Meme Dump...

Shrinking knife...

I love the Emerson wave opening feature on Spydercos, but I don't use them for any sort of tactical reasons. It's just handy to have a knife that pops open automagically when you yank it from your pocket, without having to operate any buttons, flippers, thumb studs, or whatever.

As a result, over the years the one I carry has gotten smaller and smaller, starting with the big ol' Endura on the right, and then the Delica in the middle (which shows the wear of nearly a decade of carry) and finally the little Dragonfly, a gift from a friend, which I've been carrying for something like a year now.

Blade lengths: 2.3", 2.9", 3.8"

BezosMart appears to have them on sale at the moment, maybe for Labor Day or something. The current price on the Endura at the link is less than I paid for it from Amazon in 2013...

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It makes sense, in an evil sort of way...

Som information is being released regarding the planned terrorist atacks in Vienna that would have included the Taylor Swift show there:

“They were plotting to kill a huge number — tens of thousands of people at this concert, including I am sure many Americans — and were quite advanced in this,” Cohen said Wednesday. “The Austrians were able to make those arrests because the agency and our partners in the intelligence community provided them information about what this ISIS-connected group was planning to do.”

If you're a bad guy who wants to kill thousands of people, first you gotta find someplace where thousands of people are gonna be. Sounds like the playbook was going to be similar to the one at that Ariana Grande concert in England.

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Meme Dump...

Automotif DXXXVIII...

By the early Nineties, the 3rd Generation Mustangs, known to enthusiasts as Fox Body cars, were getting long in the tooth. A replacement was already in the works, and it would be another front-engine rear-wheel drive car with an optional V-8; fan outcry had saved the Mustang from being re-cast as a Mazda-sourced FWD coupe. (That car was instead being sold as the Ford Probe.)

Sales hadn't been strong in the recession of the early '90s and so ambitious plans for the next generation 'Stang were shelved in favor of a much more modest upgrade. In the meantime, the Fox Body would need to soldier on for another couple model years.

For 1992 the only really new external visual cue was the black rubber strip in the side molding and bumpers was replaced with one in body color, as can be seen on this Bright Calypso Green LX ragtop.

The LX came from the factory with a 2.3L SOHC inline four; Ford's Lima motor that had been around since the days when it was found under the hoods of '74 Pintos. Now sporting electronic fuel injection and dual spark plug heads, it was rated at 108 SAE net horsepower. The only optional motor was Ford's 5.0L H.O. V-8. Either engine could be had with a five-speed manual or a four-speed automatic.

The pony fender badges, rather than prominent chrome "5.0" ones, tell us this is a four-cylinder secretarymobile, like roughly half of all Mustangs sold that year. No race car, but certainly a pleasant cruiser with the top down on a sunny summer day. Besides, the fuelie OHC twin plug Lima probably made as much juice as any six cylinder available in a First Generation 'Stang.

This one was photographed in September of 2023 using a Canon EOS-1D Mark III and EF 24-105mm f/4L IS zoom lens.

Ink on Steel, Old and New

Issue number 40 of RECOIL: CONCEALMENT is available, and I've got two pieces in it: A Classic Carry piece on the Harrington & Richardson self-loading .25 and .32 pistols from ye olden tymes, and a 400-round review of the new Bersa B1911.

The data box David Merrill did for the H&R .25 made me spew soda out my nose...

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Ugh.

I had intended to go to the outdoor range today, but it's going to be swamp-ass hot, like Gulf Coast levels of heat and humidity, and neither the Mustang nor the Zed Drei have any refrigerant aboard currently.

If I were faced with a week- or month-long stretch of this, I'd just cowgirl up and go, but when you can look ahead to Thursday and Friday and see it's going to be more bearable, it's easy to just punk out for a couple days. I'll maybe hit the indoor range on Thursday and Friday.

The next three days are supposed to have highs in the mid- to upper 90s and dew points in the low 70s, and it's those dew points that'll take the starch out of me. Bicycling and walking around the neighborhood will be bad enough, but 30 minutes or more in a car with no A/C? Nah. I'll skip that. Next week is supposed to return to more normal late summer weather.

