Tell me about firearm functions

DA revolvers can also be fired by manually c0cking the hammer, similar to a SA revolver. This greatly reduces the amount of trigger travel and weight required to release the hammer and fire the gun. There are also what are known as Double Action Only revolvers, which can only be fired by pulling the trigger. There is either no exposed hammer to c0ck, or if there is an exposed hammer, it does not have a c0cking notch and will not stay in the c0cked position.

A semi-automatic revolver is a design that uses the recoil force of the fired cartridge to operate the cylinder, moving the next loaded cartridge into line with the barrel & firing mechanism and to re-c0ck the hammer for the next shot. Very similar in concept to a semi-automatic pistol. The most famous example of this is the Webley-Fosbery revolver used in the Maltese Falcon to kill Sam Spade's partner, Miles Archer. Here's a video of a Webley-Fosbery in action:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSPIhHFtLX0

I would define the bolt as the back end of the chamber where there is a hole for the firing pin. The chamber in general is the area which confines the cartridge.

The bullets are forced up by the magazine spring. However there are 'lips' at the top of the magazines which prevent the spring from simply tossing bullets out. The slide action basically scoops the bullet forward past these lips and up into the chamber. There is generally a feed ramp which guides the bullet into the chamber.

You pretty much always have start with the slide all the way back (slide, not slider) to load a semi-auto. If you do not, there is a significant chance of feeding not working and you get a jam.

Along these lines, if you don't have a good grip on a pistol when firing it, you can do what is called limp wristing, which means you let the gun flop back too much in your hand and the recoil action gets botched. This can lead to misfeeds and jams.

Yes, it's a whole different story than in revolvers.

This is pretty much correct. Both use springs of course, though the short recoil operation mechanisms use the mechanical action to mitigate recoil more so than the spring. Only blowback guns are all about the spring.

There are two ways to put a semi auto back into battery. They all have a slide release (which is a button or lever which will release the slide forward and chamber a round), or you can simply pull the slide back and let it go.

As always, never assume some enthusiast hasn't done what you think impossible.

Try This

or this

Again, I can find a shooter to prove this wrong.
here

It's said by the really high end wheelgun people that a heavy double action pull makes it easier to shoot fast since it means the hammer is working faster since the spring makes it cycle faster.

The real reason that old TV shows had crappy shooting scenes is that they never either got a firearm expert to advice at all, or the had a really bad one. To gun enthusiasts like myself, it is easy to tell when a show has hired someone to provide good advice.

Your first and easiest clue will be that nobody will have a finger on the trigger until they are on target and ready to shoot.

There was a semi auto revolver actually, you are right. Basically the idea was to use a revolving magazine with recoil to operate the mechanism of rotation and the resetting of the hammer. The ability of a rotary magazine to feed quickly and more precisely than a spring loaded magazine was the advantage. It didn't really catch on however since it was more limited in capacity. I read about it some time back in a gun magazine, though I'd be hard pressed to find a reference now.

Oddly enough, submachineguns are often the cheapest and easiest to make.

Well if you do decide to cross the pond sometime, you'd be welcome to try some real ones out here. I'm generally happy to teach people how to shoot and let them try some items from the collection.

Damn, I feel sloppy for forgetting to mention that. It's especially bad since I almost never fire my revolvers double action(and I only have one single action revolver).

I wouldn't worry about it.. You did an awesome job of condensing a lot of fairly complex information down into a couple easy to understand posts.

OK, that was a lot of fun to watch. I think this little animation is as good as it's going to get without actually disassembling one by hand, which is not an option, as I don't live in South Florida There was still some ambiguity around how the safety works, how the hammer gets primed between changing magazines and a whole load of little metal plates that actually look a whole lot like the insides of a door lock o.O. Beyond that, though, I saw the operations being discussed.

As per the animation, the whole barrel pivots back and down, which I assume means the hole for it in the front is either very big or oblong. It slips out of grooves made to hold it to the slide, and the slide moves backwards, completely seriously just forcing the hammer down by pushing against it. I would not have called that. It felt like too... Brutish an approach for it to be true, but apparently it is. I can't imagine that would be good for material wear.

