When I last attended a class in Alliance, I brought my "work" carbine along and was mortified to discover it started doubling midway through day one. I set the gun aside and one of the other students was kind enough to lend me his spare stick to finish out the class.
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| All blinged out and nowhere to go... |
Fortunately,
Dave Laubert was nearby and actually performed a house call at the range to check on the ailing blaster. Unfortunately the problem was that it just had enough miles on the lockwork that the hammer/sear engagement was getting spotty. Understandable, because it was a very early Nineties Colt Sporter lower with the original guts still in it. Also unfortunately, because it was a very early Nineties Colt, it's a large-pin lower with a pinned sear block, so getting replacement parts wasn't going to be as simple as running by my local gun store...
Since I had my own backup carbine at home, all sighted in and ready to go, I just pressed it back into service as the housegun and filed the now trigger-group-less Colt away as a "when I get around to it" project.
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| A giant rail farm, straight outta 2007, with an AFG and MTAC |
Some time late last year I was in
Indy Arms Co and mentioned my woes to Mark, the manager, and he was like "Hey, I've got an Armalite large pin trigger group right here on the shelf I'll make you a deal on." So I bought it and it rode around in the trunk of my car for a bit until, right before SHOT, I dropped off the carbine and trigger group at the shop. (I've built enough AR lowers to know that if someone else wants to do it, I'll let them.)
It was late February before I got around to picking up the gun and now I haven't had a chance to confirm its reliability myself. It passes all function checks and I'm pretty sure it got test-fired, but still...
So the backup housegun is still the one with the loaded mag in the well.
What's making me itch is that I had intended to replace the
Leupold 1.25-4X that's on it with the
1-6X Vortex Viper PST II I won at TacCon last year, and now I have no easy way to sight it in...so I guess that's going to hold off for a bit. At least that way it's still dialed in if some weird scenario requires its use.
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