It's here, Charlie Brown.

 So, you bring your eight- or nine-hundred pound pumpkin to the state fair...

 ...only to have your gourd squashed...

...by a behemoth weighing in at a full seven-tenths of a ton, a new Hoosier record.
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Hit-and-Miss Engine

The grist mill in Pioneer Village is powered by a hit-and-miss engine. It's become something of a tradition to get lunch in the Indiana Beef Cattle Association tent next to Pioneer Village, and the sound of the engine chugging away is now linked by association in my mind to the taste of a ribeye sandwich.

This year, the engine was a different one than usual, with an open waterfall radiator for cooling.

 Rocker arm for exhaust valve.

 Stone mill grinds grain for purchase by fairgoers.

American-Occupied America...

I just spent a wonderful afternoon deep in the heart of American-Occupied America. The State Fair is such a mood-lifter. I look forward to it every year.

It's the politest crowd you will ever find yourself in. The kids, especially the farm kids, make you go home humming "The Kids Are Alright". The whole thing is a celebration of the people who Get Shit Done. It's a wonderful antidote to the 24/7 depressing news cycle.
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The Circle of Life...

"Man, I just {LISTENED_TO_ALBUM/WENT_TO_CONCERT} by {$GROUP_FROM_MY_TEENS/EARLY_TWENTIES} and they still kicked ass just like they did when they were new. {$GROUP_LIKED_BY_KIDS_WHO_SHOULD_GET_OFF_MY_LAWN} just won't have that same kind of staying power."
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Moving right along...

Thanks to Lucky Gunner, the Glock 20 test continues, with a box of 50 Armscor 180gr FMJ rounds being sent downrange at Indy Arms Co yesterday morning.

Ballistically, these are about what I'd choose if I were to be running up the round count in a class with this gun; they've got enough oomph to cycle the thing reliably, even with the heavier recoil spring, but they're not so fatiguing that you couldn't shoot a few hundred in a day without risking carpal tunnel syndrome. The big Glocks do serve as pretty decent recoil sponges.

I probably was shooting a little fast. (The bottom cluster of bullet holes, including that flyer in the "neck", are from the Honor Guard 9. Ignore those for now.)

This makes 730 rounds since the Glock 20 was cleaned or lubricated, with two failures to feed (#401, #454) and one failure to fire (#598). 1270 rounds to go.
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Swoon...

This mo'cycle is just gorgeous...

One of the coolest things on two wheels😎. #bestoftheday #custom #custommade #cool #instagood

A photo posted by Ride•Shoot•Pray•Cut•Train (@rspct) on Jul 6, 2016 at 3:46pm PDT

QotD: Sharpened Rock Edition...

From Roomie:

"IMO, any adult human -- and most children past a certain degree of maturity -- ought to carry a knife. Otherwise you're just a chimp with a haircut."

CAFE Racer

Silicon Graybeard has a good post up on the EPA's looming fantasyland CAFE requirements, a topic that's relevant to car nerds. One way to eke out more mileage is to make cars smaller and lighter, but as I've noted elsewhere:

The early '80s saw plenty of cars that would be considered efficient even by today's standards enjoy sales success in America, from the Toyota Starlet to the Honda CRX HF, which sometimes leads people to ask "Well why don't they just sell those cars again?"

Because they wouldn't be legal to sell. They lack airbags. They'd fail side-impact and offset crash tests. And, more importantly, have you looked inside a small car lately? All but the most wretched clean-it-out-with-hose loss leaders on your neighborhood dealer's lots are stuffed full of things that used to be considered amenities: power windows, remote adjustable mirrors, power door locks with remote. Automatic transmissions outnumber manuals in passenger cars by a staggering margin, and even performance-oriented cars are like as not to have some paddle-shifted clutchless setup rather than the classic three-pedal row-your-own.

The aforementioned Toyota Starlet, one of which was my dad's commuter vehicle for many years, was a two-door hatchback on a tiny sub-92" wheelbase that weighed in at under 1700lbs; by comparison, a current Prius stretches over 106" between the axles and weighs in at over 3,000 pounds. (And lest you think that's all batteries, even the current Mini outweighs a Starlet by better than 700 pounds despite being a good ten inches shorter.)

I don't mind austere cars that crumple like beer cans in a wreck, but the rest of the market seems to think differently...

There's this potent reality-distortion field surrounding the DC beltway. Once inside it, people seem to think that the laws of physics will bend to a majority vote or a bureaucratic edict handed down after a mandatory public comment period.
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Important Saftey Tip...

Just because you're carrying a cool guy gun in a cool guy holster doesn't mean you're suddenly cleared hot to point guns at yourself. Rule Two even applies to cool guys. Observe the correct way to put your heater away in AIWB:



Nothing makes me cringe more in a gun class than watching someone rush a reholster to AIWB while still standing straight up and down. I will overcome my introverted nature and ignore the fact that I am not the instructor to have a couple quiet and encouraging words with you.

