ZCQOTD

ZCQOTD: "That's the kind of shit that sticks to everybody's fur."

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) March 12, 2023

When you need it for a photo prop...

I've got 1990s-vintage ammo boxes to use for photo props in most every common handgun caliber... except 9x19mm, because at some point back while I was still living in Tennessee I consolidated most of my handgun ammo...and apparently all my 9mm...into MTM Case-Gard containers and pitched the boxes.

So of course I need some vintage 9mm boxes today.

I can set up some pretty good early Nineties tableaux: Nikon F4, Motorola MicroTAC, Macintosh Powerbook Duo, early Chris Reeve Sebenza...but no old Cor-Bon ot Hydra-Shok or Winchester Subsonic 9mm boxes.

Thanks to Commander Zero, I have a .45ACP Black Talon box, and nothing's more Peak Early Nineties than Black Talons.

Maybe I can position it in the photo so the caliber can't be read and the size disparity isn't too noticeable?

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Size Matters, Except When It Doesn't

Taurus's older Model 85 small-frame .38 Special revolver was a five-shooter almost exactly the same size as Smith & Wesson's J-frame family, enough so that they fit the same holster.

Despite the protestations of some Taurus fanboys that the new 856 is the same size as the 85, just with an extra charge hole somehow magicked into the cylinder, it ain't. It's a bigger gun.

Here's a Taurus 327, built on the same frame as the 856, side-by-side with a Smith & Wesson 432PD. Both are .32-caliber six-shooters, albeit the Taurus is chambered for .327 Federal Magnum while the Smif is a .32 H&R Mag.

With warm .32 H&R Mag, like the 100gr LSWC from Ventura Munitions, the Airweight Smith is right on the edge of the dreaded "brisk-but-manageable" territory, which is old-school gunwriterspeak for "each shot felt like getting smacked in the palm with a tee ball bat". I tend to favor Federal 95gr LSWC ammo for carry for that reason. No, it doesn't expand, but it's got a nice flat meplat and sharp shoulder and it has yoinks of penetration.

On the other hand, being all steel and therefore a bit heavier, plus having just a teeny bit more grip, the Taurus 327 is plenty controllable with any .32 Mag load you put in it. With .327 Fed, on the other hand, it takes a lot more work for me to keep the muzzle from pointing skyward between shots.

While the Smith is light and small enough to be a coat pocket gun, that's not a role I'd ask of the Taurus.

On the other hand, in a tuckable AIWB belt holster like the Dark Star Gear Apollo, they're essentially the same size...

As an aside, I really wish they hadn't discontinued those compact hard plastic original gangsta J-frame Lasergrips. The closest these days are the LG-105s, which have the same abbreviated "boot grip" contour and smooth plastic construction that won't stick to your shirt like soft rubber does, but I think the placement of the second finger was better for me on the originals.

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Well...

I certainly didn't have a good old-fashioned bank run on my 2023 bingo card, and yet here we are. (Rather, here Silicon Valley Bank is...or, technically, was.)

It was an extraordinary denouement less than two days after the bank shocked Wall Street and its depositors with emergency moves to raise cash and stave off a collapse in the face of withdrawal requests and a precipitous decline in the value of its investment holdings. The bank as of Friday morning was working with advisers on a potential sale, a person with knowledge of the negotiations said, and had halted trading in its shares in the wake of a rapid fall.

The F.D.I.C. created a new bank, the National Bank of Santa Clara, to hold the deposits and other assets of the failed one. The regulator said in a news release that the new entity would be operating by Monday and that checks issued by the old bank would continue to clear.

Offset

"Mechanical offset", "height-over-bore", whatever you want to call it, is a thing I'm more used to dealing with when using AR-pattern carbines at close ranges than when shooting pistols and revolvers.

Getting this T.O.R.O. dialed-in reminded me that the center of the optical sight is most of an inch above the axis of the bore, and given the wide range of velocities in .38 Special ammunition, it opened a whole 'nother can of worms.

The other sighting system on handguns that has this amount of offset from the bore is lasers...well, most of them, that is. They're usually slung below a flashlight on an accessory rail or perched out on a CTC Lasergrip, like the ones on the old Painted Ordnance "Gun Blog 9" here.

With Lasergrips I've come around to the solution of adjusting them so that the beam is parallel to the bore axis, such that the bullet's point of impact will be about a half inch left and an inch above the dot (on my J-frame) at anything out to something over 25 yards.

There's no real equivalent of that for a MRDS, though, as far as I know.

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QotD: Doomer Brain Virus Edition

From a pretty good read on the pitfalls of doomerism:

What doomerism does, basically, is to execute a distributed denial-of-service attack on our threat perception. If we start to see everything in the world as a mortal threat, it makes us incapable of focusing our efforts on the actual priorities. I see doomerism as an extreme version of “polycrisis” thinking — the tendency to see all the bad stuff in the news as part of a mutually reinforcing web, instead of a list of challenges to be addressed one by one.

