalls in the baffle, which was a more effective method of production. The K baffle, of course, was not a patentable item, at the time that we were making improvements in it, and it has been very widely copied, has become kind of the standard of the industry. It’s probably the most efficient baffle for its size. It is a little pressure-sensitive, and there are some pressures that it really doesn’t work very well with, including the .50 BMG caliber. We had an interesting experience with that. We made a .50 suppressor, and we fired the first shot on the Barrett rifle, pulling the string, and it worked real well. Jim Ryan fired the second shot, and he thought he broke his shoulder, because everything sort of came apart at that point, as the suppressor itself launched downrange. The K baffle has one disadvantage. It has a certain inherent weakness, due to the direction of vector forces in the structure. What had happened on the first shot was some of them had collapsed a little bit. And the leading, instead of being about .55 caliber hole throughout the lead, was about .70 caliber, but the exit port was about .40, and of course that’s just a little bit too tight for the .50 caliber bullet, and the unit went downrange. Newtonian physics being what it is, the recoil was fairly intense.

SAR: Three pounds going downrange, with an equal and opposite reaction onto Jim’s shoulder. [laughter] I remember that phone call from Jim.

Dater: We all laughed about it later, but there was an initial concern that he might’ve broken something. But that’s part of the R&D process. You learn things. Take Ops, Inc. – Phil Seeberger. He’s a fascinating character. He started in the mid-’80s, and he had some theories about a mechanical phase cancellation, which may or may not have worked the way he says. But he certainly built some product that worked quite well. It was fairly lightweight. But again, there was a lot of innovation, a lot of thought process that was going into it. Military Armament Corporation really popularized the “wipe,” a WWII concept seen in the Welrod and other suppressors of that era. The wipe is a piece of rubber or urethane or similar material, with a little hole in it that is seriously less than the diameter of the bullet. The whole idea is that as the bullet passes through the suppressor, it hits the wipe, it exits out, and then the wipe material snaps back and sort of locks the gas in the suppressor and lets it come out fairly slowly, cooling and interrupting the gas flow. The problem is that anything that touches the bullet in free flight once it has left the rifling, causes horrible accuracy problems. If you’re using a hollow point or a soft point, high velocity projectile, you’ll just have the projectile disintegrate right at that point. It will go ahead and expand. Wipes were seldom used in anything other than pistol calibers, the potential accuracy issues were terrible. The Knight’s Armament early pistol suppressors, the Hushpuppy, used a number of wipes in it, to give a very compact unit. Reed told me once, “It’s very quiet, but it’s not being shot at 50 yards, it’s being shot at one to two yards, and at that range, the accuracy is not an issue, it’s not going to be deflected that much.” There certainly were uses for the wipes. The problem, of course, was that they had to be replaced on a fairly frequent basis. Military Armament Corporation used them. We, at Gemtech, got away from wipes completely. As Automatic Weapons Company, I never used wipes.

SAR: But at Gemtech, you did have one wiped can…

Dater: We had one wiped can, it was the Aurora, and it was a nine-millimeter pistol suppressor that was 3-1/4 inches long, and 1-1/8 inches in diameter, and it had wipes in it, and some grease for artificial environment technology. It did an honest 25 decibels reduction on the first shot, and deteriorated from there. It was designed, really, as a 10-to-12-shot suppressor. That’s strictly last ditch effort. It was designed to be in the pilot’s bailout bag on say, a Glock 26, which is a very compact 9mm pistol. The idea was a downed pilot, if he is discovered, can use it at basically a one-to-two-yard range, to take out a sentry, take out the person who has just discovered him, or to take out an enemy combatant, so he can steal his uniform, overcoat and his rifle. Strictly for evasion. It was not intended for backyard shooting or target shooting or anything like that. We also had a 9mm pen gun that looked like a mini-kubaton. It had no projections sticking out the side. It was four inches long, 9/16 inch in diameter, and the first run of 20 used 9x19mm. The subsequent ones use the .380 cartridge, which was probably a little better suited. It was kind of miserable to shoot. You could put it on a keychain, nobody ever spotted what it was. In fact, one of our customers, before 9/11, was going through airport security, and he threw his keys in the tray, and when he threw the keys there, he spotted his LDE-9 pen gun on the key ring. He said he had a real adrenaline issue until he got through the other side, and they handed him the tray and said, “Here’s your pocket contents, sir.” [laughter] Not a product we offer anymore. We probably built about 30 or 40 of the .380s. Our core product has been silencers. That’s what we wanted to concentrate on. When you start producing firearms themselves, then you have the excise tax issues to deal with. The way we legally avoided the 11% excise tax on those pen guns was we just sold them all out on a Form 4 with the $5 transfer tax.

SAR: Under section 4181, that if the Form 4 transfer tax is paid on the first transfer out of a manufacturer or importer, there’s no Federal Excise Tax owed, because the transfer tax is an excise tax and the first payment counts.

Dater: That’s correct. As an “Any Other Weapon,” it qualified for the $5 transfer tax. Of course, we had dealers who were really unhappy about that, because even though they didn’t have to do the fingerprint or sheriff’s signature, they didn’t get transfer approval as quickly.

SAR: Using the Form 4 front only method of transfer directly from the manufacturer can certainly save some FET money. Phil, In today’s market, there are basically four companies that come to mind as working the major contracts, the military contracts. Knights Armament clearly is the leader in government contracts on suppressors. Gemtech is certainly in there, with Surefire, and Ops Inc. as well. These four suppressor brands are the ones mostly seen overseas in our military’s hands, although there are other shops selling to government agencies.

Dater: I think these are probably the major ones. Surefire’s a relative newcomer to the suppressor field, but they have phenomenal manufacturing and marketing capability and contacts, because of their flashlights. They have a decent product. Don’t forget, however, that there are other manufacturers who have made sales to the government. It’s extremely difficult to get to that Holy Grail of a real “contract.” The true government contract is frequently the death knell for a small company, because of the strings the government puts on everything, to make sure they’re getting their money’s worth. We get primarily large “sales orders” at Gemtech as opposed to “Contracts,” and that suits us just fine. There are contracts, and there are sales orders or purchase orders, and they’re different things, and there are a lot of small companies that have received a purchase order for a production run, a small run. But a genuine military contract, well, the companies that have actually achieved that, or can afford it and handle it when it happens are few and far between. The main one that comes to mind is Knight’s Armament. They’ve been having actual honest to goodness contracts for years. The truth is that if somebody really is working in that field, the government doesn’t really appreciate them talking about it.

SAR: That brings us around to advertising suppressors. The internet has given rise to a new level of suppressor advertising and claims being made, as well as guerilla marketing being done by companies. Are you seeing innovation from some of these companies?

Dater: Not many. Look, guerilla marketing is fine as far as that goes, people need to try to build business. However, the vast majority are basically taking a product that another company has developed, and has been marketing successfully, making a few extremely minor changes to it, perhaps changes in the method of assembly or actual manufacturing, without changing the product itself very much, and putting it out under their own label. I believe that certainly in the civilian marketplace, that the ’90s was where the majority of the innovation had occurred. Innovation in anything goes in jumps. There’ll be some innovation, and then there’s a plateau that goes for a number of years, and then all of a sudden there’s an increase in innovation, and then another plateau. Now, some companies will take the innovation that others have done, and just copy it absolutely identically. Some will find very minor changes, and some will use, actually, older concepts and older designs, and make some truly major changes to it. That ramps up the next slope of innovation. Unfortunately, there are a number of companies that don’t make true innovation. Changing a thread pitch is certainly not innovation. Rather, they just copy other’s products. They may change manufacturing technique. If you find a specific design that works, and that you like, that is machined parts, and you change it to casting, that is a manufacturing innovation, but it is not a technological innovation. The same thing with taking discrete parts and merging them into a module. That, again, is a manufacturing issue. It’s not technological innovation. At best it’s flattering to be mimicked, at worst, it’s frustrating to see the level of intellectual theft a few of the newer shops are stooping to.

SAR: Phil, you have had over 30 years of time that you’ve worked intensely on designing suppressors, and to stopping hearing loss, and have led the charge in Gemtech, one of the groups that’s been at the forefront of the suppressor industry for many, many years. I’d like to explore a little bit aside from that. I know with Antares Technology that you do suppressor seminars.

Dater: I do. As Antares Technology, I’ve traveled fairly extensively in Europe, and now in Asia, examining historical suppressors, suppressors manufactured by contemporaries abroad, and I’ve done sound measurements for a number of European manufacturers under contract. I do not divulge the results that I get. If they wish to divulge them, they’re certainly free to do whatever they wish. But I have studied a lot of the historical suppressors, things not common to the community, such as Welrods, DeLisles, Chinese Type 67s and the suppressed Makarovs. (Read Doc Dater’s take on historical suppressors in the next issue of SAR.) The training seminars I have done are in sound suppression issues and hearing damage issues. I just completed teaching a two-day course at LMO in Nevada on sound suppressor design, function, hearing loss, and sound measurements; mostly government clients. My prime interest has been in sound measurements and hearing damage, but it’s awfully hard to get up and talk without going into a lot of what makes the things work. They’re not just sound catchers you buy at the auto muffler supply store. There is some real science to suppressors. I’m interested in the designs, I’m interested in teaching. I’ve accumulated 30 solid years of knowledge in suppressor design, and I enjoy sharing it.

SAR: You’ve also worked on consulting projects with a number of companies in the small arms.

Dater: We really cannot discuss it, there are confidentiality issues. I am available for consultation on firearms design and sound suppression issues. Some of my European competitors have hired me to do sound measurements so that they have measurements utilizing the US system and the US technique, and what has become a very standard procedure, so that they can compare their product with products built in the States.

SAR: Jim Ryan left Gemtech in 1998, and Mark Weiss left at the same time.

Dater: Yes. Kel Whelan came into Gemtech, I believe it was March 2000. He came over from Weapon Safety, a retail store in Bellevue, Washington. He was in charge of their Title II sales department. He saw an opportunity with our small blue sky company, and he came in to be in charge of our sales and marketing, and has done an excellent job. He’s been a wonderful addition to the company.

SAR: The trend in suppressors through the ’90s was to try and make them smaller, quieter, narrower, trying to compress them down to a certain point, and there were some issues that came out of that.

Dater: There were definitely some issues. The first thing is, the suppressor marketing people analyze the market and say, “Well, here’s what the customer wants: a silencer that works just as well as it did in the Antonio Banderas movie, ‘Assassin,’ and it is one inch in diameter, three inches long, will work on anything from .22 long rifle up through .50 Browning, and does 40 decibels reduction. That’s what the customer wants.” The customer, unfortunately, does not understand the basic laws of physics. At the moment the bullet leaves the bore, you have a certain volume of gas at a certain pressure and temperature that you have to deal with, and you have to drop your pressure one way or another. When you start making things too small, you are not dropping your pressure enough, and one of the things that happens is that the pressure stays higher in the bore for a longer period of time and cycling becomes more violent. As the cycling becomes more violent, and the cyclic rate goes up because of the violent cycling, you start beating the crap out of your gun, and you shorten the life of the weapon. Yeah, it may be smaller and lighter weight, but the reliability of the entire system is diminished. People don’t realize that suppressed weapons are a system; they’re not just an accessory you hang on like a flashlight. The other thing is that you’ve got to have some volume in the entrance chamber. There are people who have made really short cans, and they’ve taken the blast baffle and just shoved it up almost right against the muzzle. And in .223, at least, and especially in the shorter barrels, you’ve got a lot of unburned powder particles that are coming out like a plasma jet of superheated sand. Not only does it seriously sandblast the blast baffle, but it also sandblasts the muzzle. There have been some designs, the Smidget was one, that Al Paulson said at about 75 rounds, absolutely ruined the accuracy of his rifle because it eroded the muzzle. These are concerns. When you’re dealing with the pressures that you’re dealing with, you have to put in a margin of safety for your wall thickness of your tubing, so that you don’t end up rupturing the side of the suppressor and blowing stuff out the side, or breaking welds, because the entrance chambers are not designed properly. There’s a lot more to designing a suppressor than letting a monkey stick washers in a piece of pipe.

SAR: With suppressors there’s always been kind of a “spy thing.” There’s a mystique to suppressors and using these items, and I think what you’re pointing out here is that beyond all of that, there has to be sound understanding of the laws of physics, the mechanical things that are involved, the construction of all of it, and how a heat engine actually works.

Dater: You’ve got to understand thermodynamics, you’ve got to understand strength of materials, you’ve got to understand flow dynamics; all these things enter in there. This gas is a fluid that is flowing, and you’re creating turbulence and you’re trapping it here and there, and it’s going to dump heat wherever it happens to be, because it is significantly hotter than the ambient temperature of the suppressor. A lot of folks just do not understand that.

SAR: To be simplistic, exactly what does a suppressor do?

Dater: A suppressor reduces the sound of the muzzle blast, and that’s all it does. It does not eliminate the sound, but it reduces it down to where it is not perceivable from as great a distance and it helps confuse the target because the target does not hear the muzzle blast and can’t localize where it came from. Basically, the suppressor is taking the high energy that is being suddenly released at the moment the bullet uncorks from the end of the barrel, and it is releasing that slowly into the atmosphere and cooling it. The best example is one I use in my classes: You take two party balloons and blow them up. One of them you put a pin into and you let the pressure out almost instantaneously, and it makes a big pop. The other one, you undo the valve on, let the pressure out over about a two-second period, and there’s very little noise associated with it. You still dealt with the same amount of energy. It’s just you’ve done it over a different timeframe. Suppressors functionally work by reducing temperature through conduction, convection, radiation. That reduces pressure. Reduced pressure by increasing the volume, and then spread out the time curve, the time exit curve.

SAR: There’s a design goal to have a suppressor that can go in a belt-fed weapon and work for 1,000 rounds full auto, belt-fed through the gun.

Dater: The other issue you run into immediately is heat buildup. Most of the steels that are used in suppressors, whether it’s chrome-moly or whether it’s 300 series stainless, which everybody likes because it is more rust-resistant than chrome-moly, the core temperature of your suppressor goes up to about seven and a half degrees per round, up to around 1,000 degrees, and then rate of increase diminishes. But at 1,000 degrees, that steel has approximately 6% of the tensile strength that it had at room temperature. You’ve got to have a margin of safety in there when you start getting these things real hot. The other thing is on .223, and it does not happen on other calibers, but on .223, the projectile has a real large surface area and a real small mass of lead. The friction of shoving this projectile through a piece of pipe that is smaller in diameter will generate an awful lot of heat. The heating of the barrel is more from the friction than it is from the actual flame temperature. When the bore temperature gets up over about 650 or 700 degrees, and a suppressor will actually increase the rate at which the bore temperature goes up, then with the large surface area of a very highly heat-conducting metal, that is copper, and the small mass, that mass of lead in the center starts to melt, or certainly it starts to soften. Lead itself melts at around 650 degrees F depending on how it’s alloyed. When that happens, the bullet destabilizes. As soon as it leaves the muzzle, it starts to yaw more than normal. If you have a reasonable aperture through your suppressor, you’re going to start clipping baffles. Now, if you want to have a suppressor that’s going to do 500-round dumps on an M249, you’re going to need to open up the aperture throughout the entire suppressor to probably .38 caliber or better. Most people have taken it up to about three-eighths of an inch. Then it doesn’t matter if your bullet yaws pretty badly, because you still have plenty of clearance and you’re not going to clip baffles. Otherwise, I can just almost guarantee you’re going to clip the front end cap and clip some of the baffles, somewhere between 150 and 200 rounds.

SAR: Now we’re back to “You can’t repeal the laws of physics” that are involved in all of this design.

Dater: Precisely. Many of today’s designers, and that term I’m using awfully loosely, because I don’t think there are a lot of true designers out there, are just putting together things. They see a sketch from here, they see a photo from there, they say, “Any fool can do this,” and they build it. But most of them do not understand what’s going on in there. There are not a whole hell of a lot of mechanical engineers who are designing suppressors. Doug Olson is one, so is Joe Gaddini. I am being a bit severe here as there are certainly others who do understand the interior ballistics, and are in this industry.

SAR: The other guys look really cool in black ninja outfits with a suppressor when they put their pictures on YouTube.

Dater: [laughs] I won’t say anything there.

SAR: That’s OK, I will. YouTubing is hurting our war efforts and creating misconceptions on a massive level. I think the next big set of firearms restrictions is going to be blueprinted by the YouTube ninjas as the anti-firearms proponents gather intel on what is “scary” next. Phil, any message in particular you want to pass on to our readers?

Dater: Yes. Let me start by saying a little something about Sid McQueen, who was a truly innovative firearms designer. He was not exactly a suppressor designer. Most of the suppressors that he built, I designed, because I worked with him fairly closely on a number of issues. He designed the Sidewinder submachine gun, which was a truly unique weapon, and generated about a half dozen patents for him. He was always designing, always innovating. When the ’86 law passed, this was really a true disaster. Sid had a new assault rifle on the drawing board. The way Sid would design some of the stuff is he would make a drawing, then he’d cut out cardboard parts, and he’d stick pushpins in them, and see how various surfaces interacted. I’d never seen this done before. I suspect it’s probably not uncommon, but certainly that’s the way Sid did it. When the ’86 ban passed, he rolled up his designs, put them in a filing cabinet, and has not looked at them again to this day.

The 1986 ban was a true disaster for small arms development in the United States. There are several ways to develop new weapons. One is when the military says, “We need such and such, and of course we don’t want to pay for development, so we want it commercial, off the shelf.” You can design something commercial off the shelf, but unless you know you’re going to sell some of them, you can’t afford to do it. If you’re going to truly do design, you really don’t want another day job. Without being able to sell designs on the civilian market, it’s just not cost-effective to try and design things. The other way is you get some sort of a committee to design them within a major firearms manufacturing company that has the money to do it. Certainly, government does not want to fund development and when they do, they control it. The innovators out there are being shut out by the terrible maze of regulations. If we had had these restrictions in effect for the last 100 years, we would not have any of John Browning’s designs, we would not have any of Stoner’s designs, or Johnson’s designs, all of the seminal firearms of the last couple hundred years came out of individual shops in America, where people sat there and designed them in their garages, basements or kitchen tables. Look at Carbine Williams. He designed truly innovative weaponry in prison, and fortunately had a warden who realized his genius. I have gone through the licensing process for almost four decades now, and I am willing to go through the roadblocks to do my design work, but so many talented people just throw their hands in the air and go do something else. How can this be a good thing for small arms development, or for our national defense?

Something else I would like to share with the readers of SAR. A lot of the old-timers in this industry are getting up in the age group where some are not going to be here next year. Too many have already gone. We all have a defined period where we can be productive. The members of the new generation are the ones who will carry on the design work. If they’re smart, they will study and build on the past. They will look at what has been done before, listen to what has been said, and read what has been written and hopefully they have access to reference collections to study. But then they need to go out and follow their own inspiration. It does not work to just simply take someone else’s design and produce it. That’s not contributing to the art. What contributes to the art and contributes to technology is to say, “This has been done, that has been done, but I’m having an epiphany, and here’s an idea that just came to me in the shower this morning. Let’s see if this will work.” Then take the time and effort, work through these ideas, because sometimes the oddest inspiration can pay off in a good design. I truly believe the next generation will end up going beyond where we went. One can hope, one can hope.

The Interview ended as Doc Dater had just finished riding through the Thai jungle on elephant back and we were sitting on a floating restaurant barge off of the Mae Klong. As we ate sticky rice, Doc spoke of the sacrifices of the men who died on the Death Train project which was immortalized in the 1957 movie “The Bridge on the River Kwai.” We went to the camp cemetery to see the memorial. The last words of the Interview were spoken, and Doc Dater turned on his heel, and with a spring in his step he started across the oldest part of the original bridge whistling “Colonel Bogey’s March,” fulfilling a quest over half a century old, as he headed out to see the railway in the Thai jungle on the other side. -SAR

Doc Dater continues his stories and discusses his “take” on various suppressor designs in the next issue of SAR. Don’t miss it!

In Part I of this interview (SAR Vol. 11, No. 6, March 2008), Jim Sullivan fills in the blanks on Armalite and the AR-15 project, the Stoner 63 project, digs deep on the Ichord Committee regarding M16 failures in Vietnam, covers the Ruger Mini 14 and M77, as well as his work on the 7.62mm Chaingun, the EPAM, Chiclet Guns, and caseless ammunition. We now join the interview when Jim has moved to Singapore and is working through the Ultimax 100.

The following is Jim Sullivan’s favorite quote on preparedness regarding a 1917 exchange between Woodrow Wilson and Teddy Roosevelt. Woodrow Wilson: “If this country goes to war, our boys will immediately leap to arms.” Teddy Roosevelt: “Whose arms, their mothers’? We don’t have any guns!”

SAR: So, Jim, what inspired moving to Singapore?

Jim Sullivan: Again, it was Armalite. They had been over there trying to sell the AR-18, and the problems between Singapore and Colt on the M16 manufacture also involved the State Department. It was a huge mess. The US State Department wasn’t going to let Singapore sell any M16s they made, claiming US technology was involved. Singapore had contracted with Colt to build a factory to build M16s for their military. They also thought they were going to be able to sell them in the region. Their understanding of the deal with Colt was that they would have that part of the world and they could sell M16s to anybody the State Department agreed to. Once Singapore made their 100,000 M16s for their army, they wanted permission from the US State Department to sell to Malaysia. I don’t know how they found this out, but this is what I am told happened: Colt pressured the State Department to tell Singapore no, because they had a man in KL (Kuala Lumpur) that was going to sell the M16s to them. Singapore’s the one that did all the demonstrations that got Malaysia ready to buy. They wouldn’t have contracted on the M16 if they had known they wouldn’t be able to sell them regionally.

SAR: That’s a deal we’ve all seen before.

Jim Sullivan: Remember, this was when the Munitions Control Act and the new Arms Export Control Act of 1976 (AECA) was coming into play. The ramifications weren’t known yet, so it was hard to tell how things would be viewed by the US State Department regarding US made defense articles, let alone the quagmire of design and US based technology exports. Singapore wanted another gun to make that they could sell, that the AECA didn’t forbid. Armalite was all ready to sell them or license the AR-18 to Singapore so Singapore could make it and sell to, no longer Malaysia – they missed that opportunity – it was the Philippines that was the next customer in line. But again, the US State Department said no way. I wasn’t on the AR-18; that had been Art Miller’s project. I was working nights there at Armalite, so Armalite knew me, Armalite knew CIS and the problems they were having, and so Armalite said to me, “What would you think about going over to Singapore?” They hadn’t talked to Singapore yet. They said they saw one way around this technology transfer issue. The AECA didn’t forbid it at the time, although it does now, an American could go anywhere he wants to and design guns there. They said, “What would you think about going over there and designing a gun?” I jumped on that. They set up a meeting, and they talked to the Singapore people and we all agreed I would go. What they wanted was an assault rifle. I don’t know why they were doing both at the same time, they had bought the Sterling assault rifle, which was really an AR-18 knockoff.

SAR: So, it’s 1978, and you saddled up and headed to Singapore to design a new “Assault Rifle.”

Jim Sullivan: Correct. I took my whole family – wife and kids. It was supposed to be a two year project, but it ended up to be three years. I loved it, it’s a great place. It was a bit hard to get along with the people there at first. We did travel around Southeast Asia a lot. We’d take the train up to KL maybe three times a year. That is the most beautiful train ride around. Only problem was that at that time, people used to not want to go in first-class because the Communists that were in the jungle would shoot at the first-class coaches when the train crossed their areas. Some people, when they’d come to the bad areas along the track, would move back into the cheap seats, with the chickens and goats. Once they passed the Communist Guerilla areas, they’d move back up front. Singapore to KL up to Bangkok: all the way along there. That whole west coast of Malaysia is great. Penang is simply beautiful. Our son went over there first, but he couldn’t get a job, so he went back to the States. Our daughter went to high school there and graduated in Singapore. She just loved it. Every year at The American Singapore School, they’d go off on trips, and she ended up going to about 30 different countries when she was in high school.

