Not Made in America

So, Glenn Youngkin has released a very patriotic, motivational commercial, of the sort floated by people trial-ballooning presidential runs.

It’s time to usher in a new era of American values. It’s our turn to choose life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. pic.twitter.com/IH8enVaL5B

— Glenn Youngkin (@GlennYoungkin) May 18, 2023

There's kind of a technical problem with the obligatory "Bless our Troops, Rah Rah Military" part of the clip, though.

Pick a U.S. military jet instead of a Eurofighter Typhoon, Glenn.

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Oops.

So at CanCon, I was there as a freelancer with the RECOIL crew helping to cover the event. On the first morning we got our event staff name badges and everyone sets to filling theirs out with Sharpie.

It wasn't until I looked around and realized that everyone had been carefully printing "Fred Smith, RECOIL Magazine" or "Suzy Jones, Off-Grid Magazine" did I realize I might have been doing it wrong...

A little embarrassing, there.

I might as well have printed something dumb like "I'M GUMBY, DAMMIT!"

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Cracked Up

It finally happened...

The iPad 6th Gen that I picked up in New Hampshire back in 2018 has been doing yeoman work since then as a mobile writing machine.

However a few weeks ago, I was exiting Fresh Market and juggling groceries, camera, and iPad when the latter item squirted out from under my arm, spun through the air with its keyboard case fluttering (in seeming slow motion, as these things always happen) and hit the concrete of the sidewalk smack on the corner of the case.

The screen now sports a spiderweb of cracks like a ghetto cell phone.

Fortunately Amazon is having that big "Early Access Prime Sale" today, so I picked up its replacement for 18% off, as well as a replacement keyboard cover. (The 6th Gen iPad was the last to use the 9.7" screen of the original iPad.)

This time I remembered to get a keyboard cover with a loop for the Apple Pencil, too! I got the pencil back when I got the iPad for a screaming deal because the Office Despot up in West Lebanon, NH was closing them out, but I've hardly used it for lack of a handy way to keep it attached to the iPad. I bet it'll be turbo-handy for photo editing.

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Side Note...

The previous post could be subtitled "How I found myself in my pajamas and winter boots, squatting in the snow in the back yard with my EOS 5D Mark II and a macro lens, before realizing I'd locked myself out of the house in 20°F weather and had to bang on the glass to get Bobbi to let me back in."

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Who Guards the Guardian?

 I've talked up Surefire's Guardian before. It's my go-to travel light, especially on the (admittedly rare) occasions when I fly and don't check a bag. It's a one-light solution that gives me everything from a wide, even 15-lumen MaxVision beam for finding my way to the loo between tent pegs and camp chairs at Paul-E-Palooza to shining a conventional, focused 800-lumen spotlight on the tree line across the lawn at Castle Frostbite. 

Even if I have my regular EDCL2-T along with me, the honkin' big internal batteries on the Guardian save wear on the pocket light's CR123s. I also liked that it could theoretically be used to juice up a dead phone or other USB accessory...

I say "theoretically", because I did inadvertently discover one weakness. While it claims to use a "USB-C" connector, it's a variety of USB-C that matches no other connector in Roseholme Cottage. Having not used it since SHOT back in January, I pulled it out of a traveling jacket pocket to find it was flatter than the Texas Panhandle and I couldn't find the cable. No other cable in the house, not even on the numerous squids, fit it.

It's going to be in the camera bag pocket I use for other critical cables from now on, ensuring that I always know where it's at, as well as making sure it comes with when I travel.

Range Fumbles

Imagine my chagrin when I decided to be clever by swapping out the grip module in the .357SIG conversion kit with the one from an original X-Carry...and then I get to the range and notice that the .40/.357 magazine has the floorplate with the finger-grip dinguses and the original gangsta X-module isn't relieved for them. 

D'oh! 

At least the ammo fairy left a forgotten box of 115gr TulAmmo in the trunk of the car, so it wasn't a complete waste of a range trip.

Speaking of TulAmmo...

That's a weird little failure to eject on the last round, with the spent case performing a backflip into the ejection port. I've had pretty good luck with rather a lot of cases of this stuff over the last few years, but in this one box I had this failure to eject and two failures to extract, one of which saw the claw pop off the case halfway out of the chamber and the other left a stuck case in the chamber that required a bit of force to be applied to the slide to get it out. I was half expecting a split case or something, but it appeared normal to the eye.

