Robert’s tired of seeing the weak-azz questionnaires offered on other clickbait-y sites and demanded that I cook up something a little more challenging. You’ve got 30 seconds per question — good luck!


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44 COMMENTS

  2. No, this is not a test of firearms knowledge.

    This is a test of movie knowledge.

    They’re not the same thing.

    • Yeah, I’ve never seen more than half an episode of How I Met Your Mother. I only guessed the M4 #1 location because I read the other night that Reed Knight traded the All American 2000 design (which Colt promptly screwed up with lawyer-safety crap) for all of Colt’s historical stuff.

    • Yeah, this was a shit quiz. I don’t spend that much time watching television or movies.

    • Yeah, come on, I’ve never even SEEN an episode of How I Met Your Mother, just read the spoilers on TV Tropes. Saved a lot of time.And the last time I saw Starship Troopers, the Clintons were in the White House. (The book is better.)

  4. Funny. My coworkers refer to me as the Gun Nerd already… I think I’ll put that title on my name badge.

    • My company lets us put a unique saying on our badges. “I love football” or whatever, there’s an approved list. I tried for “I love guns” and they trashed it. So currently, I have “ask me about my hobby”.

      • I noticed nobody has one that says “I love my job.” If you work where I think you do, I understand perfectly.

  5. How do you get 98,000 points from 3 questions? And I don’t believe that was 30 seconds total, much less per question.

    • Timer didn’t reset after each question, after 30 seconds expired, the quiz self destructed. Has the Secretary disavowed knowledge of my actions?

  6. 74,315 with 13 correct. I have never seen “How I Met Your Mother,” and there was one question I didn’t see. That was pretty fun.

  7. Don’t watch TV! I cant stand sitcoms; they’re brain rot. Glad I cannot take the quiz, sounds like total disappointment!!!

    • Ditto and ditto. I watch South Park online, mostly because it’s great social commentary and keeps me up with the youngsters I teach at the local community college.

      This quiz is pure clickbait. Before I was more than a couple questions into the quiz, I realized it was going to be an utter and complete waste of time for someone who knows something about guns instead of TV and movies, so I stopped.

      • Of course it’s click bait. If hillary had won the election we’d have 10-12 postings a day with 500-1000 comments on each.

        Trump, Hail Lord Trump, blessings upon his house and issue, is messing with RF’s bottom line cause he ain’t messing with our guns.

  8. I know that Jules used a Star Model B, but I’d put money on Vince using some kind of nickel 1911.

  10. Question was wrong. Jules used a Star Model B and Vincent used a Auto Ordinance when he accidentally shot marvin in the face.

    • not to mention that is a MOVIE question in basis since you can not answer it if you haven’t seen the movie.

  14. Jeez. I had to keep hitting allow on my script blocker to try and fool with that quiz. It ended up good and locking down my browser… Thanks for the restart.

  15. Stopped playing when I was asked a question about what gun was on “How I Met Your Mother”.

    I’d be interested in taking a test on firearms knowledge, maybe with some questions as they pertain to military history. Not movie and television trivia.

  17. OK, I have a couple minutes whilst I’m waiting for something to print. Then I have to split.

    So here’s some quiz questions of obscurant knowledge in firearms:

    1. Why are the bolts or breech blocks on guns harder than the receiver in which they slide? Hint: Shear strength of the steel is a popular, but incomplete reason. Perhaps a better way to ask this question is “Why aren’t the bolt/breech block and receiver both the same hardness?”

    2. What is the Blish effect, and in which much-storied gun was it used?

    3. Why were the Springfield 1903 receivers under s/n 800,000 recommended to be destroyed?

    4. Why was (and is) AISI 8620 a good choice for the steel to be used in a rifle receiver?

    5. If you wanted to perform any welding on an AR-15 receiver, what should the receiver be made of? Would you use a MIL-spec receiver or not?

    There’s some questions that could be on a real gun nerd’s exam.

    • DG I think we would all agree that you are not a gun nerd you are THE gun nerd. And I mean that with the utmost respect – if you could bottle and sell your knowledge, we’d all buy it, you’d be incredibly wealthy and we’d all be better off.

      • I know a bit about guns, but not everything. I won’t know even 25% of what there is to learn about guns before I die.

        As I tell customers: Anyone who tells you they know everything about all guns is simply full of crap. The amount of knowledge and human inventive effort that has been sunk into guns is astonishing. If we’d devoted as much effort as we’ve sunk into guns as a species in the last, oh, 300 years, and put that instead into something like (eg) interstellar travel, we’d already be zipping around the galaxy in swank style. When one starts studying guns deeply, it boggles the mind to see how much effort has been invested by a large number of very smart people across 300+ years.

        Guns helped spawn the machine tool industry in the US. The gun industry is responsible (in large part) for precision measurement instruments, gage blocks, interchangeable parts manufacturing, tolerances down to 0.001 before WWI, etc.