SAR: Great way to grow up and learn the world. In those three years, your project was originally to just make something along the lines of an AR?

Jim Sullivan: Yes, an “assault rifle” was what they had said. They weren’t real specific, and I had a bunch of ideas I wanted to try out. One of them was how to make a controllable full automatic gun. If you can’t hit anything in full auto, the gun is worthless. It goes to my guideline rules of Rugged, Simple, Reliable, and Accurate. If the accurate part is missing, the rest of them don’t count.

SAR: I like that motto, it goes to the heart of things. How were the people to work with?

Jim Sullivan: I liked the people very much, but I didn’t like what they call “filial piety.” Your boss is god-like and Americans don’t accept that very well. I was kind of in the same position that Bob Fremont had been. I had argued with the Chairman of the Board and he was an officer in the government. He made a suggestion that I didn’t think would work and I argued with him about it. Everybody froze up solid, but I wasn’t going to give up on it. I was expected to stop talking because he was upset.

SAR: That’s not really an American trait.

Jim Sullivan: (Laughs) You got that right. Anyway, he ended up beating his hands together, and he couldn’t even talk he was so upset. (Laughs again) Two guys helped him out of the room. They said, “Don’t anybody leave,” and we just sat there absolutely silent, nobody could talk, and pretty soon they came in and said, “Okay, you can leave now.” Last I heard of that!

You know, they had good machinery, but the machinists were basically uneducated types that are just naturally gifted people. They did good work because they had this innate understanding of mechanisms and mechanics. I got along real good with them. Funny, because they didn’t speak English and I didn’t speak Mandarin. It was a difficult environment in some ways. I had designed this thing, and it was obvious how it was supposed to work, and the machinist was making the two or three parts that had to go together. The other engineer who kind of acted as the interpreter went out because of a fuss going on out in the machine shop. He came back in and the machinist was hanging his head, following along. These two parts didn’t fit together and they were ashamed. I said, “Oh, well, he gets 20 lashes.” (Laughs) They kind of brightened up because I was kidding, and pretty soon they went back and came back in again with the drawing, and they were both kind of smirking, and here it was because of my mistake on the drawing. I said, “Okay, now you only get 10 lashes.” They all laughed, and that story went all through the plant. It became real easy to work with everybody over there, there was no tension at all like there had been at first.

SAR: Let’s recap this. You had ideas, and you’d seen and designed different systems and studied all around. At this point you had 25 years of small arms design, and now you’ve got a country and a company that wants a rifle, and they’re not really quite sure where they’re going with it, and you’ve got full access to the machine shops and design. The end result is one of the most controllable machine guns ever made, the Ultimax 100.

Jim Sullivan: Yeah, it was great! I started in on making a machine gun that in fully automatic fire would be accurate. I had lots of ideas, plus some things I had seen elsewhere – you know Hugo Schmeisser’s work, I had seen the guns. In fact, they had some at Armalite, but I hadn’t paid much attention to the STG, although I recognized some kindred ideas. The Ultimax idea came from over there. It wasn’t until I was working on this thing as an assault rifle that it all clicked. One of the things about 5.56 being a small cartridge with low impulse is that you don’t need excessive length in the gun. I had already recognized that as a blowback submachine gun, the MP-18 in World War I was designed to get controllable full auto, but that was a blowback gun, and I got to thinking about that principle. How could you do it in a gas-operated gun? You can’t use blowback, of course, with a high-pressure cartridge like a rifle cartridge. The case walls seize in the chamber and it’ll just blow the back end right off the case. The pressure needs to come down enough so that you can get extraction. Pistol bullets that are used in a submachine gun are low pressure so no problem, but that higher pressure was a huge stumbling block. We had solved this in several weapons before, but not to my satisfaction for a controllable weapon. They gave me several guys to assist me, and I invited Bob Waterfield over there too. He came over a couple of months after I had started, and I’m glad he did. Bob did almost all the work on the 100-shot round magazine, and I concentrated on the gun, but there’s a lot of overlapping on that type of thing. He did an excellent job. Think of the requirements we faced. First, I had to design a gun that would fit the equipment they had at the factory; that they could build with what they had. The reason that factory could make the M16 is because Colt had come over there and gave them all the production equipment, tooling and everything else, a turnkey line. Now, I had to design a gun that could be built on what the factory had, or could use. The skills necessary to manufacture something are different from the skills needed to design something. My specialty is the product, not the production end of it and I now had to engineer for manufacturing capability, not what might have been my best choices.

SAR: Adding another dimension to the design phase. Any examples?

Jim Sullivan: I used sheet metal that was simple to form – not drawn, complex shapes. These were very simple shapes requiring very simple machining. And to also make use of some of the Colt machines and processes because by then they were familiar with them, so that they were similar type. Other than the magazine, there are no dimensions that are the same on the two guns. But some of the machining that’s done on the bolt and bolt carrier is similar in principle, so they could set up and do it.

SAR: Did you have any problems with the system you designed?

Jim Sullivan: There are always problems. I made a first prototype. Talk about a plumber’s delight. Except for the barrel coming out of this junk pile, you wouldn’t know it was a gun. (Laughs) I tackled that thing very early on and got the controllability I wanted but not the looks. Then I made the gun fire full auto only, and from the open bolt, and tried to interest them in working backwards towards the assault rifle idea. I was going for an open bolt, closed bolt trigger mechanism. You really can’t get accurate semiautomatic fire from an open bolt mechanism. You get too much lurch in the gun before it fires, throwing your aim off.

SAR: So you went off on a tangent to the goal of an assault rifle. Were they supportive of that?

Jim Sullivan: Yeah. What I was doing there for the first year, and what they were doing was in parallel, and they would only end up with one of these guns. What I suggested to them is why don’t we break off and go in this direction, and come back to the assault rifle? They liked that idea because they saw that of these two programs, one of them would just die a natural death. I knew that would happen too, and I didn’t want it to, because I really had something with that controllable full auto.

SAR:What’s the heart of the system?

Jim Sullivan: Everyone thinks they know the reason a gun kicks. A bullet goes this way…

SAR: …and Mr. Newton tells us that there will be an equal and opposite reaction….

Jim Sullivan: …and it’s true you can’t violate that principle, Dan, but recoil is a measure of force times time. Let’s take a simple bolt action rifle: The force of recoil is the same force that’s driving the bullet, and it’s for the same amount of time that it takes to drive that bullet. In other words, whatever amount of time it takes to accelerate that bullet from the back of the barrel to the front, and out through the front of the barrel, that amount of time is what that same force is pushing rearward against the gun and against the guy’s shoulder. Okay, of course it kicks, but here’s the thing: that time is very short, so the force is very high. Recoil is a function of force times time. In a machine gun, let’s say it’s firing 600 shots a minute, that’s ten shots a second or one shot every one-tenth of a second. You have one-tenth of a second to deliver that force. If you’re delivering it in the one-thousandth of a second that a bolt action rifle does, you’re screwed. But if you can find a way to stretch it out, instead of a thousandth of a second, stretch that time out to a tenth of a second, that’s 100 times longer. That means the force is one one-hundredth, and it’s the force that moves you, not the time. It not only means that you can reduce that force to one one-hundredth; that’s a hell of a reduction in force. It also means it becomes a constant force, because you time it so that it fires this shot and stretches all the recoil out until exactly the time it fires the next shot. So the force is not only a very small force, it is now constant. It doesn’t hit you as a bunch of sharp impacts.

SAR: OK, Jim, the mass of the bolt is traveling rearward after it unlocks. It travels rearward on the spring, and that spring applies pressure against the rear of the stock and the platform, the shooter’s shoulder. That bolt mass never has a jarring impact to the rear because you’ve got such a long recoil spring designed into this. It runs out of energy, and the spring energy forces it into return. So the spring is always constantly pushing backwards against the platform, which is your shoulder.

Jim Sullivan: That’s right. You don’t have two things going on in there: it’s constant over the stroke. You can’t do it perfectly because of friction and a lot of other things. If you take an assault rifle of the same weight as the Ultimax, the Ultimax out-hits them about eight-to-one, on light machine guns it out-hits them three-to-one, but they’re heavier. It’s finding the harmonic of a machine gun, and balancing it with a constant recoil system.

SAR: So, what was the response from CIS to this?

Jim Sullivan: Excellent. We went to the range, and they were impressed. It’s a shame it never made it to the SAW trials in the US. The Ultimax kicked the M249’s ass in all of our trials! But, the politics involved kept it out.

SAR: It’s 1978 and you’re with your family in Singapore, and you’ve designed the constant recoil system in the Ultimax 100.

Jim Sullivan: Singapore was 1978 to 1981, and the Ultimax was what I did first. We got the proof of concept done and we took it to one of their army bases to shoot. They did the firing against their M16s as I think that was all they had to compare it with. Later on, they got a hold of some of the Minimis. This is before the US adopted the Minimi. After they fired the Ultimax they were sold on it, and that was very early in the program. Bob hadn’t finished the 100-round drum yet and we just used a standard M16 magazine. The prototype gun looked really crude but it was the first step. This was about the time that I found out that they had been running a parallel program to make the Sterling rifle, what became the SAR80 in Singapore. The US military had come out and I suggested that we go in this new direction, do this machine gun first, partly because the US military already had come out with the Squad Automatic Weapon requirement.

SAR: So you saw this as a possible SAW candidate?

Jim Sullivan: They were so angry over the State Department screwing them over on the export of the M16 projects that they refused to enter it in the SAW trials. This was too bad because it would’ve beat that M249. By then we actually had tested it against the new M249. There was no way to really compare it because the guys in Singapore couldn’t hold an M249 on target at all. One guy fired the thing. It was kind of a gravely berm and he was laying at an angle to the gun. He started shooting and it was so wild that he froze on the trigger. It swung him around and rolled him over. He was firing straight up in the air, and we’re all steppin’ and fetchin’ all around there. Luckily, he ran out of ammo. There was a lot of nervous laughter after that. They couldn’t hit anything with it. They wanted to get into production on the Ultimax immediately. There were actually 16 patentable items, and they patented it in 19 countries: separate patents. That’s the most patents I’ve ever had at one time, but patents run out after 17 years. At any given point the most patents I had active was 200, so I’ve gotten a lot of patents, on a lot of guns.

SAR: How many of the Ultimax 100 were made?

Jim Sullivan: I never got a full count, but about 10,000 for their army. One guy out of ten had the Ultimax 100. They’ve got a system like Switzerland does where everybody has to go in and serve. They have a fairly big army, 100,000 men or so. I looked on Wikipedia on the internet and they said they’re up to 80,000 Ultimax 100s made now, so they’ve sold a lot of them. A lot of the users are Central and South American countries.

SAR: I understand that the Mark IV Ultimax, with the quick changeable barrel, has some interest in the US military. Vince Dinero is involved in that project.

Jim Sullivan: Yes. Bob Waterfield and I went back to Quantico and put on a demonstration with the Ultimax. This was a different group of people from the ones who had tested it a year before that. There were four guns they had tested at 29 Palms. Ultimax was one, and they had a Colt Light Machine Gun, HK’s MG36, and the M249. Somebody had taken off the elevation slide on the Ultimax. On the Ultimax, when the aperture drops down without the slide, all you see is a pivot pin and you can’t get a sight picture at all. Still, on one of the tests, it beat the M249, and yet nobody could get a sight picture. Out of all the four guns, the Ultimax was chosen by almost all the Marines that tested it.

SAR: Are you familiar with the Israeli Negev?

Jim Sullivan: Yeah, I am, I’ve fired it. I was over at IMI one time, and they were going through their paces with that thing. A lot of similarity in the Negev system to the Ultimax but it’s not controllable like the Ultimax and it’s no better than the M249 in my opinion. They shortened the travel, and didn’t really get the constant recoil thing although people say the Negev does. It doesn’t.

SAR: In 1981 you left Singapore?

Jim Sullivan: From there I went to Italy. I had a program where I did an assault rifle for Beretta. They had the AR-70, then the AR-70/90 later on. There was one gun I was supposed to do, and there was another they were doing with SIG or somebody in Switzerland. That had fallen apart on them and whatever that program was they weren’t able to sell it to their own military. Beretta wanted a new gun to offer. Again, the Armalite people kind of lined that up because they knew the people over there at Beretta. I spent a year and a half there and did a prototype of that.

SAR: They never completed it? Italy has some new offerings now.

Jim Sullivan: All they did was a prototype. My agreement with them was a royalty agreement. They couldn’t make it without my permission, and we hadn’t reached the point where they had signed yet; assignment hadn’t been made. What went wrong was, right about the time I got done with it, their Air Force went and bought 17,000 of the gun they thought they were never going to be able to sell to their military. They didn’t need my project anymore. Mine was a controllable full automatic weapon, somewhat different in principle from the Ultimax, and it would have an open bolt, closed bolt trigger mechanism, to fire accurate semi-auto. It had a precise quick barrel change. You need the barrel change for hot barrels for the machine gun role, but that traditionally has ruined your accuracy, it makes for a loose, sloppy fit for barrel, for heat expansion, and ruins it as a rifle. But this system didn’t do that. It was accurate hot or cold, you could change barrels and it stayed put on accuracy.

SAR: At the end of that project you came back to the US?

Jim Sullivan: Yes. I met a US submachine gun designer named Gordon Ingram. I had actually known him for a while and one day he and his “angel” who had funded one of his programs ended up there at Beretta. We all went out to dinner together. This was right about the time things were falling apart on the Beretta project, and it looked like there was going to be no completion on this thing, and his angel asked me to do the C-Mag for him – it was part of my Italian project ideas. Actually, he feigned interest in the C-Mag. What he wanted me to do, though, and this ended up kind of as a fight between myself and Gordon, was to take Gordon’s program over, where in this guy’s mind, Gordon had kind of messed up. There were problems with the gun. That’s what the guy wanted me to do. Gordon had been working on something similar to the Mini 14 idea in 5.56, but it was based more on the M1 Carbine.

SAR: He didn’t have a drum magazine for this…

Jim Sullivan: No, it was an assault rifle. The gun I did for Beretta had a double drum magazine. It was the predecessor of the C-Mag. I took the innards out of my Italian design and that eventually became the C-Mag, but that was my design, my invention. It didn’t belong to Beretta yet, because they hadn’t completed the program because our agreement was they had to fund the whole thing before I made assignment. They hadn’t done that. So, I was with Gordon and his financial backer, and I mentioned this C-Mag – it wasn’t called that at the time – and he got all excited about it. He wanted me to leave Beretta, and that was fine with me because it was all coming apart. I still had to complete some stuff, so I said, “Okay, in two months we’ll get on this C-Mag.” Before the two months was up, it became clear that what he really wanted me to work on was Gordon Ingram’s program. Well, I wouldn’t do that. The thing that Gordon and I had the fight over was that this guy that was funding all of this, he was setting up in Somalia, in Mogadishu. I had gone down there, still thinking the interest was in my magazine, and it wasn’t. Gordon, when he found out I was going down there, he thought I was stabbing him in the back. I wasn’t, but he thought that.

SAR: Did you ever get that squared away with Gordon?

Jim Sullivan: Yeah, but it took a while. He never did quite trust me after that, which is too bad. Anyway, I did make the deal on the magazine with the guy. He was kind of an entrepreneur. It wasn’t his money, he had a group of investors lined up, and one of them was the ex-governor of Georgia, Carl Sanders. Sanders was the real investor in this thing, and then he and this entrepreneur had a falling out, and neither one of them owned enough of it, and they got Sylvia involved, otherwise it would have fallen apart.

SAR: What was your inspiration on the beta C-Mag?

Jim Sullivan: I designed it there in Italy for the purpose of the gun I was designing, and I used a double drum magazine because it makes a lot of sense. You’re familiar with the old German saddle drum magazine?

SAR: Of course. The 75-round saddle drum fit on the MG15 and the MG34 with a special top cover.

Jim Sullivan: I was going to do that basic design, only the one I did for Singapore, the two drums were right up tight against each other. I had to spread it out again when I made it a C-Mag; when I wanted to make something that would fit the M16. But the thing about it is the M16 was designed for a 20 or 30-shot magazine. We really designed for a 25-shot at the start. The bolt comes back, it barely over-travels, 3/16ths of an inch, and that’s enough time for the cartridge to get up there before the bolt is bounced back forward and starts chambering it. The C-Mag, you couldn’t make 100 rounds work, because 100 rounds moves slower than 30 rounds. In theory you can just make the spring three times stronger and get it to move as fast, but in reality you can’t. It’s like putting the brakes on and the gun couldn’t cycle. This was all in 1983.

SAR: Where did the physical work get done for the C-Mag?

Jim Sullivan: In the US. The original idea was to make this an expendable package of ammo that the soldier would use once and toss. The ammunition was going to be low temp ammo. On the technical side, barrel heat doesn’t really come from the powder gases; it comes from the friction of shoving a bullet through the barrel with the brakes on. A Spitzer bullet, a lead core bullet, remember that we think of lead as a solid, but lead is real weak, and it’s nothing more than hydraulic fluid when it gets heated. Imagine a bullet copper skin has been filled with hydraulic fluid, and now you hit it with 50,000 psi behind it, driving it through the barrel. That’s where barrel heat comes from – resistance. The reason I know that is from the ammunition that we did: Delta ammo. It’s a steel bullet with a plastic sabot, and the rifling twist is transferred from the sabot into the bullet by fingers that reach through grooves on the steel bullet. You can get 19 grains of powder to give you as much energy in 5.56 using that as 26 grains in standard ammo. The difference between 19 and 26 isn’t really the barrel heat. Sure, the powder’s got something to do with it, but a bullet only takes one millisecond going down the barrel. The powder hangs on for a little while longer. It’s venting out the barrel. It’s about one and a half milliseconds at 5,000 degrees, which is hot as hell, but that’s 5,000 degrees for only one and a half seconds on a long burst. That won’t heat that barrel up enough to boil water; the real heat is coming from friction.

SAR: One and a half seconds, you mean…

Jim Sullivan: Yeah, a thousand-shot burst is the equivalent of a 5,000 degree torch put on the barrel – 5,000 degrees for one and a half seconds. You can take 5,000 degrees and go very quickly like that over the back of your hand and it doesn’t do anything. That’s about a half a second that you’re exposing it to. At one and a half seconds, an M16 barrel, just to use a well-known weight, is 1.7 pounds. It will not heat 1.7 pounds up more than 30 degrees. It won’t even boil water. There are all kinds of things that should have been done by now in small arms development. You don’t need water-cooled barrels or seven-pound barrels on .30-caliber machine guns. You can get by with rifle barrels if you design the ammunition correctly. Nobody’s doing this kind of work.

SAR: Reducing the friction? What about the chamber heat?

Jim Sullivan: Most of that just comes back from the pressure, from the heat that builds up in front of it. The hottest part of the barrel isn’t the chamber area, it’s well forward of that. That’s one thing you can do to fix the systems. You can get rid of barrel heat, not entirely, but you can sure reduce it with ammunition design. Since the barrel’s the heaviest single part in a machine gun, if you can cut two and a half pounds out of a machine gun barrel and get rid of a quick barrel change, you’ve done something for a machine gun. Although I developed the magazine in America, I had invented the ammunition in Mogadishu, so we chose England to develop that in. You could still do that back then. Americans could still develop things overseas. Today you can’t legally help a foreigner in designing munitions. That’s the AECA. All this was before that law changed, and I went and developed that ammunition in England. The name of the company was Delta.

SAR: What happened with the C-Mag?

Jim Sullivan: The C-Mag became a success; just not so much in this country. Remember, the C-Mag is a different type of drum. The Ultimax drum moves pretty slow. The C-Mag has an accelerator in it so it’ll work on an M16 because you don’t have much time to get that top cartridge lifted up and presented. The way they work, it’s like two rings of ammunition moving together, and you can squeeze them together. They make their full circle and they get to the end of their circle, and then they get squeezed. As they squeeze together, this doubles the speed of the cartridge. It’s changing it from a double column to a single column. That doubles the speed and cuts the force in half. Now you can have twice the spring force and twice the speed of the cartridges at the top. If you took the Ultimax drum, it wouldn’t be near fast enough. It was fine for the Ultimax because I sailed way on past the back end of the magazine and gave it just lots of room, lots of time before it starts ramming the cartridge forward. You can have a sluggish drum magazine. Before the C-Mag the only way you could get something like this to work was you had to design a gun for a drum, you couldn’t just put a drum on there. Some of the other high capacity designs, well, they’re not that reliable because they use way too strong a spring force. Spring force equals drag on the bolt. That limits the reliability of the gun. It’s all about getting that cartridge out there just as fast as if you had a 30-round magazine. The C-Mag system does it.

SAR: How long did you work on that project?

Jim Sullivan: Six months, I guess. It didn’t take very long. That’s been pretty successful, but not in the US military market. The US, they don’t seem to even know what’s out there, and for another thing, they don’t test anything in the US unless they have a big budget for testing. That means they don’t like to test anything that they haven’t written a requirement for. That means they don’t write requirements for stuff that’s already there. I don’t know what’s gone wrong here. When I say “they,” I mean Army Materiel Command and it’ll be one of their agencies. I don’t think they’re opening the market up to enough tests other than just specifically the things that they are writing a requirement for and not testing what’s out there to see if it suits. The other thing is they like program longevity; I mean to the point of the extreme. They never want a program to end. I think the last thing they want is the successful conclusion of a project.

SAR: You’re defining “bureaucracy.”

Jim Sullivan: I know, and the contractors know that, and cooperate because they want it that way too. That’s why they love stuff like caseless ammo, even if somebody in there knows that they’ll never get to the finish line with that idea, they love those programs. You can always make small incremental improvements.

SAR: Still, there have been a lot of successes and advancements out of these programs…I mean, research has its place, but admittedly not as many fielded projects as there have been programs.

Jim Sullivan: (Jim gestures emphatically) That’s the whole point! Look, after C-Mag, I had made some money, and I went back to my office in Armalite and did a lot of proposal work and stuff. I did a lot of consulting. I went over to Royal Ordnance, Nottingham; just short-term stuff. Looked at the British SA-80 program. It was at the time they were shutting down RSAF and Enfield. They had already switched all the manufacturing to Nottingham. There wasn’t all that much to my involvement. They asked me to go over there and take a look at it, I did and I told them my views on the gun, and they got angry and that was the end of it. From what I saw, everything about it was wrong. For instance, they were using an M16 type bolt and not making it right. In manufacturing it, first you drill a hole for the firing pin. Once that hole is there, everything centers on that hole. You turn the outside, you cut the slots and everything else. They didn’t do that. They cut all the outside first, then tried to drill the hole for the firing pin in the center. It wasn’t “true.” Then they found out you can’t drill a hole that way, holes go off this way and that way and aren’t centered. To solve that, what they did was mess with the firing pin tip. The firing pin has a nice, respectable diameter for most of its length until the front. Instead of a tapered firing pin so that it’s good and strong, they just narrowed it down, and they had the thing about a half-inch long, and just a sixteenth inch in diameter. Another thing was the magazine well. It’s a sheet metal receiver, and the magazine well is sheet metal, but it has to be welded on. That’s fine. But the sheet metal stamping for the magazine well, they stamp the slot, the little hole, the slot for the magazine latch, they stamped it in there, and then they weld it on. I mean, sure, you save an operation because you can stamp the hole instead of machining it, but no two latch positions on any guns are precisely the same. Their magazines on some of the guns were jammed up and the bolt couldn’t move ’cause the magazines were stuck in there on some guns. On other guns it was too low, wasn’t feeding properly. They didn’t fix this stuff, it just went on and on like that. They’d hold plus or minus one-thousandth, completely unrealistic tolerances, which nobody could make the parts to. The firing on that trip when I went over there was still done at the only range they had, which was still at RSAF Enfield. One of the things you do to test is you load up a mag, put it up in the rifle, you fire a shot and let the thing cycle and chamber the next round, and then instead of firing that next round, you hand extract it and look for scratches on it. When I did this test, it was just scratched all to hell. They weren’t up on that. The back end of the lugs, you’ve got to carefully smooth off that corner. These were just raw. It was just cutting the cartridges. I don’t know why they weren’t getting split cases from that. Maybe they were.

