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...

Ignorance is no excuse, they say…

I just closed a column with the sentence “Know the law, so the law doesn’t get to know you” and I could have kept going for another thousand words.

For instance, there are a lot of very pro-2A states with very relaxed, liberal handgun carry laws that, at the same time, have strict prohibitions against loaded long guns in vehicles.

This isn’t an “anti-gun” thing, it’s the result of the state having a strong hunting culture and therefore having laws intended to thwart poaching and “road-hunting”.

This is the kind of thing folks need to be aware of on roadtrips. Don’t just glance at your handy CCW reciprocity map and think that it’s an indicator of the entire regulatory climate along your route.

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The Legend That Won't Die

Over at Commander Zero's place, I ran across this blurb:

Functionally, both should, in theory, have an advantage over the AR-15 in terms of reliability due to the gas systems of the 180 and JAKL not venting gases into the receiver. Although, to be fair, if you fire enough .223 in one session to gum up your AR you probably have a much bigger problem on your hand. But, on the other hand, a system that can be indifferent to the occasional benign neglect is always nice. You don’t always have time to detail clean your gun at the end of the day.

My reaction was something like this:

Wtf Time GIFfrom Wtf GIFs

So, when I took that carbine class from Pat Rogers, he had me using "Filthy 14", rather than my own blaster. I know it had been cleaned once back around the 26,000-round mark, but I'm not sure it had been cleaned since, although some grime was probably knocked off as parts were replaced on schedule. 

It was certainly dirty enough to spew a fine mist of carbon mixed with Slip 2000 with every shot. Seriously, the gun was so filthy that I got freckled on my hands and cheeks with garbage blowing out of the receiver. Keep it lubed and it will run.

I don't know that my current school carbine has ever been what you'd call "cleaned", outside of having a bore snake pulled through it a few times. It stays well-lubed and that's about it, now that all it gets used for is classes. (If I were still using it, rather than a gauge, as a house gun, I'd keep it cleaned on general principles.) 

No matter how many times this pre-GWOT myth gets debunked, it somehow lingers in the collective consciousness of a segment of the gun-owning community.

(IMO, the main reason to prefer a piston gun to a DI one is if you're running a suppressor. The increased back pressure can spew a lot of nastiness into the shooter's face with a direct impingement gun.)

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The French Correction

So, set the wayback machine for the summer of 2007, when I was still living in Knoxville, right after I left Coal Creek Armory. Having some spare time on my hands, I drove over to Nashville to spend a few days at Oleg Volk's place, hanging out and providing an eclectic selection of guns for photographic purposes.

The first morning there, Oleg and a few others were heading out to go do some shooting. Having just finished a good long stretch of six-day workweeks at an indoor range, I begged off. "I'll just chill here and read, if it's all the same to you guys. If you want to shoot anything I brought, feel free to drag it along."

Among the guns they elected to take was the MAS-49/56. I handed Oleg a couple boxes of Portuguese FNM-branded full metal jacket ammunition and told him to knock himself out.

He asked where to hold on the target at a hundred yards.

"How the hell should I know?" I replied, "I've had it a couple years, but never got around to shooting it."

I spent a pleasant couple hours in silence with a book, and when the crew came trooping back in from the range, Oleg had an unhappy look on his face and was nursing his right thumb.

"What happened?"

"The rifle tried to break my hand."

Yikes. The internet wouldn't be happy with me if I broke their photographer, no matter how indirectly.

It turned out that Oleg let the bolt fly forward to chamber the first round, and the rifle promptly slamfired, kicking up a gout of dirt a few yards in front of the line and pranging the base of Oleg's thumb with that big round nylon knob on the MAS charging handle.

A bit of research on the internets turned up the fact that this is what we would call a Known Issue with some ammunition, since the MAS has a large, heavy firing pin meant to deliver a healthy lick to a hard French military primer.

The two solutions for this I uncovered at the time were to either have a 'smith lighten the factory pin, which seemed pretty iffy, or to track down one of a small number of titanium firing pins someone had allegedly made in unicorn-like quantities a few years earlier.