Also, I kept thinking the recoil spring would be somewhere at the back. You know, BEHIND the thing being forced back. Turns out iti's in the very front, explaining the width around the barrel, and explaining why an automatic with a forward magazine would need a significant redesign.

Cool, that actually explains a lot. It's a lot finer, more intricate machinery than I thought. Explains why it took so long after the invention of firearms to get to that.

P.S. Also, ZOMG BABS POST! I... Guess invoking him worked I'm really happy to see the man in charge of making all the cool Dual Handguns take interesting in that little discussion. Sweet!

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

What's even more fascinating, to me at least, is that the pistol design used in the animation, was created around 1906, adopted by the United States military in 1911, and it still used today. It has been used by American troops in World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam conflict, Desert Storm, Somalia, Iraq & Afghanistan. One year from now, that pistol design will have in service with our military, in one role or another, for a century, despite having been generally replaced by the M9 Beretta in 1985.

This is correct. Mostly. Some semi-auto pistols do have real bolts. The main difference between a bolt and a slide is that the bolt will have some way to rotate and lock itself onto the barrel. The slide is simply held in place by the recoil spring, or a simple friction type lock.

This is also correct. Mostly. For handgun, the "slider" is just the slide, and the most common term for doing it, is "racking the slide" For a rifle or SMG, the "slider" is called the "charging handle".

The main reason for a DA Semi-auto is that the weapon can be carried with a round in the chamber with the hammer at the half-rooster safety position. From here, there is no physical safety to release before firing. A simple pull of the trigger will do.

Some guns, like my little Sig 230, have no physical safety other than the half-rooster setting. A de-roostering lever on the side will take it from ready to fire on single action to the safe position.

It should be noted that the trigger will be in a different position from DA fire than for SA fire on every gun I can think of. This makes that first shot feel odd to me. Every shot after the first will be from a single action position.

Not really. All bolt rotate. In the case of a bolt action rifle, this rotation is done manually after every shot. In the case of a semi or fully automatic, the gas which drives the bolt back forces it along a path that makes it rotate. The tube that collects the gas is usually up near the muzzle and the bullet will be long gone before the bolt even begins to move.

Nothing is more punishing to the shooter than a revolver or fixed action for a given caliber. Every little thing that moves between the back of the case and the palm of the hand, or the shoulder take recoil away.

NOTE Holding a rifle with a little space between your shoulder and the stock, while technically allowing the entire rifle to move before it gets to you, is a bad idea that becomes more spectacular as the power goes up. Always pull the stock in tight.

Some systems, like the Heckler and Koch, have a delayed blow back action that locks the bolt in place for a moment after firing until the gas pressure comes down to a certain level. This helps them to fire a wider variety of ammunition.

In nearly every case, a gas operated weapon will have less recoil than a blow back of the same caliber.

Basically correct. Again, it comes down to the difference between a bolt and a slide. Slides are much easier to build and maintain, but they cannot handle the pressure and recoil of the higher calibers. The only handgun that I know of that uses a gas system is a Desert Eagle. Even the old Automag was a modified blowback.

In most American designs, it's a lever on the left side, about where the thumb rests above the trigger. In many European designs, the slide needs to be pulled back a bit with the free hand to release it.

The Desert Eagle requires both. It uses the American design, but there is so much tension on the lever that I've only seen one guy that could release it with one hand. This is the same guy I watched unhook a trailer with three dirt bikes on it and walk off up a slight hill with it in one hand. That man scares me.

One objection tot he single action method. I have a .44 Redhawk (double action) but I do tend to pull the hammer back with each shot. I've gotten to where I can pull it back with my left hand as the gun comes back down from the recoil. This is in a two hand grip. The result is that every shot is single action and just as fast as if it were a semi- auto and I still wanted to hit stuff.

Some Double actions have no outside hammer, so every shot is full double action whether you want it to be or not. The advantage to these is that there is nothing to snag on your clothes when drawing from concealment.

There is also a spot where the pressure comes off of the trigger just before the gun fires. If you learn to feel this, you can pause there to get a very close to single action feel.

They didn't hold any more bullets than a regular revolver. The design they used had a groove that ran in a zig-zag pattern around the cylinder that acted like a track for a pin in the bottom of the frame. Dirt and wear could degrade the pin or the track tin such a way that the gun didn't work very well.