In part three of the interview with L. James Sullivan, we cover Uzi Gal, the Ruger SMG, Kalashnikovs, “Sacred cows”, his current design work and Jim takes a no-holds-barred look at the current USM4 issues. Don’t miss it!

L. James (Jim) Sullivan was born on 27 June, 1933 in Nome, Alaska.  His father was an attorney and Senator in the Alaskan legislature.  He has one brother, Frank Sullivan, who is a doctor in Cranston, Rhode Island.  He is married to his wife Kaye, whom he married while working for ArmaLite in the 1950s.  The list of Sullivan accomplishments and designs in small arms is impressive and stretches from the AR-15 system, to the Stoner 63 system, the Ruger Mini-14, the Ultimax 100, and countless projects in between.  Jim Sullivan is still going strong, and this winner of the prestigious Colonel George Chinn Award from the NDIA Small Arms Symposium, is forging ahead on new projects.

In Part I of this Interview, Jim Sullivan fills in the blanks on the ArmaLite days and the AR-15 project, the Stoner 63 project, digs deep on the Ichord Committee regarding M16 failures in Vietnam, covers the Ruger Mini 14 and M77, as well as his work on the 7.62mm chain gun, the EPAM, Chiclet Guns, and Caseless ammo.
      
SAR:  Jim, how long did you live in Nome?  

Jim Sullivan:  Until I was seven, and then the family moved.  It looked like the world was heading back into full scale war (World War II). Actually, it had really already started and it looked like the US would get into it and might head towards Alaska; so we moved down to Seattle.  I went through grade school, then went to a town called Kinewagon, Washington, and then went back to Seattle’s University of Washington for engineering.  I’m not a graduate engineer, but I took engineering courses there.  

SAR:  What was your first experience with firearms?  

Jim Sullivan:  I was 12 years old, and a friend of mine’s father had quite a collection and I used to go over there and just look at all those pistols.  It was a very large collection and he had a firing range set up.  He would fire them for us – he wouldn’t let us shoot, but we could watch.  Most were military auto-loader pistols.  The first time that I used any military firearms myself was when I went in the Army.  I was in during the Korean War, from ’53 to ’55, and the war was already winding down at the time.  They were having the Panmunjom talks, and the war ended by the time I finished basic.  That was fine with me.  

SAR:  What was your MOS?  

Jim Sullivan:  I don’t remember the number.  I had been trained as a telephone installer repairman, but I had also gone to what was called the Sparling School of Deep Sea Diving before I’d gone in the army, so I transferred into diving when I went overseas.  That was in 1954.  There was a lot of repair work to do after the invasion at Inchon.  This was after the war.  As far as firearms, the only ones that I fired at all were just in basic training, and we got everything: M1911A1 pistol, M1 Garand, M1 carbine, and the Browning machine guns.  I didn’t see any odd machine guns in Korea.

SAR:  Were you interested in those modern guns?  

Jim Sullivan:  I was fascinated by machine guns in general and I read everything I could ever find on the Maxim gun, especially the technology and the effects of World War One.  This was long before I ever fired an M1 rifle.  I had WHB Smith’s Small Arms of the World and a wonderful biography of Hiram Maxim.  I read about him, and read quite a bit on John Browning and the German designers.  I’ve noticed that most of the small arms advances were either designed by Americans or Germans.  

SAR:  At what point did you shift over to working with small arms?  

Jim Sullivan:  When I got out of the Army in 1955, I went back to the University of Washington, and I read about this new company called ArmaLite.  I think it was in Time magazine.  They had an article on the AR-10.  I applied for a job as a draftsman there, and that’s how I started with ArmaLite – that was in 1957.  I was never a good student, and I had gone to work for Boeing like half the people in Seattle.  ArmaLite was something that really caught my interest and I was very happy to land that job.  They were in Hollywood, California at the time, so I moved there.  

SAR:  Who did you work with at ArmaLite?  

Jim Sullivan:  I reported directly to Gene Stoner.  Everybody did.  Well, not everybody, because there was a front office staff.  Charles Dorchester had some people up there, but everybody in the machine shop and the designers did.  There were two designers at the time, John Peck and Gene Stoner,  I was just a draftsman.  Bob Fremont started later, and Art Miller was there already, but he was pretty much working at Artillerie Inrichtengen in Holland on the AR-10 program during the three years I was at ArmaLite.  John Peck was one of the designers of the M-1 Carbine; he had worked for Carbine Williams and had actually worked there at ArmaLite before Stoner joined.  He worked for George Sullivan – not a close relation to me and I never did discover how close we were.  George Sullivan was the founder of ArmaLite.  He was the patent attorney for Lockheed and got Fairchild.  I don’t remember why that even though he was still in Lockheed, why he got Fairchild involved.  Fairchild was the one that funded the Fairchild Airplane Engine Company, funding ArmaLite.  

SAR:  What type of projects did you work on at ArmaLite?  

Jim Sullivan:  I did almost nothing on the AR-10.  They wanted to make another try at moving the gas system from the side to the top.  The original AR-10 had it on the side.  Gene asked me to take a whack at it, and I did.  He didn’t like my idea at first because there was a transfer tube in the AR-10, and what we ended up with on the AR-16 and the AR-10 was that transfer tube was pulling off of the gas tube, and he thought it would add to the leak, and of course it does because it’s got an additional gap in there.  Anyway, it worked.  This was about a year into my time there, and I was promoted to Design Engineer.  John Peck had designed an early .556 caliber gun.  Actually, there were two guns made.  There was one they called a Stopette, which was in .222 Remington caliber.  It didn’t have a pistol grip, and it didn’t have a big enough barrel extension.  The extension broke, and the head of the machine shop that was firing it was creased on the top of his head, and required getting patched up.  The Stopette was originally designed by somebody who wasn’t there anymore, I think his name was Doc Wilson.  John Peck was doing a military version, just a scaled down AR-10.  What you might call a first AR-15 in a way, but it certainly wasn’t.  It was smaller in diameter, it still had the same small barrel extension diameter as the one that had blown up.  That project was stopped when the Stopette blew up.  They had fired it all right, but it was the first of that size that we changed the gas system from the side.  This too had the side gas system that I moved to the top.  That was my only work on that project, and my only work on the AR-10.  Since that worked well, I got promoted.  

SAR:  How was the work atmosphere at ArmaLite?  

Jim Sullivan:  It was great.  The people were really sharp people, all of them, and fun to work with.  Most had gun backgrounds.  George Sullivan, the founder, had a big collection of military guns.  John Peck certainly was a gun enthusiast, and Gene Stoner, well, you know his background on the early work on AR-10 before joining ArmaLite.  People at ArmaLite were into guns and into the history and technology, and there was a good work atmosphere.  I only had a Browning Pump while I was there.  After the Stopette, they wanted to do an all new cartridge, a new gun, and that was what became the AR-15.  This is the M16, basically the same gun, it’s just more evolved using two different numbers.  We started from scratch, and there was another guy that joined me by the name of Bob Fremont who wasn’t a gun guy.  Bob was one of these fussy guys that was exactly right most of the right time.  He drove everybody crazy.  He did the most meticulous tolerance studies.  He would do that, and I was doing the gun design on this gun, they hadn’t even given it a name yet, but that was what became the AR-15.  We put a different trigger mechanism in there.  We made changes from the waffle magazine, which, while it looks stronger, it’s actually weakened by doing it that way.  We had a 25-round steel magazine that wasn’t a waffle magazine.  That didn’t last.  With the 25 shot, the taper in the cartridge was a problem, so we went to the aluminum 20-shot to keep the mag straight.  You can only go so far before you run into trouble, if you have a straight magazine.  The AR-15 was designed for a straight magazine.  In retrospect, that was a mistake.  You really needed a curved magazine to make the weapon more effective.  We never should have done it that way with a straight magazine.

SAR:  What material did you use in the first AR-15?  

Jim Sullivan:  George Sullivan, the founder, he was kind of into new materials, and he had a version of 7075 aluminum that he called Sulliloy.  Yes, “Sullivan Alloy.”  [Sullivan laughs]  I think he put some kind of patent on it, pretended it had special properties.  Really, it was just 7075 aluminum with some kind of bat’s blood voodoo in it.  Never made any difference that we could see.  

SAR:  How did the first AR-15 work?  Did you get it built while you were there?   

Jim Sullivan:  Yeah, we got it done.  Prototypes never work right, and we had lots of problems, but we solved them all.  Actually, we had moved out of Hollywood by the time we got started on that one.  We were down in Costa Mesa, which is 30 or 50 miles outside of Hollywood.  The company was growing and growing.  We had a great range that we could go to there in Hollywood.  It was a little ways out of town.  The Hutton range, but we lost that.  The one we had that we were able to use there in Costa Mesa nearby had too many rules.  You would have to make arrangements to go out there and fire, where at Hutton we could just show up and blaze away.  That restricted the test firing, which in a way may have caused some of the problems that later showed up regarding the extraction business.  

SAR:  What were you doing personally?

Jim Sullivan:  I got married almost as soon as we moved down there.  Kaye had agreed to marry me already, so she came down immediately after I started there, and we got married right away.  I worked there three years, through the entire process of the AR-15.  After that, Bob Fremont got laid off, then I got laid off and Gene Stoner left.  ArmaLite wasn’t really making any money, and ArmaLite had originally intended to produce this rifle.  Stoner and some sales group had gone to Asia with an AR-10 and the new AR-15.  Nobody wanted the AR-10, everybody wanted the AR-15.  Strangely, Stoner never thought much of 5.56 caliber.  He’s called the father of the 5.56, but he didn’t like it.  He designed the AR-16, which was a 7.62 rifle using a piston version which went no place, but the scaled down version in 5.56, the AR-18, was the one that was successful.  That was Arthur Miller’s project after I was gone.

SAR:  Did you stay in the firearms business after you left ArmaLite?

Jim Sullivan:  No, I went to National Cash Register: it had nothing to do with guns.  I was a designer there for two years, and then I wanted to get back into guns.  I went to work for Harvey Aluminum, which made Sulliloy, the 7075 forgings.  Here’s one of the first ones. (Sullivan pulls out an AR-15 lower receiver forging.)  That’s the first AR-15 forging.  It was from a group of 40 that we did.  I also got involved with explosive munitions that helped me get some background in this area.  It was for an earth anchor; it wasn’t demolition or weaponry.  You pounded a pipe in the ground, then you dropped this little bomblet down in there, and set it off.  It would spread open, and then you’d drive it down one and a half feet further into this empty space down there, and then they poured concrete in.  This was something they could anchor aluminum.  They were special little pallets that joined together and made an airfield and it was for anchoring an aluminum airfield.  So to sell their aluminum airfield, which the military adopted, to sell that, they had to develop this earth anchor, and that’s what I was involved with.  It was adopted in the early ’60s.

SAR:  You joined Gene Stoner on the Stoner 63 project at the beginning, didn’t you?  Where were they at when you joined them?

Jim Sullivan:  Bob Fremont had joined him too, so it was the three of us, the same three that had worked on the AR-15.  Bob worked on the Stoner 62; I never did that.  It was 7.62 caliber like Gene’s M69W prototype.  M69W reads the same whether it is in a standard machine gun version or with the receiver inverted to become a rifle.  I joined in on the Stoner 63 at Cadillac Gage in Costa Mesa.  All of these projects, the M69W, the Stoner 62 and the Stoner 63 had similar concepts.  If you turned the receiver upside-down, it was a rifle, turn it the other, it was a machine gun.  I worked on everything in the project, but each of us did different things as a focus part of the project.  We were no longer doing special cartridges, so that was a little different.  Bob Fremont concentrated his work on the machine gun parts, the belt feed, and I worked more on the magazine-fed gun.  Of course, they’re the same gun, so whatever one guy was doing had to be compatible with what the other guy was doing.  At this time, Colt was making the AR-15 and M16.  ArmaLite was shut down as a division of Fairchild and was sold off to some guys in Texas.  They had sold the AR-15 gas system patent to Colt.

SAR:  Were you following what was going on with Colt and in Vietnam?  

Jim Sullivan:  I wasn’t getting any special briefing on it or anything, or aware of what was going on.  Where I became aware of it was when everybody else did, the scandal of American soldiers being killed with jammed guns, being overrun.  I didn’t know what the problem was at the time, nobody knew when that first hit.  I mean, the people in Army Material Command apparently knew, they had to have known, but they didn’t volunteer any information.  [laughs]  I mean, those people, still today I think they must worry about what would happen if anybody really found out what they had done.  Nobody can prove that they sabotaged the M16 program, but there was no way that, in the testimony that came out in the Ichord Committee that this was a complete unknown.  I feel very, very strongly on this.  (Senator Ichord headed the committee, which was the 90th Congress, 1967.  The report is titled “Special Subcommittee Report on the M16 Rifle Program, House of Representatives” dated October 19, 1967).  Essentially the problem that happened with the M16 in Vietnam was that they changed ammunition from what we had designed and they went and changed from IMR powder to a ball powder.  I can find the conclusions here  “Increased cyclic rate caused by ball propellant,” it goes into that waver of cyclic rate of seconds test.  The problem was that they changed from the intended powder.  Who did that change?  Army Materiel Command at the time did not have the ammunition.  They had guns under their control, but not ammo, which was stupid, just an organizational problem.  But they were in charge of the guns and the arsenals.  Ah, here’s the findings and recommendation of the Ichord Committee Report.

“Both the Army and Marine Corps personnel have experienced serious and excessive malfunctions of the M16 rifle, most serious being the failure to extract a spent cartridge, that the past experience of the army with the M16 rifle in Vietnam was not properly called to the attention of the Marines when the weapon was issued to them.  That the major contributor to malfunctions experienced in Vietnam was ammunition loaded with ball propellant, that the change from IMR-extruded powder to a ball propellant in 1964 for 5.56 ammunition was not justified or supported by test data.  That a number of modifications of the M16 rifle were made necessary only after ball propellant was adopted for the 5.56 ammunition, that the AR-15/M16 rifle as initially developed was an excellent and reliable weapon.”

It went all to hell just because of that change in propellant.  Certainly there were other problems.  We should’ve chrome plated the chamber, that causes problems, and that was something that was our fault as original designers.  

SAR:  What were the symptoms of the ball propellant change that happened to the AR-15 M16 system?  

Jim Sullivan:  It has much higher gas port pressure.  It’s not in itself a bad powder, it’s just like saying diesel fuel is fine, just don’t put it in a gasoline engine, and that’s what they did.  The gun has to be designed for the powder.  That’s the fuel that the gun as an engine runs on.  The M16 system was functioning just right, but when the powder was changed, the gas port pressure that operates the gas system that operates the bolt had much higher pressure.  It made the bolt move faster than it was designed for, and it began unlocking too early, which put stresses on the locking lugs.  Also, the cartridge metal hadn’t relaxed in the chamber enough, particularly when the weapon got hot, and the cartridge would stick in there, keeping the extractor from extracting the cartridge.  The extractor would start to pull it out and then pop loose occasionally.  In a weapon, you can’t have occasionally.  These weapons would reach a point where a guy couldn’t fire a full 20-shot magazine through ’em.  Initially with the IMR powder that we designed it for, it was 10,000 psi at the gas port.  The ball powder was 12,500 psi, a 25% increase.  That was enough to make the gun not work taking the reliability factor out of the equation.  Ball powder’s also dirtier than IMR, and the M-16 is dirty as well because the gas system goes back into the upper receiver area.  I mean the gas actually operates the gun, way back at the back of the bolt, the bolt gets dirty because of it, and it requires more attention.  With IMR powder, which is a cleaner-burning powder, it was a lot better.  I can’t name numbers on that, but I know, I’ve seen the tests, and it’s a lot easier to clean with IMR.  The US is still using ball powder in the 5.56 cartridge: they should’ve changed it immediately.  Foster Sturdevant from Colt came up with a heavier buffer.  It was more than just heavier, that’s what slowed it down, but it had another kind of unique feature which was neat, and that was the heavy weight that’s within this tubular buffer was divided up into a bunch of sections that were separated, and they were steel cylinders separated by a rubber washer.  And so they had a cascading effect of impact.  When they’d impact at either end, you didn’t get the impact of all of them at one time, it was “bang bang bang bang.”

SAR:  It spread the impulse over…

Jim Sullivan:  Exactly.  It spread the impulse over time.  It worked.  It saved the gun, but it didn’t work perfectly.  As gas-operated guns get older and get more rounds fired through them, the gas port rounds off inside.  When you drill the hole that is the gas port, it ends up with sharp corners where it breaks through into the bore.  Gas doesn’t like to flow around sharp corners.  As you fire more and more ammunition through it, it wears those corners and rounds them off, and now gas flows faster and faster.  The gun as an engine is speeding up.  The older it gets, the faster it goes, and the more powerful the cycle becomes.  A lot of people think that’s good, breaking it in.  Wrong, this is bad.  A gun has to work within a certain zone, the action has to be right, the spring, the weight of the cycling components, the distance you’ve given them to cycle and the spring force.  You get that too far wrong, and the gun doesn’t work anymore.  

SAR:  There’s a positive break-in period on the gas port.  

Jim Sullivan:  Certainly.  It’s drilled in there, and that wear-in is going to happen naturally within 1,000 rounds no matter what you do.  We plan for that.  It’s the abuse that causes the problems.  Some of the special operations groups, they do their training and they fire massive amounts of ammunition, they get their new M4 Carbines, and their doctrine is suppressive fire going in and coming out.  They do mag dump after mag dump after mag dump.

SAR:  Some of those used guns I’ve clocked at 1,300, 1,400 rpm.  Is it just that the gas port is rounded out and the flow is better, or is it that they’ve actually eroded the hole, and they have more going in there?  

Jim Sullivan:  The diameter doesn’t change, it’s the rounding off.  There are two things about this event.  The gas port in the M16, we didn’t know about this.  A lot of the US gas operated guns, the BAR for example, had gas port adjustments on it.  You can let the gas port be the initial throttle, but you can compensate for when it rounds off.  But in a gas operated gun, if you don’t have a gas adjustment on there, you can’t use the gas port diameter as the metering diameter.  You’ve got to go downstream someplace and put something smaller in there that can’t erode that remains the metering diameter.  We didn’t have anything like that in the M16, that part was our fault, we didn’t know it needed to be that way.  I went to Colt about the M4, and took the plug that’s in the end of the gas tube and I moved it over this hole, and I made it the restricting hole diameter.  No matter how big you make the gas port, or how rounded off it becomes, it’s the hole that is in the gas tube that does the metering and determines how much gas gets back here.  More is still going through, but its way better to do it that way.

Remember, going back to the Ichord Committee in the 90th Congress, they identified the problem with our soldier’s weapons.  The 110th Congress doesn’t even care.  They don’t care that the M4 has got exactly the same problems that this thing had in ’67.  Back then, people raised all kinds of hell over it.  The 110th Congress doesn’t do a damn thing, and those soldiers over there in Iraq right now have exactly the same problems with their M4 in spite of the improved buffer.  They’ve got exactly the same problems that this thing had in 1967 when the Congress actually did something about it.  These people won’t.  The United States militarily is in bad shape because they’ve let these small arms deteriorate to a point now where the US is a superpower only when it fights a naval battle or an air battle.  It’s not a superpower when it fights a rifle battle.  

SAR:  You worked on the Stoner 63.  How long were you with Cadillac Gauge?  

Jim Sullivan:  Three years there, too.  The 62 was a prototype for the Stoner 63 but the 62 had a machined receiver while the 63 was a sheet metal concept.  The trigger mechanisms were very different.  What made the gun unique and valuable was the fact that you could assemble it as a rifle, or using 90% of the same parts you could assemble it as a full-performance machine gun.  That concept had been worked out on the 62 by the time I had gotten there.  I worked on scaling it down into the 5.56 caliber.  We had lessons learned from the AR-15/M16 project that we could draw on.  We needed a longer cam and we put a longer dwell in the unlocking cam.  No matter how fast the 63 may speed up, it isn’t going to seize up.  I don’t think we ever had an extraction failure in the Stoner 63.  It isn’t the angle of the cam path, it’s the straight section.  If you make the straight section longer, the bolt carrier has to move further before it begins to rotate the bolt, and the overall total length when it’s all done and starts yanking on the cartridge is determined by the overall length of the cam.  The longer that is, the more the gun likes it, and that’s true of any auto loading gun.  

Of those three years I was there, two years were spent designing the Stoner 63.  Bob Fremont left in that time period and went to work for Colt.  Bob was a great guy, but he bullied the front office and he insulted the executives.  [Sullivan chuckles]  It was kind of fun to watch the fight going on between Fremont and the execs.  Fremont was a hell of a good man, but he was hard to take.  I liked him, but a lot of people hated him.  The execs sure hated him.  We were still in California, and the president of the company came out and he was really steaming mad.  I don’t remember what Fremont had done that day.  Anyway, he flew out to California to fire him.  Fremont knew he was coming, and when the guy was there, he walked in our office and asked for Stoner to come outside, and Fremont says, “Wait a minute.  While we’re all together, there’s something I’ve got to talk about.  I’ve been here for two years now, and I haven’t gotten a raise yet.”  [laughs]  The guy was so shocked he gave him a raise and left. [laughs]  

SAR:  A preemptive strike?  

Jim Sullivan:  Yeah, Stoner and I just roared.  Stoner had told us the guy was coming out to fire Bob.  

SAR:  You were two years into the Stoner 63 program.  How many guns had you made?

Jim Sullivan:  We had everything worked out.  We made about 80 or 85 guns at that point, and then I went back to Quantico and spent that year there.  It was all testing with the Marines at Quantico, and Camp Lejeune, and then on up to Fort Greeley, Alaska for cold weather testing.  The Marines liked the Stoner 63.  In 1965, they did a live combat test in Vietnam.  Colonel Joe Gibbs was the man who ran the tests in ‘Nam.  Recently, he wanted to do a book on the Stoner 63.  But the Marines made few changes to the gun and you know the old saying, if it works, don’t fix it.  The Marines tested the Stoner 63 for a year and then ordered 300,000 of them, and the Army talked to Congress or the Senate funding committee and said, “The Marines should use what we use,” and that ended that.  The Marines loved the gun, they didn’t want any changes to it.  In the testing, certain problems came out.  At Fort Greeley in Alaska, the machine gun wouldn’t work at all and we had to make a little fix.  Remember, you turn it upside-down if it’s going to be a rifle, from where it is a machine gun.  There’s a turret at the back of the bolt carrier.  When you turn it upside-down you have to rotate that so that it remains in the same up and down position, even though you’ve turned the bolt carrier over.  In order to be able to turn that turret, it was just bound in there tight by the buffer, which was part of the bolt carrier assembly.  It was just held in position by friction, and then when you put it in the gun it was held in position by the track.  In severe cold weather, you’ve got problems with lubricants.  A gun needs to be fairly well-lubed.  Up in the Arctic you have terrible friction problems because the lubes don’t work in extreme cold weather.  They rub off, and you’ve got chist in the air – ground up powdery stone from shifting ice floes.  This gets in the action.  Anyway, this turret, which was positioned by friction, would under normal circumstances move forward and move back, because it was operating the belt feed.  The feed was camming to one side, causing it to rotate to the other side.  It would seize up and stay there, and the gun couldn’t cycle, in an almost cold weld.  It became obvious what the problem was, and I did a little latch that prevented it from locking up.  It was a positive latch, and then Stoner came up with a simpler way.  I talked to him on the phone about it.  It was to take advantage of this stack up of buffer forces.  It had to cam itself forward to compress these Belleville washers a little further, and then would snap in.  It was a detent using parts that were already there.  We never did get it fully tested.  This is typical of the type of problems that would show up in field tests, that don’t show up in your normal tests.  