The importance I assigned to this task can be assessed by the fact that I finally got around to it last month...

CONTINUED AT THE OTHER BLOG...WITH PICTURES!

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Gratuitous Gun Pr0n #212...

It only took fifteen years, but I finally got around to it. Details forthcoming...

MAS-49/56 and a box of commercial 7.5 French with a positively quaint price tag.

Round Tuit

Photo by Oleg Volk

Among those projects that's been sitting on a back burner way too long, I really need to get the firing pin on my MAS 49/56 lightened so it will run this FNM and Pervy Partisan commercial fodder reliably without the occasional slam-fire. They're such cool rifles, with .308-level wallop but handling like a shorty SKS and a usable receiver-mounted peep sight.

Open to suggestions. Or maybe someone has one of those now-unobtanium titanium ones lying around?

EDIT: Having posed the same question on the Book of Faces, it was answered by exactly who you'd think would be Johnny-on-the Spot with solutions for French blasters. Problem solved, problem staying solved. 

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Frontstuffer Terminology

This is about my speed when it comes to black powder rifles.

While I can nerd out at some length over antique military breechloading rifles, I've never been interested enough in muzzleloading military longarms to collect any. I've long toyed with acquiring a Brown Bess, or at least a decent repro, but more as a wallhanger than anything I'd actually shoot much.

They came in a fairly bewildering variety of lengths and intended uses, and there's a pretty decent 101-level breakdown of the terminology here.

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Quick Reference Guides

I mentioned the other day keeping a copy of Green Eyes, Black Rifles near my desk for handy reference, and so I figure I'll list out the other books I keep handy. Sometimes it's easier than opening another tab, and sometimes they contain info that's not really otherwise searchable or available online.

• Some edition of Cartridges of the World. (I'm currently using a fairly old 12th Edition, but the old stuff doesn't change much.)


• The Standard Catalog of Smith & Wesson.


• History of Smith & Wesson by Roy Jinks.


• Smith & Wesson Hand Guns, McHenry & Roper.


• Smith & Wesson 1857-1945: A handbook for collectors, Neal & Jinks.


• Bolt Action Military Rifles of the World.


• Collecting Classic Bolt Action Military Rifles.


• Military Bolt Action Rifles 1841-1918.


• Savage Automatic Pistols*, James Carr.


• Savage Pistols, Brower.


• Kuhnhausen's shop manuals for the S&W revolver and the Colt .45 Automatic.


• Factory armorer's manuals for the Glock and M&P.


• A Textbook of Automatic Pistols**, R.K. Wilson


• Textbook of Pistols and Revolvers, Hatcher

  *The Carr book is essential for anyone who wants to venture into collecting Savage pocket autos. It concisely breaks down the 1907, 1915, and 1917 into all their consecutive subtypes in chronological order by the different distinguishing features, and it's small enough to carry along to gun shows.

**R.K. Wilson's delightful textbook, as complete a guide to early autos as there is, is being reprinted in paperback!

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Ah, the Hanyang 88...

I still remember buying mine...

"...a crude Chinese copy of the Steyr copy of the German original. The wood was pretty beat up and it was missing a bottom metal screw, the buttplate, and a stock fitting out by the nosecap. The exterior was surprisingly un-rusted with no real pits and a smooth brown patina, while the action was caked with a sludgelike mix of old WD-40 varnish and dust.

I asked him what he wanted for it, more out of curiosity than anything else, and he said something about how he'd wanted $100, but these guys were telling him it wasn't worth that, so he'd take $75. I thanked him for his time and walked on.

I stopped at a table run by some crufflers I knew and asked them if they'd seen the abomination. They had. They asked if I'd looked down the bore. "No, why?" I replied

"Because the last person to stick a bore brush down it pulled what was left of the rifling out in a cloud of orange dust," they laughed.

It turned out they'd offered him $35 or $40 for it, which it was probably worth in spare parts, and he'd left in something of a huff. I smiled at the story and continued my stroll.

