Ruger has re-introduced the Marlin Model 1894 Classic chambered in .44 Rem Mag. The Model 1894 Classic retains the traditional characteristics that made this a truly iconic rifle.
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The Ruger-made 1894 Classic is marked “Mayodan, NC,” bears an “RM” or Ruger-made serial number prefix, and features the red and white “bullseye” in the stock.
Additional models in different calibers and configurations will be released throughout the coming year. Due to the anticipated strong demand and the limited quantity of Ruger-made Marlin lever-action rifles, Ruger encourages retailers to contact their distributors for availability and advises consumers not to leave deposits with retailers that do not have confirmed shipments.
Why they announced this in Women’s NRA I don’t know – all men should want a Marlin .44 magnum. However, what could be better than his and hers Marlin 1894s and a date at the range? And what excuse could be better than that to buy a couple of them? “I did this for us, dear. I promise. I love you that much! I wanted you to have your very own Marlin. Let’s head to the range and that evening a nice dinner date to your favorite steakhouse!”
If that sounds weird, it is. To be completely fair, as you watch the video, it doesn’t say exactly what he says it says, at least not in direct terms. There is nothing about modern sporting rifles in the executive order, but you have to know that the DoD isn’t going to be purchasing Beretta 694s or Marlin lever action rifles. The exact wording is found in the order he links.
Use the Department of Defense’s acquisition of firearms to further firearm and public safety practices. The Department of Defense buys a large number of firearms and other weapons to protect and serve our country. The President is directing the Secretary of Defense to develop and implement principles to further firearm and public safety practices through Department of Defense acquisition of firearms, consistent with applicable law.
The controllers think it’s safer for you if the DoD buys all the guns rather than you. So that’s where your tax money will be going. Getting DoD contracts will involve the stipulation that the company doesn’t sell to civilians, I’m sure. Frankly, Colt serves as the poster child for that experiment. I would expect a company like Knight’s Armament to continue to focus on military contracts as they do now. If you think that a company like Ruger, Daniel Defense, BCM, Aeroprecision, Rock River Arms, etc., are going to destroy their future by inking a 2-year contract (who knows what will happen to this after the election), that would likely be a huge error. My assessment: I don’t expect to see much come of this.
The title of this article is rather broad and audacious, so let’s do what all good engineers would do and set the boundary conditions for the analysis.
All calculations will be approximate given the time invested in this analysis and the purpose thereto. Some assumptions and engineering judgments will be made due to the lack of independently verified information and data. This analysis is meant to be brief and the intended audience is both engineers and non-engineers (for educational purposes). Why am I writing this – out of some sort of ghoulish focus on death? Well, engineers study the ghoulish consequences of the failures of other engineers as part of our profession. Consider the fact that most engineers can explain the cause of the Hyatt Regency walkway collapse (if you can’t, you shouldn’t be an engineer), the Tacoma Narrows bridge failure, the Union Carbide Bhopal disaster, and the space shuttle Challenger disaster (where Morton Thiokol was told to take off their engineer hats and put on their manager hats when considering O-ring temperature certification). This is part of what we do to become better.
Moreover, the public needs to be more aware of things like this. Every time an individual walks into a building or drives on a bridge, they are entrusting their very lives to engineers. Let’s say all you do downtown on a given day is walk into a building to use the restroom. How do you know that the HVAC system won’t kill you? At the Bellevue-Stratford hotel, the engineers designed the intake air to be in the proximity of the condensation pooling, thus concentrating what is otherwise a fairly innocuous bacteria called Legionella to a finally fatal concentration to the occupants.
We’ll go in a sort of flow of consciousness fashion under headings for purposes of clarity, and rather than clutter the analysis with links, a series of source URLs will be posted at the end. I will use information from those sources. Understand that this puts us at the disadvantage of trusting what may be later learned to be erroneous information.
