Cobra Gun Ship

Not all things are cars around here. The "Cobra Gun Ship" has been one of my favorite US Army weapons since 'Nam. And, I'm a proud and vocal supporter of the 2nd Amendment. Although I don't have a Bell AH-1 Cobra, I do have an AC Cobra - in the 2011 time frame I got a bug to mount a 50 Cal. Browning machine gun to the roll bar of my car. Known as the Ma Deuce (from its US military designation "M2"), the 50 BMG has been around since just after WWI and is still in service today. It is not legal to own a real M2 (unless you happen to have a Class III firearms license), so I decided to build a full scale replica.

A fair amount of web searching and a small cash outlay left me with some mechanical drawings of an M2. I took these and machined out of 1/8" plate steel the pieces necessary to make a realistic full scale model. It looks pretty good! I thought about building a rotating turret system to mount on top of my roll bar, but decided that was a bit overboard. I also contemplated putting paint ball gun guts into it to make it a functional paint ball gun - again, I figured that would just get me into trouble. So, a simple mount was added to my roll bar to lift the gun above the windshield and keep it from banging me on the head as I drove. I don't have pictures of the build process, but here's some pictures of the final product.

As a post script - I have been stopped once while driving with this on the car. The officer pulled me over and came up to the car/gun with a great big grin on his face. We spent nearly 10 minutes going over mostly the gun, but also the car. He was excited to see it. He did say, since he pulled me over, he needed something to record for the stop, so gave me a warning for no front license plate.

I've also had a number of people, including cops, pull up behind me and pull out their phone-cameras to take pictures - all with big grins on their faces and many with a "thumbs-up". All that being said, I still won't drive into Chicago with this thing on! (but then, I won't take the Cobra into Chicago in the first place).