Wednesday, September 30, 2015

Linky Love

So the 1911 had gotten increasingly hard to open. It was to the point that I just about had to poke the muzzle against something to get it to unlock. I still hadn't taken it apart for fear of what I might find, my mind having conjured visions of various unlikely maladies: nasty burrs on the locking lugs or suchlike.

While I was up at Sand Burr Gun Ranch last Sunday, I asked Ray Saltzman, who was there to AI for Mas's MAG-40 class, if he wouldn't mind laying hands on it and making a diagnosis.

What the problem turned out to be was the link binding against the bottom of the frame. Now, bear in mind that the gun had gone back to Bob after the first thousand-ish rounds for a checkup and everything looked good. It had fired only about a thousand rounds since then before starting the 2k-round thing. This tight-unlocking problem had just cropped up in the last thousand rounds and had been getting worse.

I'm filing this one under "mysteries". All I can assume is that the link was so close to the frame that all it took was a tiny bit of link stretching and a bit of dirt in the gun to cause the two surfaces to come in contact.

At any rate, Ray spent a few minutes with a file and *bam* the problem vanished. He's a miracle worker. Take your guns to him to get fixed.

Since the gun still hadn't been lubed or cleaned, unless you count Ray wiping the feed ramp with a shop cloth, I figured we'll just put an asterisk next to the whole thing and go back to shootin' up Lucky Gunner's .45ACP ammo. And so yesterday morning found me at the range...

...where the gun disposed of a hundred rounds without a hiccup.

This brings the total rounds fired to 1,200 since the weapon was last cleaned or lubricated, with two failures to go into battery (rounds #356 and #1,085), a failure to feed on round #513, a failure to feed a round of Hornady Critical Duty +P on round #927, and a failure to eject a round of Hornady Critical Duty +P on round #930. 800 rounds to go.
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Tuesday, September 29, 2015

Gratuitous Gun Pr0n #135...

Seen at the range the other day: Race Glock with new horizontal C-More mount...

It moves the dot closer to the bore axis and is completely clear of the ejection port, since the body of the sight is swung outward.
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What bias?

Does this story from RawStory (which has flown 'round the world and seems to be based on this link) sound anything like what I'm reading here?

Anybody reading this have contacts with the Houston po-po who know anything like the real scoop? Because if the wild-shooting Sheepdog Samaritan indeed is a figment of Cassidy Estrada and David Ferguson's imaginations, this needs to be corrected.
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Automotif CXIII...

I was driving down College Avenue on the way to the range yesterday morning with the top down on the Bimmer. I had just crossed 42nd Street, with Diane Rehm clucking and tutting on the radio and me singing along with "Worst Part of Indianapolis", when I saw it...

 ...parked on the west side of College, just north of 39th Street.

I'm pretty sure that nobody has ever screeched to the side of the road in the middle of the 'hood, jumped out of their car, jogged half a block with DSLR in hand...

...and dodged across three lanes of traffic to shoot pictures of a minivan from every angle.

Because E-Type.
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Monday, September 28, 2015

It's late September...

...and therefore it's time for me to belatedly realize that I haven't thrown an official VFTP endorsement for Kilted to Kick Cancer.

Today I threw some cash in the bucket for underdog and Hoosier homeboy, Team JBro. All you gotta do to do likewise is go to the donate page and select "Team JBro" as your fundraising team at checkout. Or, you know, pick whoever, but you should donate, because it's for a good cause.
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Pedal & Pub II: Electric Boogaloo

Saturday morning, a group of three hardy cyclists (one of our number having punked out) departed the vicinity of Roseholme Cottage in search of the craft breweries of the Fountain Square neighborhood, just southeast of downtown Indianapolis.

Well, first we took a quick mile-and-a-half detour north for breakfast at Public Greens, laying a good foundation of protein and carbs for the day's exertions, then we turned south...

Our navigatoring was thrown off by the fact that the Circle City Classic parade route bisected downtown at the time. Then we took a detour for one of our number to pick up shaving supplies at Red's Classic Barber Shop downtown. I waited outside and took pictures of the trim on the building.

Our first stop of the day: Chilly Water Brewing. Your correspondent enjoyed an Indy High Bines Fresh Hop Ale.

From the Monon up at Broad Ripple Avenue to the Cultural Trail through Fountain Square, the bike paths of Indy were liberally festooned (get it?) with chalked Bernie Sanders graffiti and the occasional Bernie sticker on a light pole or utility box. Notable by its absence: Hillary graffiti.

