Libyan rebels are welding armor onto trucks and modifying captured weapons from their hidden workshops in Misurata, C.J. Chivers (The Gun) reports:
Around Mr. Shirksy were the assignments of the day — four civilian pickup trucks in various states of conversion to fighting machines. There was also a pair of long sawhorses serving as a workstation for modifying heavy machine guns.
Here Omar el-Saghier, 30, puzzled over a .50-caliber machine gun that had no manual trigger. Asked what kind of machine gun he was working on (it appeared to be an FN Herstal M3M, designed for aircraft), he allowed himself a smile and answered in English.
“I don’t know, exactly,” he said.
But Mr. Saghier had figured out how to make it work. And by using a set of machinist’s tools and scraps and sheets of steel, he was midway through designing and creating a custom trigger, so that this weapon might be fired by a man standing at a turret in the back of a pickup truck.
Another team beside him was making a rotating pedestal mount for the weapon. A third team was fitting a set of metal plates to the truck that would, before the day’s end, become part of the rebels’ fleet.
These armor-clad gun trucks, typically painted black and often with their taillights and turn signals removed or painted over so they are more difficult to spot, are the signature weapon of the Misurata rebels.
An American munitions-expert, looking at photos of their modified RPG warheads, was not impressed:
“Nice initiative on his part, but I think they’ll be nose-heavy and will literally nose-dive into the ground,” the specialist wrote back.
He added, upon seeing images of the explosives taken from captured shells, that visitors should “steer clear of this dude’s shop.”