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Lever-age

At the range last week I helped Michael Grasso dial in his .44 levergun with some .44 Special loads, just because having a gun in the house with an unsighted optic is anathema to all right-thinking people.

That mount for the Aimpoint Acro was pretty groovy. I hadn't gotten a good look at one before. I also dug the Magpul ELG furniture, although I'd expected to. I remember being skeptical of their shotgun stock before it came out and winding up having to eat crow, so...

Some people are skeptical, but I think a levergun has its uses, although it's possible to get carried away with one. 

I remember back at TacCon '19, Lee Weems made a pretty good case for why he used a .30-30 as a patrol rifle...

Punch Buggy

Commercials are some of the best movies out there these days. Also, the ID. Buzz is adorable as dammit.

One of the globe's historically bad neighborhoods.

The AP news headline reads thusly:

At least 13 people have died after a boat carrying migrants sunk off Yemen’s coast, UN says

It says something about how messed up that part of the world is that, not having read the story yet, I'm not 100% sure which direction the boat was going.

Odds are that it was full of people fleeing the Sudan and/or the Horn of Africa and hoping to get to the Gulf States, but given Saudi atrocities at the Yemeni border and the hot mess Yemen's been for years now, maybe they were going the other way and hoping to get to, I dunno, someplace reasonably stable like Egypt or Kenya.

*goes and reads story*

Yup, it was the former. Ethiopians hoping to get work in the Gulf States.

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Automotif DXXXVII..

Unable to compete at scale with the "Big Three" in Detroit, especially in the recessionary economy of the late Fifties, Studebaker decided to pivot toward the other end of the market.

The compact Lark, launched in 1959, actually shared a lot of the passenger compartment & roofline of the full-size Studebaker models, but had the front and rear overhangs shortened considerably. The wheelbase got a section taken out of it ahead of the firewall, too, shortening it to 108.5".

It was available in two basic trim levels. The Deluxe, which was the cheaper of the two, came as a two- or four-door pillared sedan or a two-door wagon. The fancier Regal could be had as a convertible, hardtop coupe, or wagon.

The trim on the cars, even the Regals, was quite restrained for a late-Fifties American car, and the Lark emphasized thriftiness.

The Alaskan Blue 1959 two-door pillared sedan in the photo would have sported a base MSRP of only $1,925, or a couple hundred bucks shy of $21,000 in today's dollars. While the glitzier models could be had with Studebaker's 259 cubic inch OHV V-8, the base Deluxe two-door sedan was only offered with the somewhat dated 169 cube flathead inline six, rated at 90 SAE gross horsepower.

While performance of the V-8 cars was reasonably peppy... the Lark's main competitor, the Rambler American, could only be had with a straight six ...the six cylinder Larks were torpid. The flathead Studebaker "Champion" inline six dated back to the 1930s, and the performance numbers reflected that.

Road & Track tested a '59 Lark Deluxe with a 3-speed manual and clocked a best 0-60 time of 21.0 seconds with a quarter mile run of 21.4 at 61 mph through the traps. A sufficiently determined driver who wasn't facing a headwind might eventually coax the thing up to a heady 80 mile per hour top speed.

People shopping at this end of the car market aren't generally looking for race cars, however, and they'd likely be more interested in the fuel mileage, which R&T recorded as ranging between 17 and 22 miles per gallon, which was quite parsimonious for the era.

Judging by the wheels and tires on this Lark, though, I doubt that the engine compartment bears much resemblance to the way it looked when it left the plant in South Bend, Indiana sixty-five years ago.

It was photographed with a Nikon D300S and 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 VR II zoom lens in August of 2024.

Automotif DXXXVI...

The 1984 model year was the swan song for the full-size rear-wheel drive, body-on-frame Oldsmobile Ninety-Eight coupe and sedan.