SAR:  Did you travel outside the US for that period?  

Jim Sullivan:  No, most of the travel I did in that group was testing in US military type places.  Cadillac Gage moved to Warren, Michigan and I was there for a year and a half.  I was in contact with all kinds of people in the firearms industry as by that time I had gotten to know a lot of people.  Stoner and I had gone to an army briefing on small arms, and Bill Ruger was there, so the three of us went out to lunch.  Afterwards he offered me a job, and I wouldn’t have taken it. I would’ve stayed at Cadillac Gauge, but the Army turned against the Stoner 63 order for the Marines.  Not much point in sticking around.  The Stoner 63 project was pretty much relegated to minor production.  Maybe 3,500 guns total.  They made changes to it, and by the time that test was done, it was as near perfect as you could ever make a gun.  The users didn’t want any more changes to it at that point, and Cadillac Gauge just couldn’t keep their hands off of it.  

SAR:  So you moved over to Ruger.  How long were you there?  

Jim Sullivan:  1965-1968.  Three years at Ruger too.  

SAR:  Three years.  Jim, I’m detecting a pattern here.  

Jim Sullivan:  I know. [laughs]  

SAR:  Where were you at with Ruger?  

Jim Sullivan:  That was in South Port, Connecticut.  I was an engineer and a designer.  I designed two guns: the model 77 bolt action and the Mini 14.  That Mini 14 was the third 5.56 that I had worked.  I worked with Bill Ruger. Everybody worked with Bill Ruger.  There were two guys on the Mini 14 project.  The chief engineer and another guy named Larry Larsen, who was at the time doing the single-shot rifle; that beautiful falling block rifle, the Ruger Number One.  What a beautiful gun.  Actually, that’s what Larry worked on the full three years.  It sounds funny that a gun like that takes more design time than a bolt action repeater or a Mini 14, but it does.  Everything’s got to be perfect, and it was.  

SAR:  You worked on the Mini 14.  What did you start with when you were looking at the project?  Did Bill Ruger have a concept?  

Jim Sullivan:  The Mini 14 was just a scaled down M14.  That was it.  Ruger said, “Let’s take an M14 down to 5.56.”  The M16 had been adopted, and what Ruger wanted was something he could sell to both the military and civilian world.  I tried to tell him the military wasn’t going to buy a 5.56 that looks like a hunting rifle; it’s got to be an assault rifle.  The full auto gun, the AC-556, was done after I left.  I did it in semi-auto.

SAR:  How was it working there?  

Jim Sullivan:  Oh, just great.  Bill Ruger, you remember what kind of guy he was, he was a curmudgeon.  So a lot of people were afraid of him, I guess, but he and I got along good.  I worked for him again here in Arizona.  I spent about an equal one and a half years on each rifle I did at Ruger.  On the M77, when you looked to the market, there’s the Winchester Model 70 and the Remington 700 as main contenders.  Bill wanted something as good as the old Model 70.  He didn’t want something cheap like the newer guns on the market.  He wanted something that would compete.  Bill wanted something that’d outsell them both, and it did.  He wanted a better gun, and he had bought that casting company in New Hampshire, Pine Tree Castings, and so he wanted the bolt and receiver cast, and he wanted top quality.  He wanted a Mauser-type extractor, so it’d be a full controlled-round feed.  In the end, it really wasn’t, we cheated.  It looks like a Mauser extractor.  It snaps over, though, it doesn’t slide up in.  Then he wanted his own proprietary scope system, so I had to come up with the tilt-out scope,   

SAR:  How was the Mini 14 project?  Was that challenging?  

Jim Sullivan:  Yeah.  I thought that was more interesting.  The only thing you get to do as a designer that’s kind of novel and fun is like the trigger mechanism on the Model 77.  I came up with a different way to do it, as well as the bolt stop.  We got a patent on it because it works just like a Mauser bolt stop, but the Mauser bolt stop has to have a bump out of the receiver, which makes it real hard and expensive to polish that side of the receiver.  I came up with a bumpless stop.  [laughs]  So that was fun.  The rest of it had all been done before.  Anyway, I loved Ruger, I loved the company, it was great, but Kaye and I didn’t like Connecticut.  We had two young kids going to school.  We really wanted to get back to California, and I got an offer from Hughes.  I went to work there and stayed for 10 years.  That broke the three year curse.  (Laughs)

SAR:  Hughes Advanced Armament Division of Hughes Tool?

Jim Sullivan:  Yes.  I was one of the designers of the first chain gun in 7.62mm.  I didn’t work on the upsized M242 25mm guns.  They use ’em on helicopters and the Bradley Fighting Vehicle.  The 7.62mm, it’s on the main battle tanks in England.  There was a 30mm chain gun project as well, but the Army was saying, “We want proof of concept” so I was brought in to make a 7.62mm chain gun.  Hughes had been working on a twin barreled Heligun with a revolving cylinder in between the barrels, but that wasn’t my project.

SAR:  Was the chain gun your concept?

Jim Sullivan:  I didn’t invent the chain gun, a guy named Lenny Price was the inventor: it was his concept.  Originally they didn’t have me come out there to do the chain gun.  What they wanted was a tank machine gun because there was the old Browning .30 caliber gun that was too long, and a new very short receiver .30 caliber tank gun, called the M73.  What a piece of garbage, along with its big brother; the M85 in .50 caliber.  What they wanted to do was replace the M-73.  There was a big broad agency announcement of a requirement for a tank machine gun that would go in all mechanized vehicles.  Hughes worked on several projects to address that.  One of them was the chain gun 7.62; the other one I worked on was the EPAM, the Externally Powered Armor Machinegun.

It had a hand crank on it.  That was just one of the requirements, kind of silly, I thought, but they said if power failed, you’d still want to be able to use it.  Kind of dumb in my opinion, but hey, it’s a requirement.  All the EPAM ever was, was a prototype.  Lenny Price came up with the chain gun at the same time.  In the Hughes Times, they wrote up that he got the idea from a Harley Davidson motorcycle.  He was a Harley rider, so of course he knew chain operation, but that wasn’t what set him off.  He was another neat guy.  A lot of the guys that I’ve known that were gun designers, were exceptional, interesting people.  They did all kinds of things.  This was in Culver City, California, and Lenny lived on a boat, and he went to work on his motorcycle.  I’ve ridden on the back of that many times, went out to lunch with him a lot of times.  Neat old guy.  He’s dead now, like so many of them are.  He started off with a bigger gun for a different requirement, and the chain just fell into place as a natural way to shorten the mechanism.  While he was in the middle of this, the Army had a requirement for a helicopter, and the Hughes Helicopter Division wanted something in 7.62mm.  If they could do the gun and the helicopter, that would give them the contract.  They started in on that while I was working on the EPAM, and Lenny was working on the 30-millimeter.  The army’s “proof of concept” speech was given, and they wanted to see the thing.  Hughes asked me to drop the EPAM and do a 7.62mm chain gun.  I started off on that all by myself, but there was a guy who is now kind of my partner in some of the stuff I’m doing: Bob Waterfield.  Bob worked at the range as a range technician.  He’s really sharp, and I got him involved.  The two of us ended up co-designing the 7.62mm chain gun.  We did start with scaling down Lenny’s chain drive, but we had to do the rest from scratch.  Americans didn’t do anything with it, but the British did.  They liked it because we did a forward eject on it and it had that short receiver footprint.  We got that done before they got the 30-millimeter done.

SAR:  What’s the concept on the chain drive?

Jim Sullivan:  When you look down into the receiver, you will see a chain that goes around four sprockets in kind of a rectangle.  You have all the dwell while the connector to the bolt is going side-to-side, and then the motion of the bolt is when it’s going front and back.  When it’s going across at the rear, that’s when you do your feeding.  When it’s going across at the front, that’s when you do your firing because it gives you time for the pressure to drop in the chamber.  This system has been done at higher rates of fire, but is really only effective at a lower rate like about 450 RPM.  Remember, this was the period where they were working on the new tanks and some of the new vehicles, and they didn’t want to have the long receiver Browning 1919 series or the long receiver .50 caliber.  They couldn’t get the commander in there near the gun, because it was too long into his face.  They had to make guns with shorter receivers, and the two that they had, the M-73 and the M-85 were just disasters as guns.  On the chain gun, we laterally transferred a lot of the activity in the firing cycle, so our design was very short, and very effective.

SAR:  That only covers about half of your time at Hughes.

Jim Sullivan:  There was a lot of other work that we did.  For a while the army was just fascinated with caseless ammunition.  They couldn’t face the problems in caseless ammo, and they just believed that if they threw enough money at it, somehow it’d get solved.  They’re still fighting with caseless ammo concepts.  I worked on that and the Chiclet stuff as well as the Advanced Combat Rifle (ACR) concept and later the Advanced Infantry Weapon System (AIWS) at McDonnell-Douglas.  The whole group of Hughes people went over to MDHC, in fact, after I came back from wherever, I went and did another Chiclet gun with them.  It was recoil operated to soften it.  It was like .410 caliber, only it was a Chiclet, that size, fairly big.  It used five flechettes in a sabot, which in turn was in the Chiclet.  The magazine went in the side and was semi-auto.  

All in all, I spent about five years on caseless ammunition, Chiclets, all this hopeless crap.  When you first get involved in it, you think well, the advantages are so great that it’s worth the effort.  But when you get into what the problems really are, eventually you see it’s hopeless, and then you try to tell everybody that, and they get mad because they don’t want to give up their work or contract.  With the technology that was available, and we’re in the same position right now, caseless became evident to me and the other guys that it wasn’t going to be able to be feasible.  Really, you have to redesign what the goal is.  If you say you want lightweight ammo, well, now you can work with that goal.  If you say right off that the lightweight ammo has to be caseless, then you’re screwed.  The guns were kind of fun, but man, they all ended up the same way.  The breech seal would fail and blow up the whole magazine. We had some real wreckage down there!  

SAR:  So from 1968 to 1978 you did the EPAM, the 7.62mm chain gun, caseless projects, chiclet/flechette projects, and then left for…?  

Jim Sullivan:  There were plenty of other projects, but I finished up on the chain gun just before I went over to Singapore.  I had kept in touch with the people at ArmaLite, which had been bought by a group of Texas oil men.  I actually had an office at ArmaLite.  Bob Waterfield joined me there on weekends, and we’d work there three nights a week and Saturdays.  We formed a company called Timberline Hawk.  We did just real simple things that we could try to do business with.  John Wayne invested in this one program – this one here.  It was a .22 LR rifle.  We formed a corporation called Wayne Repeating Arms, and the plan was we’d start with a .22.  Here’s one of them.  (Hands over the rifle.)

SAR:  Very lightweight.  

Jim Sullivan:  It had some nice features along with that.  It locked open.  At the time, California had the law about you can’t have ten-shot detachable magazines.  So you could load the magazine.  It’s a double-column magazine, you just load it through the port, you lock this open with the safety, then you release the safety in the chamber.  It still operates as a safety.  We incorporated, but we never got it in production because Wayne’s son-in-law was his business manager, and got caught in an “indiscretion” and Wayne fired him.  The new business manager had to take over all the Wayne businesses, and since this wasn’t progressing in far enough, they just canceled it.  So, too bad.  I interacted with Wayne: we went out and he shot ’em twice.  One of the ways we originally connected was we had started out as Timberline Hawk. We had made a little money, and we bought a bunch of parts from a company that had gone out of business.  It was a little Derringer.  Using their Derringer, I came up with a little .22 rifle.  It’s pretty crude, but John Wayne ended up with one of the prototypes and took it out on his boat.  He knew the people at ArmaLite because his boat was always being repaired by the boat yard next door, and he used to come in there since he liked guns.  We had met long before, when way back when I had worked for ArmaLite.  He used to go out and plink cans out in the water with it, and it turned into a business deal.  

SAR:  So that was the night job, three days a week?  

Jim Sullivan:  Yeah.  It was an attempt to start up something more serious.  We ended up with a shotgun that ArmaLite had made.  John McGurty was their machine shop manager, and he was my partner on that gun that John Wayne ended up with.  John McGurty, was a partner on the project.  We also did a holsterable submachine gun.  Here it is.

SAR:  A holsterable submachine gun?  

Jim Sullivan:  Yup.  Some parts were somebody else’s, but in our design, the bolt traveled a long distance and was very smooth.  We made it so you could push from both ends, and now they put this all in a holster.  It’s a telescoping wraparound bolt around the front, and a rear piece that comes together, closes up and becomes the size of a regular handgun.  Pretty slick.  We didn’t cheat and fire full auto, we didn’t have a license for that, we just fired semi-auto.  It started its life as a Linda or Terry Pistol.

In Parts Two and Three of the Interview with L. James Sullivan, we cover Singapore and the design and adoption of the Ultimax 100, the Beretta Assault Rifle, the Beta C-Mag, Gordon Ingram, Somalia, Uzi Gal, the Ruger SMG, Kalashnikovs, the British SA80, “sacred cows” and his current design work,  Jim takes a no-holds-barred look at the current US M4 issues.  Don’t miss it!

L. James Sullivan’s favorite quote on wishful thinking in an Arms Race: The Spanish admiral talking about the Armada with his men, and how he was going to face the British and said that he knew that although the British had more range in their guns, God was on the side of the Spaniards, so the British would be befuddled and not able to fire until they were within equal range of the Spanish guns.  


L. James Sullivan’s favorite quotes on preparedness: 1906 – Mark Twain, in reference to the Ordnance tests of the Maxim Machine Gun that had been ongoing since 1896: “The eye that never sleeps might just as well, since it takes ten years to see what any other eye can see in five minutes.”

Bob Faris was born in 1930 in Chicago, Illinois, but spent most of his youth in the Germantown, Pennsylvania area. He is an Ordnance veteran of the Korean War, and participated in testing many of the modern small arms used by today’s military at Aberdeen Proving Grounds and Yuma Proving Grounds. Bob is a lifelong collector of military small arms, their ammunition, belts, magazines, and accessories, the paraphernalia that accompanies them, and the uniforms and militaria. He shoots, makes parts, and generally has mentored several generations of firearms designers, testers, users and civilian shooting enthusiasts.

SAR: Bob, you’ve always been a “gun guy.” During that period, in the ’50s and ’60s when you were at Aberdeen, did you expand your gun collecting?

Bob Faris: Every time I got a raise, I’d go down and buy another bundle of guns. Most of my shopping was at Interarmco, then InterArms. I knew Dick Winter, and I got to know them all pretty well. Of course, I met Sam Cummings and I got to be one of their information resources. They were getting so much stuff in they couldn’t identify, I was helping them out, so I got a discount on guns and things. They’d call me up as soon as a ship was offloaded, and as soon as I could get off from work, I’d come down there and help them out. Start sorting and going through piles and find out what things were. Sam had his own little warehouse floor in the office building. Anything new that came in there, they would immediately pick out the best of whatever got there, and put it in Sam’s storage, which is logical.

SAR: Of course it is. It’s one of the perks of being a gun guy. Anyone in particular that sticks out?

Bob Faris: I forget what year, but Tom Nelson got out of the Army, and I introduced him to Winter, and later he came back down and got a job with them. It was the early ’60s. Tom came out and was working for them. They had finally hired someone who knew weapons.

SAR: Any interesting guns that come to mind that you found there? Any weird stuff?

Bob Faris: Sure, all of it. (Laughs) Very few automatics. They did get a few in, as did Val Forgett. Val and Sam, they kind of worked together. I wasn’t buying machine guns in those days. I had a couple of them, Dewats, but it wasn’t until ’65 that I got my first live machine guns. I got a Thompson 28A1 and a MK II Bren gun. Paid 100 bucks apiece.

SAR: That was a lot of money.

Bob Faris: I know. I had to pay the $200 transfer tax as well.

SAR: Do you still have those two pieces?

Bob Faris: Yeah. I’m pretty dedicated to collecting and not getting rid of the items I buy. I’m very careful what I buy most of the time. Hardly ever have any trading stock. Every one that I do get rid of, I have regretted it later. Those first two guns were imported guns, from Interarmco. There wasn’t a big shipment; it was a pretty select shipment. I had my choice of some fairly worn 1921A1s, and I picked a 1928A1. I wished I’d gotten the Colt 1921A1 now. I could’ve dip blued them and they’d look like new. The Bren was a Canadian MKII – that one over there (Bob points at his collection). That was in pretty good shape when I got it and I still enjoy shooting it today, especially since I traded for the Mark I that I also have, which is also a Long Branch gun. I converted it to 7.62, sold it and got it back in trade again. Technically an “L4 Bren.” The next gun I got was either a Dutch FAL or a Lewis.

SAR: How about dealing with Val Forgett?

Bob Faris: I was working at Aberdeen, and Colonel Jarret called me up one day. He said, “I got an Army GI over here, just new, just come in, and he’s assigned to help me out. He’s a real gun nut. Come on over and meet him,” so I did. I knew Val ever since, because he was working for Colonel Jarrett who had started and run the Aberdeen Museum. I also met Don Bady. Colonel Jarrett’s assistant took over when he retired in the 1950s. Val always knew the interesting guns, and I bought quite a few from him as well.

SAR: Did you register any guns in the amnesty?

Bob Faris: Yes, the Dutch FAL and then the 25mm Puteaux had to be registered as a Destructive Device, and a Dewat Chatellerault 1924/29 and I registered that. I registered maybe ten guns in the 1968 Amnesty.

SAR: Did you know anybody else that was registering guns in the Amnesty?

Bob Faris: Everybody I knew that was interested in machine guns. Some guys held some back, which they regretted later. They held them back because they felt uncomfortable with registering them, they didn’t trust the government. They thought the government was going to come and take the guns that they registered. It is good sound reasoning you know, not to trust a government when it comes to gun control. This may happen yet.

SAR: Were you going to gun shows?

Bob Faris: I was going to the Ohio Gun Collector Association (OGCA) gun shows from ’59 on. Tom Nelson introduced me to them. There I met Allan Coors. He’s big into tanks as well and he’s getting more into machine guns now. He’s got a great military rifle collection too. Remember, there weren’t many gun shows back then, it was a big deal. The three of us, Tom and Allan and I, and maybe two more guys would meet and then drive up to Ohio, taking turns driving. All of the collectors would meet a few times a year at these shows, and buy and sell. When I moved to Yuma there was nothing out west like that OGCA show; except for that big one in Pomona, California, The Great Western. It was a pretty good substitute for OGCA. It was the biggest show I’d ever been to. You did a lot of walking, but you could see the stuff and buy it.

SAR: That’s where I first met you, way back, because my family was always there twice a year. Tom Nelson was there, the whole old crew. A big gathering in the sunshine in Southern California. Everybody’d come out from the East Coast and get in the sunshine and come down to Pomona and go to the Great Western twice a year. I miss that show.

Bob Faris: Absolutely, I never missed one. It was great getting together with everyone there, finding all the parts, manuals, old guns. Too bad the local politicians killed it.

SAR: I understand the name was sold, and they run “The Great Western” in Texas now. At Yuma, most of the testing you were doing there was on aircraft guns?

Bob Faris: It started out as aircraft guns. XM-140 was what originally was tested extensively for a new aircraft, and I was up to my neck in that. The aircraft Lockheed Cheyenne pooped out and they dropped it, started over again. That eventually was replaced by the Blackhawk. They had this completely electronically run, mechanically operated gun, the XM-140 30-millimeter. It was about the same as the NATO 30mm round. It had a different semi-rimmed head, instead of adopting the one that they had standardized in the NATO group. They had to make this new thing, and eventually they did make the change, to NATO standard, mid-length ADEN round. The XM230 Chain Gun replaced the XM140.

SAR: They didn’t standardize with the British ADEN system?

Bob Faris: Not the guns, but they eventually modified the XM140 round to interchange with the ADEN ammunition. The HEDP project had a lot of work going into it. Ballistically, they’re almost identical, but were not interchangeable. They were firing mostly from the air for these ammunition tests. There was a lot of fuze testing on the ground, because they had problems, and eventually wound up with a pretty good fuze. It was an all-purpose projectile. It had blast effect, some fragmentation, that’s a shaped charge in the projectile for anti-tank effect.

SAR: You worked on the 25mm Bushmaster program at Yuma.

Bob Faris: That started with the TRW 6425 weapon system, which was sent to Aberdeen for test, for military potential evaluation. The government officially didn’t have a need for that system, but the military really did. I was pulled off another program of grenade launchers. This first design was by TRW, a combination of designs between Oerlikon and TRW. The ammunition had shown success against light armor, and you could stop any tank going with a burst. The gun was recoil operated to start with, and then gas operation was an alternative. It had right and left hand feed that was quick change, electrically fired, and could be worked by hand. You could put your armor piercing ammunition on one side and your anti-personnel on the other. This was a very important design feature. I ran the military potential test on it, and it had some problems but many good features. It needed a balance between adequate and excessive powering, and between maximum depression and maximum elevation, which was a problem. You don’t do all the adverse conditions in the initial military test. You do certain ones that you feel may be important, or may show a problem but it had potential. This project was put on the shelf for a while. In the meantime, the infantry was working out what they really wanted from this kind of system, what kind of ranges, what kind of speeds, what kind of capacities and so forth for their new Infantry Fighting Vehicle (IFV) concept. They needed more space for a bigger turret because they wanted to put a bigger gun in it. At Aberdeen primarily, they tested an interim rapid fire weapon system. They spent a lot of time and money on the German interim M139 20 millimeter. It was supposed to be an off-the-shelf item just to give the Seventh Army something to put on their scout vehicle and the predecessor of the IFV, MICV (Mechanized Infantry Combat Vehicle), having a one-man turret with the M139 20mm gun.

Now, since it was to be replaced with the IFV having a two-man turret with a 25mm gun, they needed someone to run the tests at YPG (Yuma Proving Ground), and here I was at YPG. So, I was picked for the project. The Army had to choose between the recoil/gas operated XM241 and the motor driven XM242. Both used the same ammunition and link belt. APG (Aberdeen Proving Ground) conducted the engineering tests from test stands. The XM242 performance was better than that of the XM241 in almost every test. However, there had been incidents of the XM242 firing out of battery (unlocked) at other test installations (at least one at a Hughes test range). The Army convened a Source Selection Board to summarize and analyze all of the test results and decide which gun should be chosen. In December of 1978 I was appointed to review all of the results for safety because of my experience as I had either conducted or observed many of the tests. All of the testers including the contractors and other Army agencies were represented.

SAR: Identical ammunition in 25 millimeter?

