Sorry 'bout that...

...no bloggery for you this morning.

Maybe later.

Books on Boomsticks: SCSW, 3rd Ed.

My Standard Catalog of Smith & Wesson showed up yesterday, and the 3rd Edition is grande! A massive coffee table tome with slick paper, full color, much more useful layout, and way more complete data than the last one. Pricing info's still a little soft, at least for this area, but that's to be expected for what is, after all, a national average.

So far I've only found one Smith in my collection that isn't mentioned: There's no reference to the 3" PC627 V-Comp that I can find.

Welcome to the future.

First they were orbiting their own astronauts.

Now they're shooting down satellites.

Interesting times, folks.

Someday, I'm gonna live there...

Dustbury mentions Brewster County, Texas, which contains miles and miles of miles and miles, as well as some rocks and cacti, and a hidden UFO base.

Boomsticks: A-ha!

So the A1 flash hider that I pulled out of my purse the other day has been sitting next to my keyboard, baffling me with its origins, for the last couple days.

I've been picking it up and fiddling with it the way one does with worry beads, but just now I actually looked at the thing. Wow, that's a big hole...

Eureka! It's a 9mm flash hider! I must have tossed it in my purse when I put the Vortex on my 9mm carbine and forgot all about it.

You can't imagine what a load off my mind that is.

This inspired me to go clean all the AR stuff off the Table What Has Accumulated A Big Pile Of Gun Detritus and put it in a box the way I did with the 1911 bits. I was a bit surprised at just how much AR effluvia had piled up there. Green and black followers, mag floorplates, mag springs, a complete collapsable stock and buffer tube assembly (from when I put the M93 on my Superior), black plastic A2 pistol grips, green Hogue and Ergo grips (a legacy of installing MIADs on the 9mm and Project Housegun), A2 carbine handguards, non-tritium front sight posts, EOTech battery compartment latches, ladder rail covers, push-button QD sling swivels...

If I dropped a barrel, an upper receiver, and a lower in there and shook the box real hard, another carbine would fall out. Hmmm... We still have a bunch of DPMS stripped lowers at work for, like, a buck and a quarter, and a life without a current AR project is a life devoid of purpose.

Lor' bless Amazon.

You have to love anything that can consistantly make a cynical adult feel like a kid on Christmas morning. I'm just sitting here bouncing with anticipation, waiting for the Big Brown Truck Of Happiness to show up with GTA: San Andreas, the third edition Standard Catalog of Smith & Wesson, and the second Simon Scarrow novel.

I wonder how much money they've lost on my "Amazon Prime" membership so far?

(...and I'm serious about the "kid on Christmas morning" bit. I just caught myself thinking "You know, if I lay down for a nap, when I wake up, the truck will be here!")

Overheard At Work...

Me: "So, that's why I can rationalize having three AR's. The green one is for if I'm ever in the jungle, the coyote brown one is for the desert, and the black one is for, uh..."

Co-worker: "Zombies. Camouflage doesn't work on the living dead."

At the risk of sounding like a woefully behind-the-times geek...

Despite being a fan of computer games since blowing up ASCII Klingons on an Apple II in the Decade of Disco, I somehow missed out on the whole Grand Theft Auto thing. Towards the tail end of a grueling day at work today, Dr. Strangegun mentioned how he unwinds after a stressful day by playing in the streets of GTA: San Andreas. Then he showed me a link to this video.

Joyous hallelujahs! A video game that not only has flamethrowers, but where you can apparently take out your frustrations on passersby with a Louisville slugger! And old enough that it will run on my PC with the video settings cranked to the max! (VFTP Command Central was bought some three years ago by walking into a Best Buy and asking "What's the baddest, most expensive PC you have? Great, okay. Now, what's the baddest video card on the market? Good. Now, what's the ultimate sound setup?" It may be a little old, but it'll still shove a pixel around fast enough to make it need its little pixel airsick bag...)

Blogging may be slack for a bit, because I just placed an order with Amazon...

Sigh.

Exactly one week to go until my last birthday that starts with a "3".

Not that I'm bitter, or anything...

Good luck with that...

It's aliiive!

Dr. Strangegun got his reloading bench all set up, and tonight I happen to know he left work with a handfull of once-fired .38 Special brass, a big box of 148gr HBWC bullets and a pound of Unique. Let's see what happens.

For entertainment's sake, here's me with my first handloading experiences:

Tinkering with the Tong Tool...

So, as I shamefully admitted in a recent thread, I don't actually... you know, reload yet. I do, however, have a metric buttload of borrowed reloading stuff here in my apartment, and I've saved a ton of brass over the years. Last night I re-found my big ol' brass box. This sort of inspired me. About four minutes ago, I got even more inspired when I saw an object in a red box labelled "Lyman Ideal 310 Tool, complete with dies" for .44 magnum. I pulled out the pliers-shaped gizmo, and noticed one die with a long pokey-looking thing that looked as though it might knock a spent primer out of a case. Feeling a rising sense of discovery, I dashed off to my brass box and brought back a freezer bag full of spent .44 Mag shells. Threading the likely-looking die into the pliers and then sticking a shell in...