Final Pressure
Computation of the final pressure upon destruction of the vessel is fairly easy, but then fairly complicated, depending upon how precise you want to make it. Under normal conditions, many mechanical engineers use a simple rule for conversion, i.e., 0.433 psi/ft. This comes from the STP (standard temperature and pressure) value of 62.4 lbm/ft³ / 144 in²/ft² = 0.433 psi/ft. So assuming that the vessel imploded at 4000 meters, this converts to 3.28084 ft/m ⋅ 4000 m = 13,123 ft, but we’ll use 13,000 feet. The pressure at that depth is 13,000 ft ⋅ 0.433 psi/ft = 5629 psi. This will be seen to be important later.
True enough, this is a simplification. The assumption of 62.4 lbm/ft³ is at STP, and water becomes more dense down to 39.2 ºF (also, there is a compressibility factor for water to be incorporated). So as the temperature of the water decreases and the pressure increases, the water will become more dense. If asked to solve this more precisely, I would use the ASME steam table data and enter it into TableCurve-2D, then use the fit and coefficients it gave me to enter into MathCAD or JupyterLab for integration. Another option might be just to solve the equations of state. But the resultant value wouldn’t be much different than the one above.
Hull Fabrication
OceanGate apparently used a mixed composite of carbon and Titanium fibers wound with adhesive to construct the hull. Whether this is a good design notwithstanding, the vessel had been to approximately this depth before. Apparently, the assumption was that if it was safely done once, it can be safely done again. But that doesn’t account for deformation where the crystalline structures slip, discontinuities form along grain boundaries, and you go beyond mere elastic deformation to loss of material strength. The operations manager wanted NDE (non-destructive examination) to be performed on the hull and viewport (we’ll get to the viewport shortly). The CEO responded that there was no NDE that could possibly be successful on this design, an assertion I flatly deny. The chief of operations was fired because of his concerns.
Viewport
From all available sources, it is apparent that the viewport was designed and certified down to a depth of 1300 meters, not 4000 meters. I have found no information to contradict this. This was perhaps the largest concern that the operations manager had. The viewport material is essentially Plexiglas. He wanted the viewport to be redesigned by the same company to be worthy and certified down to the same depth as the hull, of course, assuming the hull hadn’t sustained plastic deformation. As the analyst says in the video I embed at the end, this is the most egregious failure of all. I agree. I would assess that it’s mostly likely that the catastrophic failure the Titan sustained was caused by the viewport. It was previously stated by the CEO that each time he descended to that depth, the viewport deformed several inches inward. Whether that was plastic deformation or not is unknown, but that’s what NDE might have determined.
Construction & Vessel Closure
Videos I have seen showed no concern for FME (foreign material exclusion) during either fabrication of the vessel or closure of the aft end (done externally, I’m assuming, with torquing passes on the bolts). Foreign material in any of these design materials or in the closure head would of course completely negate any engineering analysis done on the vessel.
NDE
I am not an NDE engineer, but I know a bit about it. There are many kinds of NDE: visual examination, eddy current testing, acoustic testing, dye penetrant testing, radiograph, ultrasonic testing. Of these, I would surmise that UST would be effective, and I know for certain that radiograph would be a successful test of the hull, and I assume the viewport (I am less certain on the viewport, but the viewport may be an easier test by other means anyway). Cobalt-60 is a commonly used radionuclide for radiography. Grabbing David Kocher, ORNL/NUREG/TM-102, Co-60 emits two photons at 100% yield, 1.173 Mev and 1.332 MeV. For simplification (so I don’t have to interpolate), we’ll use 1 MeV for our calculations.
