Quote:Finished reading Mann's under-appreciated book on The Bullet's Flight.
You
did finish the book?
I got stuck last fall in a cabin with nothing else to do but read that book. No electricity, no internet, no phone, no TV, no nothing, no other books or magazines, not even wood to whittle. and nothing else to read. It rained cats and dogs and it was cold and miserable for several days. So i finished that book, too.
A few random comments:
1. His experiments were not very organized or useful, many obvious questions were left unanswered, while others were answered
ad nauseum. . He tried over and over things that he had proven himself, such as the effect of bullet base and nose on accuracy, etc.
2. Some of his experiments are simply imagined out of boredom or misplaced curiosity. He did not have any sort of system to try things, such as various degrees of bullet hardness, or various twist rates, or primer types, or lube types, or anything that a logical organized person with a penchant for experimentation would do. One hundred times i scratched my head asking myself why he did not try things that where screaming to be tried. .
3. While i was very interested in the subject, and therefore i took the book to the cabin to read, just in case of bad weather, i soon lost enthusiasm. I can easily sum up the content of the book as this: make sure the bases of the bullets are nice and sharp and square, and try bore diameter bullets with black powder (as Mann suggests) and slightly larger than groove for smokeless loads (as H. Pope suggests).
4. The book was the most tedious and boring piece of writing i have read in the more recent half of my life. It and the rain drove me to sleep every other page. This, while reading on a subject that interests me.
5. This was easily the worst spent money among all my shooting related expenses.
6. I will offer the book as a gift to my gunsmith, he deserves a good nap too.