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I thought the original patent was taken out by a Scotsman before WW2 and closely resembled the Giss and Whiscombe converging piston designs ?Originally Posted by ccdjg
Who/ which company was the inventor of the two-piston recoilless system used so successfully in the Diana 6 and Diana 10 pistols?
All the best Mick
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Likely a Scotsman, aye. And this ones not going to sleep tonight unless all is revealed.
Only the Whiscombe system has converging pistons, mind. Herr Giss (or the mystery man) had their pistons moving in opposite directions.
R I P John Whiscombe
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Sorry, Drew, I was referring to this Giss patent, which is very close to a Whiscombe :-
image.jpg
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Sorry, Mick. It is indeed. Converging pistons depicted there on the original patent. Very interesting that he/ they reversed the system for the production design.
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David Napier?
Optimisic Pessimist Fella
That Giss patent drawing with the converging pistons is interesting. Now imagine a Webley Senior with another cylinder sticking out the back, gear & rack housing on the side. That would be nice to shoot!
I fear its beyond my machining skills to do it though!
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If it's not a daft suggestion, wasn't the original idea based on a type of Steam Engine, so maybe dating back to the mid 19th Century (feel free to fall about laughing everyone if it's a daft suggestion).
As an aside, many years ago I had an idea for a recoilless Webley Senior based on converging piston heads and one spring. One piston rod ran through the middle of the other piston and the spring fitted between the rear of the second piston and a fitting on the end of the first piston rod. I spoke to Roy Hutchinson about it at the time and he said quite correctly that it would be difficult to maintain the correct timing for the converging piston heads. Either way, I made a rough example up by hacking a Senior to bits and fitted the assembly and cocked the gun. I didn't refit the back block to the Senior as it wasn't material to function and gingerly tried to fire the pistol. As an afterthought I lined it up parallel to my body and pointed it at a safe pellet catcher a few inches away. When I fired it, the whole lot disintegrated and part of the Piston Assembly rocketed out of the back of the pistol straight through the door of the Tumble Dryer. This resulted in two things, me frantically repairing the door of the Tumble Dryer with Araldite (and lying to the wife about how it got damaged in the first place), and Dianawerke not employing me a consultant in their development of recoilless Air Weapons.
Vic Thompson.
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Not daft ideas at all, Vic, and thank you for reminding me of this, Bill. :-
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napier_Deltic
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In John Whiscombe's first feature in Airgunworld where he was experimenting by welding two BSA Mercury cylinders together he said that his eureka moment came when he removed the cylinder end walls and allowed the Pistons to touch each other.
The Giss drawing above shows a cylinder end wall with effectively three transfer ports, I often wonder if Diana built a prototype as shown and found it a disappointment and moved to opposing Pistons.
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