Using ANSI/ANS-6.4.3, the mass attenuation coefficient for carbon at 1 MeV is 6.352E-2 cm²/g. After doing research in which I found that most carbon fibers are being sold at around 1.5 g/cm³ density, I decided to conservatively use 2 g/cm³ to prove my point. (6.352E-2 cm²/g) ⋅ (2 g/cm³) = μ = Linear Attenuation Coefficient = 0.127 cm(-1). The hull is approximately 5″ thick ≈ 12.7 cm. EXP(-0.127 ⋅ 12.7) = 0.1993. Thus, 20% of the emitted photons would have completely penetrated the hull, and this doesn’t include buildup (in other words, these simple attenuation calculations assume death of the particle at first collision, but there are always follow-on particles). Yes, there is a better way to do this calculation, i.e., with Monte Carlo transport analysis. But doing so wouldn’t change the basic point.
Radiography would most certainly have been a successful means of NDE for the vessel. After all, we perform radiography of pressure vessel nozzle welds in nuclear power plants. I assess the claim made by OceanGate to be completely false, perhaps due to ignorance, perhaps because they didn’t have any safety culture to speak of.
Thoughts on What Engineering Is and Is Not
It is the solemn duty and responsibility of engineers to protect the safety and health of the public. There are dishonest and corrupt actors in every profession, of course, but they are to be called out, shunned, and their license revoked.
Designing a vessel that can go to a shipwreck and view the remains may be fun, challenging, and motivating. Doing it, whether successfully or not, is not engineering. It’s clear from the words of the CEO himself that he held a low view of both safety and highly experienced analysts. But it’s precisely those people he needed to hold him and the project accountable to proper engineering principles.
It’s also not engineering if you solve an ODE (ordinary differential equation). Second year calculus students do this all day, every day, all across the globe. That’s called mathematics. Engineers use math a lot, but doing math doesn’t make you an engineer, and certainly not a good one.
If you want to understand the life of an engineer, consider that ODE in a different context. A client asks you to solve an ODE for him to model a chemical or nuclear system. To begin with, all equations need input. Solving symbolically does him no good. That input might be correct, or it might not be, and might be based on instrumentation that doesn’t have the range it needs, or left in the field in harsh conditions or not inspected and calibrated on regular intervals. A simple field walkdown of the instrumentation the client is trusting indicates that workers are using impulse lines as ladders to get to valves above the instrument. The impulse lines are bent or broken. Thus, the engineer cannot trust that instrument.
The engineer must correct this with the client. He must ensure that there is a calibration done on regular intervals, and he must also understand whether the inputs he has been given are normal operating conditions or transient conditions, and what happens when the system is not operating as intended. The system is out of specification. How does that effect his calculations? What are the consequences of those out-of-normal operating conditions?
You see, he is responsible for every possible use of the system he’s modeling. He must make that clear to the client, must document each and every assumption and engineering judgment in his file, and then write a document that, in today’s expectations, looks more like a book with footnotes, references, reference page numbers, and possible use of alternative methods to arrive at his results (if he used forward differencing in EXCEL, what does JupyterLab tell him and how well does it benchmark?). Did he find errors in his work? Did he find any computational instability due to numerical stiffness of the equations? How did he document and display his results? Can the client use it without confusion, or worse, mistakes and errors that may lead to personnel or equipment safety problems?
Next, on to the PowerPoint presentation of results to the client, along with recommendations for corrective actions, field notes and observations, and statements of liability. After all, the Hyatt Regency walkway collapse occurred due to deviations the construction company made from the drawings and specifications. But our engineer knows that the engineering firm was held responsible for not knowing that, and their errors and omissions insurance had to come to the rescue.
Unless there is complete and total traceability of inputs, references, communications, instrument calibrations, SSC (structure, system and component) qualifications and environmental conditions throughout the entire SSC train, no engineering has been done. I repeat. Unless these things obtain, engineering has not been done. Someone is pretending to be an engineer, but he’s not doing engineering.
These are lessons every engineering student learns in their classes all the way through school. But incorporation of these principles takes time and experience, and rarely if ever have I seen a student fresh out of any school, regardless of pedigree or extent of education, display these attributes. This approach has to be trained into people. That’s the value of age and experience.