Worth the read.

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Meanwhile, in Asia...

Dude just campaigned super well, did amazing in the debates, fundraised like an animal, etc. Gotta hand it to him. https://t.co/1gZtCg7Chw

— Berny Belvedere (@bernybelvedere) March 10, 2023

Xi Jinping got hisself elected to an unprecedented third five-year term as president of China by a vote of 2,952-0 in the CCP's legislature.

Man, that's a bigger margin than Trump pulled in The Villages! (You thought I was gonna say Biden and Detroit, didn't you?)

ANYway, Xi has pretty much solidified his control over the reins of power in China, and that's bad because his whole schtick, foreign policy-wise, is pretty aggro.

This is having some interesting effects in other Asian nations. We've seen the Japanese bolstering their military capabilities and increasing defense spending, and now they're engaging in high-level talks with South Korea, which is pretty wild given the literal centuries of bad blood between Korea and Japan.

Meanwhile, Australia has committed to the purchase of up to five Virginia-class nuclear attack submarines from the US to replace their own trouble-plagued Collins-class diesel-electric subs as they age out of service.

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Majordomo of the Forest

This little fella was alongside the Monon Trail yesterday, looking for all the world like he's welcoming you to the woods.

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Epps Oops

Comedian Mike Epps forgot his S&W 442 in his backpack at Indianapolis International Airport and got busted at the TSA checkpoint.

To add insult to injury, now we all know he carries 90gr Critical Defense Lite in the Fuddiest manner possible: with an empty chamber under the hammer.

Police spoke with Epps, who told them he was in town for a show at Gainbridge Fieldhouse and forgot the handgun was inside his backpack.

According to the report, police found a .38 Special Airweight revolver, loaded with four rounds of Hornady .38 special ammo, the spot in the cylinder with the firing pin was empty.

This is a DAO revolver with an enclosed, rebounding hammer and floating frame-mounted firing pin. You could use a fully-loaded Centennial as a hockey puck without it discharging.

Don't be like Mike. Check your bags before you get to the airport, people.

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Automotif CCCL...

Probably the low-water mark for the North American import Mercedes-Benz SL-class, performance-wise at least, was the '81-'85 380SL.

It replaced the 4.5L V-8 of the earlier 450SL with a 3.8L SOHC V-8 that was rated at 155 SAE net bhp in U.S. trim, a haircut of 25 horsepower from the preceding model. The '79 Oil Crisis had left a bad taste in the public's mouth for "gas guzzlers". Further, the federally-mandated Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards for imported marques rose from 19.0 miles per gallon for the 1979 model year to 27.5 for the '85s.

It all seemed pretty par for the course in the early Eighties, which was the peak of "Decal & Ground Effects" performance packages that added very little real performance. You can see how people watching cars get slower and dumber year after year would write books like The Probability Broach. We had no idea how close we were to the renaissance.

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Helpin' a Brother Out...

Hey, do you have kids or grandkids (or know someone with kids or grandkids) who could use a book about firearms safety?

Yehuda Remer is a nice dude and he's got a little children's book called Safety On: An Introduction to the World of Firearms for Children which is all about how a kid learns about safe gun handling, storage, and ownership from his dad. It's charmingly illustrated and an easy read for a young elementary schooler.

Check it out!

What do you call a snowflake made of milk?

Apparently a bunch of senators have been lobbied by Big Dairy to propose some vital legislation that would prevent things that weren't squirted out of udders being referred to in commerce as "milk".

Coconut milk has been called coconut milk longer than Vermont has been called Vermont.

Don't you have something serious you could be doing, Senator? https://t.co/xMlP17GoPL

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) March 8, 2023

Sproing

The crocuses are truly exceptional this year in SoBro. 

They're always such a joy to see!

The top two photos were with the Canon EOS 1D Mark IV, while the one below was snapped with the Nikon D2X.

Unsatisfied.

It's rare that I run into a truly unsatisfying experience with a lens. There are certain known lemons in the lens world that I stay way from, but generally if you are using Nikon or Canon glass other than the jankiest older kit lenses, things will be dandy as long as you're mindful of the camera on which you mount them.

It's when resolutions go up, especially on larger sensors, that the weaknesses of cheaper lenses can become apparent. I've mentioned before how lenses that turn out tack sharp images on the 12MP Nikon D700 get underwhelming on the 36MP D800.

Yesterday I had a chance to see the results from an old Canon EF 28-135mm f/3.5-5.6 IS lens on a Canon EOS-1D Mark IV.

