Anyone have ideas? Were these just made for show?
Dunno.
I was checking out the serial number. At first glance it looked like “2007 - ID10T” and I was thinking that one would pretty much have to be an idiot to get anywhere near it ;-)
Looks like the pipe plug in the section of pipe telescoping over the barrel probably moves forward. Wouldn’t be a problem to file, machine or drill and screw a firing pin onto it’s face and the hammer would drive it home. The plug and pipe act like a shroud around the breech.
One thought anyway...
Zip guns with combat grips and trigger guards? Someone’s havin’ a little fun.
that would be on the hammer
I believe that fellow got a letter from the BATFE.
They didn’t buy his “it’s art” excuse.
I don't know how the zip gun works, but I do know how parentheses work. You use parentheses in pairs to enclose words that clarify or are used as an aside.
As I recall, our zip guns used the largest section of a car antenna for the barrel, and some kind of spring/ rubber bands thingee to strike the edge of a nail against the rim of a .22. Stocks were made of wood.
The first time I ever heard about “zip guns” was in a novel “The Cross and the Switchblade”
It was a story set in New York City in the fifties between warring gangs. They made homemake firearms with car antennas, rubberbands, .22 rounds, and wooden blocks for handles.
It mentioned the “zip guns” were more likely to explode in the users hands than hit its target.
The smooothbore of the antenna didn’t help.
Wouldn’t fire one one a dare....
They were not made to function. Their intended purpose was to scare the panties off a certain whiney little twerp who runs NYC... and who runs gun buy-back programs.... into giving the artiste’ who made these “weapons” something like $300 per.
In this, they function quite well.
Perhaps that pipe plug is solid for BATF reasons. If you really need to fire it you unscrew it, place a cartridge in the chamber then replace it with another plug drilled for a nail firing pin.
I see a similar handgun in my Frankfort Arsenal tech manual. It shows a plug drilled for a nail.
Again, maybe that is not drilled so the BATF cannot claim it is a real firearm. Bet he has a spare plug drilled for it.
Armslist - the Craigslist of firearms!
http://www.armslist.com/
You put a nail or some other kind of pin in a hole in the plug that screws into the pipe section. You screw the plug down until the pin touches the primer, and the hammer drived the pin into the primer, firing the cartridge. I’ve seen these designs in handbooks for improvised weaponry issued by the army. The ones pictured are actually pretty fancy, which is not to say they look safe to actually fire.
You need to process those guns with WinZip (or an equivalent utility) and they become AK-47s.
Zip guns don’t have a firing pin, because they don’t fire anything.
They use a powerful spring to launch a projectile almost silently, except for the sound of the spring sliding through the barrel (Zip!)