        Ever hear of a company called Pratt & Whitney? You might have heard in recent years that they make jet engines. They used to make machine tools, including rifling machines to rifle barrels. In the Civil War, they made guns.

        Mr. Pratt & Mr. Whitney both got their start as employees of one Mr. Samuel Colt. Here’s a nice bit of history on P&W and what they contributed to American industry & manufacturing:

        http://www.prattandwhitney.com/images/customer-files/pratt_whitney_history_book2.pdf

    • I can’t explain the Blish, but I know it was on the older model Tommy guns. Springfields below the magic number had improperly heat treated recievers. Danger of Ka Boom.

    • “4. Why was (and is) AISI 8620 a good choice for the steel to be used in a rifle receiver?”

      AISI 8620 (according to the very first Google result) is a steel that can maintain flexibility *after* case hardening:

      http://www.azom.com/article.aspx?ArticleID=6754

      (Seriously, that was the *very first* result…)

      ” 5. If you wanted to perform any welding on an AR-15 receiver, what should the receiver be made of? Would you use a MIL-spec receiver or not?”

      (A *total* WAG, but it leads to an aluminum ‘soldering’ question I was meaning to ask you one day) –

      It *should* be aluminum, but knowing the Government, the alloy in the Mil-Spec one is incompatible with welding.

      Maybe use one of those aluminum-flux ‘soldering’ sticks I tried and failed miserably to repair the aluminum derailler bracket on that aluminum-framed bike I have?

      (When using a torch, the temp ‘window’ between melting the ‘solder’ and melting the frame was *narrow*)…

      • MIL-spec receivers are made from 7075 aluminum. It looks like it welds OK, but it will stress crack, much as welding on cast iron will without pre/post heating, just outside the HAZ.

        If you want to weld on a AR receiver, get one made of 6061 or 6063 aluminum.

        • Heat Affected Zone: I haven’t heard that acronym in a long time.

          A lay person would be surprised how many times during fabrication some metal products are welded, heated, cooled, welded again, heated cooled, rinse and repeat.

    • Blish effect is (I’m going to butcher this) greater than expected friction between two different types of metals in contact.

      Its use as it relates to firearms is the “blish lock” used in the Thompson, which slows down the unlocking of the bolt through friction between the bolt and receiver, each made of a different metal.

      Thanks for posting some questions that were actually about guns… 😐

    • 1. Galling? It also makes sense to me that the part directly in contact with the case/holding back the explosion from the backside of the chamber would be harder.
      2. IIRC something about two dissimilar metals have some sort of friction effect to delay an action like brass on steel or, used in the original Remington Model 51
      3. Improper heat treating due to a heat treat by eye method being used. This method can be accurate but when a bunch of different guys with different interpretations of what cherry red means do it, that doesn’t work very well. And/or no pressure relief holes in the receiver.
      4. I don’t even have a guess on this one.
      5. Something with the alloys, I’d guess the perhaps softer 6061 welds better/easier.

      I promise I didn’t even need to google to come up with any of my wrong answers.

      • 1. You are correct – it is galling. When you have two pieces of steel of similar hardness sliding over each other, there is a tendency to gall, absent some very effective lubrication. Want to make a smooth, fast-cycling bolt on a gun? Make it harder than the receiver in which it is sliding. Gunsmiths and gunmakers learned this the hard way over 100 years ago. It took them a little while to nut this out; it wasn’t immediately obvious why two nicely finished pieces of steel sliding over each other gave such offense at the operation.

        2. Correct again – but the effect was first used as a design element to slow down the bolt cyclic rate on the Thompson sub-machine gun – the original, civilian version with the comp and lovely (and expensive) machining.

        3. BINGO! It was exactly that. Rather than use pyrometers, the old men who were in charge of heat treating were rather proud of their skills in judging critical temperature by eye. However, when we got into WWI and production of the 1903 ramped up, their “by eye” skills didn’t scale. As less experienced hands were brought on to ramp up production for our entry into WWI, the heat treatment suffered tremendously, with later investigations showing that the difference in the temp of the steel before quenching could vary by as much as 300+F between a cloudy day’s light in the shop and a sunny day’s light in the shop.

        The ensuing investigation in the 1920’s found that some of the defective receivers had been so hot before quenching that the steel was actually burnt (ask any blacksmith to show you how this is possible – you see sparks start flying off the steel as it sits in the forge, and the next thing you know, there’s a whole lot less steel in your part), and after steel has gotten so hot as to be burnt, it is irrecoverable. There is no amount of annealing or normalization that will recover the steel to a useful state; it’s gone, toss the part.

        jwm above makes note of the danger of ‘kabooms’ with the pre-800K 1903 receivers, and that is also correct. The entire episode is recounted in loving detail in Hatcher’s Notebook. Springfield Armory (the real one) and Frankfort Arsenal both recommended destruction of the sub-800K 1903 receivers because they found there was no way to correct the heat treatment issue.

