Ammunition and explosives – Projectiles – Dumdum or mushrooming
Patent
1998-10-20
2000-11-21
Tudor, Harold J.
Ammunition and explosives
Projectiles
Dumdum or mushrooming
102501, F42B 1234
Patent
active
061487317
DESCRIPTION:
BRIEF SUMMARY
This invention relates to an expansion projectile with an integral projectile body which at its end face forms a central arbor and a collar coaxially surrounding the arbor, where the collar has an outer shape tapering towards the free edge of the collar, and between collar and arbor a cavity is provided which is open towards the front.
Expansion projectiles, which upon impact on a soft target medium mushroom open through cavities open towards the front in the vicinity of the nose of the projectile and due to the related expansion lead to a great shock effect, are available in all kinds of variants, and in accordance with U.S. Pat. No. 3,881,421 it is also already known to form inside this cavity a forwardly directed, bluntly rounded arbor, so that during the penetration into the target medium after the first expansion of the collar surrounding the arbor, the medium is opened by the protruding arbor and expansion is facilitated. These projectiles mostly consist of a core of soft, but heavy metal, in particular lead, in order to achieve a sufficient projectile weight despite the cavity, and of a projectile jacket of hard metal, preferably copper, copper alloys or soft iron, in order to improve the firing conditions through the barrel of a weapon. Expansion projectiles in a monobloc design made of copper, copper alloys or soft iron or the like have not gained acceptance so far, as they must mostly be machined and have a reduced weight as compared to a lead-core projectile. However, the expansion projectiles made of lead or with a lead core produce splinters when mushrooming open in the soft target material, or at least during the penetration into the target medium a considerable abrasion of lead occurs at the surface of the deformed projectile, which involves a very undesired dangerous contamination, so that it is desired to largely avoid lead and lead alloys in the production of projectiles. Moreover, due to their expansion effect the known expansion projectiles exhibit only a small penetration effect when striking on a hard target material, and in practice can therefore only be utilized for a special ammunition. Last but not least, the cavities at the nose of the projectile frequently lead to difficulties when feeding a bullet from the magazine into the barrel of a self-loading weapon, which in part already requires the closure of the cavity by means of a special cap, which cap, however, substantially complicates the production of projectiles, as is shown in U.S. Pat. No. 4,136,616, and does still not involve any protection against jams.
It is therefore the object underlying the invention to eliminate these deficiencies and create an expansion projectile as described above, which can be produced economically as a monobloc projectile without using lead or lead alloys, which is characterized by its wide range of applications and penetrates into soft target medium without producing splinters, and which, last but not least, is fully suitable for automatic weapons.
This object is solved by the invention in that the arbor consists of shaft and tip, that the collar touches the arbor at least in the transition area between shaft and tip, and that the arbor protrudes at least up to the axial height of the edge of the collar. There is obtained an integral projectile body, which can be produced with comparatively little effort in a multi-stage pressing operation from a cylindrical starting material, so that this monobloc projectile can also be produced as desired from copper, a copper alloy such as tombac, or soft iron. Since collar and arbor only leave a relatively small cavity, a rather high weight is achieved as compared to other expansion projectiles, so that lead cores and the like can be omitted without a loss in firing efficiency. For this purpose, collar and arbor are mostly pressed against each other along the entire height of the arbor shaft, but in exceptional cases there may also be left a narrow ring-shaped cavity between collar and arbor in the vicinity of the shaft, which involves the advantage that the
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patent: 5187325 (1993-02-01), Garvison
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