Bob Faris: Same ammo. The TRW gun had no significant safety problems. Hughes knew their Chain Gun was in trouble. They had to make a design decision. They said; “We have a fix on the way, so wait a bit.” Everybody knew how it was going to go on the decision if they had no fix; they were dead in the water. I was noncommittal. But the team chief, who was at the Tank Automotive Command where this meeting was, took me aside to say, “Hughes is here with high-speed movies, an explanation and a fix for the safety problem. Come with me.” Dan, you’ve seen how the chain gun works. The bolt goes back and forth on the chain that’s going around the receiver bottom, and it gives a fixed delay between rounds, guarantees a minimum unlocking time and a maximum travel time. In their fix, the chance of a round going off when you’re unlocked is nil because it’s set up so that it will not unlock unless there’s a recoil impulse from the previous round. The chain stops unless there’s a recoil impulse. I watched the high-speed movies and I thought it through, trying to figure out a way to make it fail. I couldn’t come up with a reasonable way. In other words, this thing had to be failsafe now. The meeting broke up; I hadn’t asked too many questions because they were pretty clear in their explanation. We were riding back and the chief wanted to know what I thought. I said, “I gotta chew on it a little overnight, but I think they got it fixed.” I couldn’t check it by tests, there’s no time for testing. The decision was due the next day.

SAR: So you had to make a call on it right then.

Bob Faris: I had to make a call on it. “Go with the XM242 Chain Gun.” My chief had agreed with it, and all the rest of the team disagreed. We were right down to the wire. I stuck to my guns because I had been doing a lot of sand and dust testing, with only minor problems with the XM242, and their fix worked to keep the out of battery occurrences. So, the M242 was accepted. I had my fingers crossed for many moons.

SAR: The first M240 Coax guns, the Americanized MAG58s were used on that project as well.

Bob Faris: I know, because I ran into belt pull problems. I immediately ran a test on those guns by testing belt pull capability. I established that it had plenty of belt pull capability and the problem was in the feed chute and ammo box. It was fixed and no further feed problems occurred.

SAR: While you were doing these tests, you were involved in the shooting community around Arizona. When did you first correspond with Herbie over in England? (The late H.J. “Herbie” Woodend, former Custodian of the MOD Pattern Room at Nottingham) I know you shared a common passion with him on belts, links and feeding devices.

Bob Faris: I started contact with him sometime after John Cross started coming over here. John came over here with a cartridge collector, and I don’t remember the year there either. The cartridge collector never came back, but I would see John practically every year. Still do. He introduced me to Herbie by mail. The students of belts and links and that type of thing are few and far between, it’s a small fraternity of serious collectors. I corresponded with Herbie, but I never made it over to the Pattern Room. Every time he came over here, he visited me, and Bill Woodin, and the others back East.

SAR: You have a passion for collecting a lot of different things to do with military. Is there a direction you’re going to go into?

Bob Faris: My collecting would be called “International,” and it is military based. There are different emphases in investment. Guns are the most expensive part of it, the most important part. No matter what, I still want to have a certain amount of each country’s military insignia, the accessories to go with all the guns, and of course the ammunition. If I had the money and the years, I’d collect tanks, armored vehicles, planes and helicopters. The trial and testing information and manuals are every bit as important as the weapons themselves to collecting. It’s part of the whole thing for doing research. The user can’t really learn how to use it without some basic material to go with it. My personal collecting parallels the job I had. I still understand that information is important. That was one of my responsibilities as test director, more so than when I started. Today that is a separate function. I remember on the M39 they’d send a few guys down, writers, technical writers, and they’d have me go through assembly, disassembly, technical issues, with them, particularly with the M39. They combined that with the testing. They had provisional ordnance manuals and we had to review those along with the guns as they approached acceptability in testing. This was to make sure the manual matched up with the real information you were finding. Originally, they would write it and we would critique it and see that it serves its purpose adequately. As time went on, it became the test director’s responsibility.

SAR: You’re always at the Wikieup shoot, The Big Sandy, and before that at S-P Crater shoots. You seem to have a heck of a great time there.

Bob Faris: Oh, yes. My favorite shooting activities bounce back and forth between the aerial targets and the on-the-ground, reactive targets: things that explode. On the aerial targets, I developed different weapon mounts to use over the years. Whatever it was, it usually would have high cyclic rate and large sights. It’s not a really realistic situation. You have a target that’s this big (3 feet) going by you, gyrating all around, and it’s at 250+- yards. If you can hit that, it’s luck. At the first, I used Vickers, Brens, whatever. Then I made a twin mount for the Vickers, and changed the cradle to make a twin Bren gun with drums. As the model plane guys got better, we got better guns.

SAR: A microcosmic arms race.

Bob Faris: (Laughs) Yeah, our own arms race. The guys flying the planes are allowed to do anything they can to keep from getting hit. In other words, they’re not flying at scale speed. And if they were, they’d lose a lot more airplanes and it’d cost more.

SAR: There’s at least one guy who brings an M134 Minigun so that he can try and take down the planes.

Bob Faris: It’s still hard to do it with anything because of the scale/speed ratio. Heck of a lot of fun though! My twin Vickers were inspired by that. Doesn’t necessarily do as well as the single Vickers because it’s bulky and you traverse the twins with your feet. It’s heavy. It’s really a lot like normal World War Two Radial and Motley mounts. These target planes are flying relatively much faster than that design could cope with.

SAR: Have you run into many unusual machine guns in private ownership?

Bob Faris: Sure, lots of them, I own some unusual guns. I also see FG-42s out there, and there’s plenty of MG-3s and MG42s as well. I seem to buy enough of most of the really odd machine guns. Weird Italian, French, other designs will always catch my interest. Most of the guys out there are more shooters than collectors, and they’ll buy a machine gun that they know is tried and true, they can get parts and ammo for. I lean towards the odd, strange machine guns as a collector, but I shoot them too.

SAR: You’ve done a lot of work on Vickers guns to change the calibers around. How many calibers can a Vickers gun be changed into?

Bob Faris: They can do 13 rifle calibers, and I shoot nine of them. They produced 13 different calibers of Vickers. I’ve done some of them different ways, but all of the calibers I shoot, I have the barrels and the belts and the locks, all the parts. I do manufacture my own parts when I need them. I have a shop with a lathe and drill press and grinders and all that stuff. I like the 11mm Gras, which was the balloon gun. I made the cases from the 11mm Austrian round; the case is slightly shorter, but it works with cast bullets. I also shoot 8mm Siamese Type 66, because I happened to have a couple new barrels for it. I got components that Kynoch had disposed of. John Cross helped me with these deals.

SAR: You bought some other things from England at one point, didn’t you?

Bob Faris: I bought rifles there, too. Also a lot of Vickers rusty gauges, 900 pounds worth. They came from the scrap yard adjacent to the old Enfield Locks. I wish I’d gotten them sooner before they got so rusty. That was in the late ’70s. These were the gages used in manufacturing the Vickers guns. I got 90% of them and lots of parts. If it involved a major receiver component, it was not shipped. There were some Lewis parts and original factory production gages in there, too. There was a small box of .50-caliber Vickers parts and locks and stuff.

SAR: From the Vickers light .50 low velocity or the heavy .50 high velocity?

Bob Faris: Both. I have a new barrel for the high-velocity Vickers. (Laughs) All the others were the low velocity model.

SAR: Have you seen a transferable Vickers .50 in the US?

Bob Faris: No. Only the parts, some were just thrown into a pile. I bought the whole lot, which was in England.

SAR:Always the best thing to do. Do you have a favorite machine gun?

Bob Faris: Probably my Vickers 1912 MK 1. That’s the first one, the very first production gun. Favorite rifle? A Number 4(T). I like shooting it, and I like its accuracy, versatility and form.

SAR: (Dan eyes Bob’s rifle wall) When did you get that Mondragon? How much did you pay?

Bob Faris: 1950 and I paid $35. (Laughter) It’s in 7mm and it came from Mexico. I’ve got the drum for it, I got it from another collector, Steve Fuller. The leather case and drums over there is for the Farquar-Hill rifle. They only made 100 of those. These are the early 20th century prototypes of the modern semiautomatic rifles like the Mondragon, the Farquar Hill, the ZH-29 and the St. Etienne.

SAR: Do you believe that collecting firearms has enriched you? Aside from doing the opposite and spending your money for you.

Bob Faris: I couldn’t think of a better way to spend money. I’d just like to do more. You get a feel for history through the weapons. I can appreciate the history books that I read. Probably wouldn’t need nearly as much research with a certain rifle in front of you. Lately I’ve been trying to track the history of the machine gun during the 1904-05 Russo-Japanese War. It’s very hard because most of the publications talk about the same machine gun.

SAR: There was a British officer who went there to observe from the Japanese side. He wrote a book…

Bob Faris: That’s mentioned in the book I am reading now; Rising Sun and Tumbling Bear: Russia’s War with Japan by Richard Connaughton, printed in England. I have different books in different parts of the house that I read whenever I can. When I see something interesting about a firearm in the book, I make notes on the back inside page, what guns, what units, so I can research further.

SAR: Favorite handgun?

Bob Faris: Currently, the CZ-75. I like it. It handles well, it shoots well, it’s reliable, and it fits my hand perfectly. I like that Enfield Number 4 or the Number 5 for a rifle, I like them both. Number 4 has a good reputation. Number 5 kicks like hell.

SAR: When LMO was doing the Stembridge Gun Rental analysis and sale, I brought in J.R. LaRue’s company as the specialists on the Title I firearms. There was a particular Enfield that caught a lot of interest from people and J.R. made sure that went to you. Herbie Woodend just about killed me for that; the Pattern Room didn’t even have that model. He never forgave me and would make me sit through a night of bad English Karaoke every time the subject came up.

Bob Faris: That’s too bad. (Bob grins) That was a pre-Short Rifle made about 1900. They made two patterns, Pattern A and Pattern B, and I had the Pattern A already, which is the one the UK adopted with modification. I got that from Cholly Steen, along with some other early short rifles that had all come out of a military school in Nairobi. That was a Sarco deal – I’ve bought a lot from Cholly over the years, known him since the late ’50s. Most of those Nairobi guns weren’t even pictured in the good gun books. The one I got from J.R. and you out of Stembridge was the only known Pattern B. There’s a saddle lug on it. There is a chart that Skennie (Ian Skennerton) re-drew to put in his book, because they had no guns nor photos in England of Pattern A or Pattern B. There’s been a lot of conjecture, why are there only two of them left, one Pattern A and one Pattern B? I’m sure there’s some more out there, but we just don’t know where. They were never photographed for the record, either one. If you see an old SMLE with a white band around the butt, check it out because there were others in that same time frame, plus about six years, I have them hanging on the wall too. They came from the same lot. The British Army didn’t want these anymore when they adopted the SMLE No I MK III in 1907. They just dropped them all off in Nairobi, and most are marked “DP”, usually meaning “Drill Purpose.” Not suitable for service use.

SAR: All the readers should be running to their gun rooms about now, looking through their Enfields. Bob, you had the opportunity to work with some of the young engineers and designers on many of the new small arms systems over the last 30 or 40 years. Are there any particular messages you have for the young designers out there?

Bob Faris: As a tester, I have heard everything from, “You’re doing everything wrong, the test is too severe, you’re being unfair,” to, “We know how to fix this,” and they often did, and everything in between. If you’ve got modifications or a new design and you think you might have problems, you will have. Try to avoid that at the test facility. Try to get all the things done you can afford to, or can do before you bring it to the test range, because it can get a bad name if you have a lot of problems in the beginning. Do real thorough testing before you even come out to do the testing in front of anyone else. Your methodology should be considered as well – by you that is. I don’t know what was in their minds when they started on many projects, and why they chose the design they settled on, but sometimes it seems like it was something they just pulled out of the air. A lot of careful study and analysis should go into the design, and you should test as much as you can before you try to go in front of the users/buyers. Most of the designers and developers of the M85 and M73 simply designed themselves into a dead end; could not get out of it. What a debacle. Don’t do that to yourself, before you present or try to get it into service, work it all the way through.

SAR: Weren’t they restricted by the physical length of the receiver that they could use?

Bob Faris: Dan, there are always restrictions, but that was the main reason for the new design requirements. There are solutions. It gets back to more testing. The testers are under attack all the time for holding up production, holding up getting the guns out there, keeping the developer, the producer, from getting their money. Sometimes even we testers don’t do enough testing. As I’ve indicated here on the M73 and the M85, they don’t properly analyze the results. The user is just as guilty of that as the producers are. The user would usually take an optimistic view of problems, because after they’re through the engineering tests, they go to the user tests, and they’re supposed to, in a haphazard way, pick up what we don’t get, or do dumb things that we wouldn’t do except by accident. That’s important to the process of finding and curing the problems – making things soldier-proof. However, you want to find the problems BEFORE these go to combat.

SAR: Do you see a value for working reference collections of firearms to the country and the industry?

Bob Faris: Absolutely. Take a look at the history of firearms from the beginning to today. It’s a series of incremental improvements. You have to know what has been going on before, how they arrived at those conclusions, and what kind of a lifestyle they had while they were working on it. Take Browning for example, a most original designer, however, he had to know what was done before him. For Browning to change the design of machine guns, there were only one or two other designs that were even known, and he probably didn’t know much about them, because Maxim and other contemporaries were not showing their designs to each other. Everything since then has been incremental in development, and you have to know what’s failed or works and why they did certain things in their designs to avoid that.

SAR: As a tester you saw a lot of people repeating mistakes?

Bob Faris: Sure, or not accomplishing the objectives at all. They can get carried away with their little “improvements,” that are not really improvements. These modern multiple weapons, a veritable walking arsenal, barrels and calibers and bayonets and lights and lasers pointing in one direction. It doesn’t work out too well when you get out in the field. Nearly every one of these multi-guns they proposed for the Army has fallen by the wayside so far.

SAR: Do you have a principle in mind when you think about design?

Bob Faris: Ruggedness, simplicity, accuracy and portable. Those have to be satisfied first. After that you can expand the system. I think we have a problem with these Objective-whatever guns. There’s something wrong with their objectives. With some of them, it’s like playing an accordion. They make them so bulky and heavy, a shooter can’t get a hold of it for any kind of natural pointing capability. I think someday the dual guns are going to be at a point where they’re going to be better, but so far they haven’t been good enough. Having the full and semiautomatic capability of the rifle, and at least a fast repeater for the grenade is good. I’m sure they’ve got improved projectiles, leading to smaller rounds and smaller weapons. In the grenade category, they’re working on 30mm, they’re working on 25 mm. I am not so sure they can maintain those design objectives I just stated.

SAR: They need to do the initial designs to get smaller.

Bob Faris: In my opinion they should persevere in what they’re working on, but they’ve got to remember those four basic principles and keep it rugged, simple, and accurate, as well as reliable.

SAR: What do you think is the best operational General Purpose Machine Gun in the world today?

Bob Faris: What caliber? In rifle caliber, it would be the PK series. The PKM is nice and light and easy to carry around, and very forgiving to use. Very reliable. The M240 is a bit too heavy for optimum dismount use. Did you know they had spade grips for the M73 to dismount with? They dropped the off-vehicle requirement because they found that it wouldn’t work on a tripod, or the M85 either. They found out early on that the M73 would only work at all from a rigid mount, and the M85 was too light. In heavier calibers? The best we have is still the M2HB. It beats the DShK; I don’t know the NSV. I hear good things about it. They apparently made a working short receiver gun.

SAR: It’s a good gun. I’ve shot the NSV in a number of places, and in Serbia with the Zastava infantry stock on it; it’s pretty interesting. Weird little side-shuttle vibrations, some lateral dispersion from that, but the designers say that’s conquered. How about for an infantry rifle? If you were looking between the FAL and the SA-80 and the M16 and all those different ones that are in different uses, the Famas, the G3, what would you think was best?

Bob Faris: You haven’t even mentioned my choice: the AK. I like Kalashnikovs. I like the Finnish variants the best, the Valmet series. It’s the most accurate. I like the 7.62 x39 but I’m doing a lot of shooting these days with the 5.45. I haven’t made up my mind yet. Kalashnikov’s designs show up in a lot of different weapons. It’s very robust, it’s simple, and it works.

SAR: Thanks for talking with us today, Bob.

Bob Faris: My pleasure, Dan, but there’s still some things I’d like to say to the readers of SAR, whether they’re collectors, designers, or military. Please, be diligent, make sure you keep your Right to own firearms alive, and don’t let the government take them away. Quit electing liars. Know who you’re voting for, then let all the people you know, understand what you think of who the candidates are. Don’t go by what the politician says, go by what he does. That’s the most important thing I can think of. I have very strong feelings about firearms ownership and firearms rights. This comes from experience, you betcha. I lost a lot of my Rights in 1968, when they banned so called “surplus.” Through good luck and Bob Dole, we got a lot of it back when they allowed importation again of Curios and Relics. Lost them again in 1986 i.e.; the Machine Gun Ban. We need those Rights back.

Bob Faris was born in 1930 in Chicago, Illinois, but spent most of his youth in the Germantown, Pennsylvania area. He is an Ordnance veteran of the Korean War, and participated in testing many of the modern small arms used by today’s military at Aberdeen Proving Grounds and Yuma Proving Grounds. Bob is a lifelong collector of military small arms, their ammunition, belts, magazines, and accessories, the paraphernalia that accompanies them, and the uniforms and militaria. He shoots, makes parts, and generally has mentored several generations of firearms designers, testers, users and civilian shooting enthusiasts.

SAR: When did you get your first firearm? Did you go hunting?

Bob Faris: I guess the first thing I got was an old muzzle-loading musket, or a shotgun based on a Civil War rifle. They had smooth-bore guns from the scouts or troops in the field. I didn’t even know what it was until I met Val Forgett years later. I guess I was about nine years old. Just about all military weapons in general caught my interest when I was young. I was following the Spanish Civil War. Then, I was tracking the Japanese War in China in newspapers and even in bubble gum cards. There were these color bubble gum cards that had gory scenes of the Spanish Civil War and the war in China. Those wars weren’t over yet, and that’s where my interest started.

SAR: Did you get your first machine gun when you were a civilian, before military service?

Bob Faris: Oh yeah. The first one was a water-cooled Maxim MG08/15. I bought it for about $25 from someone I knew, and it was a battlefield pick-up that he had gotten from a junkyard. That was early in World War Two, and it was complete. I was pretty young, maybe 12 years old. It had all its parts and the right bipod. I think it was missing something in the lock. I never had a chance to shoot it because I traded it off for something else. It was too heavy for me. There were no books to look at in those days, so I just kept taking it apart. I found a piece of belt but never shot that MG08/15.

SAR: Was your interest in the mechanics of it or the history?

Bob Faris: It’s hard to tell because I was fascinated with both aspects of it. I had a lot of cap guns and similar things, and I used to repair the neighborhood’s cap guns. I found out that machine guns were pretty illegal, so I decided I was going off them for a while and traded that off. The next thing I was into was competition shooting. My father had bought an old deserted farm about 30 miles outside of Philadelphia, near a town called Perkasie, not very far from Norristown, PA. I made a 100-yard range on a 60-acre piece of farmland. I wanted to get out of the city, and my mother’s brother was living with us at the time, well he had some health problems, and he decided he would farm that piece of land if my father would back him up financially and help him with his medical problems. I’d gotten a few handguns, Iver Johnson’s and other fine weapons like that. I had a single shot percussion pistol, and just about anything that was a gun was of interest, but I soon got into military weapons.

SAR: When did you start keeping track of information about these types of firearms?

Bob Faris: I started scrapbooks a few years later, to classify the information I was gathering. The W.H.B. Smith book Small Arms of the World came out in 1943. That was my first useful gun book. Before that, it would be American Rifleman and even some of the sporting and hunting magazines would have an article on a military weapon every once in a while, but there was no other publication that would print articles about the stuff that I liked so I was gathering any info I could get.

SAR: Did you have any other exposure to machine guns or National Firearms Act-type weapons in the ’40s?

Bob Faris: I’d run across some veteran or GI, maybe a veteran from World War One that had something military that we could shoot, (machine guns, pistols, rifles.)

SAR: Then you went into the service?

Bob Faris: I was in the National Guard in 1948, but I went in the service in 1952, after I got out of gunsmithing school. I went to Trinidad State Junior College, Colorado in 1949, and they had a two-year, 50% accredited course. They had a lot of gunsmithing students, but there were also a lot of other students, mostly auto mechanics. I was in school 1949 through 1952, and I had almost joined a reserve outfit at school, but I didn’t fill some of the papers out properly. When I came back in the fall, they said, “Hey, you’re going to fill this out, right? Do you still want to go in?” I said, “No, I’ll wait a while, ’til I finish my schooling,” so that was the end of that for a while. When I went out to school, that automatically separated me from the state National Guard. I was still in it technically, as they had not done the proper paperwork to discharge me and that gave me enough time to finish school. Then, I was moving on and I decided that I wanted to work at Aberdeen. I knew somebody that had gotten a job there the year before, and that appealed to me. I wanted to get my foot in the door, and I did for nine months, and then I joined up in the Regular Army. I had it all set up to go through armorer schools at Aberdeen Proving Ground (APG), but when I went down to enlist at Fort Meade, they had just gotten an emergency requisition for 200 bodies for tank driver school, Fort Knox, Kentucky.

SAR: Shanghaied from your dream job to something you had no interest in…first time the Army ever did that.

Bob Faris:Laughs Right. I would’ve done ’em a lot better good going through Aberdeen, because eventually when I finished Basic Combat Training as a Tank Driver at Knox, they assigned me as a small arms repairman in the Third Armored Division. I knew enough about small arms, and when I got to the machine gun classes, I was ahead of the instructors in taking the guns apart. I was showing off. They said, “What are you doing?” I said, “Well, I’ve taken everything apart.” “Can you put it back together again?” and I said, “Sure.” They said, “Show me,” so I put it together again. Laughs I explained to them that I had not only gunsmithing school, but I had been at Aberdeen for nine months as a civilian gunner. I was asked if I wanted an assignment at Fort Knox, but I really wanted to go back to Aberdeen. They wouldn’t assign me to anywhere but Fort Knox, so I took my orders for Korea instead. I wanted experience in the field, and that did help me years later. That was November of 1952. We went there by ship leaving Fort Lewis: no other way to get there than by a long trip on a ship. We stopped in Japan, got outfitted in Yokohama, and I was assigned to the Seventh Infantry Division in Korea and traveled to Inchon. Ultimately after a month’s stay in a tank outfit, I would be going to 707 Ordnance. I got to my outfit on December 25, 1952, Christmas Day! Merry Christmas. Laughs. When I got there I thought I would be assigned right into Ordnance. But, oh no, the commanding general, by name of “Snuffy” Smith, had decreed that all replacements for any outfit in the Seventh Division would spend a month in their combat MOS before they were assigned to their ultimate destination. My combat MOS was “tank driver.” They assigned me to a maintenance company for a tank battalion. There were about four other replacements in there with me. We went to a tent and sat down and discussed our experiences, and of course I didn’t have a hell of a lot. I had a month experience as a small arms repairer at Fort Knox for the 3rd Armored Division. So, here I was, in the 86th Tank Battalion of the 7th Infantry Division in Korea. Anyway, they told us to call out our MOSs, and the other guys called out theirs, then I called out my small arms MOS. I heard a voice shouting through the tent walls, “I want that man.” It was the battalion ordnance officer. The reason he wanted me was he had a whole tent full of broken down small arms, and no way to get them fixed. He wanted ’em back operational as quick as I could get ’em there and, “Get these guns back in the fight.” We weren’t far from the fight, so it was in our minds. Well, I was all for that, so I asked; “What do I have for parts?” “We don’t have any parts” was the reply. “Tools?” “Probably can dig you up a screwdriver.” It went down hill from there.

SAR: What kind of guns were in the pile?

