Fun show yesterday...

Let's sing the Fun Show song!

Flintlocks and Flop-tops
And Number Three Russians
Black-powder Mausers
From jackbooted Prussians,
Shiny Smith PC's from limited runs
These are a few of my favorite guns.

Socketed bay'nets
On Zulu War rifles,
Engraved, iv'ried Lugers
That make quite an eyefull
Mosin tomato stakes sold by the ton
These are a few of my favorite guns.

Rusty top-breaks!
Smallbore Schuetzens!
And all of Browning's spawn
I just keep on browsing my favorite guns
Until all my money's gone.

I'm pretty much tapped out on the fun gun budget, but it's always fun to go look, since you never know what you'll find. A lot of the small table guys who'd speculated deeply on 9/.40/.45 ammo over the last year didn't appear to realize that the drought was over and were bitching that they couldn't sell the stuff at scalper's prices. One guy, though, had decided he wasn't going to get caught holding and was blowing out a few cases of Golden Saber at not-unreasonable prices, and so I grabbed a box of 185gr .45ACP just because.

I know I said I wasn't going to get seriously attached to the PPX, but I acquired a fourth magazine for it.

Lastly, for those people who have old surplus rifle addictions, this purchase probably won't require too much explanation:

Assault clips!

6.5 Carcano on the left, with a Societa Metallurgica Italiana 1953 headstamp. (The vendor had it labeled as "Nazi WWII"; I guess the Nazis loaded it in their moon base.) 8mm Lebel Balle N in a Berthier clip on the right. In both cases the purchases were made for the en bloc clips more than the ammunition, since Carcanos and Berthiers, like all rifles with the Mannlicher clip-loading system, are next thing to useless without good clips. Note that both the Italian and French versions improved on Herr Mannlicher's system in that the clips can be inserted either way, while the Austro-Hungarian original had a very definite right-side-up orientation.
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