One more time showing the correct procedure:



I miss Todd. :(
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Political Derangement Syndrome.

Last administration, we had "Bush Derangement Syndrome": Every imaginable evil and flaw, even contradictory ones, was attributed to the administration, and not a sparrow did fall but his detractors didn't blame George W. Literally Hitler Bush for its sudden loss of altitude.

This administration the meme is #ThanksObama, and though the detractors differ, the blame remains the same. Witness this discussion trying to assign a share of legal culpability for that yahoo in NC who put a "warning shot" into a passerby on Joe Biden.
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Big Splash...

From an old Onion piece:

"ORLANDO—Fourteen-time Olympic gold medalist and SeaWorld main attraction Michael Phelps returned to his seven-million-gallon water tank Wednesday to resume his normal schedule of performing in six shows a day for marine park crowds every day of the week."

Which is doubly funny because here we are, two whole Olympiads later, and if Michael Phelps were a country, he'd be in 13th place for gold medals in Rio, just ahead of Spain and only two golds behind Texas.

Also, a bonus .gif of Katie Ledecky in the most dominating athletic performance since the '73 Belmont Stakes:

Katie Ledecky in an 800m race

Sympathetic Magic

Apparently if you press the "Publish" button on a post about waiting for the FedEx guy, it will cause him to knock on the door.

Freaky.
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Waiting for FedEx...

Waiting on the FedEx dude for a signature delivery.

You just know that any random 30-minute block of time you pick for a grocery run will be the one the FedEx dude, so you decide to put off errands until after the delivery is made.

What's worse, though, is that you can't be certain that the sensor in the toilet seat that makes the phone ring isn't also linked to the FedEx truck somehow.
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QotD: Squidward Edition...

|DIVE ALERT| Smile, we're diving on Partington Canyon off the coast of Big Sur, CA! Watch: https://t.co/Ajj54YYX2Q pic.twitter.com/Xm7h3mJZwu

— E/V Nautilus (@EVNautilus) August 15, 2016

"The ocean floor is not an unsettling cartoon hellscape at all, no sir."

From Elsewhere...

Another poster wrote:

"Speaking of which, is there a good reason not to do away with the EC? In my view, at least, it exists because of technological limitations of the 18th century in terms of communication and vote tallying."

To which I replied:

"Like the pre-17th Amendment Senate, the Electoral College is a vestige of the fact that the US was formed as a confederation of sovereign states. Under the Constitution, the states vote for the president. If you look in the constitution, nowhere is it mentioned that individuals have a right to vote for POTUS; there's nothing in the constitution to keep states from appointing electors or choosing them via lottery or by throwing darts at a phone book.

Like the post-17th Amendement Senate, I'm certain that the mob will eventually vote us a post-Electoral College election system as a move toward perfect democracy. Hopefully I will be dead by then." 

Hmm...

Nothing perks up a dull Monday evening like the cheery warble of the Emergency Broadcasting Signal coming from your cell phone, harmonizing with the tornado siren down the block.
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Tab Clearing...

• Honda Odyssey vs. XKE vs. 356.


• Funky island with alien trees.

What bias?

I know people who consider themselves centrists because they're not as far to the left as Bernie Sanders but they certainly aren't any establishment right-winger like Hillary Clinton, either.

Seriously.

One of them probably came up with this idea for a Vice story...

"To see the general level of racism in America, we took three kids from Brooklyn and sent them on a trip across the heartland, sampling typical middle-American venues along the way, such as the set of an interracial cuckold porn movie, Cliven Bundy's ranch, and an encampment of Confederate army reenactors. 

Based on our observations at these totally randomly chosen, average middle American locales, we have concluded that the heartland is still racist as f**k."

Hoosierlympics.

"If you’re keeping score at home, central Indiana now has 10 medals – which, if we were a separate country, would place us 13^th on the medals table: King (two in swimming), Miller (two in swimming), Blake Pieroni (swimming), Michael Hixon (synchronized diving), David Boudia (synchronized diving), Steele Johnson (synchronized diving), Elmore (rowing) and Dygert (cycling). Now, it’s probably safe to assume that Paul George will medal (although the U.S. has played poorly its last two games against Australia and Serbia) and Tamika Catchings of the women’s basketball team will surely get the gold. Oh, and one more: Carmel High School tennis star Rajeev Ram will win either gold or silver in doubles tennis alongside Venus Williams Sunday. Then either Boudia or Johnson - or both - have a very good chance to medal in the men’s 10-meter individual platform diving.
I’m going to guess central Indiana has had more medals in a single Olympics – remember that Mark Spitz guy? – but have they ever earned four in a single day?"

Local NBC affiliate is big on the Olympics, and for good reason.

