Comments by "mpetersen6" (@mpetersen6) on "Alofs: A Steampunk Mousetrap for a Shotgun" video.

As long as the springs haven't been compressed and released 100Ks of thousands of times and gotten rusty there's no reason they should have failed.
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And places for it to get out of alignment. In a way it reminds me of the table saw I've got for just general use. It's got a sliding table that movable on the fence rails which are moveable all on a sheet metal box with an cast aluminum table. Cuts nice when set-up properly. But it is a real PITA to get set-up.
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Yes, but in one of the Nitro Express cartridges
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Yah, and you need to be Arnold Schwarzenegger to shoulder it. The China Lake pump action grenade launcher would beat it hands down.
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@Doomsday_Report Time to failure being inverse of cost I assume.
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@socksleeve With modern materials the weight could be reduced somewhat. Polymer receiver, magazine tube and stock. The parts that really need the strength are the bolt and chamber/barrel. But wasn't there also an issue with possible chambering of the high pressure rounds from the crew served weapon. The big problem is probably the weight of the ammunition when the tube is full. What I could not figure out is the whole intellectual property thing. The originals were produced by Marine armourers iirc. Hence any intellectual rights should have belonged to the government. The attempted re-incarnation was being done under contract with the DOD if I recall correctly.
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Ian would have been SOL in the 1920s in terms of left handed shooting Rube Goldberg is still around to some degree in the Maker community today. Some of the useless contraptions that are made (marble machines come to mind) that still look cool in operation. One place you can see a very large collection of mechanical masterpieces from the late 19th and early 20th centuries is The House on the Rock in Spring Green WI Southwest of Madison. Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesen is in the same area.
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