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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   4034 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for May 10, 2024

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Found on 4chan:

Cordite Eating

The British soldier has discovered a new intoxicant. In the October number of the Journal of the Royal Army Medical Corps appears a most interesting paper, in which the author details the results of inquiries regarding the consumption of cordite by soldiers. Cordite, the new substitute for gunpowder, is composed of 58 parts of nitroglycerin, 37 parts of guncotton, and 5 parts of mineral jelly. A Lee–Metford cartridge contains sixty “strands” of this material. It has “a sweet, pleasant, pungent taste and is only slightly soluble in the mouth”. It causes “throbbing, headache, flushing of the face, visible carotid pulsation, giddiness, and disordered action of the heart”. The author sucked a fourth of a strand for two minutes and experienced the most racking splitting headache he ever felt in his life, together with hammering and ringing noises in his ears. The headache lasted quite thirty-six hours.…

Just been prescribed (dilute) nitroglycerine cream for haemorrhoids, and it sure does hit like a truck. Pounding headache within a minute of sticking it up there, although thankfully it ebbs fast.

Just this week I was joking that it looked like a forbidden snack.

I've got some old .303 British cartridges in the safe, but I will not be testing this.

Potential emergency home remedy for angina I guess? Keep your powder dry and your bullet-puller at the ready!

This was one of the most stereotypically American things I've read.

Canadian please -- Americans rarely hoard WWI era .303 shells, whereas every farmhouse up here has a mouldy old box of cordite (or several) lying around the garage. (I'm a bit surprised at netstack TBH!)

I’m quite fond of my Lee-Enfield and stocked up on ammo for it.

Agreed that it is not the cartridge of choice for most Americans. Much easier to stumble on grandpa’s old boxes of .30-06!

Well done, the stuff's become awfully expensive these days. 50rd boxes of 60s era surplus were less than twenty bucks at one point, so I'm well stocked also.

I'm much too young to have had access to the $5 Lee-Enfields in a barrel at the hardware store, but I do appreciate mine as well.

I’m quite fond of my Lee-Enfield and stocked up on ammo for it.

It is the best fighting rifle under the technological constraints of the era (ignoring the P14/P17, but those are just iterative improvements on Rifle No. 1; Rifle No. 4 had to compete with "just make semi-autos lol" and isn't in my mind as special).

They already had the high-speed operator thing figured out, and you can tell; cock on close, 10 rounds in the mag, and the safety that you can "slingshot" off of Safe when the rifle is cocked (which is an interesting touch I've never seen anyone mention). It's truly unfortunate that a fighting bolt-action rifle was never iterated on meaningfully beyond this- I would have expected one design just to try and keep that niche alive but nope, nothing but slow-fire high-accuracy (which was the only niche that remained for the action type).

Secret origin of the phrase "bite the bullet."

Yeah, nitroglycerine is a vasodilator (prodrug to nitric oxide); it's still used medically for such.

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