[Tom Hanks voice from Castaway]I have made fire![Tom Hanks voice from Castaway]


...or at least I'm well on my inquisitive way to doing so.

More TongToolery...

Having gotten bored with depriming cases, I decided tonight to screw what seemed to be the next logical die into the holder; the "muzzle resizer" die.

*SQUEEEEEZE*

Ugh! Grunt! I think the case is stuck!

*spoing!*

A little half-moon of brass came flying off the rim...

Give the die a fraction of a turn and...

*spoink!*

...out pops the (mangled) cartridge case.

This must not be right. There must be a way to keep this from happening... I ran inside and soaked a paper towel in Wesson oil and rubbed it on the outside of a case.

*Scrunk... spop!*

Cool! That was easy!

Still, maybe I'm not doing this right. After we finish setting up for the gun show tomorrow, maybe I'll ask ol' Charlie for some pointers.

(This was followed by Mike Irwin's priceless retort: "Wesson Oil? My God you are such a girl!")

Hey! Cool! Found a case lube pad in that big box in the corner!

Let's try a couple more...

Whoops! Crushed one...

Wonder how this "priming chamber" works.

Nope... doesn't go in that way... wait... eureka! Way cool!

Let's prime these cases now!

...after an interlude containing a minor setback around the fire at My First Deer Camp,

When we left off, he-man JShirley, unaware of his own strength, had just busted the decapper pin on my little 310 Tool by a campfire in GA.

Back home in TN, I pondered long and hard... What to do?

I went digging around on the shelf among the die boxes, curious as to what might be there. Hmmm... A complete Lee press with dies and dipper for .357... That's pretty cool... Wait, this isn't shaped like the other die boxes; I wonder what a "Lee Loader" for .38 is?

Cool! Just a couple of pins, a die-looking thingy, and all I need to find is a hammer! I grab some powder, a handful of spent cases, some primers, a box of 148gr HBWC's, and the Lee Loader and head for the concrete steps out front.

The first bullet winds up seated too deeply. Following safe cartridge disposal procedures, I chuck it into the bushes. The next one turns out fine. (The .5 dipper of Green Dot and Winchester small pistol primers, in case anyone's wondering) Seating the primer on the third one results in a *BANG!* (at 0200 hrs... ), a seating rod launched six inches into the air, and black tats on two fingers and a thumb. The fourth cartridge turns out fine. It being freezing, and 0230 to boot, I went back in. Two days later, I launched them from my 627, and both went off fine and shot where I pointed....


COOL!


I just got a Lee Turret Press in at work, pre-loaded with .38 Spl dies, and have both a full set of dippers and an Auto-Disk powder measure on order (we'll see which one works out better.)

Just think how much money I'll save if I spend all this money!

Ah, reloading. Never have I had more fun spending dollars to save dimes!

Politics: Remember how we were talking about the ANWR?

Nigeria, 5th largest supplier of oil to the US, is dissolving into chaos.

Venezuela, from who we get even more oil than that, has nationalized industries, jumped into bed with Iran, and has been taken over by an El Presidente-For-Life bent on playing chicken with the Yanqui superpower:

In a speech earlier Saturday, Chavez called for the U.S. government to accept "the new realities of Latin America," as he brushed aside restrictions that limit presidents to two consecutive terms. He vowed to stay in office beyond 2013, when his term expires, saying he would revise the constitution to get rid of presidential term limits.

We're making noises about attacks on Iran, who is cheerfully providing us with casus belli.

Anyone who thinks that this isn't going to blow up messily in the next two or three years is, to put it bluntly, hopelessly naive.

Fill 'er up?

About last night.

You can tell me you were having more fun than I was last night, with me at a belated company Christmas/end-of-the-year dinner, eating bloody and still-twitching prime rib, drinking Newcastle on draft, surrounded by gun nut friends and co-workers...

...and I'll call you a damn liar. :)

Odd things I pulled out of the side pocket of my purse today...

...while looking for a quarter:

1) The sawn-off bolt knob from an Argentine M1909 Engineer's Carbine. (Don't ask.)

2) A dead CR123 battery.

3) An A1 birdcage-type flash hider, complete with crush washer, which I have no idea where I got or what it was doing in my purse.

Boomsticks: Real world reliability.

Marko has a good post up discussing why reliability is the most important criteria for a carry gun. I would like to take this opportunity to expand on that a little bit.

All my .45 ACP 1911-type carry guns are absolutely reliable with Wilson 47D magazines. They will all feed 230gr ball, 200gr SWC from Georgia Arms, and 230gr Remington Golden Sabers with one hundred percent reliability.

"But, Tam," you say, "How do you know they're reliable? Will they feed Aguila IQ? Will they feed X-treemShok from 10-round PowerMags? Will they feed Nytrillium hollowpoints from Chinese knockoff GI magazines?"

I don't know.

Nor am I likely to ever find out.

Because I don't put that crap in my guns.

