Made these videos a while back and never got the time to post it. We took the Boys, rechambered to .50 by the way to the range back in the fall last year and blew off some rounds. Had lots of fun. The kid was terrified which is always funny, but after the first shot he was cracking out the rounds like no tomorrow.
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We shot one of the first to come into Canada back in the '80's when I was posted to the prairies, still in .55. They aren't as bad as all that, but we were used to shooting so...wish ours had been in .50 BMG though.
Not hard to understand why "recoil-less" devices that launched shaped-charge warheads became so popular.
Even the cheesy old 66mm, M-72 launcher will cheerfully penetrate MUCH more armour than the old Boys (Boyes?) and do it at MUCH longer effective ranges.
In fact, the slower a shaped charge is going at impact, the better, (as long as there is enough residual kinetic energy in the projectile to actuate the (usually) Piezoelectric initiator). At the "correct" stand-off, the HE gets to detonate and form the jet / copper "needle" at the perfect stand-off distance for maximum penetration. Think about the various shaped-charge "anti-tank" grenades / mines that were designed to simply be thrown at, or placed or attached magnetically on the outside of the target. As an anti-tank device, NOT a good idea if you planned to live long enough to repeat the exercise.
See also "Beehive" demolition devices used do doing nasty things to hardened defence-works and such.
The mighty Soviet 14.5mm cartridge for the KPV and similar, started out as an anti-tank rifle round. That would have been "exciting" to shoot. No wonder they took to the RPG series so enthusiastically.
I've only fired a few rounds from my Boys, but that was due to the lack of the .55 rounds. It came with a three die set to neck up .50BMG cases so I set about getting he rest of the gear together to reload. I now have a heap so the next opportunity will be big!
I've fired three different rifles in .50BMG, all just under the weight of the Boys. For comparison I punched the data into a recoil calculator and found the Boys in its original form has a lot more recoil force than the .50. I'll get the info up when I get home....
How did it compare? I think if you don't set yourself up behind the rifle and pull it in, you will regret it. I'd like to try it in .50BMG, but I get the impression it would be easier on the body- just from the AW and two Barretts being easier to handle.
It's a shame it's so hard to own in the US and so hard to feed in its true calibre, but I think it's worth the effort in either form, to have a go sometime if the chance comes up.
Interesting to compare the Boys with the German PzB-38 and 39, and the Polish Mascerzek-WZ-35.
The PzB 39 was chambered in a wild 8mm calibre, the 7.92 x 94, a bit like a radically necked down .50 BMG. Unsurprisiingly, the Germans derived this cartridge from their own 13mm HMG round, itself, like the.50 BMG round, derived from the French WW1 developments.
Somebody in the know worked out fairly early after the shooting started that the days of such things were numbered. Thus, the long Pzb (Panzerbuchse) barrel was lopped back to about 24 inches and fitted with a grenade discharger cup and this became the GrB (GranatenBusche) 39, a few of which arrived here in Oz at the same time and with the same importer who brought in a bunch of Boys rifles in the late 1970s. The cute part about these German guns as a collector's piece here, was that at least you could shoot them as a rifle by the relatively simple expedient of machining up a "sub-cal adapter" that would take standard 7.92 x 57 ball ammo. A rear stub of a "pre-loved" K-98 barrel could be machined down to form an expedient version, but if you wanted proper extraction, the chamber could be reamed deeper and an extractor groove machined in the back of the adapter. Fun times, indeed
There were several US experiments with the Grb and Boys platforms in the development of the early .50 Cal "sniper" units. As I recall, the book, "Limited War Sniping", by Peter Sennich, covers this and a lot more.
And then there was the Anti-Tank PISTOL!!
Basically this was the standard German Walther 27mm equivalent of the old Very pistol, but "adapted" to launch grenades and to thus become the "Kampfpistole" (Battle Pistol). A shoulder stock and grenade sights were added and it had a removable, smooth-bored liner for launching shaped charge grenades.
If you have one of these, you are probably the only kid on the block to do so.
I let my son fire a .55" Boys using about 5 rounds that we had left over from a live firing shoot at a couple of old Ferrets. He said it was very harsh but mind you he was only about 14 or so. He also fired the self loading Barrett.
I have a whole lot of historical info on the Boys that I acquired from old archives at work. I had thought about putting it all into booklet form. Mind you, it'd never be a thick book or make the best selling list. As for the man Boys. It seems that everything he put his hand to turned out crap! And nobody ever got to the bottom of his mysterious rank or title of 'Captain'. That and he remains a mystery!
I remember seeing a Boys for sale in an antique shop in the mid? 80's, try as I might I couldn't convince my mother that it was either a good investment or a good present for a +/-10yo boy. she did ask how much it was though.
I also failed to convince her about 2 or 3 years later that a $3000 stored since the 60's, running XK150fhc was a good buy. I still remind her of that one occasionally.
I had often thought of making a big calibre rifle from an old M8C spotting rifle but ammo wasn't available nor were reloading facilities so the project went sideways
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she did ask how much it was though.