Kravitz, as a columnist, is interesting in his own right as a look at the future of media. The TV station picked him up from the local newspaper (The Indianapolis Parakeet Primer has been slowly circling the drain for years and is shedding employees the whole way down.)

The TV station picked the guy up specifically to write print content for their website. They seem to grok that the website is fundamental to their future survival as a media outlet, but they're not a hundred percent sure what to do with it, and so they're willing to experiment.
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Darnit.

I gave Bobbi the Canon DSLRs, although I maintain nominal control over the Rebel XTi as a host for my Canon EF-S 60mm f/2.8 macro lens in case I need it for work pictures. Like the ring of brass torn from the case mouth of a Win Q4318 round that I just popped out of the chamber of the Honor Guard 9.

Unfortunately, it's been long enough since I used the Rebel XTi that the battery was flatter than the Llano Estacado. Stand by for pictures and lot number.
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Movie Synopsis...

2013's Star Trek Into Darkness suffered from trying to be both a gigantic summer action blockbuster as well as a very self-conscious "reinterpretation" of maybe the most beloved of the big screen appearances of the original Star Trek crew. As a result, it didn't quite live up to either. You came out of it thinking that it was a bunch of individual little scenes that were kinda cool, crammed into an overall movie that was...pretty mediocre, really. It was worth one viewing on the big screen if you're a fan of space opera explosions, but nobody's going to be quoting dialogue from it in whatever has replaced social media in 2043.

The ambition of Star Trek Beyond was dialed back somewhat and, while it's no better from a snooty film critic standpoint, it's a better Star Trek story. It's like a classic Trek episode with epic CGI and lots of lens flare.

It's amusing because this reboot must really be a mirror universe: The odd-numbered films are the better ones here.

Big L, little l...

“The five-shot rifle, that’s a standard military rifle; the problem is if you attach a clip to it so it can fire more shells and if you remove the pin so that it becomes an automatic weapon, and those are independent criminal offenses,” Weld said. “That is when they become, essentially, a weapon of mass destruction. The problem with handguns probably is even worse than the problem of the AR15.”

Remember that the big-"L" Libertarian Party decided several election cycles ago that running ideologically pure candidates with no name recognition wasn't working, and if they wanted to move from having 3% of the vote up into the broad, sunlit uplands of five or six percent, they needed to embrace candidates whose names people knew. This is how the Tax-Free Guns & Dope party wound up running bible-thumping foreign policy hawk Bob Barr in '08. "I will bite the head off this live chicken if you will let me be your party's presidential candidate!" is a phrase that will be heard in party offices sooner rather than later.
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Euro cameras and badge engineering turned up to 11.

The world of cameras, or at least of modern camera companies, is so much younger than firearms.

The biggest names in American firearms mostly date to the dawn of the industrial era: Winchester, Smith & Wesson, and Colt, for instance, all being creations of the early-to-middle 19th Century. Thus it is for most of the recognizable names on the world scene, with occasional youngsters like FNH (a fin de siècle firm formed to produce license-built Mausers for the Belgian military) or elder statesmen like Beretta, who was making guns when they were still called gonnes and lit with matches.

European camera makers have especially ephemeral career arcs in comparison. Rollei, a company that was a pioneer of the use of roll (as opposed to sheet) film, was formed in 1920 and was bought by Korean giant Samsung in 1995. Bits and fragments and brand & model names still exist, but the company's been a dead letter since the early Aughties.

Zeiss, under the Contax name, pretty much invented the single-lens reflex camera as we know it today, but by the '70s, "Contax" was just a name that appeared on a succession of, first Yashica, and then Kyocera cameras.

Voigtländer, being an 18th Century optics company that started making lenses for the newfangled daguerreotypes the early 1800s, is a name as old as photography itself. It wound up getting folded into Zeiss in the '70s before getting passed off to Rollei, and now is a name applied to Japanese Cosina cameras.

Two big names still hold magic, though.

First, of course, is Leica. Inventors of the 35mm camera in the interwar years, their rangefinder cameras were legendary. In retrospect, however, their period of commercial dominance was remarkably brief. Dragging their heels into the SLR era, they were passed by the Japanese and by the 1990s, you would be hard-pressed to find a working commercial photographer still using Leicas. As early as the 1980s, Leica had abandoned their own in-house SLR design and were selling cameras that were joint ventures with Minolta.

These days Leicas come in two flavors: Obscenely expensive German-built objets d'art, and the "-Lux Leicas" (C-Lux, D-Lux, V-Lux) that are re-badged Panasonic digicams with some luxury touches, a red circle, and a 50% price premium.

The other name with which to conjure was Hasselblad, who held onto a surprisingly large share of the medium format camera market. In 2003, they were bought by their Far East distributors, and progress was made on large-sensor digital cameras. Despite being just about the last medium format maker left standing, the company's future seems to be constantly hanging by a thread.