A revolver "not working well" generally means the hole in the cylinder no longer lines up just right with the hole in the barrel. This generally sucks, because the bullet doesn't know this. If you're lucky, and the damage isn't bad, the guy beside you gets splattered with a bit of shaved bullet that leaks out of the gap between the cylinder and the barrel. If the rotation misses by too much, the bullet has no where to go an the top of the cylinder pops off. Big pop.

My 1911 has a slide made by Remington Rand, the sewing machine company. We've traced the serial number back to 1940-1945. The trigger was worn smooth at one point, then diamonds were filed into it by hand, then they were worn smooth. The front sight is hideous and a little crooked, and there is what appears to be a bloody fingerprint under the bluing in the front of the frame, but I wouldn't trade it for a case of new Beretta's, or anything else for that matter.

It can chamber an empty and get 5 rounds to touch at 25 yards. A good 1911 is forever.

It was a typo, guys. I meant to say "slide"

A "de-roostering lever." Man I love this forum

Wait... So bolt and slide are mutually exclusive? OK, that might explain a few things. First of all, slide-operated weapons don't have an actual "bolt," so much a just having the slide covering the hole in the barrel where the cartridge is ejected out of, do I have that right? Which would mean that "bolt," then, is the plate which covers the same hole in weapons with a more static barrel that don't have a slide to move back and reveal it. Which would mean the Desert Eagle 50 doesn't actually have a slide at all... That kind of makes sense, since pictures I've seen of the thing make it look like one solid lump of metal with the "barrel" being basically a hole in the end, whereas slider-operated handguns tend to have a hole in the slide up from that the actual barrel comes out of.

OK, that explains why the Desert Eagle looks like a cast-iron stove plated in chrome, and it also explains why it would have a rotating bolt and why that is meaningful. Lacking a slide (which would explain why it also lacks washboard pattern which I assume is there for grip on the slide), it instead has a bolt like an assault rifle because of how powerful the cartridge it uses is. Weapons both in games and movies fire too fast for me to actually see what the heck is going on, so I kind of assumed the Desert Eagle had a top slide like all the others, but it doesn't does it? That really would explain a LOT.

Thanks, that explains what that is for. My toy replica has that, but being that it's plastic, it's just a bump on the surface. Now I know.

Something tells me he wouldn't exactly NEED a gun But then, I'm getting the impression from everything I've read that the Desert Eagle isn't exactly a gun for those weak in the hand, so I guess it's kind of fitting.

They didn't hold any more bullets than a regular revolver. The design they used had a groove that ran in a zig-zag pattern around the cylinder that acted like a track for a pin in the bottom of the frame. Dirt and wear could degrade the pin or the track tin such a way that the gun didn't work very well.

That jives with the video I saw of the semi-automatic revolver before. The whole drum and barrel assembly looks like it's on a rail to recoil backwards of the grip, and with that pattern and a static pin welded to the stock, I can definitely see how that back-and-forth motion could rotate the drum automatically, and I assume drum rotation is what, err... "Roosters" the hammer. OK, I get that, too. Cool

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

That animation had a few things that made it a little confusing. Mainly that the safety was engaged during the magazine change.

The thumb safety was little rocker thing under the hammer on the side of the slide. It doesn't normally get flipped up between shots. You also can't flip it up while changing magazines.

The thing that moved in and out on the very back was the grip safety. This is to ensure that the gun can only be fired if it's actually being held. Little trivia for you. A LOT of 45 shooters pin these down to make them in effective. It's possible to get your hand caught in them as the move.

The hole in the front of the slide is a smooth bushing. as the barrel cams down, the slide is moving back. The bushing is the part that is holding the barrel in the down position to ensure a proper feed ramp alignment to pick up the next round. The inside of the bushing is slightly convex all around to prevent it from binding.

The hammer face an the back of the slide are very smooth and generally kept oiled to reduce that wear. And yeah, it is brutish. Most semi autops use that same method though.

The spring is actually under the barrel, not around it. At least in a 1911. The width of the slide is to accommodate the bushing.

Yeah, the only guns I know of with a recoil spring around the barrel are blowback designs. A former roommate of mine had a Makarov, and it featured a fixed barrel with recoil spring that went around it.