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Sizing Error

Monday's range trip, I decided to do a bit of "just for fun" shooting in addition to the monotonous pew-pew-pew of trying to build up the round count on a test gun. And few things are as "just for fun" as the little Vz.61 Skorpion in 7.65 Browning, aka .32ACP.

Had a couple of interesting malfunctions before it was noticed that somehow some 9mm Browning (aka .380) ball had found its way into my .32 Auto ammo can. The two rounds have identical case head dimensions, with the semi-rimmed .32 having a smaller diameter case, and so are easier to confuse than most.

I need to make some time to weed it all out.
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Oops.

Corporal Somebody-or-Other apparently never heard that it's rarely a career-enhancing move to do something that causes the governor have to start his day off by making apologetic phone calls to cable news CEOs. #cnnarrest https://t.co/Yo25wiRtwK

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) May 29, 2020

That was unexpected...

I'd been idly thinking that maybe I shouldn't have the window open so far while I wasn't there to supervise; the screen is kinda flimsy and it didn't take a lot of imagination to envision Huck or Holden shredding their way through it to try and reach a bird or squirrel.

What I didn't envision was a bounding cat having the inertia to pop the thing right out of its moorings.

Fortunately there was a happy ending, but given the speed of events, it's not ever getting opened that wide again even if I'm sitting right there.
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Too many containers...

>be me

>go digging through S&W boxes to find the one for the 2" 64 you're taking to the gun shop today for extra SHOT Show shekels

>find box for 3" Model 610 you sold years ago and realize you could have made an extra hundred bucks

>dammit

Also, um... Hey, Shootin' Buddy? I found the box for that nickel Model 38 no-dash I sold you back in two-thousand-aught-nine or whenever.
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Serious Gear Fail

Remember a couple years ago when an IMPD officer had his Glock discharge in the holster when the officer sitting next to him got some bit of gear inside the light-bearing Safariland and then stood up?

Well, just this past week another IMPD officer was tussling with a shoplifting suspect who got on top of him in the ground fight and attempted to pull the officer's pistol out of the holster. The holster's retention worked, but the dude managed to get a finger into the mouth of the holster and fire the still-holstered weapon, hitting the officer in the leg.

Not all light-bearing holsters are created equal, and some obviously have way too much clearance around the trigger guard. This kinda defeats one of the main purposes of a holster.
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Fabricating...

So, once upon a time, I bought a Frommer Stop. This is an intriguing little historical footnote of a pistol whose main purpose in existing is to serve as the answer to a Trivial Pursuit: Firearms Edition question:

"The two major pistols to operate on the long recoil operating principle are the Webley Mars and the ____________."

Thing is, when I finally got around to test-firing it, it didn't extract the spent shell.

On closer examination, most of the extractor was gone.

Now, on a blowback operated pistol the extractor isn't, strictly speaking, what you'd call necessary. On a gun like a PPK or Hi Point or Colt 1903, the extractor is only really needed to extract unfired rounds from the chamber. Tip-up barrel blowback autos like those from Beretta or their Taurus clones don't even have extractors. During firing, the spent shell is blown backward out of the chamber by the equal and opposite reaction to the same gasses that push the bullet out the front.

On a short recoil operated pistol, i.e. one where the barrel and breech travel backward locked together for a length of travel shorter than the length of the cartridge, you might still get some functionality with a broken extractor. There might be enough residual chamber pressure at the moment of unlocking to kick the spent case out of the chamber, although without the extractor claw to hold it in position to meet the ejector correctly, there could still be issues.

On a long recoil operated arm like the Frommer Stop, however, the barrel and breech remain locked together all the way to the rear, and the extractor is needed to hold the shell in place against the breechface as the barrel returns forward. Without the extractor, the round will likely just stay in the chamber.



No problem. Just buy a new extractor, right? Ha ha ha.

So, maybe make a new extractor? I worked at Coal Creek Armory at the time, and we had a full machine shop and gunsmiths on the premises who could build a gun from scratch with a lathe and a mill and a block of steel.

Okay, first, it wasn't like just the claw was gone. That would be easy enough to weld up and re-cut. This would require fabricating an entirely new part, and it's not like machinist's drawings were available for the piece.

So just get another Frommer Stop extractor and duplicate it! Except that I could count the number of Frommer Stops I've seen in the wild in my 25 years of manning gun store counters and attending gun shows without taking off both mittens.

Eventually, after a couple years of trying to find one locally that we could borrow to copy, the acquisition of a second gun was required to duplicate the part.