Along with their GM C-platform stablemates, the Cadillac De Ville and Buick Electra, they'd been downsized for the 1977 model year and, in search of more fuel efficiency, for 1981 the base engine in the 98 became the 252 cubic inch (sold as the 4.1L) Buick V-6...although oddly they didn't call those cars "Oldsmobile 96's".

In 1982 an extra super deluxe trim level called the "Regency Brougham" was added to the Olds 98 lineup, with super plush upholstery and electroluminescent opera lamps on the B-pillars. Also standard on the Brougham were a tilt wheel, cornering lamps, and a padded vinyl roof. 

Base engine in the '84 Brougham was the Olds 307 V-8 with a Rochester 4-barrel carb, rated at 140 SAE net horsepower. Optionally, masochists could order the wretched Olds 350 diesel, which put out 105 horsepower when it could be persuaded to run at all.

The original MSRP of the Silver Metallic 1984 Regency Brougham in the photo was $15,201, which was enough to let you go shopping on a Cadillac lot back then, so long as you stuck to well-optioned Cimarrons.

This one was photographed in August of 2024 using a Nikon D300S and 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 VR II zoom lens.

Meme Dump...

See the dot, hit a lot...

Back at the range with the Staccato C on Tuesday morning.

The reticle on the Trijicon RMR HD is selectable between a regular dot and an EOTech-esque "donut of death" that has a central dot, a large circle, and crosshairs-style tick marks at the top, bottom, and sides of the circle. That might be okay atop a carbine or something, and I guess it could be helpful for people who have difficulty finding the dot, but in that little slide-mounted MRDS window both Michael and I found it a little cramped and busy and we opted for the plain dot.

Anyway, the Staccato C made it through another two hundred rounds without any sort of malfunction, bringing the total round count thus far to six hundred rounds. Fourteen hundred left to go.

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Automotif DXXXV...

By the early Sixties, a Ford dealership had most of what we'd now consider a full-range model lineup. When the 1964 range debuted, a customer in a Ford store could choose among the sporty Thunderbird personal luxury coupe, the compact Falcon, the mid-size Fairlane, and the full-size Ford, which came in Custom, Custom 500, Galaxie, and Galaxie 500 trim levels.

In the photos above is a 1964 Ford Galaxie 500 Sunliner convertible in Skylight Blue. The '64 was the last model year for the Space Race-inspired lines of this generation, to be replaced for 1965 with a far more sharply-creased looking design

The base engine in the Sunliner was Ford's 223 cubic inch Milage Maker OHV inline six, rated at 138 SAE gross horsepower. Additionally, a buyer could opt for a range of V-8s: The Challenger 289 2-bbl rated at 195 horsepower, the 2-barrel Thunderbird 352 putting out 250 horsepower, the Thunderbird 390 four-barrel FE big block at 300 SAE gross, and the top of the range dual-quad 425 horsepower Thunderbird 427.

Going by the badges on the rocker panels and the dual exhausts, the convertible in the photos came with the 390 V-8. The transmission could have been a 3-speed Cruise-O-Matic, or a 3- or 4-speed manual.

Motor Trend tested a '64 Galaxie 500 XL hardtop sedan with the Thunderbird 390 motor and Cruise-O-Matic and got a 0-60 time of 9.3 seconds and a 17.6 quarter mile at 82 mph through the traps. With a cast iron drum at each corner, hauling the two-ton sedan down from 60mph took 163 feet. The convertible was only about a hundred pounds heavier than the hardtop, so the numbers should be similar. 

Check out those rocket exhaust taillights! You can easily picture some dude driving this thing to watch the first NASA Gemini mission launch.

This one was driving to Fresh Market in August of 2024, and not Cape Kennedy in March of 1965, and it was photographed with a Nikon D300S and 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 VR II zoom lens, which would have been alien space magic tech when this car was new.

Reliability Check...

My friend Michael Grasso was able to obtain a loaner RMR HD from Trijicon to use on the Staccato C test pistol. There's some question as to whether the fact that the element slightly overhanging the rear edge of the ejection port would affect the reliable ejection of spent cases or not.

