Cured?

So, I had an idea that might fix the FNX-45 Tactical's problem with intermittent failures to eject on the last couple rounds in the mag: Clamp a few extra ounces of weight to the frame:

Fifty rounds, loading five or ten at a time and holding the gun lightly in an attempt to induce a limp-wrist, and the gun ran fine with the Uboat attached to the rail. Plus, I now have the industry standard in pistol lights on the gat. It's enough to make me wish I still believed in that ol' .45 voodoo.

Who sells kydex holsters for an FNX-45 Tactical with a mounted RMR and an X300U and can deliver inside two weeks or so? I've got a place I'm going where this gun would be perfect. Email me if you've got a source.
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Day at the Movies...

The only way Depp's not getting an Oscar nomination out of Black Mass is if he gets caught voting Republican between now and awards season.

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) September 19, 2015

Drone photography...

Sunset on Pluto as seen by New Horizons:

Watch this on The Scene.

Shots Fired

Wednesday I brought another hundred rounds of Lucky Gunner's .45ACP ammo along to work and, after I clocked out, I stepped onto the range to put it through the CCA 1911.

On round number fifty-seven of the day (#513 of the test) the gun experienced a failure-to-feed. It looked like it didn't go all the way under the extractor claw. It occurs to me that I probably should have scrubbed the breechface before starting the test. Oh, well, you can't un-ring a bell.

The FTF rather obviously threw me off my game, as evidenced by that egregious miss from the following magazine.

With 556 rounds through the gun at the end of Wednesday's session, the odd number began making me itch. So I dragged my bulk ammo can and an impromptu target out to lane one after work yesterday.

Fourty-four rounds of assorted S&B, Federal, and Winchester ammo later, there were no further malfunctions and the round count was now a nice, round number.

This brings the total rounds fired to 600 since the weapon was last cleaned or lubricated with one failure to go into battery on round #356 and a failure to feed on round #513. 1,544 rounds to go.
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This is surreal.

A high-mileage and much-worse-for-wear Duran Duran is on the Today show right now, doing a live performance of "Old & Creepy Like the Wolf". Bobbi asked "Have they rearranged it so he doesn't have to hit the hard notes anymore?"

Sigh. Time and gravity make fools of us all.
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Tab Clearing...

• Walther P1


• Crossing the streams


• Raylan's Law: "If you run into an a**hole in the morning, you ran into an a**hole. If you run into a**holes all day, you're the a**hole."

:(

It's just a month shy of eight years ago that I remember running out on the porch of my old place in Tennessee and calling Marko on the phone to exclaim "Dude! You are not going to believe who just commented on my blog! Frank frickin' James!"

It wasn't long after that that I moved to Indy and met Frank at one of the first blogmeets we had here. What most impressed me about him at the time was what an encouraging mentor he was even then. Frank, a legend in the world of gun writing, treated me like a peer and never failed to provide encouragement. I learned a lot from Frank over the years.

All this is a roundabout way of explaining why the phone call I got tonight has left me just gutted.

'Bye, Frank. Thank you so much.

Michael Bane has penned a moving tribute.
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How does that work?

Increasing funding to the BATFEIEIO to combat gun trafficking is like giving money to the Sinaloa Cartel to cut down on dope smuggling.
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Switchology...

So, I've been carrying the SureFire E2D Ultra in the front pocket of my mom jeans every day for a few weeks now. I'm liking it a lot, except for one thing...

First the good stuff, though: It has yet to get squirted out of the pocket; the clip works well. It has yet to show signs of trying to chew its way out of my pocket, despite the aggressive "strike bezel". I assume that will be the eventual failure mode of the jeans, but it remains to be seen if it can chew out of a cheap pair of Lees faster than my IWB holster can tear a belt loop loose from its moorings (which is how I usually know it's time to bulk order another three pairs of jeans from Amazon.)