(This memory was brought up by a discussion on old cameras on the internet last night. And an extractor is a lot simpler part than anything you're liable to find in, say, a Ducati Sogno.)
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I was a little cranky this morning.

I just accidentally saved my ENTIRE Lightroom catalog to my "Gun School Pictures" directory. Twice.
How's your morning going?

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) December 3, 2018

Sorry 'bout that.

I had a video clip on here yesterday morning of a dude getting a piece of brass down the back of his hoodie at an indoor range and, in the process of doing the hot brass dance trying to extract it, cranking off a pair of ND's to his six o'clock, narrowly missing an RSO.

The video was security camera footage from the range that had been posted to a secret Facebook group by the RSO in question. He had asked that it remain in the group (I don't know which group; I'm not a member) but someone leaked it and it went viral.

Unless I'm contacted by dude saying it's okay to repost, I'm leaving it down. Just because everybody else is violating dude's confidence is no reason I should.
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Panic

Olympus's M Zuiko Digital ED 12-40mm f/2.8 Pro lens is a fantastic constant-aperture zoom that covers wide-angle to portrait focal lengths with a fairly fast maximum aperture and is good for all but the dimmest indoor settings. I've had good luck with it in the classroom at last weekend's FPF Training class in Terre Haute as well as shooting "grips & grins" type shots at the Tac-Con presenter's dinner the weekend before.

It uses a pretty slick selector to switch back and forth between auto and manual focusing: Slide the manual focus ring to the rear (there's a slight detent) and it exposes the focus range numbers on the lens barrel. Now you're in manual mode.

The downside is that if you do slide this ring back inadvertently, it can take you a good fifteen minutes of panicked digging through the camera's menus and turning it off and on again, all while thinking you've somehow bricked your very expensive lens, before you realize what's up.

Well, that's embarrassing...

Some of the most fun I have on my annual New Mexico trip is taking photos of roller derby. I don't get to do much sports photography, so this is my yearly chance.

Last night I tried making do with the cameras and bodies at hand, putting the Sony 50mm f/1.8 on the NEX-5T and then getting daring and mounting the old Leitz Elmar 9cm f/4 on the Ricoh GXR body to shoot some fully manually in B&W. If there's anything more hipster than using 1955-vintage German glass on a Japanese digital camera to shoot pictures of roller derby, you'd need to be drinking PBR ironically to find out what it is.

Shooting with the NEX-5T was a breeze. Put it in aperture priority and crank it open enough to where you're still getting ~1/200th shutter speeds, and then trust auto focus and mash the button at the start of each jam, keeping the pack centered in the frame and know that the shutter whirring away at up to 10 frames per second would grab something good.

Using the manual focus lens on the Ricoh GXR was a whole different experience. Having to shoot wide open or at f/5.6 meant that at all but the longest shots across the rink, depth of field issues were a constant worry. I lost plenty of shots to "almost-but-not-quite-in-focus". The lighting was perfect for B&W shooting, though, and even though I had to press the shutter button for each one, I think I wound up shooting more frames with the manual Ricoh than either of the automated cameras.

We got back to the Nerd Ranch and I started throwing stuff from one Compact Flash (the yeoman Nikon D200) and two SD cards onto my laptop.

As I started sharing pics around, everybody was noting that the internet in the house was lagging something fierce. It was noted again when we were binge-watching a few episodes of Rick and Morty later that evening.

It wasn't until I sat down at the computer and checked my email this morning that I realized what had happened, since that's when I got the email cheerily informing me that all my photos had been uploaded to my One Drive account. Yes, I had failed to disable automatic photo uploading for this roadtrip...

It's something I never notice at home, because auto uploading five or ten pictures happens seamlessly in the background. Nearly two gigs of derby pics dumped on the hard drive all at once? That's a bandwidth hog.

D'oh!
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Disappointed...

I saw that a member at a forum on which I post had the handle "Woo Pig".

I chuckled, thinking that was a clever riff on "War Pig". Like maybe the dude's into both firearms and aromatherapy and moxibustion or something?

I clicked on his profile to discover he was an Arkansas Razorbacks fan.

*sigh*

I like the world in my head better...
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Unbelievable.

So, I had planned on a range visit today, because I've got deadlines fast approaching on a couple reviews and I wanted to get one of them as cleared up as possible before the weather turned. I needed to chrono two more loadings and, if I hopped to it and got out the door early enough, maybe I could shoot it for groups today, too.