Still, there's that name. Hasselblad is the camera that NASA took to the moon, after all (there are still a dozen up there) and Hasselblad's marketing department milks it to the fullest. Thus it should have been no surprise to me that the luxe Swedish brand name tore a page from Leica's playbook and cranked it to 11.

That camera in the previous post? Underneath all the carbon fiber and hand-stitched Tuscan leather and titanium vapor deposition and the fancy Hasselblad Lunar logos...it's a Sony NEX-7. Now, that's not a bad thing; the NEX-7 is a solid mirrorless interchangeable-lens camera. But the Sony sold for a $1,300 MSRP new. Hasselblad, apparently deciding to go big or go home, wrapped it in their shiny aura and presented it to the market with a nearly $7,000 sticker.

That's chutzpah.

Sales apparently went about as well as you would expect. Hasselblad Lunar jokes were told. Fire sales ensued. I'm having flashbacks.

Still...that's a sexy-looking thing, innit? Especially at a fraction of its... HAHAHAHAHAHA! ...original asking price?

Mother of God...

...I had no idea this was even a thing that existed just five minutes ago, and now I'm just consumed with the wantsies... It's just another digicam, dammit, and it doesn't even use one of the more popular lens mounts. I need to go lie down until the feeling passes.

If all the other kids jumped off a bridge with Perazzis?

I would not use the people with the double-barrel ballistic golf clubs as models of firearms safety.

Yeah, they've made shoe buttons for a long time. Almost as long as they've made heroin. Both assist in forming bad habits.
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Overheard in the Office...

RX: "You know, when the Orthogons attack, it's from a completely unexpected direction."

0900 and that's pretty well guaranteed to be the nerdiest joke I'll hear all day.

See this? Don't do this?

“We have a lot of people outside our house, yelling and shouting profanities,” he said. “I yelled at them, ‘Please leave the premises.’ They were showing a firearm, so I fired a warning shot and, uh, we got somebody that got hit.”

“Someone was shot?” the operator asked.

“Well, I don’t know if they were shot or not, ma’am,” he told her. “I fired my warning shot like I’m supposed to by law. They do have firearms, and I’m trying to protect myself and my family.”

Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/crime/article94248182.html#storylink=cpy

This dude messed up by the numbers, killed a man, and wrecked his life and his family's life, in addition to those of his victim and his victim's family, all because he was stupid and believed a lot of the sort of BS self-defense advice you pick up from well-meaning ignorant morons in gun stores and on the internet.

Folks, self defense with a firearm is no joke. This is life and death stuff right here; it literally does not get more serious than that. With great power comes great accountability.
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Forgotten Weapons, and I don't mean the Ian kind.

A disproportionate number of guns seized by the TSA are little pink or purple autochuckers, which tells me that they were probably either bought as gifts, or under spousal pressure, or as an impulsive reaction to a crime story on the news, then thrown into the bottom of a purse and forgotten until found by the TSA. These are the same sorts of guns that occasionally kill toddlers.

One time, on my way out to New Hamster, I checked out the “Seized Last Week” scare poster at the head of the TSA line and it sported a photo of an RTF2 Glock 19 with a Surefire X300 U-boat. Now THAT was a sad camper whose story I’d like to hear...
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Hardware report...

The gun I used in class was this Gen2 Glock 17. It had 1,051 rounds in the book since I bought it with no malfunctions in the last 1,000+ (since I replaced the goofy trigger that the previous owner had put in it.)

The only two changes I made to the gun before class were adding the Overwatch Precision TAC trigger and NY1 trigger spring, and moving my T&E Gadget from my Glock 19 carry gun to this one.

I think if you're going to be going into and out of a CCW holster with a Glock dozens, if not hundreds, of times over the course of a weekend and have access to a Gadget, you'd be a fool not to use it.

Also, there was an inadvertently funny Gadget advertisement. In order to demonstrate how anemic handguns actually are, as well as how easy it is to make even the most reliable ones choke, Tom asked if anyone in the class was shooting a Glock 17. I was the only one to raise my hand, and so I forked my pistol over to be used for the demo.

Before I realized that "Um, maybe my gun's not the one to use for this particular demo," he had his thumb on the back of the slide to prove that it could be held shut by thumb pressure alone while it was fired. He was yanking on the trigger as hard as he could with no effect when someone piped up with "It's got a Gadget on it."

D'oh! I'd gotten so used to it that I hadn't even thought about it.

I had a couple-three FTE's on day one and two more early on day two, mostly due to a poor grip with a sweaty paw and low-powered ammo. There was (as I expected) one failure-to-fire with hard-primered Russian ammo.

I'll note that with my Glocks and the Sig Sauer P320, I expect a failure to fire every several hundred rounds of Russian ammo, whereas with the Steyr C9 I was getting them at a rate of one-in-fifty.