The next stop on the trail was New Day Meadery in the heart of Fountain Square. Note more Bernie graffiti. A small glass of Washington's Folly cherry mead was quaffed there. The staff was discussing that newfound darling of the Progressive Left, Pope Francis. A Bernie/Francis '16 ticket would be a juggernaut. The GOP better thank its lucky stars he doesn't have a Hawaiian birth certificate.

The eponymous fountain in the square, which is actually a sort of triangle.

 Next stop: Fountain Square Brewery.

 Love the decor. And the Star Trek: Voyager video game.

I had a pint of their Hop For Teacher pale ale.

We turned northwards again toward home. Where the cultural trail overlapped the street in Fountain Square, the bike lanes were separated from the traffic lanes by low concrete walls and bollards and had their own traffic lights. It was a much nicer setup than the life-in-your-hands cycling experience of Broad Ripple Avenue proper.

Back downtown, across from the City-County Building, lies the City Market, a sort of ⅔rds-scale Quincy Market. On the upper deck was the Tomlinson Tap Room, featuring a rotating menu of Hoosier craft brews. It was there that we decided to remedy an oversight of our previous journey before the slog north commenced.

Back down the Cultural Trail a long block and then out Washington Street and under the interstate, and we were on the edge of the Holy Cross neighborhood, where we had hit Flat 12 last time but neglected to pay respects to Indiana City Brewing.

Indiana was two years ahead of the nation with Prohibition, but we got better.

Shootin' Buddy, having seen more #FeelTheBern graffiti.
Now came the long pull up the Monon, back through The Worst Part of Indianapolis ("Somebody got found shot in the head in their SUV just two blocks that way this morning!" I'd pipe up helpfully, as we'd pass certain areas featured on that morning's news) and to the leafier, quieter streets of South Broad Ripple...

...where the final stop of the day was for dinner at Bent Rail Brewing, the newest addition to the SoBro scene. So new, in fact, that they hadn't yet gotten their own brewing underway yet. The tanks are all set up, waiting on all the i's to be dotted and t's crossed.

They did, however, have guest taps, and a delicious charcuterie plate, which hit the spot nicely after twenty-three miles in the saddle.
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Automotif CXII...

'72 Cadillac Eldorado convertible

Sunday, September 27, 2015

Automotif CXI...

1966 Cadillac Eldorado convertible

Gratuitous Gun Pr0n #134...

Seen at the range last week: A Walther GSP Expert target pistol.

The magazine forward of the trigger guard makes these exotic target pistols "assault weapons" under California law, I believe.
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Saturday, September 26, 2015

QotD: You Can't Lose A Fight You're Not In Edition

From a post at WeaponsMan:
"These odds of survival are improved by training to hone your skills and survive an armed encounter, but they’re improved more by using your superior judgment so as not to have to make a vulgar display of your superior skills. Too few people do the former, and far too few people do the latter."
This is Plan A. The main reason I carry a gun is because my situational awareness is not perfect. If it were, I'd stroll on out of the area and let the gunfight happen to somebody else.

I'll go ahead and reprint from an older post:
1) If you're in a bad neighborhood, the kind where you get to hear gunfire and sirens on a nightly basis, move. If you can't move, have yourself inside at a decent hour, before the time when "suspects" start outnumbering "witnesses" on street corners.

2) As a matter of fact, having yourself in at a decent hour is good advice for just about anybody. Ask your local po-po, but I'd bet that in most places, not much good happens after ten p.m.; certainly after midnight, the majority of the folks not already at home are already legally intoxicated, or are engaged in business transactions buying or selling intoxicants. Saying that these people are overrepresented in criminal and traffic code violations is like saying that rednecks are overrepresented in the stands at a NASCAR race.

3) Regardless of your opinion of the War on (Some) Drugs, the fact remains that, for now, drugs are illegal. This means that to get any for your own use, you have to come in contact with some one who is, by definition... class? Anyone? That's right, a criminal. Now, other than engaging in a little unlicensed pharmaceutical distribution, your particular connection may be a saint and a member of the Kiwanis. On the other hand, how well do you really know them? They've demonstrated the willingness to break one law; what others do they break? What other criminals do they associate with? What are the chances of this all ending in tears? If you want to play the safe side of the odds, wear your seatbelt, don't ride motorcycles, and stay away from the dope and the people who use it.

4) Likewise, hitting people is against the law. You should stay the hell away from people who think fisticuffs is an appropriate method of conflict resolution for adults. Particularly if they also have a fondness for judgement-impairing substances like Budweiser. I don't care if you lovelovelove them; if they have proven their willingness to talk with their fists, they will do it again, and maybe worse. If you are living with them or hanging around them, get out. You can then settle your differences from the other end of a phone line a whole lot safer than you could have from inside the tiger cage.