No. The slide is the part that moves when you rooster it. Nearly all semi autos will have that. In a 1911, the breechface (the part that touches the back of the round) is all there is. In a Desert Eagle, the bolt sits in the breechface, which is part of the slide.

The slide on an Eagle only runs up the back half. The barrel really is just a hole in that giant block of metal. The recoils springs are thin and run up the bottom of the barrel on both sides, which is why the bottom is so much wider than the top.

No, it does have a slide, and that slide will come back every shot. It's just that it's not as long, and it has more parts in it.

As for the rest. They are ridiculously heavy and the grip is so big that I can't get my fingers to touch when I hold it. The round is just a .44 mag, the same as Dirty Harry used.

Also, REAL Desert Eagles are matte black.

If maximum number of rounds is important, one can also put the magazine in, chamber a round, then remove the magazine and put one more bullet into it before reinserting it. So you have a full magazine plus one in the chamber. (Note that this is inherently less safe than carrying the weapon without a live round in the firing chamber.)


A handgun that can fire a whole lot of bullets and wasn't a commercial success? I give you the Calico M950. It's a "handgun" that attempts to straddle the line between "cool" and "ridiculous". The drum on top is a 100 round magazine for 9 mm bullets. The spent cartridges are actually expelled forwards and downwards, through the spot just in front of the trigger guard. Naturally it came in semi-automatic and fully-automatic versions.

The gun was a failure because firstly, you're holding the gun plus one hundred bullets. That gets heavy real quick. There was a half-length, fifty-round magazine, but that still didn't help enough. Secondly, you couldn't steady the gun by gripping it under the barrel with your other hand because it was very easy to get burned with the hot casings streaming out of the bottom of the gun. Thirdly, if you really need that much firepower it's kind of silly to try to cram it into the ergonomics of a pistol rather than just going to a sub-machinegun design.

Still, it looks neat and exotic, which earned it a prominent spot in a number of B-movies from the early 90s like I Come In Piece and Stone Cold.

Interesting... Sidetracking into movies a bit, it seems that there are usually two ways action heroes fire automatics. One is the case when the hero is clearly shooting blanks and seeing no recoil, which allows him to basically squeeze out more rounds out than a minigun, shooting one-handed while suspended upside down. The other is the more "realistic" shooting of the gun with both hands, obviously firing live rounds, that have the gun rotate at least 45 degrees in the shooter's hands on each shot, causing the shooter to fire really slowly.

I'm assuming complete fantasy is the former example and "limp wristing" is the latter, with actual proper use somewhere in-between? Because, honestly, the former looks too cool to be real, and the latter looks too silly to be practical.

Well, of course I'm just looking at basic movie clices and what I've seen, and movies are notoriously bad about keeping authentic physics authentic. Though, I have to say, those clips are... Spectacular, put it like this

Possibly a case of this. A lot of movies I've seen this in are the kind where someone would hold another person at gun point by casually holding a gun to his chest, easily within an arm's reach. No great shock is felt when the other guy grabs the gun and they wrestle like entangled tumbleweeds. Those same movies have shooters fire their (really small) revolvers by frantically squeezing them, often at the cost of the gun drifting off to the side as their hand spasms. Those guns also have an interesting tendency to shoot out sparks, so I'm sure they're not realistic, but the handgun's function DOES explain why the actors do that with their props. If each shot requires a lot of pull strength, an untrained actor would look a lot like this.

I actually had a small metal revolver toy that just popped percussion caps and made a small bang. It had a drum, but no mechanism to rotate it that I can remember, and it had a striker to pop them. It was heavy, made of cast iron and had a HIDEOUSLY hard trigger, especially considering I was, like, 5 at the time. Whenever I could manage to fire it one-handed at all, this is exactly how I looked - more squeezing for all my worth than actually aiming to fire. The gun didn't actually FIRE anything, so there wasn't any point, anyway, but I can definitely relate.

Yeah, that seems to be a fairly common slight. Though it also seems to be a little less common, as both media and critics seem to be picking up on it, and even unlearned gits like myself have heard of it. It's still an easy trick to spot which movie had an expert advising the actors and which just had the director hand them guns and instruct them to act cool. I personally learned about it watching a documentary about the bank robber known as Hollywood, as police used this to assume he had police training. Turns out he didn't, but the little tidbit has been with me since.

