Brassey's Essential Guide to Military Small Arms: Design Principles and Operating Methods (Hardcover)

~ Derek Allsop (Editor)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

This work deals with the classification, construction, design and theory of different kinds of small arms (hand-firing weapons, heavy machine guns and small-calibre automatic cannons). It provides the necessary knowledge and information to designers, workers in research and development, students at military colleges and all those with an interest in firearms. Introductory chapters give basic information about the history, task and utilization of automatic small arms, about the properties of cartridges used and about the basic arrangement of small arms. Subsequent chapters deal with the individual components and mechanisms of automatic weapons (barrels, breech systems, systems of weapon drive, high rate-of-fire weapon systems, feeding of cartidges, springs in weapons, firing and trigger mechanisms, extractors, ejectors buffers, safety arrangements and cocking). The special theoretical problems of automatic weapons dynamics are discussed and the procedure of the research development and beginning of production of automatic weapons explained.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 361 pages
• Publisher: Brassey's UK; 1st English Ed edition (August 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1857531078
• ISBN-13: 978-1857531077
• Product Dimensions: 10.2 x 7 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #3,553,403 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Good overview of small arms design, lots of formulas, August 8, 1998

By A Customer

As a broad treatise on small arms design this volume generally succeeds. It does not include every possible design, but has good coverage of the important ones. Since the main contributors are Czech it's particularly strong on East bloc designs including a few obscure ones, which is an interesting contrast with most Western writings.

This book may have origins in a collection of articles but has been well-edited to create a relatively coherent whole. The writing and grammar are generally clear. There are a few places where the language (translations?) is a bit garbled, but the meaning is usually discernable.

Arms design generally moves so slowly (compared, say to computers) that I'd say the content is reasonably current. For example, the coverage of modern Gatling designs is probably fresh enough to provide insight into current models.

My overall impression is that the scope and background are reasonabl! y broad and technical information is strong. There are lots of detailed formulas describing the physics involved. Given all this and the general difficulty in obtaining good information on small arms design, I recommend this title highly.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good, but not great. OVERPRICED., February 27, 2000

By	Fuzzbean (Nangoku, Japan) - See all my reviews

This book is not as good as I had hoped. I think it suffers in the following areas:

1) It's got a serious Eastern Europe/former Soviet Bloc slant. This could provide a refreshing point of view, but it's hard to cover this subject well while practically ignoring such widely-used arms as the Browning M2.

2) It actually doesn't spend much time on any specific weapons, treating the subject in more of a theoretical manner. Connected with this, most of the drawings (there are no photos) are semi-schematic rather than cut-away style views of actual weapons. Some of them are a little hard to interpret, too.

3) A little bit was lost in the translation. The authors do not always use what I believe to be the standard U.S. terminology. They use "weapon casing" for "receiver" and a couple other odd ones.

4) This book is fairly packed full of complicated-looking mathematical formulas. I suppose such things are essential to modern scientific small arms design, but to me they make boring reading. I also doubt that John Browning or "Carbine" Williams ever took such an egg-headed approach to things.

5) Speaking of "Carbine" Williams, I don't see anything in this book about floating chambers. Also nothing about the principles and advantages of the high/low pressure system for small arms use. I think there's a lot of odds and ends missing from here that would be important for a well rounded understanding of the small arms field.

These things said, I guess if I didn't have this book now I would still want to get it.

EDIT: It's almost two years now since I purchased this book, and I see the price has risen dramatically from the already-high 60 bucks or so I paid for it. In my judgement, it is simply no way worth the current price unless you are so hardcore that you simply must have every word written on this subject. I would recommend getting the book, "U.S. Army Weapons Command Technical Notes -- Small Arms Design" published by Armalite. It sells for about [...], and covers quite similar material.

4.0 out of 5 stars CALCULATING SMALL ARMS DESIGN VARIABLES, December 16, 2008

By	Eugene N. Neigoff "manufacturing Guru" (Pheonix AZ) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This book is the best single source of engineering calculations necessary to validate firearms design. I have used the book in the development of designs that I am patenting, and designing.

The book has a few short comings like the lact of equations on short recoil operating system and is more aimed at the design of automatic weapons.

I am a REGISTERED PROFESSIONAL ENGINEER and a Journeyman machinist. This book is my design bible.