The CEO had a low view of that, apparently leading to confirmation bias. Because I’ve done it before, I can do it again. Chain of SSC qualifications (is the viewport qualified to the same depth as the hull), testing to detect plastic deformation, understanding material fatigue, spending a bit more money to ensure that proper engineering principles have been followed, obtaining fully independent review of his design – these are all things that were apparently not motivating or exciting or inspiring to him. The fact that this craft had a fairly new design schema doesn’t negate the need for review by experienced engineers – it increases it. The principles of physics, mathematics and engineering are timeless.
I am not saying that doing any or all of this would have prevented the implosion. I am saying that this vessel was not “engineered.” It was fabricated and set to voyage, but it was not engineered. The company also apparently marketed this vessel as having industry and academic involvement that it didn’t have.
I assess this failure to likely have been preventable, and the company negligent. Unfortunately, this will probably take its place as a case study alongside other engineering disasters like the Hyatt Regency walkway collapse, Union Carbide Bhopal disaster, the Texas A&M bonfire disaster, and the Tacoma Narrows bridge failure.
New evidence continues to strongly suggest that OceanGate’s submersible, which catastrophically imploded and killed all five passengers on its way to the wreck of the Titanic last week, unfit for the journey.
Arnie Weissman, editor-in-chief of Travel Weekly, initially agreed to join the June expedition, the Washington Post reports, but backed out at the last minute due to a scheduling conflict. A May dive he was supposed to go on also was canceled due to bad weather.
A conversation he had with OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush the night before the expedition, however, still haunts him to this day.
According to Weissman, Rush had bought the carbon fiber used to make the Titan “at a big discount from Boeing,” because “it was past its shelf life for use in airplanes.”
In other words, Rush knew that the carbon fiber — which is a very poor choice of material for a deepsea vessel, as many experts have pointed out — already potentially had flaws that could’ve played a role in the Titan’s tragic demise.
It’s yet another indication that Rush and OceanGate cut alarming corners in the development of the sub. In fact, experts had been warning them for years that building such a vessel while dismissing any efforts to have it qualified and tested by experts and regulators is a very bad idea.
Even after his death — Rush himself was on board during last week’s implosion — the CEO’s poor decision-making and rejections of prioritizing safety are starting to come to light.
“I responded right away, saying, ‘Don’t you have any concerns about that?'” Weissman told the WaPo, recalling his conversation about Rush’s decision to use expired carbon fiber for the hull of the Titan. “He was very dismissive and said: ‘No, it’s perfectly fine. Having all these certifications for airplanes is one thing, but the carbon fiber was perfectly sound.'”
Meaning what, exactly? Certifications for aircraft are fine, but not necessary for sea craft? Anyway, I don’t know how Boeing (or the manufacturer of the carbon fibers) ascertains a shelf life. But this exchange goes to show a cavalier and dismissive attitude towards SSC certification and traceability. I continue to believe the most likely failure point was the viewport, certified as we discussed above down to 1300 meters, or < 2000 psi. If I was the manufacturer of the viewport, at this point in the warranty I would get very, very precise with my calculations of depth, temperature/density assumptions, and pressure, as well as fold in margin of safety.
The U.S. Coast Guard has announced the launch of an investigation into the implosion of the Titan submersible that killed the five people on board.
The Deseret News reported that the Titan lost communications with the Canadian research ship Polar Prince about an hour and 45 minutes after the dive initially began and that the U.S. Navy heard a potential implosion of the submersible on June 18.
The Coast Guard’s Marine Board of Investigation is looking into the case and is set to include officials “from Canada, France and the United Kingdom as they look into what caused the deadly implosion,” according to CBS News.
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The Guardian reported that some questions being asked following the incident included questions about “the craft’s experimental design, safety standards and lack of certification” for the submersible.
“My primary goal is to prevent a similar occurrence by making the necessary recommendations to advance the safety of the maritime domain worldwide,” chief investigator Capt. Jason Neubauer said, according to ABC News.
