The Fine Art of First Strike Round Loading

TBD:  Red springs, Spyders, and shitty overall strategies.

Krotary Rifle

Look at the grin on this guy's face at the beginning of the video.

Speaking of which, I think it's great that people are posting videos of their creations online.

This was basically what I was wanting to do myself, but I realized there was no fucking way I would be able to pull it off with my resources.  He has the basic elements I wanted -- a rotating feed and a feed gate.  And obviously he had FS rounds in mind.  I'm totally copying his 10rd tube dispenser as well; what an awesome idea.

Not overly complicated; just a nice, elegant bit of work.

Only problem is, of course, it's Not An Automag.  Being a bolt action gun, that means that once the bolt is forward, you can't rotate and load up the other chambers at-the-ready.

But at least you are damn sure you're not going to have a misfeed when firing.  That is one of the few remaining useful purposes of (closed bolt) pump guns outside of class-based games/rules.  (I.e. pump only games.)

I also hate shooting vids, but there are a few things to note.  I'm going to guess that he actually has pretty good dexterity, and probably does things like practice motions.  His motions and placement of items appears careful and deliberate.  I think that people with similar dexterity levels may wind up coming up with similar preferences.

FS Drum Mag

So I found this on the ol' Intertubes as well.

I kind of want to hesitate to call this a rotary loader because it's really more like a curved magazine loader.  The rounds are still fed from the back by a single pusher; it's just that it's using a torsion spring like mine instead of a compression spring.

Being a single pusher design, it shares the same shortcoming as the other pusher designs -- inability to load new rounds in on the fly.  And this has a pretty large dead zone.  Pushing the entire stack from the back instead of distributing over multiple rounds can also be problematic.

This compensates for that with increased capacity of course.

Still, an interesting design and worth thinking about.  Plus he 3D printed it like I did, so extra points.