Now, in City of Heroes we don't have FINGERS, but less an index finger for us to care where we place it, so chances are we'll just keep holding our firearms in a squeezing fist, but even games that DO have fingers rarely actually use this trick, and you'll often see supposedly elite soldiers constantly keeping their fingers on the trigger. It's a good thing video game characters don't trip

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Another reason it wasn't that great was that the rear sight was mounted on the top of the magazine. Your aimpoint would move around with every shot, and if you ever swapped out for a different magazine, you were really hosed.

It was also the laser rifle from Spaceballs when Princess Vesper went all Rambo after they shot her hair.

There was a full auto .22 called an American 180 that looked like a Tommy Gun but had the drum sitting horizontally on the top. It held 177 rounds, took about 30 minutes to load the spring loaded magazine, and if you slipped, it would go off like the mainspring in a clock and rain shells all over the area. Is also dumped hot brass into your left sleeve if you had a long coat on and weren't careful, and the fumes would waft right up into your face.

It was still a lot of fun for 2.8 seconds every 45 minutes though.

When I was a kid, a friend of my dad's was class three fun dealer. Class three stuff is full-auto, so I got to shoot a lot of things the average 10 year old misses out on.

Ah, OK, that explain is. So it does have a slide, only it's not exactly like other guns. What slides back is the... Back 1/3 of the gun's length, plus the BOTTOM of the gun, which... Honestly looks kind of really odd I see what you mean, though, and I take my comment back.

That still, however, leaves the question of what, exactly, a "bolt" is and what it does on the Desert Eagle. I went through several ideas of what it might be, and each has been shot down as total nonsense (which they were), so I don't know where to go. Let's simplify the question and see if that'll get through to me. What is the little plate that closes the gap on the side of the barrel where shell casings are expelled called? I'm assuming it isn't the bolt, so it must have a name of its own.

Afterwards, back to formula, am I correct to say that the "bolt" is the thing that plugs the barrel and, in a semi-automatic handgun, is attached to the slide, and that a rotating bolt is merely one that locks so it stays in position longer before recoiling back?

And what the hell would possess someone to even develop a weapon like the Desert Eagle? I mean, I can see why people by they, I can even see why some people fire them, and I can DEFINITELY see why they're so common in games and movies, but for something this seemingly impractical to be developed by a military force? How did that happen?

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

They can be fired with one hand, you just need to remember to actually hold onto them. Limp wristing allows the whole gun to move too far for the slide to move all the way back to pick up the next round.

In IDPA style shoots, you may be called upon to not only fire one handed, but in the weak hand as well.

The two handed grip is the most often taught stance. A good movie for proper technique is Way of the Gun. THey had some good coaches.

I'd bet a kidney (not one of mine) that they don't let actors fire live rounds while filming. They normally use full load blanks with a plug in the barrel that has a small enough hole to let the pressure cycle the gun. These don't always work well, and you can often see and actor blazing away with an empty brass sticking out of a half closed slide. This is called a stovepipe and it's the most common malfunction a auto can have. If you can't clear it yourself, you shouldn't be unsupervised.

Nothing personal, but I've got to jump on this one. It's one of my pet peeves. There is nothing that is inherently less safe about carrying a modern semi-automatic pistol with a round chambered as opposed to with an empty chamber, provided the operator is properly trained and follows proper safety procedures. Nearly 100% of "accidental" firearms discharges occur because of negligence on the part of the operator. In other words, the idiot with the gun pulled the trigger. All those news stories where somebody was cleaning their gun or some cop was in the bathroom and the gun "just went off"? Pure, complete, unadulterated BS.

Modern handguns are almost without exception all "drop safe", meaning that the gun cannot fire without the trigger being pulled, due to passive mechanical safety devices built into the design of the firearm. Long-guns such as rifles and shotguns are a different story, and it is generally a good idea to store or carry them with an empty chamber until it is necessary to use them.

Considering this is a thread about firearms, I think this is an excellent point to bring up firearms safety. There are four simple & easy to remember firearms safety rules. If every gun owner (including police and the military) followed these basic rules 100% of the time, no one would ever get injured or killed with a firearm accidentally.

