Better than New

Posted on by

I loaned a rifle and case to a Boomershoot Staff member who doesn’t own any guns. His were all stolen out of a moving trailer shortly after he got out of the Navy and he hasn’t replaced them yet. This was his first Boomershoot, and I figured he had to do some shooting. Loaned him a suppressed AR with a suppressor. After the first High Intensity event, I cautioned him to wait until the suppressor had cooled off before putting it back in the case.
After the second High Intensity event, he didn’t wait a sufficiently long time, and it melted a hole through the lining of the soft case. He felt terrible about it and wanted to buy me a new case. I decided I would talk to Barb and maybe we could repair it rather than replace it. It wasn’t catastrophic damage:

Barb thought a patch probably would work. But she didn’t have any. I went looking on Amazon for patches. Then I thought, I really should look for something that can tolerate high temperatures.
TA-DA!!! Meet FLASLD Aluminized Heat Shield Thermal Barrier Adhesive Backed Heat Sleeve Up To 2000 Degrees Fahrenheit:

For $20, I got enough adhesive backed shielding to line multiple cases.
Here is the finished product:

It is better than new.

Share

16 thoughts on “Better than New”

  1. What a great idea!
    I have to get some of that.
    My only buzzkill thought is, how thick would the heat resistant part need to be to not eventually melt through? Me not having the science and math background to calculate this more precisely.

    • They don’t list an R-Value so I can’t do the math either. I could probably test a sample and come up with an estimate of the R-Value. But, more likely I’ll just get a suppressor hot and see if my finger avoids burns on the other side of a sample.

      • The Amazon page looks like the product is made of chinesium, superlative word salad and photoshop.

        Still, it doesn’t have to be aircraft-rated to do the job. On the other hand, I went hunting for stick on sound deadening foam a little while back, and while checking the reviews for allegedly “fire resistant” foam, one of the reviewers said they tested a cutting and it went up like a candle at the merest touch of flame.

        Remember, if it’s Chinese fake-brand stuff, and they straight -up lie in their product page, you may get your money back from Amazon, but the alleged company exists only long enough to sell things then evaporate in the light of a lawsuit. You’ve no standing in a CCP court, anyway.

        • A possible alternative might be metal foil duct tape, though that may be too stiff.

          “No standing” — that reminds me of a patent attorney’s advice not to pursue patents in Red China. His comments were along the lines of: “They’ll happily take your money and give you a patent, but that’s just a starting point for negotiation when someone then steals your invention.”

          These days I paraphrase that more briefly: “The three pillars of communism are lying, stealing, and murdering”.

          • And how is that different from how badly our congress has messed up patents here?

  3. Hmmm….Amazon sells 12′ X 8″ 304 stainless steel woven mesh in packages of 5 for $12. The wire size listed is .4MM (~.016″) and 20 mesh is 20 holes/inch, they say it’s 1 MM holes. No idea how flexible it is. A 16″ X 50″ sheet of 40 mesh (.4MM holes, .2MM (~.008″) wire diameter is $16.99 and shipped rolled up so it’s flexible.

    Anyway, a layer of that under the aluminized insulation would serve to both space the insulation off the surface and dissipate point heat over a larger area. I’d think a “sandwich” of aluminized insulating foam, wire mesh and another sheet of insulating foam would handle anything that wasn’t emitting in the visible spectrum. Maybe a “suppressor sleeve” to slide over the can? Make it 1.25X the diameter and 1.5-2.0X the length of the suppressor to acommodate gun movement inside the case.

  4. “We can rebuild it. We have the technology. We can make it better than it was. Better, stronger, faster.”
    ~The Six Million Dollar Gun Case (1974 tv show)

      • Lee Majors was great in that 😀
        The book, Cyborg, that it was based on by Martin Caidin was only fair to middling.

        • And the footage at the intro of the show where we see the lifting body aircraft having a kinetically-interesting incident always caught my attention.

          • Science fiction TV show. Real crash.
            1967 – Piloted by Bruce Peterson, the Northrop M2-F2 Lifting Body aircraft crashes on landing, becoming the inspiration for the Martin Caidin novel Cyborg and TV series, The Six Million Dollar Man.

          • Yes, the “real crash” part is why it always got my attention.
            I wonder how being a cyclops affected his flying after the incident.

  5. Good idea! And one could always buy a suppressor cover, as they get set down on all kinds of things one doesn’t need heated. Or melted.

  6. Another good reason that Boomershoot is in Idaho. I am sure there would be some do-gooder in Washington that would have sent the Stasi after you because you loaned a rifle to someone without getting a background check first!

    • That’s absolutely correct! I told him to be sure to return it before we got back to the Seattle area because of that.

Comments are closed.