Sir Joseph Whitworth is quite the famous name in engineering circles, credited with the development of such things as Whitworth threading (the first standardized thread pattern) and engineer’s blue. When he decided to make a rifle, he decided that he could make flat surfaces more precisely than round ones, and chose to design a rifle with a hexagonal bore and mechanically fitted bullets.
Video: [15:19]
https://youtu.be/Hi-S_horZGk?si=
Ian makes a correction to the original video: [7:18]
https://youtu.be/cUd2RQGfL7E?si=
Sir Joseph Whitworth is quite the famous name in engineering circles
How ironic.
Well alleight then, from now on I’ll call my hip group of engineers The Hexagon. You’ll have to tell Jimbo that he’s out, though, as he was the seventh member.
Hexagons are bestagons.
Vi, is that you?
Looked up how to drill hexagonal holes and came up with some answers for holes that weren’t much deeper than their width… Really not sure how this would be done for a rifle bore, though. Is there twist to the bore? Seems like a nightmare to manufacture.
Pretty sure that rifling nowadays is sometimes done this way. I think it’s called polygonal rifling.
I hesitate to ask but has some Muppet tried square or triangular bullets before?
I think I can guess how well they’d work 😅
The Dardick used triangular rounds but I think the actual bullets weren’t triangular.
Is this a carabeene ?
But isn’t the spin off a bullet part of why it’s so destructive? Super interesting!
Spinning helps with range and accuracy. How destructive a bullet is more because of its weight and speed, which is controlled by how much propellant like gunpowder.
Spinning “rifling” is what makes a bullet go straight. Before then, you’d just have to hope it hits in that general area you’re aiming for. Any imbalance in weight would steer the bullet then.
Do we use round bullets today because he was wrong about his assumptions, or was he correct, but round is easier and cheaper to manufacture?