1. All guns are always loaded. There is no such thing as an unloaded gun!
2. Never let the muzzle of a firearm point at anything you are not willing to destroy.
3. Keep your finger off the trigger until your sights are on the target AND you have made the decision to fire.
4. Know what your target is and what is beyond it.

I wholeheartedly endorse this post.

Glock even did an test where they took one of their pistols with a primed shell (no power and no bullet, just a primer) and dropped it from the drop of their building, repeatedly. It never fired the primer.

Desert Eagle Manual in PDF. Page 32 has an exploded view.

Okay. let's build you a gun action. You'll two small boxes, like shoeboxes. Two cardboard tubes out of a roll of paper towels or toilet paper, and a small bottle that fits in them.
Cut a hole in box 1 and but the paper towel tube in it. This is the barrel.
Put the bottle in the tube. This is the bullet.
Press the second box flat against the first. This is a breechface and basically how the 1911 works.
When the gun fires, the bullet casing pushes back on the breechface and it gets ejected.
Now take the toilet paper tube and stick it on a hole in box 2. This is the bolt sticking in the breechface of the Desert Eagle.
The tube can rotate slightly to lock in place, making the whole assembly one unit prior to firing.
When the gun is fired, the bullet is blown back into the bolt where it is drawn back and ejected.

Exactly right.

Not a clue really.

Way past my bedtime now. See you later.

You're on the right track here. The bolt serves a couple different functions, depending on the type of firearm. It encases the base of the cartridge, and seals the gap at the rear of the firing chamber when closed, holding the cartridge in place. When the cartridge fires, the brass (or other material) cartridge case expands, fully sealing the chamber and preventing the hot gasses being vented rearward. The rearward motion of the bolt will extract the empty cartridge case from the firing chamber, followed by ejecting the empty case from the gun, as well as c0cking the hammer or striker for the next shot. Forward motion of the bolt will strip the next round off the top of the magazine, and load it into the chamber. That sequence of actions can be accomplished either manually, in the case of a bolt action or lever action rifle, or automatically in the case of a semi-automatic rifle.

One way to think of a slide on a semi-automatic pistol is as an almost fully enclosed bolt. The operations & functions are nearly identical. A rifle bolt's movement generally occurs inside the firearm, whereas the slide on a pistol is part of the gun's exterior.

On a pistol, what you refer to as the "plate" that covers the side of the ejection port is generally simply the rearmost part of the barrel. When the slide recoils and moves backwards the open ejection port in the slide moves back away from the barrel, allowing the empty cartridge to be ejected. On a rifle, what you refer to as the "plate" is generally the bolt itself.

I say it is "inherently less safe" because it takes one less conscious action to proceed in discharging the weapon. To me it's in the same vein as "always treat a gun like it's loaded" and "never point a gun at something you don't want to shoot": don't make the weapon ready to fire unless you are about to shoot.

OK, the exploded view finally showed me what a "bolt" is, and it isn't at all like what I thought it was. Basically, if I'm reading the picture right, it, err... Looks like a small flute Basically, it is a inner pipe with a capped end and several holes in the side, one of which I assume is for the round to load into, and the other for the round to eject out of. I'm assuming this rotating bolt somehow screws inside the barrel, possibly inside the slide, hence why it is a rotating bolt. From the looks of it, it doesn't rotate much, no more than probably a quarter turn just to align holes with the barrel and the slide opening and eject the spent shell casing.

But at this point it's coming to my own bed time, as well, so I'll look more into this tomorrow. Though, I have to admit, this kind of mechanics is actually pretty interesting stuff. Maybe I missed out that I didn't pull things apart when I was a kid. But hey, now I can buy stuff for this precise reason Not guns, obviously, but smaller, more mundane stuff. I really need to figure out what goes into a door lock one of these days, just so I'm not afraid to unbolt one for fear I'll never put it back together again.

*edit*
Oh, and I can see how it would turn and how it would lock. People who actually know this stuff will laugh at me, but that actually kind of looks like the mechanism inside a retractile ball-point pen Which, by the way, is a deceptively ingenious invention in itself. I've pulled a few apart in my life, and the more complicated ones can be amazing. I think I found one with three springs in it once

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.