I woke up with my head pounding like the soundtrack to Zulu Dawn and every time I'd roll from one side to the other, the bones of my skull would creak and groan like a submarine changing depth. Oh, I didn't want to get out of bed at all...

I finally dragged my carcass upright at 1000 and threw clothes on. If I had to postpone shooting for groups 'til Wednesday morning, I could at least knock out the remaining chrono testing. The range bag, 9mm ammo can, chrono, and target stand were all already secured in the trunk. I was so prepped to roll that my gate card was already in the door pocket of the car and ear pro was in the passenger seat so I could hit the ground running when I got there.

I drove across town, dodging inattentive cell-phone users and suicidal pedestrians down High School Road like some kind of bass-ackwards game of Frogger, and got to the range, signed in at the club house, pulled up to the bay, and...

Anybody notice the item that wasn't on that list?

Yeah, the actual, you know, gun.

Derp.

Well, I'd left the Glock 19 and the PPX in the range bag, so the trip wasn't a complete wash.

Walther PPX in a "Shaggy" AIWB holster from Custom Carry Concepts.

It looks like I'll be out in the cold come Wednesday AM, unless they're wrong about the rain tomorrow.
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"I think I see your problem..."

So I took the Mauser .25 apart and laid the pieces out on a paper towel for an Arms Room post this morning...

See the recoil spring guide rod? Note how it's flanged on one end to hold the spring? Well, it will go in the gun when oriented like you see it in this picture, but the gun won't go back together because you've got it backwards, there, Einstein.

D'oh!

(This is one downside to accumulating old pistols; I've had this one gathering dust in the back of the safe for yoinks, and its 7.65 big brother even longer, but I haven't had one apart in... well, a while. You forget little details in that time period.)
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Boresighting perils...

So, on Facebook somebody asks about sighting in their first scoped Bambi-zapper. Several people chime in with boresighting advice and dial-in tips and tricks. One guy points out in an aside that

"If the rifle is used you might want to mechanical zero the scope. Misaligned mounting and someone putting clicks on it can leave you little adjustment in one direction or t'other."

...which reminded me of a tale...

'Way back in the Fall of Aught-One, I ordered a handy little Ruger No.1 RSI in .243 Win from Davidson's and purchased a used Leupold fixed 12x scope for it from a coworker. (Yes, current me laughs at old me's choice of optics, too; that thing wanted a fixed four or low-power variable glass, not a lunar observatory.)

He offered to mount and boresight the scope for me, which was nice. As I left to run some errands and fetch lunch, he had my little rifle in the cradle on the counter and was breaking out the scope ring lapping kit. When I returned to the shop, the lapping kit was as yet unused and he was spinning a ring reamer and standing in a disturbing amount of metal shavings from the scope rings.

"What's up?" I asked, cleverly.

"Here," he said, plopping the Loopie glass in the rings and tightening them down, "Look through there at the collimator and see if you can tell."

Sure enough, the crosshairs were 'way over at the edge of the grid on the old-style ground glass boresighter, and the adjustment screw was pretty much all out of clicks in the opposite direction. This was not good.

After a bit more grinding, it was apparent that we were going to run out of scope ring before we got the thing dialed in, and the base was, in fact, unusable. (We were fast on the draw like that.)

The rings on a No.1 are mounted on a little quarter-rib, which is secured to the barrel with screws fore and aft. My co-worker began to loosen the forward screws and, when he got down to, like, the last the last half-turn on the second one, the front of the sight base torqued to the side off the barrel, pulling the screw free with what my mind insists on remembering as a *ping* but which was more likely a *click*.

With the quarter-rib off the gun and the upper scope-mounting surface held level, it was obvious to the naked eye that the two "feet", the mating areas at the front and rear on the bottom of the quarter rib where it sat on the barrel, weren't machined anything remotely like concentric. In other words, while the "rib" part of the quarter rib was nice and straight, the feet were askew, and tightening both feet down flush to the gun twisted the formerly-straight rib like a piece of rotini.

"I don't have to worry about that!" says the Cletus in the back, at this point in the tale, "I only buy nice guns!" Hey, this was on a rifle that had an MSRP of something like seven or eight bills even back then, right? You could have darn near bought two Remington Wally World specials for what this thing cost.

Ruger handled it well though; we called them and they sent a fresh quarter rib and a set of rings gratis, without even a core charge. I still have the cattywhampus quarter rib someplace, I guess. I think we pitched the rings.