Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on forgottenweapons.com
I'm Ian McCollum
And I'm here today at the Rock Island auction company
taking a look at some of the guns that they're going to be selling in their upcoming December of 2017
premier firearms auction and today, we're taking a look at an enormous behemoth of a rifle.
This is a rifle manufactured by JD Jones, or I think his company name is SSK industries
And it's chambered for the largest sporting purpose cartridge
that's out there the .950 JDJ. It's this thing and it's freaking huge.
This was originally built on specific requests of a customer of JD Jones who wanted a
big bore rifle for shooting cast bullets and so the original loading for this cartridge, they took a 20 millimeter Vulcan
brass case, they cut it down to a 70 millimeter case length, necked it up to .95 caliber
which is 24.1 millimeter, and then they loaded that with
a 2600 grain bullet fired at approximately 2,200 feet per second. That's going to give you a lot of muzzle energy, about
28,000 foot-pounds of energy
To convert this into metric this would be a 168 gram bullet traveling at about
670 meters per second for a total of 38 000 joules of muzzle energy. Really an incredible amount.
Now some of you watching are going to have already noticed and recognized that .95 caliber is a lot bigger than .50 caliber and
according to US law
Anything that is over .50 caliber, 0.5 inch in diameter, has to be registered as a destructive device
Well, this is not and the reason it's not is because JD Jones got a sporting purposes exemption from the ATF
for the .950 JDJ cartridge. So this does actually transfer and handle just like any typical rifle.
The thing weighs a little bit over 60 pounds. Probably
a quarter to a third of that weight is in the muzzle brake. That is an
absolute beast of a muzzle brake. We in fact have a little clip of high-speed footage of it shooting and you can see just
how ridiculous that brake is. In fact the tablecloth that we had under the rifle was thoroughly
shredded by that muzzle brake.
Let's start by putting this in a bit of proper context. Here for comparison sake is a
.577 Snider cartridge, this is .57 caliber. This is already substantially more than .50 caliber.
Here is the .950 JDJ
It's a lot bigger
As such it doesn't necessarily require a complex action,
it just requires an extremely strong action and a very large action.
Even a really strong action built for something like, you know, a .50 caliber Nitro Express type of cartridge is
just not going to be physically large enough to hold
something like this in the system. So actions for this had to be custom made by McMillan
because they're just too ludicrously huge
to be commercially available.
The syst- it is a bolt action system, and it's a single shot, rifle, so you'll notice the receiver is completely enclosed
on both sides there is no ejection or feeding port. The reason for that
is you actually have to take the bolt out in order to load it.
This is a technique that was used on a number of
.50 BMG single-shot rifle designs on the civilian market.
Yeah, a little while back, honestly, not so many recently, but what you do is take the bolt out
and then you take the cartridge and actually slide it into the bolt like this
and then you load the whole assembly into the gun.
One thing to be aware of when you're doing this and you'll see this reflected in the other video that is out there of someone
shooting, not this rifle,
but one of the other rifles, is they're always extremely deliberate and careful when closing the bolt.
And there's good reason for that.
When the bolt is in the open position the striker, the firing pin, right here can't go forward.
But when you close it what you're doing is rotating this into this position
and then the only thing holding the firing pin back and it's got a tight enough spring on it that I can't even really pull it back manually.
This is held back in this position by the sear in the rifle.
So in theory if you were to close this, you know, in a fast and rough manner
You could conceivably jar the sear off of the firing pin, let the firing pin down, and perhaps fire the gun
Probably not out of battery, the curvature here
just ensures that the firing pin won't actually protrude enough to fire until it is effectively locked
however almost
as bad as firing out of battery with a rifle like this is having it fire when you're not ready for it to fire because of those
38,000 joules of energy that come out the front. That much energy is also transmitted into the rifle and has an incredible amount of recoil.
So the guys in the video are probably a little bit overly ginger about this.
They're probably and maybe justifiably a bit paranoid.
But you wouldn't want to like give this bolt a swift smack with your hand to close it.
This is compounding the fact or compounded by the fact that this has a really light trigger.
*Loud snap*
You can hear how heavy the firing pin spring in that thing is.
Very little travel on the trigger and remarkably light, so
And no manual safety on this. The manual safety for a rifle like this is
don't put a cartridge in it until you're ready to fire.
As I mentioned the stock is a Macmillan stock with a nice thick
soft rubber recoil pad on it. A nice big wide pistol grip and you can see just how wide this surface is.
You want a long surface here
and you want it nice and square to
evenly divide out the recoil forces and not concentrate them in any one place that could cause a crack in the stock
And of course we can't finish up a video like this without taking a specific look at the muzzle brake on this beast.
To some people a muzzle brake like this might be an indication that maybe it's a gun you don't want to fire.
Once again just for size comparisons sake there's our .577 Snider.
I can't put that cartridge parallel to the brake because
the rifle and the brake are heavy enough that they are putting a bend in the table
causing the cartridge to roll down the table if I put it that way so anyway.
That muzzle brake weighs approximately twice as much as a typical
semi-auto rifle. That's like an 18 pound muzzle brake right there, and you'll be glad of it when you pull the trigger on this thing.
Well the information out there on the internet about this rifle and this cartridge is pretty lacking in substance.
So hopefully you've enjoyed watching this video and learning a little bit more about what was actually going on behind the development of
this rifle. Why it's out there, and what it's actually capable of.
If you are interested in having it yourself it is coming up for sale at Rock Island.
So take a look at the description text below the video
and you'll find a link there to Rock Island's catalog page on this beast and
You can take a look at their pictures, description, price estimate, all their other information on it
and if you decide you're interested you can place a bid on the
Through their website over the phone or live here at Rock Island at their auction. Thanks for watching!