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Axios reported that Neubauer said that officials investigating the incident “are taking all proper precautions on site if we are to encounter any human remains.”
No human remains will be found. Without trying to be ghoulish, the bodies have been incinerated and torn apart. This is what happens when engineers don’t do their job. However, this development does expand the potential scope of legal liability for the company, as well as cause pause to consider potential charges depending upon the outcome.
UPDATE #3:
A comment points to this photo.
NEW: photo reveals the monitor in the doomed Titanic sub was *screwed into* the carbon fiber hull… 😳 pic.twitter.com/0mrxf8gTCb
I would have to know more about how the interior inner lining was attached to the hull before I commented on it. If there is a compressible barrier (such as cork) and the hull doesn’t sustain a lot of deformation, it’s possible this modification to the lining makes no difference. However, if the lining becomes essentially an integral part of the hull and is compressed with it, then the screw holes become a “stress concentration point.” Every mechanical engineer knows about stress concentrations at keys on shafts, teeth on gears, etc., that cause localized stress to degrade the whole structure. It probably would have been better if the device was never mounted on anything attached to the hull.
On June 7, a property owner in Virginia filed suit against the Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources (VDWR) and three conservation officers that work for the state agency. In his lawsuit, filed in Henrico County Circuit Court, Josh Highlander claims that multiple game wardens wearing camouflage entered his private 30-acre parcel without his consent or knowledge—alarming his wife and young son and confiscating a game camera in the process.
Highlander is being represented in his case by the Institute for Justice (IJ), a non-profit Arlington-based law firm with a history of backing landowners in private property disputes against state wildlife agencies. According to IJ, the incident occurred on April 8, 2023, the opening day of Virginia’s spring turkey season.
The lawsuit says that Highlander legally harvested a turkey on his property on the morning of April 8 before logging his kill on the VDWR mobile app. It then alleges that, several hours later, three VDWR officers parked their trucks in a cul de sac, a few hundred yards from the property line, and walked through an adjacent private parcel into Highlander’s woods.
According to Highlander, his wife spotted a camouflaged figure moving through a forested part of the family property that afternoon while playing basketball with their 6-year-old son. When she alerted Highlander to the person’s presence, he said he went outside to check the woods, finding only an empty post where one of his game cameras had been mounted in the middle of a food plot.
Highlander’s brother, Rob Highlander Jr., was cited for hunting turkeys over bait several miles east of Josh Highlander’s property on the same day that the alleged incident took place by one of the officers he is suing. According to the lawsuit, responding agents seized two of Rob Highlander’s trail cameras after issuing those citations.
Rob Jr. is contesting that ticket, saying that he was hunting turkeys on a legal food plot with no bait. He says the bait that the agents accused him of using was actually fresh millet seed that he’d legally spread while replenishing the food plot earlier in the year. Virginia wildlife code defines “bait” as “any food, grain, or other consumable substance that could serve as a lure or attractant.”
When contacted by Field & Stream, the Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources declined to comment on any specifics related to the “pending litigation.” But VDWR Public Information Officer Paige Pearson confirmed in an email that it is lawful for a Virginia game warden to carry out an active investigation on private property without a warrant—or the consent or knowledge of the landowner—so long as those activities are executed “within constitutional bounds.” It is also lawful, she confirmed, for a warden to deploy game cameras on private property, or to seize game cameras off of private property during an investigation—again, as long as it’s done “within constitutional bounds.”
I don’t even know what that means. It sounds to me like she is saying that it’s okay to violate the constitution as long as it’s done constitutionally. So here’s a challenge question for her. Can she explain what it means to violate the constitution as long as it is within “constitutional bounds?” Do your homework and provide examples.
The Senate on Thursday rejected a GOP effort to overturn the Biden administration’s new rule on pistol braces.
Republicans say the regulation, which reclassifies pistols as short-barreled rifles if gun owners use the firearm accessory, is an infringement of the Second Amendment and universally supported the measure. The legislation nonetheless failed 49-50 in a chamber that Democrats control.
