Yes, I am familiar with them. I used one from 1969 until 1976. When a ring of clinker would build up in a cement kiln and of course you couldn’t get into the kiln to knock it down, we would load up the old 8 gauge with a big slug, take aim, and shoot the ring down in usually four to twelve shots by rotating the rotary kiln on its trunnions four times until the ring was down. Never needed a couple hundred. But it also knocked all the dust down from the overhead and covered you with it. It’s been a long time, but as I remember, we used to burn the three kilns at 2800° with soft coal, fired by blowing the pulverized soft coal from the coal mill located under the burner floor by a high speed fan and into the kiln. A ring was apparent when the fire from the kiln would come out around the discharge end of the kiln where the clinker was discharged. This was a huge cement manufacturing process from the quarry to the raw grinding mills to a preheater to the kilns to the gypsum mill to the finish mills to the packaging department and onto rail cars or bulk cement trucks. And that is JUST putting in a “nutshell”. I was a process technician and a shift foreman. Cement manufacturing is a cold dirty job in the winter and a hot dirty job in the summer. And it can be dangerous.
wicked looking, kind of steam punkish...wonder if there could be any other real world applications...maybe a drone swarm killer, or prison yard firing rock salt or pepper balls. maybe i'll drop kentucky ballistics a note- let's see one of these puppies on the range!
tres cool. did you load and fire too?...the video shows them firing dozens of rounds, with gunner and loader working doubletime...any idea how much one of those puppies costs, price of each round etc...love reading the small details.