I was optimistic, since I've put thousands of rounds through several FN509's wearing a Trijicon SRO, which similarly overhangs the rear of the ejection port, without any problems.

We mounted the optic, got it dialed in, and proceeded to crank out two hundred rounds at a pace that left the slide hot enough to be painful to the touch. Not only were there no malfunctions of any type, the brass does not seem to contact the sight housing at all.

This morning I'll get back to the range and we'll try some different brands of ammunition with varying power factors.

Meme Dump...

Creepy Swimmies

I'm not much of a fan of bugs in general, and the bigger they are, the more they creep me out. So I definitely would not have liked going for a swim during the Paleozoic, when six-foot long gigantic sea scorpions were the apex predators of the Iapetus Ocean off the coast of Gondwanaland.

Meme Dump...

Automotif DXXXIV...

1979 marked the tenth anniversary of the Trans Am package on the Pontiac Firebird, a vehicle that had loomed large in American lore and popular entertainment through the decade of the Seventies.

Pontiac commemorated the occasion with the Tenth Anniversary Trans Am, which was actually listed as a separate model with its own unique VIN prefix. (Firebird: S87, Esprit: T87, Formula: U87, Trans Am: W87, TATA: X87)

Only 7500 were built and the only option buyers had was a manual or automatic transmission. Manuals came with the Pontiac W72 400 cubic inch V-8 with an 8.1:1 compression ratio and rated at 220 SAE net horsepower.

The "6.6 Litre" badge on this one's hood scoop tells us that it's one of 5,683 with the automatic transmission and 185 horsepower L80 403 cid Oldsmobile Rocket V-8.

The homogenization of GM's engine lines was well underway by now: Your base Firebird buyers got Buick V-6's, Formulas and Trans Ams came with Olds engines, and buyers in California got saddled with a 2-barrel Chevy 305.

Incidentally, while the Trans Am had spent the Seventies as an atavistic Muscle Car Era throwback with a range of 455 and 400 cubic inch V-8 motors, 1979 would be the last year for that. Thanks to tightening regulations, the biggest motor under the hood of a 1980 T/A would be the aforementioned Californian 305.

The TATA got special two-tone Platinum paint with Charcoal accents, an extra large screaming chicken decal on the hood that sprawled clean across the fender tops, and those nifty "turbo" wheels (which would reappear later on actual turbo Trans Ams). The interior featured a full load of options and it was the first Trans Am to top the $10,000 dollar mark, with an MSRP of $10,620, the equivalent of about $46,000 in today's money.

Car and Driver tested a '79 Trans Am with the W72 400 motor and the WS6 handling package, and deleted the A/C, to boot, shaving a hundred pounds off the nose of their test car. They managed a 0-60 time of 6.7 seconds and a 15.3 second quarter mile at 96.6 miles per hour. Quick enough for its era, but still a shadow of its former self. The TATA in the photos... a couple hundred pounds heavier, its L80 down 35 horses to the W72, and saddled with a slushbox ...would have put up even less impressive numbers.

These photos were snapped in July of 2019 at the Indianapolis Hamfest using a Canon EOS M and EF-M 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS zoom lens.

I'm pretty sure my roommate's Lexus RX350, parked just out of frame, would demolish this Tenth Anniversary Trans Am in a drag race. I'm also pretty sure Trans Am Man could not possibly care less.

A new 2k round test begins...

So here's the new Staccato C with its redesigned magazine profile and 4" barrel. Staccato also sent along their new in-house match ammo, loaded with the 125gr Hornady Action Pistol projectile.

Yesterday morning saw me at the range with my friend Michael Grasso and 200 rounds of ammunition. I glorped some FP-10 lubricant onto the slide rails and around the flared lockup area on the barrel out by the muzzle and then it was off to the races. We only had two magazines, but we also had two Uplulas, so one of us would blaze away while the other hastily stuffed fifteen rounds into a magazine.