Look, the odds of me standing over some dead zombie terrorist in the jungles of Zimbabwe, forced to use his ammo since I'm out, and him being coincidentally armed with a 1911 which I apparently can't use because I shot him right in the gun, and it turns out that Dr. Evil has armed his zombie terrorist henchmen with surplus Colt mags full of Glaser Safety Slugs that won't feed in my gun, are... well... "ludicrous" doesn't begin to cover it.

I buy my own mags and ammunition. I buy the same kinds of mags and ammunition every time. I buy them in bulk. I buy them because I know they work in my gun, not because they had a cool ad with rapelling ninjas in Guns & Ammo this month or because they have a 98.6% "One Shot Stop" rating or because SquEAL Team Six uses them or whatever.

I have yet to be convinced that this is an unsound practice to follow...

Blog Stuff: The View From The Arms Room.

One of the reasons for this blog is to put some manner of discipline in my otherwise wildly-disordered personal life. I have successfully (thus far) made it a point to post something, anything, at least once a day, no matter how swamped I get at work, no matter how lethargic I feel at home, unless I'm actually out of town or something. As a bonus, hopefully I'll be able to look back in a couple of years and glean something publication-worthy out of the better stuff. I really think that five or ten years down the road, there will be a better (or at least wildly different) America around us, and there will be as much interest in these times as there was for the late Sixties after all was said and done.

The other blog is a bigger challenge, as it's meant to be informative and educational. The first ten posts or so were easy, as most of them were simply copied from older posts here, cleaned up, edited, and amplified with some new material. Now I'm faced with having to write them from scratch. I'm hoping to set aside a special time every week where I can write up a new entry for The Arms Room. At that rate, I've got about a year's worth of material in C&R rifles alone, so it's just a matter of buckling down and doing it now that the retail holiday madness is past. Look forward to a piece on my Springfield M1903 Mark I this week, as well as a re-write/expansion of the Gewehr 88 essay, covering the Gew.88/05 modifications.

Boomsticks: Why I went 6.8.

As some of you may have remembered (if you're very long-time readers) I had a yen to build a .300 Whisper AR. I had the lower (a Superior Arms) all put together, complete with MagPul M93B stock. I had a Leupold CQ/T scope on an ARMS throw-lever base all ready to mount on it. I ordered the .300 Fireball (nee Whisper) upper from Olympic...

In March.

Of '06.

Last week, after evicting yet another spider from its dusty magwell, I figured it was time to slap an upper of some sort on the completed lower, even if only temporarily as a means of keeping arachnids from taking up residence inside. I was considering one of the ultra-swoopy GG&G Dominator uppers we have at the shop, but a phone call changed my mind.

It was Wednesday morning and I was making my weekly call to one of my biggest distributors. We'd just sold our last case of Wolf .223, and the stock of Federal XM193 was running low, so I figured it was time to replenish the bulk AR fodder at the shop.

"So, Larry, do y'all have any XM855?"

"No, we're all out. Sorry!"

"How 'bout XM193?"

"Nope."

"Federal American Eagle? Winchester Q3131?"

"I have 10,000 boxes of the American Eagle on order, but I'm out of both."

"Wolf?"

"All out."

"S&B?"

"Nope."

"So, basically, what you're telling me is that y'all don't have any cheap .223 in the house."

"I'm afraid that's about right."

Well.

Now, I have enough bulk 5.56 at home to resupply Task Force Ranger, but suppose I didn't? Suppose I'd unwisely shot up my stockpiles and needed to buy more? I'd be stuck buying premium .223, which runs $15-$20 (or more) a box.

You know what else costs about that, at least when bought by the box? That's right: 6.8mm SPC. And I can get all the bulk 6.8 ball ammo I want right now, and I can get it by the case lot.

And there is a DPMS 6.8mm AP4 flat top upper at work.

Well, scratch that... There was a DPMS 6.8mm AP4 flat top upper at work, because now it's pinned to my lower, with the CQ/T parked atop it.

The cartridge has always seemed a good idea to me, delivering a pretty good wallop while requiring minimal changes to the existing AR platform, and with Hornady and Remington both loading ammo, availability is good right now. (This also gives me an excellent excuse to pick up a 6.8 barrel for my Encore.) Since the lower required no modifications to work with the upper, when my .300 Whisper upper finally arrives (or should I decide to pick up another .223 upper) I can switch it out with two push-pins and not have to worry about the hammers, buffers, and mag blocks that make having a dedicated pistol-caliber lower almost a necessity.

So there you go. Only about two years after they hit the shelves, I've finally got a 6.8, and almost by accident at that. Who knows? If ammo prices and availability trends keep going like they have for the past two years, I may be converting my other 5.56 AR to the caliber before long as well...

Make me vote Republican:

Draft Ron Paul.

I already picked two of the easiest ones...

...here and here, but there's still a gold mine of punchline-worthy material here.

Smith & Tesler lied...

...Johnson died.

You know, if this is true...

If this is true... If I was in those two officers' shoes, sworn to uphold the law and protect the public, and as a result of my lies an innocent old woman lay dead by my hand, I believe I'd have no option but to take my department-issued Glock with me into the bathroom and Do The Right Thing.

There are no words for my contempt right now.


(Via Ninth Stage.)