Remington Industrial Gun

One of the least known Remington products is the Industrial Gun, also known as the Kiln Gun. Up till now very little information about the development
of this gun was found in any literature. After all, it is not a sporting arm, and never appeared in any Remington sporting catalog, nor in any sporting publication.

The recognized authority on Industrial guns and the ammunition they fire is Dick Iverson. At this year’s Annual Meeting of the International Ammunition Association in St. Louis (April 17th – 19th) Dick displayed his collection of Industrial gun cartridges – all brands, including those made by Remington Arms Company, Inc. Dick shared much of the information found in this article, and is working on a soon- to-be published illustrated listing of 8 ga. cartridges.

The earliest information that Dick
has found is an article in the Scientific
American magazine dated January 1926,
authored by well-known firearms authority Captain Edward C. Crossman: Shooting Clinker Rings from Kilns. We are paraphrasing and quoting from Captain Crossman’s information. It is unfortunate that Remington’s new “gun” is so poorly illustrated that no detail can be ascertained.

The business of producing cement from lime rock and other materials involves the build-up of “clinker rings” in the kilns. These obstructions impede the process and

The rotary cement kiln (in the 1920s) were long tubes, ten feet in diam- eter, lined with fire brick and an internal heat source. The process produces a clin- ker which is removed and ground into a fine grain cement product.
The first use of guns to break up the clinker rings has been lost to history, but both shotguns and machine guns were first utilized. [see illustration on next page] Neither type of gun was able to hold up to the hard and demanding use under difficult conditions. Lead projectiles fired from 12 ga. shotguns lacked the mass and velocity to do the job. These hard-use shotguns rarely survived more than a thousand shots in the kiln. Yet another unsuccessful method was to introduce hollow, brass “bombs” filled with black powder which exploded upon contact to the super-hot clinker ring.

The next experiment was the use of 8 ga., double-barrel shotguns firing a three ounce cylindrical slug of lead.