Very happy with the Overwatch Precision trigger. The flat face makes it very obvious if you have your finger out of place; fantastic feedback.

Counting the Federal HSTs that were in the gun on day one, which got blown downrange in the name of putting fresh BBs in the gun at the end of class, I expended 872 rounds of ammunition. (That'd be all the empty boxes in the picture above.)

The gun earned a cleaning, and is still in my holster until I can get around to cleaning and lubing my Glock 19 and moving the Gadget back to it.
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Wehraboo becomes Wehrabubba...

I suppose that the swastika armband that was also lifted off the dead Nazi general who was carrying this Luger has vanished. They usually have.

One thing I have learned from decades of seeing Lugers come into gun stores is that every single one of them was lifted off a dead Nazi general, along with his swastika armband, which is now missing.

The western front in ’44-’45 was apparently manned by entire divisions of Luger-wielding generals wearing red swastika armbands, which must have made camouflage difficult.

Hydrate or Die

The humidity needle lying on the bottom of the dial is a nice touch.

You want to drink plenty of water and remember your sunscreen when you're running around all day like this. Especially if you're a squishy and out of shape sedentary type like I seem to have become.

I drank four or five liters of water, plus a couple sodas, each day. In retrospect, that probably wasn't enough. I was definitely falling behind the power curve at the end of day one. Day two was better.
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You can't improve what you don't measure.

There are countless self-defense-oriented handgun classes out there these days that purport to teach you the skills required to use a handgun in a stressful life-or-death environment, or to take the pistol skills you already have and refine them or make them better.

In a distressing number of these classes, you will never shoot to a par time, have a score on a target tallied, be ranked against your fellow students or even assessed against your own performance at the start of the class.

A 271 on the Rangemaster Bullseye Course.

So how do you know you haven't just wasted several hundred dollars, several hours of your life, and several hundred rounds of ammunition? I mean, you can go shoot at the range on your own time and not get scored or graded and only be out the range fee. Sure, you think you've learned stuff, but can you demonstrate what you learned? Can you prove it?

"Well, there's no timer in a gunfight!"

No, but there's some guy trying to kill you and you need to make him stop before he gets finished doing it.

"There're no scoring rings on a bad guy!"

No, but there are a distressingly few square inches on a human body where a pistol bullet is going to have any noticeable effect in the space of seconds that we are talking about, here. As Tom Givens wryly put it this weekend, "Can shooting the guy in the stomach kill him? Sure, but probably not in your lifetime."

Mike Grasso's edge-on 2x4 hidden by a tee shirt starts to gain a whole new relevance when you think of it like that.

If the trainer is not grading your performance, is not measuring your skills against your peers and/or your own performance baseline at the start of the class, it's generally for one of two reasons:

1. They're probably not as clueful as they think they are.
2. They don't want to hurt the feelings of customers because that cuts down on repeat business and good word of mouth.

Sadly, the latter is as common as the former; it's the "Everybody Gets A Ribbon" culture as applied to gunfighting. Except everybody doesn't get a ribbon in a gunfight, unless you count a toe tag as a ribbon.
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Tore up from the floor up.

Gun school in August in the Midwest...at least it wasn't quite as humid Saturday and Sunday as it had been over the previous week. The sun was merciless and, while I haven't counted yet, I'd guess I probably busted about nine hundred caps over two days.

Yesterday evening I got back to the motel room in Goshen after a delicious dinner served family-style at Amish Acres in Napanee, sat down at my computer to write stuff...and...and...I woke up an hour and forty-five minutes later still sitting upright in the chair. I took a soak and went to bed and then did it all over again today.

I will write more tomorrow and the rest of this week as stuff occurs to me, but for now, I think I'm going to enjoy some mindless video game fun or something...
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Gun School Time!

Off to start day one of a two-day Intensive Pistol Skills class w/Tom & Lynn Givens.

Usual gun school objectives are in effect:

1. Don't set myself (or anybody else) on fire.
2. Learn something.

Wish me luck!
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Gratuitous Gun Pr0n #148...

Function checking ammo for a class this weekend. #glock #glock17 #9mmglock #phlster #overwatchprecision #magpul #robarcustomguns #fiocchi #indyarmsco #pewpewlife

A photo posted by Tamara Keel (@tamarakeel) on Aug 3, 2016 at 8:44am PDT

I'm not a huge Olympics fan, but...

I do enjoy watching the US women's soccer team totally, completely, casually pwn the rest of the world at the one sport every other country on the globe desperately wishes we'd give half of a fuck about.

Oh, and it's fun trying to figure out where they sewed the antigravity belt in Simone Biles' leotard.
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Overheard in the Office...

Presented without context...

RX: "Yeah, I almost wanted you to come along and ȴѳճԟ ͳ the guy, take his temperature..."