A couple of hours later, I ran into him again, still dragging the gun-shaped tomato stake with him. "No luck?" I inquired, sympathetically.

"Nah," he said, dejectedly, "They all say it's worthless 'cept maybe for spare parts."

I need this thing like I need a hole in my head... but I am such a sucker for a poor, neglected military rifle.

I rummaged through my pocket... A twenty, a five, and four ones.

"Will you take $29 for it?" He would and did."

Tab Clearing...

• The last gasoline-engined V-series Cadillac?


• A really cool photo essay about sheep ranching on the Russian steppe.


• The Glock carbine was a rumor when I was still a moderator on GlockTalk twenty years ago. It's still a rumor today, albeit a more concrete one.


• Adrianople: Twilight of the Legions.

Deflecting...

Louis Awerbuck had an interesting "final exam" for his firearms classes, a time pressure enhanced shooting drill on a target he called his "South African Computer" (Louis was a vocally proud Luddite).

Louis dispensing wisdom, this time on mechanical offset.

Said target consisted of a clothed torso mannequin target, surrounded by several other clothed torso mannequin targets, all of which were on hinged, pivoting arms so that Louis could control their bobbing gyrations by tugging on lines. Students went through this in pairs and, at the "go" signal, there was a very limited amount of time for one student to step off at an angle and the other to stay on the start line, and one or the other to neutralize the moving "Bad Guy" in the middle of the bobbing, weaving crowd of "No Shoot" targets with a single shot.

During that first handgun class back in 2009, one of the students took their shot, the baseball cap on the "Bad Guy" went flying, and the range was called cold. On going downrange, the head of the "Bad Guy" target was unmarred, although when the baseball cap was picked up off the berm, there was a distinct divot in the bill of the cap from the student's .45ACP pistol bullet.

"Heeer's a cloo for you," said Louis in his broad accent, and proceeded to relate the tale of the same sort of incident...in a shotgun class...with a 12ga slug.

Yes, the brim of a ball cap can divert a 12ga slug or a .45ACP pistol bullet enough to turn a hit into a miss.

A twig...or a furring strip...can do the same with a rifle bullet.

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Speed and Expansion

Four layers of denim is a challenging barrier for expansion, especially for slow projectiles and older hollow point designs. For a slow, older hollow point? Expansion actually becomes somewhat less than likely.

On the left, a 225gr .45 Colt Winchester Silvertip, and on the right is a 230gr .45ACP Remington Golden Saber. Both were fired out of a Blackhawk Convertible, one of the birdshead ones with a 4.6" tube.

The Silvertip peeled a petal back but the Golden Saber didn't deform noticeably at all. Both exited the block on the far side and were stopped by the cloth on the backside. Penetration was adequate without being excessive, but they didn't do anything a LRN projectile wouldn't have done.

A Silvertip from the same lot was fired into the block from a 16" lever-action carbine and performed rather differently...

Out of the levergun, the round had enough steam to expand violently, but still enough momentum to traverse the entire length of the block, coming to rest slightly protruding from the far side. Nearly ideal performance for a pistol bullet, it just needed to be launched from a long gun to attain it.

Incidentally, we also fired a .45 Colt Hornady Critical Defense load, using the 185gr FTX flex-tip projectile. It also expanded violently but, being on the light-for-caliber side of things, stalled out after around 12" of penetration.

This is marginal performance at best. On the upside, if fired out of a CCW revolver with a 4" or shorter barrel, it likely wouldn't have expanded at all and would have therefore penetrated just fine. Or you could have used a cheaper semiwadcutter.

Footnote from a discussion on the Bookface: 

"It's my experience that, as velocities go up, Clear Gel results get wonkier due to the difference in the shear characteristics of the two mediums, to the point that at rifle or near-rifle velocities there's no meaningful correlation to be even guessed at. I also try and avoid reading any tea leaves in Clear Gel from where or how quickly the projectile upsets. 

It's easy to draw unnecessary conclusions from the fact that duty handgun rounds that perform well in 10% ordnance gel also tend to perform well in Clear Gel."

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Beggars Can't Be Choosers...