Literally Can't Even...

Today seems like a splendid day to wear my new ENDO T-Shirt.
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This probably makes me a bad person...

Got off work last night and ran home to get something for the gunsmith at the new shop. He's still getting settled in and doesn't yet have a full suite of tools and suchlike. In this case, a range rod stiffer than a fiberglass Dewey was called for, and so I ran home to grab a cleaning rod out of one of my Mosins.

That poor AK... I told the owner (one of my coworkers) that even if the case came out that easily, he likely wouldn't be winning any benchrest competitions with the thing after this.

Anyhow, when I got back to the range with the cleaning rod, three young guys were getting ready to go out onto the pistol range. They were Latino dudes and there was a fair bit of machismo in the air as they selected their zombie targets and headed out to the range to air them out with Glocks. The results were the usual shotgun pattern of holes all over the target at 25 feet.

I had the Springfield Pro with me and so I went out to the next lane over to do my daily shootin'. Not gonna lie, I took a bit of pride in the reaction caused by drilling a ragged hole in the X-ring.

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Friday, September 25, 2015

Boom

One thing I plan on doing is taking advantage of the fact that I work at an indoor range to shoot stuff that I haven't shot in years. Just take a random pistol and a box of ammo to work with me every day. Maybe it will help jump-start the moribund Other Blog.

Today the 629, I think. Or maybe the 53. Ooh, or the .32-20 H.E.!

Thursday, September 24, 2015

Regrets...

I went out on the range after I clocked out and put another hundred rounds through the CCA gun yesterday. Fifty rounds of Lucky Gunner's PMC Bronze and fifty of Sig's new domestically-produced 230gr FMJ, courtesy of Sig Sauer.

The CCA gun has a snug but smooth frame to slide fit, but the barrel lug fit is as tight as any I've felt. You can feel the lugs pop free of the mortises in the slide as you work the action, and it's drier than a popcorn fart in there now. I really should have scrubbed that area and lubed it heavily before starting this. As it is, we're probably into territory where those lugs are taking a beating. As I wrote on Facebook, "I'm worried about doing permanent damage to the lockup of a bespoke gun that means quite a bit to me in order to prove nothing to the internet."

I've got a couple pistolsmiths willing to fit a new barrel if this does leave the lockup all ganked and as sloppy as, say, a factory Colt or Kimber. I dunno, though; I'm at least going to want to detail strip it and look at the lugs closely.

100 rounds at 21 feet.
Anyhow, a hundred rounds yesterday. Round number eighty-five of the day (#1,085 of the test) didn't go completely into batteryand was resolved with a push of the thumb.

This brings the total rounds fired to 1,100 since the weapon was last cleaned or lubricated, with two failures to go into battery (rounds #356 and #1,085), a failure to feed on round #513, a failure to feed a round of Hornady Critical Duty +P on round #927, and a failure to eject a round of Hornady Critical Duty +P on round #930. 900 rounds to go.
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Wednesday, September 23, 2015

Note to self...

If I haven't typed the next day's post by midnight, I should just go to bed and do it in the morning. Otherwise I'll turn out a dog's breakfast of an editing mess that needs so much revising in the morning that I might as well have waited anyway.
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Half.

Tuesday morning I raided some boxes of .45ACP defensive loads around the house and set out for the range with my trusty chronograph to see what was what. In more conventional loadings, I had some Speer Gold Dot 230gr and Federal HST 230gr +P. I also had a couple of more exotic loads as well as one of the classic JHP designs of the fin de last siecle...

The three exotic loads, seen from left to right in this photo, were Hornady's 220gr +P Critical Duty, Cor-Bon's 165gr +P Pow'RBall, and the classic Federal 230gr Hydra-Shok.

If you look at the pictures, the "cartridge overall length", or COAL as we shall call it, of the Hornady 220gr is a little longer than the others. This, combined with the bullet profile, may have contributed to the failure-to-feed on round #27 of the day, #927 of the test.

,,,and on round #30, the round fired normally, but the spent case didn't eject. Given the dimensions and shape of the round, and the fact that a 220gr bullet at 1,016fps was likely generating slide velocities in excess of what the 16# IMSI recoil spring could handle, I'm not surprised. The simplest way to reduce this malfunction would be to not use the +P Critical Duty ammo in this gun.

Thanks to Cor-Bon, a number I'm not used to seeing on the chrono screen while shooting .45ACP. I'll post all the chrono data in a subsequent post.

Other than the Hornady Critical Duty, the gun ran fine.