Me: "'LICK' the guy?!"

RX: "'LOOK AT' the guy! Are you deaf?"

Me: "Whew. I was wondering what that was supposed to accomplish. *slurp* 'He tastes kinda salty and...'" *mimes feeling someone's forehead* "'...he feels pretty warm.'"

Fifty More

Wednesday morning I ran another box of fifty Sig Sauer 180gr FMJ through the Glock 20.

I tried it at fifteen yards, which...have I mentioned how I hate the factory sights?...was a little disappointing. I'm sure the gun was fine and the suck and fail was all mine. UPLULA is still helpful getting that fifteenth round into the magazine.

There were no malfunctions of any type to report.

This makes 680 rounds since the Glock 20 was cleaned or lubricated, with two failures to feed (#401, #454) and one failure to fire (#598). 1320 rounds to go.
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"High Capacity"

Elbert Searle's .32 self-loader design for Savage was a pretty futuristic pistol for its time. The double-column ten-round magazine was hyped heavily in advertising...

...as well it should be, when you see other contemporary methods used to try and get more than the usual seven or eight rounds into a pistol mag.
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Moving Notice

Longtime columnist and Friend of S.W.A.T., Claire Wolfe, has moved her writings to her new blog site: Check it out!https://t.co/e6OUBbRhKf

— SWAT Magazine (@SWATmagazine) August 5, 2016

Can't brain today. Have the dumbs.

So I spent the last few days putting the finishing touches on two columns and a feature article and sending them off to make sure editors cancelled the hit contracts they'd doubtlessly taken out on me by now.

That's *scribbles on back of envelope* a little over three thousand words total, and it's left me drained. I mean, if you scraped the bottom of my brain pan right now, you might find some loose syllables and a spare consonant or two, but I ain't got any whole words left in the tank. It's going to take time to grow a fresh crop.

Now, my friends who are real writers? Three thousand words would be a slow day for them. Mad respect for that.
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Click Click Boom

A hundred rounds worth of 10mm fun was had on the indoor range at Indy Arms Co. yesterday morning. It says something about the difference between Sig Sauer's 10mm FMJ loading and most other commercial 10mm FMJ loads that I make a point of shooting the Sig first, while I'm still fresh.

I got one "click" instead of a "bang" from a round of S&B ammo, on round number 68 of the day (#598 of the test). Always a risk with hard primers and striker-fired guns, and in my experience, S&B primers are harder than woodpecker lips. The round ignited on the second try.

There were no other malfunctions to report.

This makes 630 rounds since the Glock 20 was cleaned or lubricated, with two failures to feed (#401, #454) and one failure to fire (#598). 1370 rounds to go.
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Passing five hundred...

Range trip to Marion County Fish & Game yesterday noonish to do some chrono work with the Glock 20 for a couple loadings I hadn't measured yet.

First up was the 180gr FMJ load from Sellier & Bellot.

LO: 1088
HI: 1115
AV: 1102
ES: 26.79
SD: 9.00

So, basically your typical 10mm commercial ball ammo: Hotter than .40S&W, but nothing to shake your fillings loose.

The numbers from the Sig Sauer Elite Performance 180gr FMJ were as much spicier as the felt recoil would indicate:

LO: 1172
HI: 1203
AV: 1188
ES: 31.23
SD: 12.40

Most of a hundred feet per second faster than the S&B, and you don't stand around wondering if the gun went off, either. I'll note that this pretty well echoes the numbers of the 180gr V-crown JHP offering from Sig, making it a legit practice load, and it's priced pretty aggressively, too.

After the chrono work, I spent the rest of the range session shooting steel at about twenty yards. I didn't have any paint with me, and that center target was hard to pick up in a hurry. I did have one failure to feed with round #24 of the day (#454 of the test) that may have been caused by limp-wristing the gun. I was concentrating hard on sight alignment and trigger control and was holding it pretty loosely when this happened:

There were no other malfunctions to report.

This makes 530 rounds since the Glock 20 was cleaned or lubricated, with two failure to feed (#401, #454). 1470 rounds to go.
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Overheard in the Office...

"'Pay My Bill'...What do you mean 'Page Not Found'? Why are you making it difficult to give you money? 'Click Back Button'? Okay...oh, there's all my stuff. Do I want to use the stored card? Yes. That's the whole reason I stored it, you knobs. Would I like to sign up for auto pay? No, I like sticking needles in my eyeballs like this on the first of every month..."

#triggered

Apex trigger, arrived on OEM Gen3 trigger bar. Installed in Gen3 Glock 32 with standard connector and trigger return spring. Combination yields a measured 5.5# pull. Tactile feel of trigger vastly improved over stock serrated trigger that shipped on the gun.