        4. Geoff PR has the answer correct above. The Garand and M14 receivers were made from War Department equivalent 8620 steel or AISI 8620 (respectively) and their outer case was in the Rc 52-55 range, with their interiors being in the Rc 42 range. To this day, if you want to case harden (or color case harden – the Garand and M14 receivers are case hardened, but not color case hardened) – you can achieve case hardening by heating the part to above-critical temps in a sodium cyanide salt bath, hold it there for a period of time (more time means a deeper case layer) and when the time needed for the specified case thickness has passed, quench in oil. It’s fast, reliable and effective. 8620 is also often used for transmission gears due to this ability to case harden quite nicely.

        I should NB here that no one should attempt to case harden their own receivers (or anything else) in a cyanide salt bath; rather, just send what you need done out to a professional heat treatment shop. There are several who have FFL’s and do gun work and do nice work. The fumes coming off cyanide salt baths can prove fatal for those who are trying to do this as an ad-hoc heat treatment without sufficient ventilation hoods. Better to use charcoal pack case hardening in the small shop, and get some colors to boot.

        5. You’re correct again – 6061 welds better than 7075. 7075 is sneaky stuff – it looks like it welded up just so nicely… until you put some actual stress on the joint, and then it breaks out, very much like the way welds break out when you’ve used something like 7018 rod to weld up an engine block.

        The mechanism of failure is due to the particular alloy that is 7075, which creates micro-cracking in the HAZ as it cools off, rather than the precipitation hardening at the edge of the HAZ, as happens on cast iron. The net:net result appears to be similar – cracking out at the edge of the HAZ.

        The only application where I’d weld 7075 is perhaps a mold.

        The practical implication of this (as I’ve had to explain to two AR-15 owners) is that if you damage your AR-15 receiver to a point where it starts to crack, and you want to have a TIG guy (like yours truly) “just weld it up before the crack spreads,” well, you’re out of luck. The crack is going to spread, and there’s not much I, or anyone else with a TIG welding rig, can really do about it. Matter of fact, I believe that as soon as I lay an arc on it, the crack is likely to spread faster, not slower, than if I’d left it alone, but that’s just my personal opinion at this point; I don’t have statistically sufficient data on which to make that statement, just a hunch from a couple of results.

        6061 welds up quite nicely, but the HAZ won’t machine well. Matter of fact, it will machine like cold, damp, chewing gum. The heat treatment of 6061 is part of what makes it machine so nicely.

        • Thanks DG, as always a wealth of knowledge.

          Was the pressure relief hole on the 1903’s a different thing or part of an attempted fix solution? Or am I misremembering altogether?

          Was the Blish effect used on the R51 at all as well as the Thompson? IIRC, someone wrote or explained to me at one point that the Blish effect doesn’t actually do what thought it was doing.

          How do you think laser 3d printing would affect 7075? It is basically welding but… different, I wonder if the micro welds would make a difference. A prior employer had a metal laser printer and they were doing aluminum production parts on it, but sadly I cannot remember the allow. The were also printing inconel parts.

        • The original Remington Model 51 was a “hesitation locking blowback” type of action. The breechblock recoiled with the slide for a short distance, then the breechblock stopped (basically, locked up on the frame) while the slide continued to the rear. When the slide got far enough to the rear, the slide picked up the breechblock out of the stopping point in the frame and continued to open the action. It isn’t a Blish effect in that there’s no brass or dissimilar metals involved.

          I wish someone would produce a modern version of the Model 51/53 in at least 9mm. It is an elegant design, with few moving parts. Unlike Remington’s abortive R51 effort, I’d like to see someone make it in alloy steel, for real, per the original design. Screw the issue of cost cutting, just make a run of 100 or so in 9×19 and put them into people’s hands for testing. The Model 51’s I’ve handled were elegant, simple, reliable and quick-pointing guns, but sadly chambered a bit light for modern CCW usage. It has lots of features CCW shooters want:

          – low bore axis
          – smooth, nearly featureless exterior
          – crisp trigger, because it is a sear/trigger/hammer pistol, not a striker on the inside
          – slim, elegant lines

          It would be an interesting project to reverse engineer it and bring it to market.

          3D DMLS printing and 7075: No idea. The only alloy I’ve seen spec’ed for DMLS is “AlSi10Mg,” – aluminum, silicon and magnesium.

  18. Second question was a TV sitcom question. That terminated my interest and the quiz.

  19. This is mostly a media quiz not a gun quiz. And I believe it’s “3-Line”…
    If you want to ask questions along the lines of “what did so-and-so carry” make it historical.
    Like this:

    What was U. S. Army’s official service rifle in the Spanish-American War?

    The soldiers of which nation used the Baker rifle?

    What firearm was used to assassinate Abraham Lincoln?

    Or basic technical trivia:

    What is the actual bullet diameter of the [insert cartridge here]?

    Or legal trivia:

    Which type of FFL allows one to manufacture destructive devices?

  20. AND this is why I’m spending more time in Fakebook. In and out and not dealing with a superbuggy site. Now if I could win a GUN?

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