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.60 Cal. MG

Birdseye

BOCN Contributor
The leftmost casing is .60 in diameter at the mouth and 4.5" o/a. The headstamp is "S L 44" (St. Louis Ordnance Plant 1944). Near as I can make out it is for a .60 cal. Machine Gun. Is this correct? What is/was it? It really is a completely new one on me.

The other rounds are (l to r) .50 cal, 20mm, .223

Thoughts would be appreciated.
 

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Hi, yes, you're correct.
The 60 cal was developed but didn't get adopted and ended up getting necked up to the 20mm Vulcan. Early Vulcan rounds sometimes have headstamps showing their 60 cal pedigree. They made a 60/50 also.
I'll dig out my rounds and photograph them unless someone else does it first, there's all sorts of projectiles out there.
Dave.
 
We were at our local flea market (boot sale?) and my son spotted it. His eye is getting quite good.
 
For the sake of completeness and having everything in the same place, here is a scan of the head.
 

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My 60 cals.

Hi, this is my very limited collection of .60 items.

The .60 commenced pre WW2 as an anti-tank gun development. During WW2 another project commenced to improve on the .50 Browning aircraft machine gun. The cartridge developed on the a/tank gun was ammalgamated into the aircraft gun. The anti-tank gun project was terminated but the aircraft gun forged on and was still around in the early '50s, when as has already been stated, it lost out to the more destructive 20mm. I suspect that it's use did not proceed much beyond operational trials(?)

Headstamps from left to right are: SL * 44, SL 44, FA 44 *. The cartridge at the extreme right is the .60/.50.
 

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The 60 cal rounds are available, I know a guy with some for sale.
The 60/50 are quite hard to find.
Dave.
 
Apparently the fired .60 cases are quite common in the USA

On alot of these fired cases you can see serrated patterns on the neck, this is becuase the rifling was extended from the barrel part-way into the chamber, it apparently aided extraction.
 
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.60 "Fisa Projector"

The "serrated patterns" on the neck that Falcon talks about reminds me of an interesting project that was incorporated into some .60 cal ball cartridges, known as the Fisa Protector (Franklin Institute, Section A).

The device was a thin metal crimped sleeve that covered the case mouth and rear of the projectile. A modified barrel had to be used and the idea was that the device reduced wear on chrome plated barrels, by apparently quite a considerable amount. There were several slots at the rear of the sleeve so that when the cartridge was fired, and the case expanded locking in to these slots, ensuring that both case and sleeve would remain together during extraction.

So another .60 cal variation to look out for!
 
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