Overwatch Precision TAC trigger, arrived on NP3-coated OEM Gen3 trigger bar. Installed in Glock 37 with ZEV connector and NY1 (olive) trigger return spring. With the stock trigger, this gun had a measured 7# trigger pull. Installation of the TAC trigger shaved this to 5.5# in addition to reducing takeup. I'm also very impressed with the feedback offered by the flat-faced trigger. It helps me with proper finger placement.

ZEV Fulcrum trigger, with ZEV connector and standard trigger return spring, installed in a Gen2 Glock 17. This setup resulted in a 4.5# trigger pull and a good rolling break. It just took a little getting used to.

What I'm likely going to wind up doing is swapping the trigger assemblies in their entirety between the Glock 37 and 17 and use the former for bowling pins and the latter as a backup carry/class gun.
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Oh, it starts this Friday!

One of the two immutable pole stars of my annual calendar.

STATE FAIR! Baby goats and ice cold Red Gold tomato juice and tractors and miniature donkeys and steam engines and fried meat onna stick and one year I got to ride a heffalump!
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Glock 32 2,000-Round Wrapup

So, here's the Gen 3 Glock 32 after firing two thousand rounds of assorted ammunition without any cleaning or lubrication after an initial application of Lucas Oil to the factory recommended lubrication points...

You've got your typical discoloration around the muzzle end. Most of this was done a hundred rounds at a time, pre-loading the three magazines I have, going into the range, shooting up that initial 39 rounds, and then again & et cetera until the 100 rounds were gone. Of note is how the White Sound Defense guide rod protrudes from the muzzle end.

 Pretty grody on the inside.

Note the schmutz collected on the front rails. Part of the reason guns like this are less sensitive to dirt or lack of lubrication is that they just have those little metal nubbins keeping the slide flying in loose formation with the frame, rather than conventional frame rails.

The brass smear on the feed rail is notable as is the sheer amount of cack around the firing pin safety.

In the first three hundred rounds, the pistol experienced three failures to go completely into battery and three failures to feed, and then one more of each around the seven hundred and fifty round mark. It was at this point that I replaced the magazine springs with 11-coil springs from full-size Glock mags, in order to ensure that the next round was lifted into place fast enough to be picked up by the slide (despite the higher slide velocities, Glock 32 magazines use the same springs as 19 mags.)

I also replaced the factory 18# recoil spring with a CrSi flat wire IMSI 20# unit. Unfortunately, this meant having to use an aftermarket guide rod, something of which I'm not generally a fan.

Sure enough, the rear cap on the three piece Lone Wolf guide rod began unscrewing around the 1,300 round mark and the rod itself actually fell out of the gun, which I noticed because the gun failed to go fully into battery at round number 1,503. I knocked the slide off the gun with a rubber mallet, reassembled the guide rod, and fired off a couple magazines, experiencing a failure to feed with defective round of Remington ammunition. (During this test, I fired a total of 1,000 rounds of Remington FMJ .357SIG, two 500-round cases. Each case had one round with the primer wadded in sideways.)

Lone Wolf guide rod starting to unscrew

I replaced the bent Lone Wolf unit with the uncaptured White Sound Defense guide rod at the 1,629 round mark. There were no further malfunctions.

I'll note that, after the spring replacement, the only malfunction that wasn't caused by user error (me not making sure that I'd used thread-locker on the rear cap) or defective Remington ammo was the lone FTE at round #1,033.

So, that's a wrap. I think the 11-coil mag springs are the key, here, although the 20# recoil spring doesn't hurt.
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Perfect Ten?

I put another hundred rounds of 10mm Auto downrange yesterday, fifty of the S&B 180gr FMJ and fifty of the Sig Sauer Elite Performance  180gr FMJ. (Indy Arms Co. has both the Sig FMJ and American Eagle in stock for range ammo.)

First up was the S&B, which claims a velocity of 1164 fps at the box flap. I fired it into that upper grouping at ten yards. It felt a little boomier than the Prvi or the Armscor, but not as stout as the Sig Sauer FMJ. I hope to get some chrono numbers for it from the range on Monday.

I then brought the target back in to five yards and fired the fifty rounds of Sig Sauer ammo weak-hand-only into that lower mess. By the time I was finished with the second mag, I was kinda regretting my decision; that stuff was a handful shooting one-handed with my left hand. Round #71 of the day (#401 of the test) was a failure-to-feed, a classic "limp wrist" malfunction caused by me holding the gun way too lightly, trying to fight an incipient flinch by focusing really hard on the trigger and forgetting to keep a good grip.

There were no other malfunctions to report.

This makes 430 rounds since the Glock 20 was cleaned or lubricated, with one failure to feed (#401). 1570 rounds to go.
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Big Bang Theory...

Yesterday's  Glock 20 range outing was another fifty rounds of the Sig Sauer 180gr FMJ (which runs at a claimed 1250fps, just like their V-crown JHP offering) and fifty of Armscor 180gr FMJ, which has a velocity of 1,008 fps as measured at the ad copy.