Bob Faris: Everything. The full TO&E. Brownings, .50s, .30s, M1 Garands, I had one of the M2 carbines, M3 Grease Guns, .45 automatics. I got approximately half of them operational by cannibalizing the others, and he was tickled pink. “Well,” he said, “You’re going to be the unofficial small arms repairman, and when you’re done with your month I’m going to get you assigned here permanently.” He wouldn’t officially authorize the work, but he said, “Okay, here’s what I’m going to have you do. You’re going to go around to all the tank outfits on the front line in the Seventh Division and inspect their weapons.” It was only tank weapons that he was interested in. Somewhat the same stuff that I just rattled off. So I said, “Okay, what’s my transportation?” “Oh, we don’t have any. You gotta hitchhike your way up to the front line and hitchhike your way back every day.” Laughs So, every day I’d go up there to the front line where the fight was, and then come back at night to battalion headquarters. If I got back early, I would help the tank mechanic with his work. Not really a hell of a lot of fighting going on up there right then, but there was some shooting going on. Shelling hit near us, but I always just pulled the hatches shut and kept on working. It was a lot safer than the bunkers. It was in the winter, and it was miserably cold out on the line.

SAR: How long were you in Korea?

Bob Faris: 14 months, two winters. Halfway through my time the Armistice came. We went back in “reserve,” and had wooden floors in our tents and all this kind of special just-like-home comfortable stuff. For the first winter, just about everything we had was in trouble, including the M2HB. There was improper lubrication and the cold to contend with. There wasn’t any correct lubricant. You had to completely clean a weapon of all old lubricating oil, get it all out of there before anything would work. They were short of the right stuff. That winter of ’52-’53 there was no proper gun oil in the Seventh Division. The weapons didn’t get proper maintenance. The M2HB worked the best, better than say the A4. We were starting to use disintegrating metallic links on the A4. They were just about out of cloth belts. There was still some few left and we used them for functioning, not combat.

SAR: Did you see any unusual weapons while you were there?

Bob Faris: Not anything really unusual. The enemy weapons, foreign weapons, were pretty standard stuff. I would pick up a Schpagin here and a Mosin there just to play with. It was hard to get ammo for things. There wasn’t much of a choice on things to bring back home. You couldn’t bring back anything US or anything Allied, and you couldn’t bring back anything Russian, so that only left Chinese, and the weapons supplied to the Chinese. I have a Chinese Mauser hanging on the wall as my official souvenir. A buddy of mine in Seoul picked out the best one he could find for me. I left Korea in March of ’54.

SAR: Did you have any contact with people over there that you met back in the US?

Bob Faris: I not only met a guy that I went to school with, but he was going through intelligence school in Aberdeen when I was there as a civilian, and he was assigned to headquarters FTIO in Seoul. I had some business in Seoul. My project was an optical sight for the .50 caliber M2HB. So I spent all my free time there. I got a 20 power spotting scope, and I made a mount to fit on the dovetail base of an M2HB. I did 20 of them. This was the first time that I know of that anyone put a good optical piece on an M2 heavy barrel machine gun. Except for the M1 Optical Sight, of course, which was a vile thing. No power. But this one wasn’t all that great because there was no reticle in the spotting scope. I had to put a crosswire in there and then rotate it to where you got a good average focus, and you had to rotate a little bit to get a sharp focus, but you’re still aiming with the center of the X. This was just before the Armistice, and they had a big dustup on the east side, as I was on my way back from Seoul. They got ’em out to the guys, but they got no feedback because the Armistice came shortly, and all interest was lost in the project. They were turned in and disappeared.

SAR: Was your intention to have them firing fully automatic with the scope or just single shot?

Bob Faris: Single shot, because there was too much vibration. The scopes were quite sensitive to vibration. Remember, I volunteered to do that project and it’s all we had to work with.

SAR: You came back stateside, and you went to Aberdeen?

Bob Faris: I went back to Aberdeen and picked up where I left off as a civilian. They’d had a couple of raises while I was gone, which I got, ’cause in theory I was only on reassignment when I went in the Army. I stayed there for a total of 20 years, and I left there in July of ’71. I had started out as a civilian gunner, and worked my way up to top level you can get as a gunner, and in ’56 I got a job as a test director. I was never in the military at Aberdeen. I worked with Bill Brophy, and Larry Moore, who headed up the shoulder weapon section for many years. I worked on testing weapons, ammunition, accessories, and fire controls. We had scientific procedures set up for testing all types of weapons. There were different procedures for handguns, submachine guns, rifles, machine guns, infantry weapons and aircraft armament and tank armament.

SAR: What programs did you test personally?

Bob Faris: I started out with aircraft weapons, primarily the T160 20mm Revolver Cannon, which became the M39. I started on that before I went in the Army, and then when I got out they put me right back on it. I didn’t do hardly any of the initial T130 .60 caliber work, because they expanded the neck and made 20 millimeter out of it, and they stuck with that. It was the same ammo used in the Vulcan M61, but using a different link. Primarily we ran endurance, cook-off, and reliability tests, various adverse conditions, arctic temperatures down to -65F because the gun bays would get that cold at high altitude. There was a stratosphere chamber that would evacuate the proper amount of air to simulate the altitude temperature-wise, and that was variable. It could start out at low altitude at higher temperature and just program these test conditions up and down. We would fire a test from a heavy-duty mechanical rest, a little bit of adjustment for elevation and azimuth and fire into a “container.” There was a firing chamber, then ahead of that another chamber with sand in it to catch all these projectiles. There was “altitude” in there, so you can’t vent it until you were through. You had to make sure that the accumulation of projectiles did not exceed the amount of sand. When you heard a clankety clank, it was hitting the metal container – that’s bad. You had to stop. That phase would have to be done over, until we screened all the projectiles out. Now, if you weren’t taking the altitude into consideration, you used standard firing chambers, temperature-conditioned and armored in case of an explosion.

SAR: Did you work on any of the small arms testing for shoulder-fired weapons?

Bob Faris: Very few. I filled in for people occasionally on the standard and experimental arms of the time. I do remember some politician wanted to see what the Johnson 1941 Rifle would do in the cold test spectrum in the ’60s at a low temperature. It had never been tested at low temperature. I did that one; it was a very limited test. I did some M60 testing, and of course M73 and M219 and the T175, which became the M85. I got into that M73 the first time and it was already in production; that would be in the early to mid ’60s. There were inherent problems with the system and there were a lot of them. Too many to name actually, but here’s a few… Ammunition compatibility, mount rigidity problems, gas contamination from the booster, which is not limited to the M73. They would change the booster relationship with the recoiling component because of fouling, and it would knock the back plate out. It had a stamped receiver and a stamped back plate. Excessive recoil would also knock out the alignment of the solenoid and manual trigger, because it also could be manually fired, which was the requirement for any machine gun on a tank. However, it would not function off of a modified M2 tripod, as it was not rigid enough.

SAR: The M73 used the same standard M-13 link as the M60, and it had ammunition problems, sensitivity to different lots of ammunition?

Bob Faris: Yeah, it’s related to case hardness. We had problems with yielding of the locking system. It wasn’t very rigid, and it had a lot of spring. When you had soft cases, they would stick too hard, and they would separate. This was accentuated especially with high pressure and heat. It was also accentuated in cold, because ball propellant tended to completely fragment and raise pressures, so we had to watch that. The propellant fragmented before it was ignited, when it was in the cartridge case. While it was being ignited at the rear, there’s pressure up forward, and in the cold it’s crunching the propellant up front. We were able to measure the pressure changes under these conditions. That was all thoroughly done by the ammunition test people, once it was determined to be a problem.

SAR: Was this a problem in other weapon systems also?

Bob Faris: No, it was mainly a problem in M73 because of the semi-rigid locking system. They were planning to replace all of the Browning Tank Machine Guns with the M73 because of the shorter receiver. I don’t know how many millions of dollars the government spent trying to make super cartridge cases for 7.62x51mm ammunition just so they’d work in the M73. They went crazy on this. Instead of looking at the system and saying, “There’s a fault in this system,” they tried to change the cases. The ammunition failed, so they said something had to be wrong with the ammunition.

SAR: But the ammunition wasn’t failing in other systems.

Bob Faris: They oversimplified. They had all these problems and they didn’t analyze them properly. It was all in my reports in the ’60s. The higher ups gave Springfield Armory hell and told ’em to fix it. Well, they were in the hole already, and that was their own choosing. They had gotten this design accepted that wasn’t functional and they didn’t know what to do about it. They tried all kinds of things. They changed the configuration of the chamber, tapered the neck, trying to ease extraction, but it wasn’t extraction that was the problem. The cases were yielding at high pressure. For several years we were spending the money and making the finest 7.62mm brass anywhere in the world, all unnecessarily, because while there were lots of other problems in the M73, the ammunition was working fine in the M60, the M14, the Minigun and so forth. I also did lots of work on the M85. I got in on the first engineering test on that: that was about 1960. It was still the T175 at that point, but it was up to E2 model, I think. At least the E1 model at that first test at APG.

SAR: So what was wrong with the M85?

Bob Faris: Laughs Ha… well, this problem was not ammunition compatibility. Parts life of critical components for a start, but… how can I condense this? The problems were all, once again, from a bad design: a locking system that wore out and broke frequently. They had a recoil and feed system that took too much energy to operate. Consequently, when you got into adverse conditions, or just un-lubricated, it figuratively would screech to a stop because the energy required to operate it under normal lubrication conditions was such that it was not adequate for adverse conditions, like dust and sand and non-lubrication. AAI did the original design on the M85 program (T175.) Problems with the M85 were political in a way, but the real problem was that they were committed on these weapons, and they’d convinced themselves they could fix them. The designers and the re-designers had convinced the proponents of this thing to accept it in the first place, then that they could fix it, and they did their damndest. They had state of the art metallurgy, they had all the facilities and machinery, but they couldn’t change the fundamental design problems. They went through two tanks, the M-60 and the M-60A1. Both of those tank turrets and cupolas were configured for the M73 and the M85. That made it so that the mount and the ammo boxes and the coaxial hole through the coaxial gun mount were configured for the M73. With the M73 getting such problems with fouling, they had to extend the flash hider out the front, so the barrel and the flash hider were about that long. (Bob gestures with outspread arms). It wasn’t necessarily the fault of the M73, but it was more sensitive to the changes that this extension was causing functionally. The M85, well, they designed a cupola (M19) to go on top of the turret. The previous cupola had an offset gun mount, and they complained all the time about this weapon swinging side to side when you fired it. There was a tremendous lateral dispersion, because the gun is off-center.

That was the M-1 cupola with the Browning M2HB on the M-60 tanks. All the other offset machine gun cupolas had the same problem. That gave you a lot of lateral dispersion of the rounds. That is not acceptable. They wanted a short receiver on these guns, because with the Browning receivers mounted centrally there would be no room for the commander in the cupola. Those are the major design problems that they had to overcome to make it work, because of the short distance they had to fit it in. What they had to do was shorten up the action, shorten up the receiver. In the M85 that meant that they had a much higher need of energy to translate into feeding. That was primarily because of shortening up the stroke on it, they couldn’t translate the energy properly. If you ever get a chance to study one, you’ll see what a weird feed system it has, and excessive frictional loads are inherent to the design.

SAR: The M85 uses its own link, different from the M2 .50 BMG.

Bob Faris: There was a lot of trouble with that. There were three of them: M-15, M-15A1 and M-15A2. All of them had inconsistent gripping force on the round. Because this bolt system happened to not travel very far, it’s got to hit and drive the round straight forward out of the link. The links were inconsistent in how they were gripping the round, and you had a problem with energy being taken off for feeding forward, as well as the recoil stroke feeding over. The links were either gripping the cartridge too tight or too loose. If it was too loose, while dragging the belt around trying to load it, and the rounds would fall out, the belts would come apart while you were trying to fill the ammunition box. They thought that was all right, but I raised so much hell about it. There’s no way they’re belted for combat conditions. I was watching, and I’d try it myself, and it was very hard to keep from knocking rounds out of the links. They went through two major designs, and I had some prototypes of different links they tried. The final design proved acceptable.

SAR: The end result on the M85 was that it was taken out of service; that it never really got into full service? I don’t remember seeing many in the early ’70s.

Bob Faris: Oh, hell no, it got into service all right, you’ve got to recognize that from the early ’60s until the ’70s, they were “play guns” because the M60 series tanks weren’t used in combat in Vietnam. Anything that’d go wrong in training, they’d blame it on the crews. “Oh, you didn’t do this or that. You didn’t lubricate it enough,” and there were a lot of hassles over that. I tried to convince them they shouldn’t go into production until they fixed the M85. It was too late on the M73. But not too late on the M219, where they eliminated 20 parts, eliminated the “dump cart,” (the ejection system,) and went to a direct ejection system. That’s another story. But neither one of them saw combat in Vietnam. That’s all they cared about. They had their new M-60 tank, “ready” for combat in Europe. They had new machine guns that wouldn’t be reliable, especially in the desert, and I tried to convince them of that. I had to go to the Pentagon and explain the problems based on my last test. I went with the commanding officer of Test and Evaluation at Aberdeen because my immediate boss and his boss were in Germany, fighting a battle on the 20 millimeter. The test director, me and my Colonel drove down there in his staff car, went to the meeting. It was chaired by the project manager for the M-60, M-60A-1, M-60 A-2 tanks and I explained that every time we had a test, no matter what, the M85 got a little better, except for un-lubricated, in sand and dust, it never got any better. I ran 13 engineering type tests, a complete battery of tests with all the conditions. Nine of the tests had sand and dust, and an un-lubricated machine gun, and it never passed even one of those tests. Severe failures? “Oh, we’re not worried about that.” “The battlefield is going to be in Europe”, all this kind of crap they fed us.

SAR: You must have been popular in that group.

Bob Faris: Colonel Burney was the project manager. I’d see him every once in a while, he’d come and look at a test, see how it was going. They were referring all these good results from the tests and none of the bad during the meeting, and I’m starting to sweat because I haven’t got an opening to tell the whole truth yet. He says, “Well, we’re all agreed, everything is okay and ready to go to production?” I said, “No, sir.” He looked at me, “What do you mean?” I said, “Well, sir, if you want to standardize a gun that will not work satisfactorily under un-lubricated, sand and dust,” and Louis Artioli from Springfield Armory raises his eyebrows. (He’s the guy who’s doing the project, and he thought he got through this briefing.) The Colonel said, “Tell me about it, what are you talking about, this passed the tests, didn’t it?” Well, Colonel Burney got all the high points in his reports, and they emphasize things he wants to hear, and I gave about 10-15 minutes of what’s wrong with the gun, and he’s overdue in the Chief of Ordnance’s office for the decision. He looked at Artioli and he says, “Is this true?” “Yes, sir.” He’s starting to sweat. He could see his whole plan for his vacation in Hawaii or whatever falling apart, and he says, “Are you saying that we shouldn’t go into production?” I said, “I’m not going to say that, sir, that’s your job. All I’m telling you is if you want a tank gun that works in desert conditions, you’ve got to do something about this.” He asked what they had been doing and I said, “They’ve been working like hell to get this fixed, and I cannot fault them for what they did.” I was a GS9 at that time. He turns to Artioli, “Is this true?” “Yes, sir.” Colonel Burney turns to my colonel and says, “Did you know Faris was going to do this?” “Yes, sir. Bob filled me in on the whole M85 program, on the way down to Washington.” Laughs I thought I was done for, pulling the plug at this point, but it was the first opportunity I had. Another 15 or 20 minutes of education on his part and he asks me, “Have you tried everything you know of on this gun?” I said, “Yes, sir, I have, it’s just the basic design.” Someone asked, “Is there a possibility of blocking the air intake that’s coming through the case ejection port, through the gun, into the tank?” Laughs “No, it’s the way the cupola is built.” He says, “Well, could we put a spring-loaded shutter on it to close that off, and when you take the safety off on the gun, it’ll pop the thing up, or a separate lever?” I said, “That’s theoretically possible.” But he knew I meant “Not likely.” You’ve got to recognize the time frame; this was during the last Berlin Crisis. They had these brand new M-60A-1 tanks over there, and the Crisis wasn’t over. We had M2HBs mounted on a lug welded on the top of the M-19 cupola, and they were raising hell about that. “We look like a bunch of idiots!” That’s the pressure the project manager was under to get those guns into that tank. I knew all this. The Project Manager decided to authorize initial production of the M85, but to direct every effort to overcome the problems brought out in this meeting.

SAR: Bob, if they weren’t going to work, they weren’t going to work.

Bob Faris: Not in sand and dust they wouldn’t, but they wouldn’t accept it. The goddamn test results are in every one of my test reports, and they ignored it. Back to the XM219, the M73 was continuously going through changes and modifications. They came out with the XM-219 with direct action ejection. It was not working all that well. When I split the results out, it had more failures to eject with that than it did with the old one. They put other new changes and improvements in the gun, so it looked like the new gun with a fixed ejector was better. The old gun with these other new additions would’ve been better than that. Laughs I wrote that in the report, and they were furious, they tried to get it retracted. It was not retracted.

In October 1968, I conducted my last test of the XM219 “Improvements” prior to adoption for production. (It was also referred to as the M73E1 at that time.) Overall performance was equal to or slightly better than obtained in earlier tests, though still not satisfactory. I had established by tests in May 1966, that not only dynamic headspace, but basically the guns were being manufactured with excess static headspace. In addition, a condition I called “Over-ramming” was prevalent, dynamic, probably due to an early modification to the barrel chamber neck which reduced the area of the stop shoulder, further aggravating the static headspace problem. Springfield Armory had not accepted the over-ramming analysis.

SAR: So Aberdeen stuck to their guns and they backed you up.

Bob Faris: Oh yeah, just like they should.

SAR: What happened on the M85 project?

Bob Faris: Well, nothing significant for a long time. They kept dodging the bullet, while trying to fix it. Then I got transferred to Yuma Proving Grounds. (I transferred from Aberdeen in ’71.) At Yuma I was an aircraft armament tester. Test Engineer was the title, whether you were a technician or not. I had been in the aircraft arms section right after I got out of the army. I was in it until about the time the T175 and M73 came along. Then I had transferred into another section, which included infantry and tank machine guns. I worked 14 years at Yuma, retired in 1985. I was still stuck, concerned with those two damn guns that hung around my neck like an albatross.

SAR: The M73 and M85?

Bob Faris: No kidding. For ten years the army tankers had “play guns,” and thought they were doing fine. They weren’t really happy with them, but they weren’t having any great troubles – just smaller problems that kept appearing. One day in 1973, I was sitting at my desk in Yuma, minding my business. I got a phone call from Tank Automotive Command. One of the people for the project manager (a new one) for the M-60A1 tank, a Major, was on the line. He says, “Mr. Faris, we have sent M-60A1 tanks to Israel, and the Israelis are taking the M73s and 85s out of the tank. (Yom Kippur War) Now, there seems to be some serious problems here. I understand that you tested these guns, signed off, and they were accepted.” I said, “Major, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. I did most of the testing on both the M85 and the M73 and the M219. It was all done at Aberdeen between 4 and 14 years ago. Tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to go to my files here and dig out all my reports. I’m going to give you report numbers, and you show me anyplace where I “passed” these guns in adverse conditions. Call me in two days.” He said, “I’ll be doing that.” I sat back in stunned disbelief; clearly this man was looking for a scapegoat, because I knew that they were planning to put the two guns on the XM-1 they were working on, as well as embarrassment over the performance of the M85 and M219 machine guns in their first war.

My temperature was starting to rise on that alone. It looked like something was developing there. I went back and dug out my reports. I had conducted 13 engineering tests on the M85. Nine of them had un-lubricated and sand and dust tests done at Aberdeen. The gun never passed one of those tests, and they were done over a period of years. I got back with that Major, and I gave him this information. He said, “Well, thank you very much. I’ll be in touch.” I was looking at pictures of our new XM-1 super tank at the time, and what did it have on top? An M85. The next pictures I saw, Ma Deuce was on the XM-1. By the way, they were already planning to replace the M219.

SAR: John Browning’s design is a good one.

Bob Faris: And if you can’t make something better, don’t replace it. People’s lives depend on them. The Israelis took the M73 and M85 out of the tanks because they had the exact problems that I foresaw, and they pulled them right off and replaced them. As it was described to me, they took ’em out and threw ’em on the ground. They took the cupola off and put a simple ring mount up in place of it. They had 1919A4 Brownings in 7.62x51mm, and actually some of those kits came into the United States for examination out of Israel. We, however, decided to adopt the M240 as a coaxial machine gun instead, after thorough testing.

The Interview with Bob Faris continues in the next issue of Small Arms Review, as Bob discusses the old days of machine gun, and regular firearms collecting, and more US small arms tests.

This interview was conducted at the NDIA Small Arms Symposium at Ft. Benning, Georgia, with a follow-up in Vero Beach, Florida.

SAR: Reed, give me a background on yourself and tell me how you got into the business.

Reed: In the mid 70’s, I was competitively pistol shooting and had spent quite a bit of time with the Secret Service pistol camp. They’ve done a lot of training in Florida. I was shooting the revolver for police combat. I had spent a lot of time at Beltsville, and they spent a lot of time in Florida. I had met one of the Secret Service agents that had gone down to Little Creek, Virginia. While he was down there, he had found that they had some Stoner 63’s that were inoperable. He told the armorer there that he knew a guy that had parts for Stoners and that he could call me, and I could probably get his guns working. I went up to Little Creek somewhere in the mid 70’s and repaired a bunch of Stoner machine guns there on site. I had the parts and the knowledge. They had crossed some of the 63’s with the 63 A’s, but I got the guns up and running.

SAR: How did you become interested in Stoners, and find all the parts and weapons you have?

Reed: In the mid ‘70’s, I was at a gun show and a friend of mine gave me a barrel for what appeared to be some type of a machine gun with a carrying handle on it. It was in a canvas, asbestos-lined bag, and I had no idea what that barrel fit, or what it was. I started asking everybody I knew what it was to, and it was like a giant Easter egg hunt trying to figure out what the barrel went to. Finally, I found out the barrel was for a Stoner 63 automatic rifle, which was the one with the offset front sight. From there, I questioned what a Stoner was, and began researching everything I could find on the Stoner and the Stoner system. I became more and more involved in it and I bought a couple guns form different people. Roger Cox, of Law Enforcement Equipment Company, was pretty heavy into them. He had a Stoner 63, that I bought from him. I started chasing more leads down, finding a couple more Stoners, and some parts here and there. Then one day, I called Mr. Stoner down at his house and introduced myself. He had a business up at Fort Pierce, which was about 5 miles away from my shop. One day, he stopped by for lunch. We talked, and our friendship grew from then on.

SAR: What about items from Cadillac Gage?

Reed: In about 1981, Stoner had a warehouse up in his factory in Port Clinton, Ohio, which he wanted to clean out. I went up to look at it all, and we loaded up 3 semi-truck loads of stuff. It was 13 tons of Stoners, Stoner parts and tooling.

SAR: How did Mr. Stoner collect so much ?

Reed: All this stuff had been given or sold to him at the end of the project. They had spent so much money for so many things, chasing so many things, that they just gave it to him for his efforts.

SAR: When did you establish a working relationship with Mr. Stoner?

Reed: It was shortly thereafter. We did a lot of projects together. I did some consulting work for him on the 5mm Advanced Combat Rifle Project. We would go to shows together because of our close proximity. We would travel together, have lunches together, and discuss different projects together. We built a pistol together, the SR 25 we did one summer, and we had a lot of other projects as well.

Trey: He was very open with his information as a mentor. He appreciated the fact that someone was interested in his work. He was happy to share his knowledge.

Reed: Every day, when I would go home from work, I would get books out, and research the older guns. You amass a knowledge that helps you to find the rare guns that are out there. When the book The Black Rifle came out, there were pages and pages of guns in there that I didn’t know existed. Today, I own many of those same guns-not one like it, but that exact, same gun. I consider myself very lucky that I was able to be at the right place at the right time. I got all of Stoner’s personal guns, which were not a lot, but were very significant and meaningful due to the fact that he bothered to keep them. He had an H&K that was a very early ‘60’s .308. I have a picture of him shooting that same gun. From there, he introduced me to the Fairchild Corporation, and I was able to buy all of their guns which were the early protoypes of the ones that he did not own, or have in his name. I was able to accquire Stoner’s guns, Fairchild’s guns, Chuck Dorchester’s guns, the president of Armalite, the Armalite guns from Burt Jenks, as well as Sam Cumming’s guns and the Colt collection. The chance of one person being able to put all these collections together is phenomenal! It has taken me over 20 years to do this.