...but they should still be a little choosy.

Palmetto State Armory appears to have a sizable inventory of Mannlicher-Carcano M91/24 TS carbines in stock. In this time of ammo panics and gun shortages, someone caught out without a long gun might think that's a viable choice. After all, it's a former military-issue longarm, right? And what could be more rugged and reliable than a military surplus bolt-action rifle?

As a bonus, 6.5x52mm Carcano ammo may be expensive, but a quick check at Ammoseek.com shows that there's plenty of Prvi Partizan and Norma ammo out there to be had, unlike 5.56 or 7.62x39 right now.

There's something to be said for a short, fast-handling carbine in an intermediate military caliber like 6.5 Carcano, but there are rather a lot of flies in this ointment. For starters, the Carcano action is clunky and awkward; there's a reason you don't see it serving as a popular basis for sporters the way the Mauser and its derivatives are.

Secondly (and a lot more importantly) the rifle uses the Mannlicher system of feeding from en bloc clips. Each clip holds six rounds, and the whole assembly is fed into the open action, with the spent clip dropping out the bottom of the receiver after it's empty. Like the Garand, the rifle is a single-shot without the clip. Unlike the Garand, the world is not knee-deep in Carcano clips.

Even as a battlefield pickup, this would be a gray loot drop.
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This is weird...

The M1903 Mark I, M1917 Eddystone, and M1 Garand are all gone from my collection. I still have a bunch of .30-'06 ammunition, though, and the only rifle I have left to fire it is a Brazilian Mauser.

This is like how I no longer have the FAL, M1A, or HK91, and the only thing I have left to use up all this .308 is a Spanish FR8.
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Reach Out & Touch

Objectively? It's big, heavy, holds only eight rounds, uses an ammunition feeding setup a lot more awkward than a detachable box magazine, has an external op rod of Rube Goldbergian complexity, fires an unnecessarily large round, and has the mechanical safety lever placed in an unsafe location.

Also objectively? The weight soaks up the recoil of the powerful round, the sights are nearly ideal for long range accuracy with irons, and it was the best general-issue infantry rifle of its day.

Watching Stingray use his to lay down some hate on the long range steel targets made me miss mine something fierce.

Having at one time owned the SVT-40, M1 Garand, and FN-49, my practical side doesn't regret selling the first two and keeping the FN, but my sentimental side sometimes does.
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QotD: Reach Out And Touch Edition...

"If you're not a shooter, that might not sound like a big deal, but hitting a target more than a quarter mile away with no optical magnification and eyes no longer young — that's something."

Sig Sauer VIP Range Day pics, part 2...

Sig Sauer 716

When Sig Sauer announced an in-house optics line, it was hard to escape an ingrained reflex: Generally when you see anything from pocket knives to parkas with a gun company name/logo on it, it's junky licensed merchandise where the company's trying to make a fast buck hawking their legacy to people who will pay money to advertise the company's name on a crappy Taiwanese Zippo clone.

Thus, the initial supposition when you see that Sig is going to have their name on optics is that they're going to be godawful airsoft-grade Chinesium garbage like Barska or UTG. Then you hear "No, Sig isn't licensing their name to someone, they started their own optics division."

"You mean they bought some lame brand like Tasco and...?"

"No, Sig stood up an entire new optics division and poached talent from around the industry to do it. They've designed their own scopes. Manufacture is definitely farmed out to various contractors, though."

Huh.

I remain very wary. Optics are someplace where the penalties for cheaping out can be immediate and harsh, but these do not appear to be cheap optics at all. I was proven wrong in my skepticism for the Burris MTAC, so I'm willing to be proven wrong again.

JayG is happy because he hit the thing and wants everyone to know.

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From discussion elsewhere...

A conversation about Mosins generated this musing...

"On the bright side, at least we weren't buried under a deluge of $49 Mle.1886 rifles and crates of nickel-a-round corrosive 8mm Lebel. I can only imagine the contortions neckbeards would be going through to justify the awesomeness of those.

Although, now that it's in my head, the idea of a Tapco'ed-out Lebel has a sort of perverse attraction."

