So what is it?

13 Oct 2015   Okay, I was wrong.  You'll have to read the article to find out wrong about what.


I ran across this photo and it caught my fancy.

So what do you think it is?

 It’s a gun that appears to shoot a 3 inch metal stake.  Is it an industrial tool for anchoring bolts into concrete?  I guess you could use it for extreme mountain climbing to shoot climbing petons into rock cracks.  But I think I’ve got a different answer.

Let’s look a little closer.  The stakes look like they’re loaded into .223 rem cases.  I first thought the gun had a single barrel but if you look closely you’ll see 4 barrels.  The gun looks like it’s a breach loader.  The chambers and attached barrels unlatching at the rear, pivoting on the frame just forward of the trigger guard.  Pop out the empties and drop in four live ones and you’re ready to go.

The chambers don’t look that strong to me.  I look at the thickness of my AR chamber and these don’t seem so hot.  Of course, it could be a reduced load.  Stakes that long wouldn’t be very stable in flight, so it’s a short working distance weapon.  No 50 yard shoot-the-apple-off–his-head shots with this. 

You could work out the weight of the stake assuming it’s a cylinder the diameter of a .223 about 3.5 inches long and has the density of 1050 steel.  From there you could figure the energy traveling at 200 feet per second.  It would take more than my working knowledge to calculate the pressure build-up contained by the brass cartridge acting as a gaskets and steel chamber. 

I wouldn’t want to be the first to try it.

Maybe it’s a stake driver after all.  A vampire stake driver.  They aren’t wood, but maybe in that story iron works better.  No I don’t think it’s some homemade class 3 vest penetrator.  Too easy to saw a 12 gauge down, or get a .308 up close.  No, at the risk of being wrong, this is a movie prop gun.

That’s my story until you prove me wrong.




My sharp eyed friend, Derrick, knew what it was.  It's Russian, specifically a Russian underwater pistol called the SPP-1.  The gun fires a 4.5 mm diameter steel dart that's 115 mm long.  It reminds me of a "Sea Hunt" escapade starting Lloyd Bridges involving shooting guns under water.  I seem to remember them showing the cavitation caused the bullet over the irregular and short effective distances.  it was very cool.

Thanks Derrick!