The legislation was at the center of a conservative revolt earlier this month that ground House business to a halt. A group of hard-line conservatives, upset over the deal House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) struck to raise the debt ceiling, refused to allow the speaker to move any legislation until he agreed to deeper spending cuts than what the White House agreed to last month.
But the dissidents also claimed Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA) threatened to pull a vote on the pistol brace measure if its House sponsor, Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-GA), opposed a procedural step on the debt ceiling legislation.
Scalise denied he ever made such a threat, and the House passed the resolution days later in a near-party-line vote.
Republicans argue the new regulation, finalized in January by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, infringes on the rights of disabled people who use stabilizing braces. They take issue with the administration’s requirement that pistols with those braces be registered with the federal government or otherwise destroyed.
“The ATF is just a backdoor way to subject pistols to more smothering regulations,” Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA), the resolution’s Senate sponsor, said in a floor speech ahead of the vote.
Democrats counter that the gun accessory, invented in 2012, is a way to circumvent a law on short-barreled rifles that has been on the books for decades and cite mass shootings in which the gunman used a pistol brace.
Earlier this month, the White House pledged to veto the legislation had it passed the Senate.
They could have just argued that the regulation infringes on the 2A and it would have been simpler.
You do realize that this was all optics and show, right?
This was never going anywhere because of the power of the veto. They could have stopped it cold though, by the power of the purse.
They gave that up when the current House speaker gave Biden most or all of what he wanted and called it a win. Sorry bunch of people, yes?
They could have shut down the ATF entirely by defunding any of their efforts, but you see, they didn’t want to be responsible for a FedGov shutdown because that might affect national parks in the summer, SNAP payments, and so on. They would lose votes in the next election, so they wanted to get the vote on the record and be able to campaign on it next time while leaving everything else intact.
McCarthy was responsible for all of this, but he had his helpers.
Thus is the way of things in the house of wickedness among the pit vipers and demons.
I was just looking at lever action rifle optics tonight. Scopes are just expensive, almost no matter what type, brand or power. For lever action guns I’m looking towards the low power end of things (1X4, 1X9, etc.).
However, I confess I had never heard of the 7-30 Waters before. I’ll be darned if you can find them anywhere (the guns, that is). I’d certainly be interested given the ballistics of the cartridge.
He has a nice lever action rifle collection. He’s obviously spent some time and money on that collection.
I don’t think it should be hard at all – just be honest, tell the truth, and be true to your oath. Be prepared to find another job if you need to. It’s better to bag groceries or load trucks at Lowe’s than to answer to God for malfeasance. But here is his story.
It was 2007 and I was assisting a call with an officer I’d never met before. He was from another team working overtime. Right in front of me he broke a kids nose with a punch. The septum was clearly deviated and blood was everywhere. The kid was handcuffed and the officer enquired of me “what should ‘we’ arrest him for?” “What did he do?” I enquired. “He called me a name.” he said. After 20 mins of him trying to persuade me we should fabricate a crime he had to let the kid go. “We need o do notes, get our story straight” he then told me. I don’t need assistance in writing what happened. I found a quiet place and wrote the facts. As I wrote I was joined by a female A/Sgt who knew this officer. She spent 20 mins trying to convince me this kid was a “shitbag” & my notes should ‘reflect the danger he posed’. I was disgusted. We don’t behave this way.
Oh, but you do indeed behave that way. This is a Canadian cop and he has all the proof in court documents, but it’s the same in the U.S.
As for all of those “constitutional Sheriffs and Deputies,” it’s important to know where they really stand. Here is a good analysis of what likely really happened at that gun store in Montana.
Guess what? The Great Falls, Montana, PD provided perimeter security for the IRS and ATF [5:48 in the video].
There you have it. Even in Montana, the cops have been corrupted. The Great Falls PD should have arrested the IRS and ATF agents when they showed up in the city limits.
1 year, 5 months ago