Like all SureFire lights, nothing in your day-to-day activities is likely to hurt the thing, unless your day-to-day activities involve getting run over by construction equipment or falling into the calderas of active volcanoes.

The biggest...only, really...gripe that I have is the switchology.

See, in addition to the sweet 500-lumen high power setting, there's a 5-lumen "running light" setting. I like a dimmer light for looking for dropped items under furniture or walking from the house to the garage. The high-beam setting is harder on batteries and frankly overkill for most everyday flashlight chores.

The problem is how the low-beam setting is activated. Here's SureFire's description from their website:

"[T]he E2DL Ultra is activated with a pushbutton tailcap click switch that also selects output levels: press or click once for a high-intensity 500-lumen white-light beam—ten times the light needed to overwhelm the night-adapted vision of an aggressor. Return to off and press or click again within two seconds for a 5-lumen ultra-long runtime low beam that's suitable for navigating at night or performing close-up tasks for hours."

This has two potential downsides:

The first would be if you needed to pull the flashlight out in a hurry and light up a bad guy or potential bad guy. If you fumble and double-pump the button with your thumb, you've got a fistful of flashlight putting out the approximate lumens of a half-dead firefly.

The other would be if you were using the technique Chuck Haggard was demonstrating at the class I took at Paul-E-Palooza: You're searching for a possible threat with the light held up in the "Modified FBI" position. You spot a threat, go dark with the light, sidestep, and re-illuminate with the light held in a "neck index" for shooting. Only if you do that with the E2D Ultra, you'll barely have enough lumens to see your front sight.

This latter is a technique-dependent gripe, however. Mentioning it to LAPD veteran Mike Grasso, he brought up the countering school of thought: Namely, that when you turn off the light to move, the bad guy can move, too, so once the light goes on, it should stay on, and stay on the bad guy.

So how big of a downside the tailcap switch is is going to be up to the individual user and their brand of gun-fu to determine. I was firmly in the "Once the light goes on, it stays on" camp before I took the class with Chuck, and now I'm torn. I can see the upsides and downsides of both ideas...
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From a discussion at the Book of Face...

And then it hit me:

And here's the thing: Guns are something I know pretty well, and so I have an ability to gauge the general level of derp in fora dedicated to the topic.

This led to the horrid realization: What if all the fora dedicated to topics I *don't* know that well are just as derptastic? Are the discussions on cameras and bicycles and homebrewing and BMW suspension setups just as full of pig-ignorant suck and fail and I'm just too ignorant to tell?

Chugging right along...

Took the CCA 1911 and another one hundred rounds of the Lucky Gunner-supplied PMC Bronze 230gr FMJ .45ACP ammo to the range yesterday morning. The weather was nice, and I went and set my targets on the 10-yard line.

The hundred rounds went by without a hitch. There were no malfunctions of any type to report.

This brings the total rounds fired to 456 since the weapon was last cleaned or lubricated with one failure to go into battery on round #356. 1,544 rounds to go.
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Automotif CVIII...

Spotted while walking home from lunch at Twenty Tap on Saturday afternoon, this little Triumph TR3A was dwarfed by the autos around it. According to Wikipedia, the TR3A was made from '57 to '62. We'll call this one a '58 for purposes of filing the photo.

The driver looked like he was having a grand time. Also, if he noticed any loose change lying on the pavement, he could reach out and grab it as the car went by without having to lean over!

And since we're on the topic of lunch at Twenty Tap, the special of the day was a smoked pulled chicken tostada...

Yum.

After shooting at the range this morning, I got home to find a groggy Roomie who'd just gotten home from the 0dark30 shift at work. We went to Public Greens for lunch. I had the chicken tenders, dill cucumber salad, and a pint of Daredevil Carnival Saison, imported all the way from across town in Speedway.
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Bowling Pins

I got to the range and realized I'd forgotten to grab some of the Lucky Gunner-supplied PMC ammo on the way out the door. Fortunately, there was a .50-cal ammo can half full of miscellaneous .45 ball ammo in the trunk.