Not a lens for pixel peeping, or at least my copy isn't. Works okay on the older 10MP 1D Mark III, though.

If it offered a huge size or weight benefit over the EF 24-105mm f/4L IS, I might be more charitable to it, but its only advantage is price. The 28-135 goes for $150-$175 in used-but-nice shape on BezosMart, while the vastly superior 24-105/4L can be found used for as low as five bills.

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Automotif CCCXLIX...

In the late Sixties, Buick elevated the Gran Sport from an option package on the Skylark into its own model, following the trail blazed by Pontiac with the GTO and Oldsmobile’s 442.

With General Motors dropping its in-house 400 cubic inch displacement cap in midsize cars for the 1970 model year, the motor in the Buick GS swole up to 455 cubes, putting out 350bhp and a whopping 510 ft/lbs of torque. If that wasn't enough, you could opt for the "Stage 1" option package that added a bunch of performance modifications, yet mysteriously added only a claimed 10 horsepower bump.

Insurance companies might have been fooled by the 360bhp rating, but the timing lights weren't. Even Motor Trend managed to crank off mid-13 second E.T.'s from their Stage 1 test car, putting it in rarefied company back then*.

This super clean Diplomat Blue 1970 convertible lacks the Stage 1 package, but I wouldn't kick it out of the garage for leaking oil.

*It's easy to forget, given the rose-tinted glasses through which Boomers and us GenX'ers viewed the Muscle Car era during the automotive dark ages of the late '70s and early '80s, that even during its absolute heyday in '68-'71, the number of cars that would run a quarter in the 13s in stock trim off the showroom floor could be counted in most years without pulling off both socks. 

You could get big motors in the Mustang-Camaro-'Cuda pony cars, but they tended to be traction-limited; nose-heavy and not enough rubber and weight to get the power to the ground. Conversely, the full-size cars were generally too heavy, no matter what monster mill lurked under the hood. Other than the hairiest Corvettes, only a handful of big-motored midsize cars in any given year could lay down an honest sub-14 second run in factory form.

Rat Bike!

Check out this agglomeration of parts that have been bodged together into a funky neighborhood putterer...

Yes, he's rigged up a hand shift lever. No, there aren't any brakes on that front wheel, making the disc purely ceremonial. Yes, the front wheel is from a mountain bicycle.

Yes, that's a Thrush automobile muffler. The "truck nutz" really tie the whole thing together, though.

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What makes a classic?

Blogging has occurred at the other place.

Relatedly, this 27-year-old Gen2 Glock 19 has outlived its second set of night sights. Time to put some Trijicon HD XR's on it like I've been meaning to.

Truth in Advertising

You guys, I'm starting to think that Dr. Pepper isn't actually an MD.

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) March 6, 2023

Semi-Feral

Bobbi and I went for a walk yesterday afternoon and stopped to visit with one of our favorite neighbors.

He was hanging out by the bench and trash can there at the side of the Monon Trail. He let Bobbi pet him some, but was a little more aloof and cranky than usual. Possibly he was dealing with a bit of attention overload from the steady stream of people, both big and little, and their dogs...also both big and little...using the trail on a sunny Saturday afternoon.

At least we got him to do a bit of posing for the camera!

Just using the old D2X and trusty 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6G VR II superzoom.

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Lycoming

Over on Facebook, John Correia was tickled by the fact that the Auburn 852 Phaeton in the previous post had a Lycoming engine, what with John being a private pilot and Lycoming being best known these days as a provider of engines for general aviation aircraft.

What I learned while digging up info on the car was pretty interesting. Lycoming's roots go back to a Nineteenth Century sewing machine manufacturer that had, by the fin de siècle, diversified into the typical array of Second Industrial Revolution manufactured mechanical goods: bicycles, typewriters, et cetera.

In 1907, in the middle of the economic contraction surrounding the Panic of 1907, the company was sold and restructured. Sewing machines not being as profitable as they had been, it stuck its corporate toe in the growing market for automobile engines. (In those early days cars were assembled from pieces by engine makers and coach builders, generally. Those "Body by Fisher" emblems on the scuff plates of your Grandma's Bonneville were a vestige of that.)

After the Great War, Lycoming had grown to become, among other things, pretty much the sole source provider of engines to the luxury trio of Auburn, Cord, & Duesenberg, enough so that E.L. Cord bought the company and brought it under his corporate umbrella. At the time, aviation was experiencing the same explosive growth that the automobile industry had been twenty years earlier, and Cord got Lycoming involved in developing engines for his new aero endeavors.

And now you know the rest of the story!

In the late '30s, Cord consolidated Lycoming and its other aviation assets under the "AVCO Lycoming" umbrella, which is still around and has been known to make a gas turbine or two.