This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things, Pt. I

Speaking as someone who talks about guns on the internet, it pains me to admit that one doesn't need to look long or hard to find reasons why "internet gun advice" has become the proverbial equivalent of "politician's promises" or "Confederate money" as a synonym for "valueless".

Everyone knows the guy on the forums who insists that his off-brand, low-budget pistol has been just (and I quote) "flawless" over...oh, it must be thousands and thousands of rounds, but who knows? It's not like he keeps a log book, but it's a lot!

There are the devotees of one brand or caliber or type of gun who come up with the most tortured reasons why their choice is best choice, and if you don't agree, you're just a "hater" or a "gun snob".

And on YouTube, you can't swing a 5.11 Tactical man purse without hitting some would-be instructor who doesn't know his ass from the hole he's fixin' to shoot in it.

Here's a bit of internet gun rationalizing of the second type:

Let me clear up some of his confusion: the answer comes down to ammo prices.

You can get spam cans of 7.62x54r for as low as $0.23 per round if you know where to look, whereas cheap .308 starts at $0.42 per round and .30-06 is a full $0.15/round more expensive than that.

The Ruger American Rifle comes in a bevy of calibers, but it does not come in 7.62x54R, so you can’t train as cheaply with it as you can the Mosin. If you shoot a lot, then over time the $1,000 Mosin is ultimately a lot cheaper than the $300 Ruger American Rifle.

Let's check his own math: He's claiming a $700 price difference in guns and a $0.19/rd difference in ammo costs. He says that if I shoot a lot, then the pimped Mosin pays for itself over time.

Gratuitous New England Westinghouse Mosin receiver shot

Let's cipher out the gozintas on this! *sharpens pencil* Hmmm...scribble scribble...carry the two...

At a 19¢/round gap between the two, you would need to shoot 3,684 rounds to make up a $700 cost difference.

Not that I think they don't exist, but I would like to sometime see either a Ruger American or a Mosin Nagaint with 3,500+ documented rounds in a gun book, especially the Mosin, which are often fed diets of corrosive ammo, bimetallic jacketed bullets, et cetera. That's probably most of the gun's barrel life, right there, or at least most of the accurate part of it.

The dude then suggests that Ruger make the American in 7.62x54R, which, given the diameter of the case rim, is unlikely without major alterations to the design and thus seems highly unlikely.

It's okay to like stuff just because you like it. You don't have to try and go out and justify it as the best choice for the zombie apocalypse or whatever.
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Carbine 2016...

It's been almost three years since I last put together an AR carbine, and I've been getting the itch to try a lot of stuff I've seen and learned over that time period. So, when a gun with most of the features I was looking for came up at a good buddy discount recently, I jumped on it and began setting it up to experiment with the new ideas...

 First off, 2016 is going to be the year I stick my toe in the water with a low-power variable optic, or "LPV".

LPVs are all over 3 Gun competition and seem to be more common on working guns too, these days. They help with target discrimination, and at close ranges an illuminated reticle model like the Burris MTAC 1-4 x 24 above can be used as a jackleg red dot.

I know, I know...If one has a decent optic in a good mount, iron sights these days are pretty much woobies; just there to make one feel good by their presence. Pat Rogers, on seeing my 2013 carbine wearing its Daniel Defense fixed BUIS when I showed up for class last spring, pointed out to me that they'd seen zero Aimpoint failures on their school guns over the years. John Mosby at Mountain Guerilla is well known for dishing out horrible abuse to his MTAC-equipped carbines to prove a point.

Still, I want my woobie.

This is what attracted me to the gun in the first place. The long, slim, keymod forearm is my first step back away from the full-on rail farms since 2006 or so.

I haven't settled on a stock yet, and the InForce WMLX light is only a temporary expedient on the gun. I bought it for a different carbine, and I'll be switching my Surefire Scout light over to this one. Also trying the newer style of more upright pistol grips, with the Magpul K2+.

Looking forward to getting it to a class, and maybe shooting some 3 Gun this year, just for kicks.