I fired the Armscor into the upper grouping at seven yards, and then ran the target out to ten and fired the Sig ammo into the lower one. The difference in recoil between the two brands was noticeable.

All one hundred rounds cycled the weapon fine, with no malfunctions of any type to report.

This makes 330 rounds since the Glock 20 was cleaned or lubricated, with no malfunctions. 1670 rounds to go.
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Range Day

Rode with Mike Grasso out to Atlanta Conservation Club to do some chrono work and get some groups shot for a magazine article.

First thing I wanted to do was chrono some of that Prvi Partisan .357SIG to see if it was as variable as the muzzle blast & flash led me to believe...

LO: 1314
HI: 1367
AV: 1340
ES: 52.43
SD: 16.18

Well, not as bad as I feared, but still the most wildly variable of all the .357SIG FMJ I've chrono'ed out of that gun.

Then it was on to the main event: Four different 10mm loads from the Glock 20. The first up was Prvi Partisan's 170gr FMJ offering:

LO: 1020
HI: 1087
AV: 1049
ES: 66.58
SD: 19.84

So, like most commercial 10mm FMJ offerings, basically it offers another fifty to a hundred feet-per-second over a hot .40 S&W load.

On to the jacketed hollow point offerings...

I had some Hornady XTPs in both 155gr...

LO: 1290
HI: 1321
AV: 1306
ES: 30.70
SD: 11.31

...and 180gr flavors:

LO: 1109
HI: 1127
AV: 1118
ES: 17.78
SD: 6.32

That ten shot string of 180gr XTP, by the way, is the second most consistent that I've ever chrono'ed, bested only by another Hornady offering, the .45ACP 220gr +P Critical Duty out of my CCA 1911.

Last up was the 180gr V-crown JHP from Sig Sauer's new ammo division. Sig has 10mm offerings in both the P220 and 1911 platforms, and someone at Sig must be a fan of the caliber because they're loading theirs pretty spicy, the way 10mm was meant to be. I was interested to see how close the measured velocity out of a 4.6" Glock 20 barrel would come to matching the box-flap claim of 1250fps, presumably from a 5" test barrel.

I was also interested in seeing how consistent the ammo was, which is generally a pretty good indicator of QC.  The results:

LO: 1158
HI: 1215
AV: 1168
ES: 57.46
SD: 16.88

Nine rounds were all clustered within about fifteen FPS, with that one 1200fps outlier blowing the average. Still, not bad.

We shot up the remainder of the box of Prvi Partisan FMJ which, combined with the three chrono strings of JHP made a round count of eighty for the day through the Glock 20. All eighty rounds cycled normally and there were no malfunctions of any kind to report.

This makes 230 rounds since the Glock 20 was cleaned or lubricated. 1770 rounds to go.

After all the range work it was time for lunch.

A ham & brie sandwich and potato salad at Rail Epicurean Market in Westfield, washed down with some sweet tea.

AK usage yesterday: 0.
Day rating: Good.
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Gratuitous Gun Pr0n #147...

Smith & Wesson Model 68, six rounds, seven yards, double-action offhand.

Overheard in the Office...

The reporter on the televisor is doing a "Man on the Convention Floor" interview at the DNC in Philly. The guy he's talking to is solidly pro-Hillary, says he feels she'd make a great president, can't wait for the election...

Reporter: "Are you nervous?"

Guy: "Nervous? Sure. It's not over until the last votes are counted."

Me: (yelling) "Except for the Democratic primaries, eh?"

Booming along...

I went to the range again yesterday morning with two different flavors of 10mm target ammo. There was the Prvi Partisan, which fires a 170gr truncated cone bullet at a claimed 1115fps, and then there was the Sig Sauer Elite Performance 10mm 180gr FMJ, which was considerably zestier with a claimed 1250fps muzzle velocity.

The difference in recoil was noticeable. On the unstippled Gen3 frame, sweaty hands were forcing me to fix my grip after three or four rounds.

All one hundred rounds cycled normally and there were no malfunctions of any kind to report.

This makes 150 rounds since the Glock 20 was cleaned or lubricated. 1850 rounds to go.
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Go read this...

Imagine it with me, Mr. and Mrs. America. The post office, which has practically driven itself out of its own centuries-old monopoly through incredible ineptitude, would now be granted…

“nothing fancy, just basic bill paying, check cashing and small dollar loans.”

What could possibly go wrong?

From the "There Is Nothing New Under the Sun" Dept.

"No one shoots like Gaston
Files suits like Gaston
Engineering-wise nobody loots like Gaston!"

Pepperidge Farm Remembers!

Remember when Conservatives said "Wikileaks is FSB!" and all the Progressive bien pensants tutted and clucked and said "The '80s called, they want their foreign policy back!"?
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