I was a little worried, because while there's a fair amount of factory Sellier & Bellot, Magtech, and Winchester White Box ammo in there, there's also a bunch of factory reloads from Precision Cartridge and the Brass Kings, back from the lean times of '09.

I won my first heat, and my second one saw me shooting against the guy who'd just won the state International Pistol championship a couple weekends earlier. No pressure.

"Shooter ready?"
*nod*
"Stand by... *TWEET!*"
*click*
Click? What the hell? I ran the slide. Click again. Oh, wait, it's "Tap Rack Bang" and not just "Rack Bang". This time I actually seated the frickin' magazine, visions of Pat Rogers and a certain patch on my backpack dancing in my head, and ran the slide again.

As I laid the sight on the first pin, I risked a side glance at my opponent's table. He already had two down, although one of them was still on the table. I went to work and, thanks to a stoppage he experienced, I almost caught up, but still had one lying stubbornly on the back edge when he knocked his last one off into the grass.

The second bracket I had a good run, making into the semifinals. I may have been bitten by my ammo situation, though, since with two "wounded" pins left on the table, the gun didn't go fully into battery. I slapped the back of the slide and fired, just in time to see my opponent's last pin roll of the table. Since it was the middle of competition, I can't diagnose whether that was the ammo or the gun or what.

In "pin heads", where you shoot the sawn-off heads of bowling pins with rimfires, I got knocked out in my first heat, but the losers of the first heat get put in a Second Chance bracket, and went all the way to the end on that one, winning the position of First Loser.

Had a blast. Will definitely be there for the next one.

S&W Model 610 Classic with hot 200gr handloads in moon clips. This revolver, like .44s and .45s, shoots "Major", as opposed to a .38 revolver or a 9mm pistol, which would shoot "Minor" and have its pins placed halfway back on the table.

On one heat I was helping to set pins while the RO called out the positioning "Table one, Major. Tables two and three, um, Major. And table four is Major, too. All four tables Major."

"'MURRICA!" I yelled.

What looks to be a Springfield Armory 1911, likely worked on by Ray Saltzman at Saltzman Gun Works, knowing the shooter.

Anyhow, I fired a total of 56 rounds of assorted .45ACP through the gun that day, with one failure to go completely into battery. That makes 356 rounds since the pistol was last cleaned or lubricated, with one failure to go into battery on round #356. 1,644 rounds to go.
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Rain Delay

Gotta write up the bowling pin match yet, especially since it was another 56 rounds through the CCA 1911, but between Bobbi working the weird shift this weekend and me volunteering to put in four hours at work today for the Grand Opening weekend mayhem, y'all are gonna have to wait just a little bit.
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Automotif CVII...

Spotted this '64 Pontiac GTO ragtop in the Fresh Market parking lot while walking to Twenty Tap for lunch with Bobbi yesterday. She was kind enough to wait while I geeked out and shot it from several angles, both with the P-7000 digital I keep in my pocket and the EOS-1N loaded with Tri-X.

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Getting pinned...

"I believe I can flyyyy!"

Great time shooting pins at MCF&G this morning. Full report to follow.
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Hmmm...

I should go shoot bowling pins.
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Grand Opening Sale...

Looks like they decided to put on a bit of a sale for the Grand Opening here at work. Sale prices and suchlike may be found in this post at INGO.
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9/11

It would be interesting to see how 9/11 is viewed in the big picture, a hundred years from now. From the Strait of Gibraltar, along the south coast of the Mediterranean, and then inland all the way to the far tip of Afghanistan's Badakhshan province is essentially one big long strip of failed state, with the exceptions of Israel and Iran. (Jordan and Egypt are clinging on by their fingernails, but I wouldn't be shopping for long-term real estate investments in either.)

If Osama's idea was "The worse, the better," then he definitely got his wish.
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