SAR: Did one thing lead to another?

Reed: On some things, one thing did lead to another, but on others, it was just pure luck! Absolutely being in the right place at the right time, and the right person, and dealing the right cards. I cannot imagine the luck of some of these occurrences, and the odds of finding them. I can show you some parts and pieces where I found half of the gun in California, and the other half in the Colt factory.

Trey: Mr. Stoner, himself, when he would walk in and see the collection, couldn’t believe it! He would see different stages of his life, from when he was in totally different sides of the ocean, all in one place. All of the evolutions, and all brought back together in one spot, has been quite a feat. A lot of people really don’t understand the magnitude of the project with the detail and energy that went in to it.

Reed: Let me give you another example. I found a belt-fed AR-10 at the Colt factory. Five years later, I found the bolt and carrier in a private collection in California. The owner knew it was an AR-10, but he didn’t know it was of a one of a kind prototype part. Five years before I got the gun out of Colt, I had gotten the charging handle and the bipod from a lady who’s husband had died, but who had bought it from Armalite. So five years before I got the gun, I got some parts for it, and five years after I bought the gun, I got the rest of the parts for it. It is finally all put back together. What is so phenomenal about all this, is acquiring parts that are one of a kind, and with only one gun built. I found a box of parts in 1974 that I bought. In 1986, Mr. Stoner transferred Stoner 63, serial number one to me. The lower trigger group was missing off the gun, it was just the receiver. I looked in the box of parts I had bought in 1974, and found the lower trigger group that matched up to gun number one. I determined this by examining photographs of serial number one, which had the same scratch as one of the lowers in my box of 200 to 300 parts. The chance of seeing that scratch and putting that back together, knowing that it fit that gun was one in a million.

SAR: How did you get started with the Military and silencers?

Reed: A month or two after I fixed the Stoners at Little Creek, the SEALs had a problem with what they called ‘vapor lock’. Basically, they were shooting the green tip Supervel subsonic ammo in the Smith and Wesson 39’s with a screw on Hushpuppy. This system had a slidelock and the high pressure cases would stick in the chamber. When they went to eject the cartridge case, the extractor would climb out over the cartridge case. The gun would have a malfunction because it couldn’t clear that cartridge case once the extractor ripped off the side of the rim. I did a lot of work with that and found it mostly to be an ammo issue. I built them a better system using the old 92 Beretta. It was not a military gun back in the late 70’s. I spent time doing that and improving the old Hushpuppy design, which was a Smith and Wesson product on the old 39’s and later the 59’s. The Beretta had a stronger, wider extractor which grabbed the cartridge case, even with that high pressure ammo, the Beretta would actually work better. So we built slide locks on the Berettas, and built thread-on suppressors.

In the late 70’s, a requirement came out of JSSAP for suppressors for the Air Force. We built a product and submitted a proposal and lost. Two companies got an award-one of them was Smith and Wesson, and the other one was Beretta. I didn’t get an award, so I funded the project with my own money. I called the project Snap On. It was an aluminum suppressor with wipes, and simplified the system. In the early 80’s, they were ready to test this program. The Air Force went out to buy parts for the Hushpuppy as the baseline. I just happened to be the only manufacturer for the Navy at that time making parts for the Hushpuppy. When I found that they were going to be doing these tests, I asked the testing committee if they would throw my gun and product into the test. I explained to them I had proposed my system earlier, but didn’t win the contract. The government had spent a quarter of a million dollars with each company to develop this product.

SAR: Had you been supplying the wipes?

Reed: I had been supplying the wipes to the Navy all during that time. The wipes were in a little can, prestacked in a little aluminum sleeve, with the sleeve rolled up. It looked like a roll of quarters, with 8 wipes in it, pre-X’ed. This assembly was put in the front of the original Hushpuppy, with a spring, “O” rings, and a little mechanism inside there. That was the original Smith and Wesson design that they copied from Walther, in Germany. My system used threads, it didn’t use springs, and was a much simpler system. When they got through with the tests and the trials from the Air Force at Eglin, my suppressors won out over the Smith and Wesson and the Beretta. In the mid’80’s, they bought 3800 of these systems from us. They sent us the barrels, and we put the barrel extensions on, and gave them back a barrel and a suppressor in a little plastic box. That was one of the first major contracts that we had on suppressors.

In 1982, which was prior to that, the Navy had gone out on the street, and Mickey Finn, Don Walsh, and myself had proposed silencers for the M16-A1, that the Navy had. It had a very strong endurance test. It had to fire 200 rounds in a very short period of time, and the suppressor had to live through that. Our suppressor was very large, very robust, and used double wall tubing. Our suppressor was the only one that lived through the endurance test. The others would melt down. Don Walsh’s suppressors made out of aluminum would only go about 110 to 115 rounds. It actually burst on the very first trial, so we won it by endurance. It was a fairly large contract in ’82 for us. It was about 1400-1500 Navy suppressors made out of stainless steel. These had a barrel collet on the back of it. You took the flash hider off the gun and threaded the silencer on the end of the barrel. You tightened this collet and it squeezed down on the barrel to make it sturdy. This also kept it in alignment and kept it from vibrating off. It was heavy, and big, but it was effective. It was about 30 – 32 DB’s, which is pretty good. It was an inch and 3/4 in diameter, and it was about 12 inches long. Part of it telescoped over the end of the barrel.

Trey: I think a side note to that is that at the time, he was involved in (orange) grove care. We had a small machine shop set up. I can remember that summer working on those Navy cans, with one other person and myself in this little shop.

SAR: Which is much different from your facility today, which is pretty large?

Reed: Exactly. We didn’t realize that once you won the contract, then you had to figure out how to get it built. All we were looking to do was win the test. We didn’t have enough sense to know that once you got it, and it was a tar baby thing, that you had to figure out how to build it. We subcontracted some of it out, and did the rest in the shop. A local guy did the blackening of the stainless steel, and we did the engraving. Everything was done in a little Mom and Pop shop. At the time, it was the largest silencer contract that the Navy had ever bought. When the Air Force bought the 3800 Snap On’s, it was closer to the largest silencer contract the entire government had ever bought. We had won the two big, major silencer contracts in the ‘80’s that came out, even though the premier silencer technology house was Mickey Finn, where Doug Olson had been working. They had the leading technology at the time. We won not by default, but being in the right place at the right time, and paying attention to the requirements. I think their product was better than ours, but I don’t think their product totally met the requirements. It’s like wanting a fast car or a station wagon-it depends on whether you’re going to haul something to the dump or whether you’re going to go do a race. That was the early years with suppressors, up to the mid ‘80’s.

SAR: What was the next suppressor that you worked on?

Reed: It was a suppressor for Colt, who did it for DEA. It was an integral 9mm in the late ‘80’s. In ’86 or ’87, we did a suppressor for Colt, like an MP5-SD, only it was Colt 9mm. We vented the barrel, and built an intricate suppressor under the hand guard of the 9mm Colt submachine gun. At that time, I was quite cozy with Colt. I had been doing some work, being a subcontractor for the ACR program, the Advanced Combat Rifle. I did the muzzle break for it. I had gotten in with all their engineers, which helped us when we built the suppressor for their 9mm for DEA. In the late ‘80’s, we developed a suppressor for revolvers, using telescoped ammunition. It was called the Revolver Rifle and was based on the Ruger Blackhawk .44 magnum handgun frame. This was novel, because it was a short gun, light weight, and could come apart to go into a small briefcase. The ammunition used an o-ring gas seal and forcing cone to obtain maximum suppression. We built some very effective suppressors with this system. That was the first time we could get 30 caliber suppressors to go down to 116 DB. It was large, light weight, and a very effective suppressor.

SAR: By that time, would you say you had full machine shop capabilities?

Reed: Yes, we moved into our new building in 1990 and installed our four CNC machines, which were originally purchased in 1986. Today we have about 15 CNC machines. We have grown to about 92 employees, and we do a lot of other things now.

(Author’s note: Reed left at this point in the interview to attend another meeting and Trey Knight and Doug Olson continued the interview.)

SAR: The building you’re in now, you have about 2 other businesses. Can you tell me about them?

Trey: Lawmen’s and Shooters Supplies, is a law enforcement distributor company, selling other peoples products in the state of Florida and the Southeastern United States. Knights Armament Company, is the military side of the house. Knight’s Manufacturing is a company that we set up more for commercial business when the SR-25 was introduced. That was our first time out of the closet, so to speak, with a product we could take to shows and talk about. Mr. Stoner was on board with us fully at that time, allowing us to do things that we would have never been able to do before then.

SAR: Doug, when did you come on board?

Doug: I started to work at Knight’s in January of ’92. I was hired specifically as program manager on the Offensive Handgun suppressor. And at that time, they had the subcontract to Colt on the Offensive Handgun, which was in competition with H&K.

SAR: So you began working with Colt on the suppressor, and this transitioned to H&K?

Doug: That’s correct. At the end of that contract, both the Colt and H&K guns went to the Navy for trials. The H&K gun was the clear winner. The Knight suppressor was the clear winner. The follow-on contract was marrying the two together.

SAR: What were the challenges with this suppressor?

Doug: There were a lot of challenges, and this was a major project! Up to 1992, the state of the art was about 19DB reduction with a plain, dry, suppressor. Not very much. The problem was with the straight-through baffles, which have a large hole and a small outside diameter. It was a major step forward to try and meet the Navy’s requirement of 30 DB reduction. That seemed an incredible task at the time. Everybody knew that this was going to be a very severe challenge

SAR: Did you have a lot of trial and error, then?

Doug: (Laughing) Much! I spent almost two years working full time on this, trying to solve all the problems. We went through a lot of optimization on the baffle. We had a can that we could put the parts in and out of, and we went through a lot of different baffle configurations. We made a matrix of all the possible combinations of components, built them up, and tested them trying to figure out what to do. Some of the things we came up with weren’t obvious. We built them in both directions from where we were, and we were very lucky and very successful.

SAR: Did the manufacturing present many problems?

Doug: We were set up primarily as a machine shop. It turned out that this baffle and the entire can involved an awful lot of fabrication, tooling, and tig welding. That’s how we were able to keep the weight down, and get the suppressor to function so well. The baffle actually turned out to be a follow on from work that I had done with Qual-A-Tec and AWC. We actually dropped that baffle in and we changed how many we used in the can. We changed the shape, but that was what got us to the final solution.

Trey: I don’t think anyone else could have produced that suppressor, even once they had the technology. The manufacturing was almost as much of a challenge as the design was.

SAR: Did you exceed the requirements in the end?

Doug: In the end, we were never able to get to 30 DB dry, but we ended up with 27 DB dry. If you add a little water, we were getting 39 DB, which was unheard of prior to that. On the manufacturing side, once we won the contract, then it was how were we going to produce these things. We bought a welding robot, and a wire EDM. This gave us the capability of getting the bore through the center of the suppressor uniformly, and in line with all the parts.

SAR: Does the EDM burn a hole through the suppressor?

Doug: Yes, you start with an undersized hole, and then the wire puts a bore through the center hole that’s in absolute alignment. That has turned out to be one of the keys to making this a successful suppressor. That’s where H&K was having all their problems building the Mickey Finn suppressor. By the time you weld all these baffles together, and weld them in the tube, how do you machine a hole through the center of it and keep it straight? We found out we had to completely weld the suppressor together to get it to line. A good suppressor gets hot very fast, and so the challenge is how to handle the heat. How do you keep the baffles from melting down? You have to get the heat to the outside of the suppressor, and radiate it out, while keeping the inside from collapsing when it’s red hot.

SAR: Did you have to use any special materials?

Doug: Not on the handgun. We went to a 321 stainless, which is one of the better high temperature stainless steels. This material was enough to handle the volume of fire anticipated.

SAR: Tell me about the H&K SD suppressor.

Doug: What we did with all the H&K suppressors was to take the baffle stack we developed for the .45 Colt, and scale it down to 9mm. We made an all welded can, trying to use as much of that technology on the H&K suppressors. We did both the screw on short cans as well as the SD cans, which utilized the same baffle stack as the .45, and that worked very well. We were able to keep the size down to a 1 and 3/8th inch tubing. What we did was take the Colt Offensive Handgun suppressor and adapt it to become the H&K SD suppressor.

SAR: Did you achieve some dramatic reductions in DB’S with these cans, as well?

Doug: They’re very quiet, but I wouldn’t say it’s as dramatic as the .45, because it’s always easier to make the 9mm quiet. It’s certainly very quiet, very rugged, and more durable. To me, there’s a lot more important things to suppressors than how quiet they are. Everybody dwells on how quiet they are, but to me, it’s how long do they last. Most rounds in the military are used up in training. They’ll go out, take two or three guns with them, and run ten people through the shooting houses, putting several thousand rounds through a suppressor in a day. It’s the durability and no maintenance issues that count in the military. You can’t be changing out wipes thirty-seven times during the course of a day. What Knight’s has done is bring suppressors into the ‘90’s, so that they’re really user friendly.

SAR: Tell me about your current M16 suppressors.

Doug: The M4-QD is what we call it. When I came to Knight’s, they were working on a suppressor for the M16 carbine. They were looking at shortening the barrel, machining baffles on the lathe, milling parts, and putting it all together. There was always a durability problem. We tried putting tungsten carbide inserts in there to take the initial blast, which worked well, until it got so hot that the tungsten carbide cracked. Once that cracked, the whole suppressor was useless. We ended up going to real high temperature alloys, and welded a tube within a tube, which was the key to being structurally sound, and getting through all the tests. It would take 210 rounds within three minutes, and be able to go back into the field with a full compliment of ammo.

SAR: What’s the most number of rounds that you’ve heard have been through one of these M16 suppressors?

Doug: I don’t know, but I have heard they are using it on the M249 Minimi quite successfully. The SOCOM is issuing the M4 in large, unprecedented numbers. They are planning on buying 8000 of these. They are getting to be used more and more. Part of this is that if you are planning to “own the night”, you don’t want to give your position away with flash. That’s why you need a suppressor like ours for the M16. I know that Crane has put over 5000 rounds through our suppressors in testing, and there’s almost no loss of DB reduction.

Trey: We have suppressors in house that have over 10,000 rounds through them, and we haven’t had a failure yet.

SAR: Are these being issued to all the Services?

Doug: I’m not sure exactly who’s getting them. They’re being issued throughout SOCOM units.

Trey: That brings up an interesting point. We’re up against the ideology that a suppressor is only a sniper’s tool, or an assassin’s tool. There are so many other benefits that a suppressor gives you—properly done, there’s an increase in accuracy, the shot time is decreased due to reduced recoil, as well as other benefits. When you have a supersonic round, you’re going to have a ballistic crack. It’s going to be known that someone’s firing, anyway.

Doug: I think one of the big keys of the supersonic is that if you’re down range, and I shoot past you with supersonic, my position is much more masked than if I shoot past you with subsonic. Subsonic rounds are very directional. If your object is to come back from a mission alive, I would rather shoot supersonic. If the object is that you have to get in and out undetected, then, of course, you have to shoot subsonic. You’re at more risk using subsonic, because if there’s somebody out there when you shoot, your location is more compromised. I think the users are getting more training in the use of suppressors and ammunition. The future will see more and more suppressors used, including in regular army units. They will be a part of “owning the night”.

SAR: Tell me about the SOPMOD system.

Doug: Really, this has been a number of contracts. Reed started with the idea of coming up with ways to mount things to the M16 rifle. When I went to work for Reed, one of the things that they were doing was building some test guns for the Marine Corps. I became involved with that and helped come with the first prototype that mounted in place of the handguard. The more we worked with it, the more of a systems approach we’d take.

Trey: The SOPMOD kit is adding performance to a known weapon.

Doug: It’s going to keep moving forward. The kit is going to change over time. That’s the whole idea. As new pieces appear, they’ll be added, and as pieces become obsolete, they’ll be taken out. The suppressor became part of that kit really because it could be abused and used through all the training, and still survive. It is becoming more of a standard issue piece of equipment.

SAR: Are there any other products which you see yourself working on in the future?

Doug: Yes, as we go into the future, I see more and more suppressors for big guns. We’re expecting a contract from Holland for a 25mm gun, which is a discarding sabot gun.

SAR: How do you deal with the sabots?

Doug: It’s going to be interesting. What’s driving this is that their test range is beside an environmentally sensitive area, with nesting birds. We hope to build a suppressor that will at least take the muzzle blast out of that. They look at DB, not just as a peak, but based on an average. It’s going to be a challenge because the sabot starts to open up immediately upon exiting the muzzle. The suppressor has to accommodate this, and we’ll take our best shot at it. I’d like to do work on the 155mm, as I think there is a need there. How many cannon cockers do you know that have all their hearing? People need to look at the environmental side of suppressors. In Europe, they are accepted because if you go hunting, you don’t want to disturb anyone, or hurt your own hearing. This feeling that suppressors are only assassin’s devices is going to change slowly.

SAR: Tell me about your work with the .50 caliber.

Doug: One of my first projects at Crane was the .50 caliber sniper rifle. Back then, Qual-A-Tec was one of our contractors. We built an aluminum tube .50 cal suppressor with all titanium baffles. We were able to do some real good work with that. We were able to shoot 16 inch groups at 1500 meters, with the suppressor. I see a potential need there, but so far there hasn’t been a large contract for these.

Trey: We are finally getting our .50 caliber rifles into production and start working on the suppressor in the near future.

(Author’s note, Reed rejoins the group at this time).

SAR: Tell me about the Military Armament Corporation auction.

Reed: There were about 15 people there. It was a bankruptcy auction for the entire factory and inventory. It was cash and carry or certified check only. One guy, Fred Rexler, who was a large Class 3 dealer at the time, put in a bid for everything to be sold for $250,000. The auctioneer rejected it, and the auction lasted for 3 days. The most significant thing I remember was them trying to sell guns, but there were no buyers. They had pallets of Mac 10 .45’s, with 100 guns on a pallet. There were 3000 to 4000 guns all together. The auctioneer asked how many people wanted to buy a pallet at a minimum bid of $650. I raised my hand and bought a pallet of 100 guns for $650. The guy next to me told me I was crazy because they wouldn’t be good for anything other than bookends, and I was just wasting my money. I thought to myself that I had just thrown away $650. I raised my hand again when another pallet came up, and bought it. After a while, with no one else buying them, I questioned myself, and what I was doing. I owned two machine guns the day I walked into the auction-an MG 42 and a Mac 10. I walked out of that auction owning 750 NFA weapons. I bought all I wanted, and there were plenty left. Everyone was telling me I would never get them transferred to me, and I would never get my money back. We didn’t know if the government was going to destroy the guns, or if they would transfer them to us. The ATF was struggling with a federal judge and a bankruptcy auction, and since these were assets, the judge wanted them sold. The ATF said maybe they’ll transfer, and maybe they won’t.

SAR: Were these completed guns?

Reed: Most of them were completed guns. All were in boxes and packaged for sale, with matching suppressors in other boxes and lots for sale. I bought some of everything. I had $50,000 in cashiers checks that I took to the auction, and I only spent $11,000. I could have spent a lot more money, but I looked at it, and I was very conservative. If I had been more knowledgeable, I would have done better. At that time, I didn’t know what to get and what not to get.

SAR: What does a Mac 10 sell for today?

Reed: Somewhere between $850 and $1000. I still have 200 to 300 of them left.

SAR: Were you a Class 3 dealer at that time?

Reed: Yes, with my 2 machine guns. I was just setting myself up. I had no real knowledge of what to get or what not to get. I went by myself to the auction, but met Pedro Bello who sat next to me. He cost me a million dollars, and I remind him of that every time I talk to him. He scared me off from making money.

SAR: Who else was at the auction?

Reed: Romalee Skinner was there, the people from Interarms, Ron Martin, and others whose names escape me at this time.

SAR: How did you hear about the auction?

Reed: It was in Shotgun News, and it was just a blitz to state there would be a bankruptcy auction. Nobody really went, though. It was just a fluke that I went. After that, every time someone had an auction, there were a million people there, because they thought it would be like the Military Armament auction.

SAR: I want to thank all three of you for sharing your thoughts and experiences with me and the readers of the Small Arms Review.

Most SAR readers will be familiar with Mike Dillon’s name- for many years he has been very high profile in the shooting world. Anecdotes abound, but SAR had the chance to sit down with Mike a little while ago, and the ensuing conversation stretches from the shop, to the office, to the hangar, to the Huey, out over the Arizona desert, following rivers and valleys, then back to a nice Italian restaurant in Scottsdale. Over the course of the conversation we covered many subjects, but in this first part of the interview we will stick to some history of Dillon Precision, Miniguns, Philosophy, Helicopters, Airplanes, Ballistics, Physics, and the learning process that started Dillon on the road to where he is today. In Part II, in SAR Volume 2 Number 3, Mike gets into the dynamics of reloading, specifically for machine guns, and we have his private recipes for Thompsons, 1911’s, M-16 / AR-15’s, Brownings, and a few more… Herewith we begin at the beginning…

SAR: What was your first gun Mike? What’s the first firearm you had?

Mike: The first one? I had a .22 Mossberg semi-automatic rifle. The first machinegun is easier to remember, it was a Tommy Gun; a Model 1921 Thompson. Still have it. I got it back around 1978. A good friend of mine died in an airplane crash. He had introduced me to machine gunning- the crash killed him and another friend of mine and we spent a considerable amount of time settling and locking up his machine shop and settling his estate for his widow. She wanted me to have something from the estate, and she gave me the Tommy Gun and a Star reloader. I guess this was the moment that launched me into the right path in life.

SAR: Was the Star reloader your first reloading machine?

Mike: My first reloading machine was a Lyman Tong tool, that I used to load .45 Long Colt for my Single Action 45 Colt. That was the first centerfire gun I ever owned. No, in retrospect it was probably the second, I think my first centerfire gun was a Winchester 30/30. I really liked that Single Action Colt, but I never learned how to shoot it! My buddy Jimmy Cavenor went out and bought a Smith and Wesson K38 with a four inch barrel. At that time he couldn’t afford a Single Action Colt, (even in those days a Single Action cost more than a K38 did), and I was really mortified that I had this beautiful Single Action Colt that I couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn with, and he could take this K38 out of the box and nail targets immediately. I could really fan that Single Action at an alarming rate of fire, though.

SAR: What was the target effect?

Mike: All the rounds hitting about 3 or 4 feet in front of my toes- but hitting the target really wasn’t the point- it was fun!

SAR: You’re well known around machinegun circles as being focused on machineguns, belt feds in particular. How did you start into the belt fed guns?

Mike: When I started making loading tools, well, more like messing around with loading tools, I modified that Star tool to .223. We put out a little kit that we called a SUPER STAR KIT. The SUPER STAR name came from Peter Kokalis, who was ridiculing me when he said it of course, but fairly quickly other people were asking me to make other modifications; make a machine to load 30/06 or whatever, and at that point I figured I needed a machine gun to test the results on. I bought a Hudac water-cooled Browning.

SAR: So you were specifically reloading for machineguns- what calibers?

Mike: Basically 30.06, .308, .223 and .45. People would call me up and ask me about their 257 Roberts or something of the sort and they have this problem or that problem, and “Mike, I know you’re an expert so I’d like you to help me with it…” I’d say wait a minute, you have to understand I do consider myself an expert in loading .223, .308, 30.06, .45 but that’s about it . Outside of that I didn’t know a damn thing about reloading.