By the end of the 200 rounds, the pistol was noticeably toasty to the touch, however we were off to a promising start. The Staccato C went through the full cycle of operation every time with no malfunctions of any type to report. 200 rounds down, 1800 to go.

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Automotif DXXXIII...

In the late Eighties and early Nineties, Nissan's Pike Factory built a quartet of adorable, whimsical show-cars-for-the-street on the basic mechanicals of its normally staid and sober-sided March/Micra mini car.

The one pictured above is the S-Cargo, a teeny micro van whose name is officially short for "Small Cargo" but is obviously a play on words referring to its snail-like shape and Citroen-esque styling cues.

Under the hood you'll find Nissan's undersquare 74hp single-carb 1.5L OHC four, backed with a three-speed slushbox driving the front wheels. Behind the driver's and passenger's seats is an open cargo area. It's not large in the square footage department, but the yoinks of overhead room means the cubic footage is quite deluxe.

Something like eighty percent of the 10,685 produced from '89 to '91 were in white. They were all right-hand drive and only sold in Japan, through reservations and lotteries. This one was photographed in Indianapolis in September of 2021 using a Nikon 1 V2 and 1 Nikkor 18.5mm f/1.8 lens.

Hammer Time

I love watching the work in the blacksmith shed at the State Fair!

You can tell there's a lot of camaraderie among the folks swinging the hammers and shaping steel.

Plus the forges make for some dramatic pics...

Automotif DXXXII...

The 1951 model year saw Packard introduce an all-new "junior" model to complement the "senior" 300 and 400 model lines. Less expensive than the longer and more luxurious senior Packards, the new Packard 200 rode on a shorter 122-inch wheelbase.

Just to let you know that you weren't getting the full luxury experience of a senior Packard, in addition to the shorter wheelbase, you had smaller vertical taillights and no graceful swan hood ornament. You could, however, order all sorts of luxury options on your 200, like carpeting, a heater, a radio, and tinted window glass.

In 1952, Packard added a Deluxe model to the 200 sedan lineup. The one above is a 1952 Packard 200 Deluxe Touring Sedan in Argentine Gray. While it got the extra chrome teeth in the grille and the chrome jet intake doodads on the side that aped the more luxurious senior Packards, the small non-wraparound rear window still let you know you were sitting in the Packard Motor Car Company's cheap seats, almost like a plebeian forced to drive an Oldsmobile or something.

The base 200 Deluxe Touring Sedan started at $2.675 in '52, a bit over $31k in today's dollars, several hundred more than the Olds 88, and going wild with the options list could add up fast. Under the hood was the Thunderbolt flathead straight-eight engine, displacing 288 cubic inches and rated at 135 SAE gross horsepower.

The 200 only lasted for two model years, 1951-52, before Packard shuffled model designations again and the revived Clipper nameplate was used for the cheaper cars... "cheaper", of course, being relative. Packard meant cheaper like Oldsmobile, not like the Pontiacs and Dodges driven by the rabble across the tracks.

Automotif DXXXI...

1939 was a transitional model year for the Olds Motor Works (it was still a few years until the GM division would formally change its name to "Oldsmobile" to match its cars). Up through 1938 they'd been offering the Series F car with a straight six and the longer-wheelbase Series L model with a straight eight.

For 1939 that changed to the Series 60, with a straight six on a 115-inch wheelbase, and the Series 70 and 80, both on a 120-inch wheelbase, with the former having a six cylinder motor and the latter an eight.

The car in the photos is a 1939 Series 80 sedan, as can be sussed by the "VIII" badge on the grille. Back in the day that would have been a boast regarding the 257 cubic inch flathead inline eight cylinder motor under the hood, boasting 110 eye-watering horsepower.

As can be discerned by the alloy wheels, front disc brakes, and dual exhausts on this one, that's almost certainly not what's under the hood anymore. From this distance there's no knowing if it's even sitting on the original frame or if the hot rodding extends to having dropped the original Olds body on a later frame entirely.

These photos were taken in August of 2024 using a Nikon D2X and 18-70mm f/3.5-4.5G zoom lens.

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