Jaws and guns

[M.E.Eldridge]

I was watching Jaws Yesterday and noticed a few things. First Quint's harpoon gun looks like its build on a Martini action, did anyone else know this. And second, when he shoots at the shark with his M1 he has to work the action, like you would an SKS thats been turned into a bolt action by gas valve problems. It got me thinking, what other odd or trivial gun stuff have the rest of you seen in movies?

 

[50caliber123]

One thing I noticed was that the beach patrol or coast guard that was patrolling the beach about half-way through the movie, were all armed with M1 Garands, I bet they used the same rifle for every scene.

 

[whm1974]

I may be wrong about this but it may be that he had to work the rifle due to using blanks.

-Bill

 

[Firehand]

Some gun mag tried out a harpoon gun like that a couple of years before the movie. It was a Martini action and used a .38Spl blank to fire

 

[M.E.Eldridge]

Some gun mag tried out a harpoon gun like that a couple of years before the movie. It was a Martini action and used a .38Spl blank to fire

So it was an actual production harpoon gun? I figured is was some prop gun fabricated by the movie team. Man, I need one of those.

 

[M.E.Eldridge]

I may be wrong about this but it may be that he had to work the rifle due to using blanks.

-Bill

Thats what I thought at first, but later in the film doesn't Brody fire the M1 semi-auto at the shark? On a side note, I bought blanks for my SKS, just to mess around with, and I had to work the bolt every couple of shots.

 

[MuzzleBlast]

Coincidentally, Mythbusters was doing a show on Jaws yesterday.
It turns out that an M1 will, in fact, pierce a scuba tank, but the tank will not explode.

 

[Firehand]

Oh yeah, it's a real harpoon gun. The article did mention that it kicked like the proverbial mule, but definately worked.

Saw a couple of episodes of 'Band of Brothers', there are a number of scenes in which someone has to cycle their M1 by hand, then resume firing. Blank troubles.

 

[whm1974]

Coincidentally, Mythbusters was doing a show on Jaws yesterday.
It turns out that an M1 will, in fact, pierce a scuba tank, but the tank will not explode.

I would think that a full tank would explode due to higher pressure inside.

-Bill

 

[carebear]

Nope, it will jet around like an unguided missile due to the escaping air/gas but not explode.

Navy Arms used to offer the WW Greener Harpoon Gun in a few gun catalogs in the early '90's.

One of the things I toyed with getting for sheer "cool factor" when I was a young gun store clerk.

 

[Texfire]

When pentrated by a projectile, a SCUBA cylinder will rupture, but since there is nothing in it that can combust and the contents are not a compressed liquid it will not explode. Now that rupture can certainly cause some damage, but not like the explosion they showed in Jaws, strictly Hollywood creative liscense there.

Interestingly enough, propane tanks that rupture also don't explode in the conventional meaning of the word. When a pressurized vessel "explodes" it's actually experiencing a BLEVE.

BLEVE, pronounced blevy, is an acronym for Boiling Liquid Expanding Vapour Explosion. This is a type of explosion that can occur when a vessel containing a pressurized liquid is ruptured. Such explosions can be extremely hazardous. When the liquid is water, the explosion is usually called a steam explosion.

A BLEVE can occur in a vessel that stores a substance that is usually a gas at atmospheric pressure but is a liquid when pressurized (for example, liquefied petroleum gas). The substance will be stored partly in liquid form, with a gaseous vapour above the liquid filling the remainder of the container.

If the vessel is ruptured - for example, due to corrosion, or failure under pressure - the vapour portion may rapidly leak, dropping the pressure inside the container and releasing a wave of overpressure from the point of rupture. This sudden drop in pressure inside the container causes violent boiling of the liquid, which rapidly liberates large amounts of vapour in the process. The pressure of this vapour can be extremely high, causing a second, much more significant wave of overpressure (i.e., an explosion) which may completely destroy the storage vessel and project it as shrapnel over the surrounding area.

A BLEVE does not require a flammable substance to occur, and therefore is not usually considered a type of chemical explosion. However, if the substance involved is flammable, it is likely that the resulting cloud of the substance will ignite after the BLEVE proper has occurred, forming a fireball and possibly a fuel-air explosion. BLEVEs can also be caused by an external fire nearby the storage vessel causing heating of the contents and pressure build-up.

Significant industrial BLEVEs include the accidents at Feyzin in France in 1966, Texas City, Texas in 1978, and San Juan Ixhuatepec in Mexico in 1984.

BLEVE is also a humorous backronym for Blast Leveling Everything Very Effectively.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLEVE

Tex

 

[carebear]

We had our propane storage tank bleve when the warehouse next to it (filled with expanded polystyrene foam insulation burned down.

Big fireball as the liquid propane gassed and ignited.

Never knew I was watching a bleve though. On the security cam, not in person. It happened at night. Bums started a fire in the 50's era wood warehouse while cooking.

 

[Carl N. Brown]

Martini action Greener harpoon gun

This is scanned from the Navy arms page in an old Shooter's Bible:

 

[Cosmoline]

The Greeners come up for sale from time to time on line, and are worth a pretty penny.

The tank wouldn't have exploded in a fireball, but then again there's no way a shark could have rammed a boat and sunk it. The only sea animal theoretically able to break up a boat of that size is a sperm whale.

Plus, there's no way he would have been able to stay alive with three barrels on him. Not with three.

 

[Carl N. Brown]

The nose of a shark is supposed to be the most sensitive
part of its body and allegedly you can deter a shark by
smacking it on the nose. The Mythbusters test replicating
the boat sinking in the movie showed an artificial shark
towed into a boat at the maximum known shark swimming speed
--I cannot imagine ramming a hole through the side of a
boat with the most sensitive part of my body at 25 knots,
no way. That movie works because it catches you up
emotionally and allows the "willing suspension of disbelief"
required for supernatural fiction. As a landlubber, I found
the movie scary and deferred to "Quint" as the shark expert.
Now I find everything I learned about sharks from "Jaws"
is celluloid.

 

[TABING]

The walls of an aluminum SCUBA tank are about 3 inches thick. Tanks must be tested and certified every few years, and if they don't meet spec., they are cut in half to prevent use. It's really surprising to see this, because the internal space is so small.

It would surely take an amour piecing bullet to get through that wall.

 

[Cosmoline]

Is it steel or aluminum, though?

 

[MuzzleBlast]

It would surely take an amour piecing bullet to get through that wall.

Apparently not. The Mythbusters guys did it with M2 ball. The bullet goes in, but does not exit. They shot it from the bottom and the side, with the same result.

 

[Dave R]

The thing I remember is how puny Speilberg made the guns look. On purpose, or out of ignorance, I don't know. When Brody shoots his revolver at the shark, the impact on the water looks like a pellet gun. When he shoots the Garand at the shark, the water impact looks like a .22. Real guns have a LOT more power than the movie would indicate.

 

[Cosmoline]

It's the same old difference between squibs and reality. Squibs make bullet impacts on hard surfaces look a lot more explosive than they are, and splash less water than a real bullet would.