SAR: When you were first reloading were you using other commercial tools to load for machineguns?

Mike: I never did. I mean I used that modified STAR to load 223 and 45, but I never reloaded any other calibers on anybody’s machine except for the ones that I made.

SAR: Were you driven strictly by a desire for more ammunition to shoot?

Mike: Truthfully, probably not. That is an element of it. I was driven by a desire, no, compulsion is probably a better word than desire, just to build things. I mean I LOVE to build things. I’ve been that way since my earliest memory of sitting on the apartment floor in Brooklyn, New York, pre-school age, building things with an erector set. I adore building things.

SAR: So this passion for building things translated itself into problem solving, and eventually Dillon Precision.

Mike: When I first started the company, I was a full-time pilot for TWA. I didn’t have as much time as I would have liked to. First off, I’ve never been a morning person, I don’t start real early. But I worked until I dropped. When I would start working I’d have no trouble with inspiration or adrenaline but the body can’t always keep up with that. I would work often until the sun was coming up, and I would go home after daylight having worked all night long. I had to set a rule for myself in that I would not work in the machine shop once I started stumbling. When I start missing steps I realized I was too tired to be working around machinery. I would keep working around the loading machine and one night I was in about that state, it was probably around 3 o’clock in the morning and I was loading 223 on the RO1000 and I was amazing myself with how fast I could go. I’d go a little faster, a little faster, a little faster until I finally I didn’t get my hand out of the way and my index finger on my left hand was speared by a cartridge case. I actually drove the cartridge case right up inside my finger. It was painful and very irritating, so I took a wrench and took the die out of the tool head. I put the die in the lathe and put a big 45 degree chamfer on the bottom of it so that if I did that again, it would sort of push my finger off. We used this chamfer in many of the dies. The next morning it looked like a major catastrophe had happened in the shop- you could track my blood from the reloader to the lathe and back again. I got so consumed in fixing things that I wasn’t paying attention to the pain.

SAR: Were the Browning guns of particular interest? I notice that you have a lot of variants, and used several different types in Machine Gun Magic.

Mike: Miniguns were the stars of that of course, but the Brownings are a very reliable gun. Probably the most interesting thing to me about the 1919 Browning, was the fact that when I first started reloading you could by H335 powder for about 25 cents per pound. Maybe it was $1.50, but it was still almost free the stuff was so cheap. I bought huge quantities of H335 and used that to load everything. It’s a great 223 powder and it’s an acceptable 308 powder, but it is NOT a 30.06 powder, which I discovered the hard way. I blew up my Browning about 3 or 4 times with it. Burst the case and bowed the top cover and you know how it is with a Browning; the cure is a 3 pound hammer. You drive the top cover back down where it was and you keep on shooting. It’s a good gun. I tried everything I could think of, I mean it said right there in that old reloading manual that the damn powder works for 30.06! I’d load this stuff and I’d get erratic ignition to the powder. I’d get muzzle blast that was enough to knock you off your feet, huge flames out the front for one round and the next round would burn clean. Then you’d get hang fires and the result of the hang fire was it would blow the back out of the case and bulge the top cover. We had some of that ammo tested- I took about ten rounds from right next to the shredded piece of the belt, and the parts of the destroyed cases, and sent them away. Results came back that pressures were erratic, but not all that high. It was one of those educational experiences in ballistics. There are certain combinations of powder and volume of case that you can’t combine. I mean the damn thing just blows up.

SAR: Too much volume?

Mike: To much volume for that powder. So I quit using H335. A748 will produce similar results in a 30.06. You’ll get short cycles because the powder is burning outside the barrel and yet people say it’s a quick burning powder, I can’t tell you what the formula is, but I can tell you that there are certain powders that in large capacity cases DON’T work properly.

SAR: When you say “explodes” it has a certain implication. Do you consider the mechanics of that, the physics of that, to be that the burning propellant gases are expanding and there is too much space for them to expand?

Mike: I think that and there was one other instance which made me decide that there were certain mysteries about powder burning inside the cartridge case that no one understands. Bob Ferris was there one day when I had a hang fire in the Browning. It went ZIP – BOOOOOOOM and ruptured the back of the case, broke the tee slot on the bolt that bolts the top cover, and I said “OK I am not touching this Bob, you come over and tell me what happened”. So he came over and put his hand underneath the ejection port and the case came right out. It looked like a prune. The case was completed collapsed. The hang fire had been just enough to push the bullet out of the case and into the rifling. The pressure in the case wasn’t sufficient to seal the case against the chamber wall. So now when the powder exploded, it was all down the barrel, and it went back alongside the case and crushed the case in the chamber, and blew the back off the case. Once again, the convenient thing with the Browning- you throw another bolt in it, take your three pound hammer and straighten the top cover and keep right on shooting. You haven’t even slowed down for the day. Brownings sure are a wonderful gun.

SAR: As far as belt feds go, it that your personal favorite?

Mike: Well, if it’s going to be mounted on something, probably yes. It’s hard to pass up the Minimi though, a gun that’s a lot of fun, because you can comfortably carry it around.

SAR: So in .223, did you load more for the Minimi or the M16?

Mike: I bought a huge load of linked .223 for the Minimi, so most of my experience would be with the M16 / AR-15 series.

SAR: In loading for the M16 series, have you done any accuracy testing personally or worked with people who were working for accuracy?

Mike: Yes, there were a couple of surprising incidents that led to our present reloading philosophies. We can cover specific recipes later. We went out shooting one morning, and Kokalis had an M16 carbine he had just gotten that little 3 power Colt scope on. I had an M16 and another guy had a Mini 14 and we went up to the range and set up. Pete was shooting his reloads using Hogsden H322. That has a DuPont number. It’s an extruded powder, an IMR powder where the grains are cut so short that it meters just like ball powder. It is the best powder for a small capacity high-pressure cartridge that there is. The silhouette shooters have taken to it. I mean it’s a beautiful powder, it’s great. He shot off a sand bag rest on the bench at 100 yards, getting sub-minute groups with an M16- a machinegun- right out of the box. He then took my H335 reloads and shot those, and they opened up to about 11/2 inches. It wouldn’t have surprised me if my loads didn’t shoot as tight as his just for psychological reasons. What did surprise me is that the group moved about 2 1/2 “ up and about an 1 1/2” to the left. The group was in an entirely different place on the paper, not just higher or lower.

SAR: Same rifle?

Mike: Same rifle. He then shot GI loads in it, which were bloody hot, 3150 feet per second or so. The group opened up to almost 3” and moved to an entirely different spot on the paper. I am thinking, what in the HELL is going on here. As far as throwing a 55 grain projectile, it can’t change where it’s going to go that much just because of a few feet difference in velocity. Why is it moving around the damn page?

SAR: Did you ever get an answer for that?

Mike: Yes. I saw it on television. There was a series on the Discovery Channel or something like it, we called it the education channel at that time. The show was on high-speed photography and one of their examples was photographing a cannon shell being fired out of the barrel of a tank. As this cannon projectile exited the barrel, it was tracked by a high-speed camera. It was painted alternatively black and white so you could clearly see it turning. The camera tracked it from the barrel at right angles all the way down range to the target. This projectile, which had to be 20” long, exits the barrel and as soon as the base of projectile clears the barrel it pitched up, must have been 15 degrees, and then as it tracked it, it pitched down about 14 degrees, up about 13 and down about 12. It kept wobbling its way down range, and you would have thought “Damn, that’s not going to hit anything”. The camera tracked it down range right through the bulls-eye. Right through the center of the target. Now, I understand something about ballistics, that the round comes out of the barrel twirling at 3000 feet per second, which means 3000 rotations per second, in a one in twelve twist. So you take 3000 x 60 to get the RPM and were talking about 180,000 RPM. That why it’s stable- it’s a Gyro. Seeing it made it clear.
OK, but what happens when you put pressure on a spinning object? You get gyroscopic perception, gravity is pushing the bullet down, the instant it clears the barrel, gravity acts on the bullet and upsets the Gyro. The Gyro then, as it’s spinning, returns its path to stability. At what rate it returns it to stability dictates where the bullet is going to go. So in short, any time you change the minutest characteristic of the velocity, pressure, weight, balance, anything at all, the bullet is going to go some place else, because it’s only through this miracle of mathematics that it ever goes straight to begin with and it does not come out of the gun stable.

SAR: Any variable at all can change point of impact, even if the group is tight…

Mike: And there is no way to predict where it will go. That round leaves the barrel in an unstable manner. We learned a lot more than just seeing the theory in action as I just mentioned. Combined with this business of the gun blowing up, and we still couldn’t figure out why these cartridges were blowing up, then I was told that there were experiments where they had transparent chambers where they could high-speed photograph the charge inside the cartridge that was being fired. It never looks the same twice. They said the primer will throw the fire into the propellant, and it will light at the back and burn forward one time, next time it will flash underneath the whole thing, light from the front and burn backwards. The photography showed that every time it is different.

SAR: And that would effect the turbulence of the propellant gasses. So we’re really lucky that we can hit any target.

Mike: That’s right. It’s really about consistency in the firearm and sighting, as well as the ammunition.

SAR: How consistent in the ammunition? I mean, you have the combined input from all the bench rest shooters, the military competitors, plus your own experiences- how close does the powder have to be?

Mike: I’ve always been a pragmatist. If I had to pick a philosopher it would be William James, what works is right, screw the theory. Just go try it and see what happens. We have done a lot of work with the 223. We had results that are so clearly supportive of our position, that I am almost embarrassed to try to pass them on. Let me tell you about our testing. We ran a test with .223 were we had a bench rest shooter who worked for us for years, who was always concerned about the “Ultimate accuracy”. We had him run an experiment one time where he loaded four different batches of .223 ammunition. The first batch using new brass which he neck trimmed, neck turned, trimmed and uniformed all the primer pockets- did everything a bench rest shooter does. He trickled charged the powder into the cases, used all the fancy bench rest in-line dies to load the stuff with. That was at one end of the spectrum and in the decreasing steps the fourth batch of ammunition was mixed brass that had been fired, some had been fired once, some had been fired three times, we made no effort to determine what they were. We ran this mongrel batch through our electric size trimmer, that sizes and trims simultaneously, and stuck the brass into a 550 and reloaded progressively for the whole batch.
He then shot the batches of ammunition with other people loading his rifle for him, so he couldn’t see which round he was shooting. We sent a fairly substantial sample of the four batches of ammunition to a major scope manufacturer who shot it in their tunnel. The results were consistent between the stuff that Darryl shot here and the stuff the other company shot.

SAR: So you had four control groups , and you had two testing facilities duplicating the test. When he was firing he didn’t know what he was firing, but he did each control group on paper for record.

Mike: Right

SAR: He had no idea which one he was shooting….

Mike: And that was the same way with the people in the tunnel, they didn’t know what each group was, only that they were in groups. Clearly the best accuracy came from the stuff that was slam-banged together. Size, trim, stuck on the progresser and loaded.

SAR: The mongrel group was the most accurate? I used to trickle every grain in my hunting ammo- it took hours. What theory do we apply to this in reverse? Have you come up with one?

Mike: No, I mean that there are a lot of things that people are concerned about that have no effect. There have been numerous tests were you could maul the front of the bullet and it has virtually no effect, but you touch the back of the bullet and it just goes to HELL. There are things that appear to be important, but aren’t. Powder charges being to the absolute last grain, or piece of a grain of powder has very little effect on accuracy. A half grain variation on a powder charge, like a 50 grain charge or even a 1/2 grain variation in a 25 grain charge. I am sorry, you can’t find it on a target, it isn’t there.
Darryl’s explanation was that probably one of the most important things is that the brass has been fired before. That he was actually handicapping the bench rest loads by using new brass.

SAR: Did you put this information out to the shooters?

Mike: On numerous occasions he took presses to the range during the bench rest rifle competitions, and demonstrated for people that progressive ammunition shot just as good or better as their tweaked ammunition. A friend of mine named Don Carper, who was associated with our company for awhile, had a distributorship over in California where he distributed our product back in the early days. He has retired from the shop he had, now he’s just a shooter and he goes out with this 5 gallon pail of 223 and shoots prairie dogs. Don told me that at first everyone said “Oh, we can’t have that much accurate ammunition because it takes too long to load. He’s converted virtually everybody to the fact that he hits just as many prairie dogs as anybody else does. Ammunition off of a progressive press.

SAR: You realize that for the next three months Mike, that everyone that has a re-loader is going be doing this test.

Mike: (With a big smile) Great!

SAR: I know I am going to be testing this.

Mike: The powder charges need to be accurate, they need to be pretty close. The first press we made was the AR1000, everything was automatic then. Powder measure was extremely accurate, I had the Army Marksmanship Unit come in and they wanted to know how accurate our powder measure was. I told them there is no sense in me BS’ing you , I am not a accuracy shooter. Here is the press, here is a whole variety of powders, here’s a scale- knock yourself out. You determine how accurate it is. So they worked with it for about 3 hours and they came out and said we’re getting 3/10th of a grain variation on 55 grain charge of extruded stick powder. I was impressed. Then he asked me if we couldn’t do any better than that.
That floored me! I said what in the HELL are you talking about? You’re going to tell me you can find 3/10th of a grain out at a 500 yard target? He laughed and said “No, of course not, but if the Son of a Bitch shooting the ammo knows there’s any variation in powder, then every “flyer” he has on the target is going to be my fault”. They bought two units, and used them.

SAR: Other than the reloading products, Dillon Precision is known for the Miniguns. When did you put your first one put together?

Mike: 6 or 7 years ago

SAR: There are a number of changes that you have made to the design- evident at the NDIA shows among others.

Mike: The only real “changes” that we are responsible for are in the feeder de-linker. We have incorporated what you call “SLAP round guides” in all of our feeder de-linkers. It’s an integral part of the feeder de-linker rather than a bolt-on accessory that goes inside it. It gives us a lot of advantages- any length cartridge will feed in it- it positions the cartridge to feed into the gun off of the shoulder of the case rather an off the point of the bullet. This means we can use short blanks. The military designed the system so they could use SABO penetrator rounds, sometimes referred to as “SLAP” rounds. The system they came up with was a bolt-on snail guide. It had to be positioned inside the feeder de-linker, which was a real pain in the neck to do. We’ve incorporated it as part of the casting of the endplate. Actually, we have changed much of the design of the internal part of the feeder de-linker, while retaining a few of them as standard. A few of them can be modified rather than replaced. Probably the most interesting change we made is evident from the outside. We are replacing the entire mid-section of the housing with a unit that has a hatch in it. The Minigun that has this modification can be loaded much like a Browning A4. Rather than having to twist the barrels and disassemble the unit if you get a jam, now you just open the hatch and clear the jam.

SAR: There was a clutch system on the back of the Miniguns that I saw downstairs.

Mike: GE designed a clutch for the gun a number of years ago that really changes the way the gun operates. I remember reading in Clancy’s Clear and Present Danger where he was talking about the guys going in a helicopter to do a jungle extraction, and as they were firing the Miniguns, and after the barrels were spinning you would press firing switch and fire the gun. I don’t where he got that weird piece of information, because that’s not the way the clutch operates. When you pull the trigger it engages the clutch, which is clutching the feeder de-linker. When the gun is turning and firing the feeder de-linker is clutched to the gun, and therefore it’s turning and feeding ammunition into the gun. When you let go of the trigger it de-clutches the feeder de-linker but continues to put power to the drive motor for another one to two revolutions of the Minigun, so that everything in the gun fires out. The barrels are always empty. In the past the feeder de-linker performed the same service but it did it by throwing 6 – 12 rounds of loaded overboard at the end of the burst. You don’t like to do that because you are throwing away a lot of ammunition- especially if you’re shooting a series of short bursts. The other problem is that without the clutch you might throw only 6-7 rounds overboard, which meant if you had a little drag you might still have a loaded barrel in the gun. With the clutch system, when you let off the trigger, there will be no rounds in the gun and the feeder de-linker is fully loaded and ready to feed into the gun. No cook off, no vibration of the gun turning it another degree and firing it. So the gun is always clear.

SAR: Is this clutch something that can go on any Minigun?

Mike: It’s a straight add-on. You just pull the drive gear off the back of the rotor and slide the clutch in. As long as the rear of the gun is accessible, you can do it without even taking the gun apart. I tried to buy clutches from General Electric, and they wanted an enormous amount of money for them and so I finally got a set of drawings and we made our own castings and now we’re making the clutches ourselves.

SAR: You could fire a two round burst from a Minigun?

Mike: You can sit there and fire a two-round burst out of the gun now. Before if you fired a two round burst you’d throw 8,9, or 10 rounds overboard in the unloading after you let off the trigger. I wanted my guns to be equipped exactly the way the military guns are equipped, because we are developing some products for them.

SAR: Was the military clutch installed to save ammunition or for safety?

Mike: I think their prime motivation for the clutch had to do with the SLAP round. Once you put the SLAP round guide in the gun you no longer have the option of throwing loaded rounds overboard, it shuts off that gate where you threw the loaded rounds out. Actually they have found you can cut the slap round guide off a little short and still throw loaded rounds overboard, but in the initial approach to it they figured that putting the SLAP round guide in required the installation of the clutch

SAR: At SAR we’re hearing of a resurgence of the Minigun being used in special operations units in various countries around the world. Is that something you are seeing as well?

Mike: There does seem to be that, I do believe the gun has been used more than anybody realized because it was by the special operation groups that don’t want or get a lot of publicity. The Minigun has been used all along as a “STAY THE HELL OFF MY HELICOPER” gun. It is an excellent defensive weapon and it gives you a lot of fire power- which translates into time. Miniguns allow you to send a lot of lead at your enemy, and to keep it up for a very long period of time. It’s not unusual in these installations to have magazines that hold 5,000 rounds, and to have multiple magazines. Many of these rescue helicopters carry 20,000 rounds of ammunition for the guns.

SAR: Is there a recommended burst rate that should or should not be exceeded?

Mike: Well, it’s a common misunderstanding that the gun fires 6,000 rounds per minute. It doesn’t. There were a few rare installations that with a linkless feed system would fire 6,000 rounds per minute, but the most common rates of fire are 2,000 rounds or 4,000 rounds. Some of the services are beginning to think that the multiple fire rates are not desirable, that a single fire rate of about 3,000 rounds per minute probably makes more sense. Now that the clutches are there, the low rate of fire doesn’t make much sense because you can fire a short burst out of the gun.

SAR: Is there an amount of ammunition that you shouldn’t exceed in firing a Minigun?

Mike: The GE engineers tell me that if you fire 3,000 rounds in a single burst of 3,000 rounds that you maybe flirting with structural problems in the barrel assembly, over heating and what not. With 6 barrels that’s only 500 rounds per barrel. As of yet I haven’t had a big enough magazine to fire mine with 3,000 rounds, but we soon will and will find out what it does.

SAR: Dillon Precision is now manufacturing the Minigun as a complete system.

Mike: Correct. We are manufacturing for military contracts only, for liability reasons. One of my customers contacted me after the last Knob Creek shoot, sending a fairly hostile letter. He said that I wasn’t supporting the Second Amendment because I wasn’t willing to sell these guns to the general public, and that two different people had told me that they needed parts and that I wouldn’t service them. I was a little irate because the two people that needed parts I had given the parts to, and the issue was that they were complaining that I said a bolt head was a $300.00 item. I am sorry, it IS a $300.00 item and if someone is willing to make them for less than that, please call me I’ll buy them from them.

SAR: There is a different between buying surplus equipment that was bought at scrap prices and manufacturing new, quality equipment in modern facility. That definitely would show a difference in price. We don’t need in-fighting on this.

Mike: Indeed. The company that called me, I won’t tell you who it was, had allegedly damaged somebody’s Minigun with bad ammunition and they wanted to fix it. They were asking to get these parts, and I said I am really not comfortable selling this stuff domestically because of the liability problem. I suggested that they call Neil Smith. That is his business, and I am sure he wouldn’t mind selling the parts. He’s very knowledgeable on Miniguns. I said if he can’t supply you, come back to me, be aware that this is probably a $300.00 part. Then I get the story back from Knob Creek that I am trying to hold this guy up for $300.00! I called this guy back and said I was a little incensed by this. I gave him the parts – free – stuck them in an envelope and sent them to him with no bill. What more do you think I could have done to have been a “Good guy”?

SAR: Flown out there and put them in

Mike: (Laughs) Right…..

SAR: The Minigun is a little bit more complex than most firearms are.

Mike: I consider it the most dangerous gun I have ever laid my hands on. Not because it can throw a lot of bullets fast, but because it has 6 barrels and not until you become fully acquainted with the gun, and fully acquainted by making mistakes with it, do you gain the respect for the gun that you should have. We go to enormous lengths for safety when we shoot the gun. Our guns are spiked until we are on the range, facing down range, away from everybody and there is no chance that the gun is pointing at anybody, and that everybody is clear. We literally spike our guns, passing 5/16 steel rods down between the barrels so they can’t turn, and while they are spiked the safing sector and firing cover are removed, and we don’t put them on. We go step by step by step by step, so the gun becomes less safe, less safe, less safe and the very last thing we do is reach round and pull the spikes out of the gun, so the barrels can turn.

SAR: Is your preferred method of shooting the Miniguns as duals in the Quad mount?

Mike: First, the Minigun has to be mounted to something heavy. It’s got up to 600 lbs of thrust when it is firing and I prefer to have it mounted to something that weights 2500 lbs. The quad-mount is a delightful way to shoot the gun, because you have total control over it and you can sit there in comfort and electrically power the guns around where you want them to go.

SAR: This was in that world famous video that you made “Fire Storm In the Desert”.

Mike: That setup was the star of the show. We don’t really want to reveal all of our secrets in the magic of making the movie.

SAR: We at SAR don’t mind the occasional “Patented Shameless Plug” Mike. Do you still have that available?

Mike: Of course! We’ve also had a sequel in planning ever since we made the first one. The mistake I made was that I should have gone out 6 months later and just made another one. I’ve been trying to make it so big and so grandiose, that we’ve been 6 or 7 years now in preparation and we’ve still haven’t gotten started on it yet. We have all sorts of props ready, but the main filming hasn’t been started.

SAR: I take it that means you don’t have a release date yet in mind

Mike: That would be a fair evaluation.

SAR: You’ve been doing some other theatrical work with the Miniguns recently.

Mike: We had a real interesting one that came in from England. Stembridge Gun Rentals from Hollywood had been working over in Ireland on a show and these guys were talking about a fellow named Jeremy Clarkson who writes a column and has a TV show on the BBC. It’s about cars and he is a humorous evaluator of different cars, and they had done a video last year that they had sold very successfully where he evaluated several cars and then destroyed the ones that he didn’t like. They wanted to make a better one this year. Jeremy called us up and asked us if we could shoot a sports car for them. We said of course! (Mike now has a huge grin) One thing led to another, then led to another, then led to another as the project escalated and we ended up using the Hughes 500 with dual Miniguns on it, with all sorts of special ammunition loaded for them. We used a Corvette which we radio controlled, then we put a radio controlled crash dummy in the Corvette that could shake his head and look in different directions. Jeremy came over and we put the corvette on a dry lakebed that was 5 miles in diameter and then shot the hell out of it with the helicopter mounted Miniguns.

SAR: And that was on British television?

Mike: Yes, and it’s become a British video that’s been distributed over there and called “Apocalypse Clarkson”. The working title was “Jeremy Clarkson Out of Control” but after they got back and viewed the helicopter footage and what not, they decided to call it “Apocalypse Clarkson”. It’s a good video. It probably will never be distributed over here, but it’s a fun video.

SAR continues the interview with Mike Dillon in next month’s issue- wherein we get to divulge Mike’s private recipes for machine gun ammunition- don’t miss it!