This brings the total rounds fired to 1,000 since the weapon was last cleaned or lubricated, with one failure to go into battery on round #356 and a failure to feed on round #513, a failure to feed a round of Hornady Critical Duty +P on round #927, and a failure to eject one on round #930. 1,000 rounds to go.
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Tuesday, September 22, 2015

Almost to the halfway point.

Drove out to MCF&G yesterday morning with a stack of PMC .45ACP boxes from Lucky Gunner in the passenger seat. I didn't have a ton of time, but I was pretty sure I could knock out two hundred rounds pretty quickly. I'd added a fourth Wilson 47D magazine, since we stock them at work and I'd purchased one the other day.

Note the Slip 2000 weeping from the frame rails.
The 200 rounds went by uneventfully, although that's a lot of mag changing. Several years of shooting the M&P 9 has skewed my expectations regarding mag capacity. Nowadays, eight rounds feels dangerously close to needing a mag change, not like a full gun.

Each target got a hundred rounds from ten yards. Most of the hits on the left hand target would have stayed on the proverbial 3x5" card. I'm gradually getting better.
This brings the total rounds fired to 900 since the weapon was last cleaned or lubricated, with one failure to go into battery on round #356 and a failure to feed on round #513. 1,100 rounds to go.
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Monday, September 21, 2015

Automotif CX...

Seen in the theater parking lot on Saturday: A Maserati Gran Sport.

Sure is a looker.
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Seven Hundred

I love working at an indoor range so close to my house. It's so close that on workdays the total elapsed time from the when I stand up from my desk in the office at home 'til I'm clocking in at work is about eight minutes. Ten if I catch the one red light between here and there.

This morning I made use of its proximity by grabbing a couple boxes of Lucky Gunner's .45ACP ammo and ducking out the door for a quick hundred round Sunday morning range session.

I used the first fifty round box to shoot the second clean Dot Torture drill I've ever done. (The first was with the P320.)

Can't go from the leather on this range, so it was from low ready instead of the holster, but my bugaboo is the SHO/WHO on dots 5 and 8 and not the holster work, anyway. I've reached a point where I'm shooting pretty consistent 48s and 49s both from the draw and from low ready with my M&Ps and G19.

Then I flipped the target and ran it out to 21 feet to shoot up the other box of PMC Bronze.

This brings the total rounds fired to 700 since the weapon was last cleaned or lubricated with one failure to go into battery on round #356 and a failure to feed on round #513. 1,300 rounds to go.
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Sunday, September 20, 2015

Overheard in the Office...

RX: "...and you didn't move the quilt from the washer to the dryer. But I did, for I am awesome."

Me: "Oh, yeah? Well, I moved it from the living room floor to the washer in the first place!"

RX: "Anybody could have done that. I wiped the cat hork off of it."

Me: "Well, I got the cat that horked on in the first place."

RX: "I don't see what that has to do with..."

Me: "You wouldn't have been able to wipe up any cat hork if I hadn't bought the cat that horked..."

RX: "One does not buy cats!"

Me: "Okay, '...if I hadn't ransomed the cat that horked in the first place.'"

RX: "One does occasionally have to ransom cats."

Back story...

So, I asked on Facebook:
"Which one of y'all is searching up a storm on my blog looking for the back story on the Winnie the Pooh cartoon?
Jenn drew it using my Martini and the 24th Reg't of Foot pith helmet I got as a gift from Peter, 'way back in the early days of THR."
And that triggered the following exchange, caused by the 24th Regiment of Foot helmet...

This just kicked my giggle box right over...

Anyway, the cartoon first appeared on TheHighRoad.org many years ago, and has since been spotted all over the internets.
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Automotif CIX...

When Buick introduced the droptop version of the sixth-generation Riviera personal luxury car in 1982, it was the most expensive vehicle sold by GM. A base run-of-the-mill hardtop Riv was just shy of fourteen grand in '85, which was a lot of money back then, but the roofectomy at ASC in Lansing, Michigan bumped the sticker to the then-nosebleed-worthy price of $24,494, and that was before you went crazy with the options list.

By comparison, a base Corvette coupe started out a little over eighteen grand, and a Cadillac Eldorado was a shade over $19k.

Base engine in the ragtops was the 125bhp 4.1L V6, or an optional Olds 5.0L V8 topped with a 4bbl Rochester Quadrabog, wheezing out 140bhp.

By the time the 6th Gen Riv went to the elephant graveyard after '85, to be replaced with a unibody badge-engineered Toronado/Eldorado/Riviera pod car replacement, the convertible was available with the turbocharged 3.8L V6 from the T-Type hardtop. The boosted motor was rated at 180hp.
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