F, H, C, D

So, it started with a post at Weaponsman, where he noted some ex-RAF Tornadoes for sale. (Just the thing to shorten your commute!)

One of the commenters noted that the Tornado F3 (the British name for the ADV, or air defence variant) were in use in the Falkland Islands in the 1990s.

"Tornado F3's flying over the Falkland islands. MOD 45147767" by Photo: Cpl Darren Smith /MOD. Licensed under OGL via Commons.

So I followed the link to discover that, following the Falklands War, the British government stood up a  flight of interceptors in the islands, now based at RAF Mount Pleasant, and assigned it the flight number of the old unit number given the Hal Far Fighter Flight: No. 1435 flight. Originally composed of four RAF Phantoms, the aircraft were named Faith, Hope, Charity, and Desperation. (They initially operated out of the repaired Port Stanley airfield before RAF Mount Pleasant was built.)

The Phantoms were replaced by Tornadoes, and the Tornadoes in their turn have been supplanted by Typhoons. Apparently Her Majesty's Air Force no longer puts names on the planes, but the four Typhoons bear the tail codes F, H, C, and D above the Maltese Cross emblem of the flight.

(Incidentally, and perhaps unsurprisingly, the Falklands seem to have much more relaxed gun laws than are normal for a UK possession.)
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Avaunt, miscreants!

It was when I discovered my roommate investigating a noise in the back yard with an Enfield No.2 revolver that the idea occurred to me. Taking a report from a woman in a nightgown who had just shot a bad guy through the brisket with a .38 S&W round from a 70-year-old service revolver would guarantee that Officer Friendly wouldn't have to buy his own beers for a while, sure. However, the round itself was far from ideal for self defense and generally only available with lead round-nose bullets.

We had a 4" nickeled Smith & Wesson Military & Police model at the shop that was new enough to have a heat-treated cylinder and old enough to be interesting to Bobbi, and I knew that somewhere in my ammo stores was a small stash of standard pressure .38 Special JHP loads as well as some warm-loaded 148gr HBWC, which would also do in a pinch.

Bobbifoto

Sure, it was trading one medium-bore Depression-era service revolver for another, but I think it was a step up.
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"These blast points, too accurate for Sand People..."

Saw this target propped in a hallway at work today. Couldn't resist making a little editorial comment...

"...only Imperial stormtroopers are so precise."

Tab Clearing...

• Courtesy of Weaponsman, an informative PowerPoint slide show on ISIL.


• Are the terr'rists winning? Your neighbor thinks so. 


• SECRET CODES!

Yeah, I'll probably be seeing it again...

...so it's easy to understand why it's the biggest thing in the history of ever.

It's easy to be cynical and pan it as a re-hash of the very first Star Wars movie, but the fact is, that's what a lot of fans have wanted for a long time: To plant their butts in theater seats and see the opening narrative scroll up the screen and then feel those feels as the young Nobody from Nowheresville turns out to be the badass hero who saves the day and Good triumphs over Evil and swell the music and bring up the lights and everybody cheer and go home.

Instead, we got three episodes of Jar-Jar and increasingly disjointed blatherskite revealing George Lucas's ideas about politics and economics.

It's good that a whole second generation of kids can now really grok why their parents make such a big deal about Star Wars, because now they know it's not just some incomprehensible CGI spectaculars on a dusty DVD boxed set.

The most Monday-est time of the year.

Are there any Mondays that are Monday-er than the Monday that comes after Christmas falls on a Friday?

I submit that there are not.
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Gratuitous Gun Pr0n #140...

Glock 35 Gen4 with the finger grooves removed, a stippling job, AmeriGlo I-Dot sights, and featuring a threaded LWD 9mm conversion barrel (and using a 9mm extractor and ejector, as well.)
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Further study is needed...

 AmeriGlo CAP sights...

...or the regular wide surrounds like on the I-Dots and Trijicon HDs?

I've been using the I-Dots for years, but tried the yellow/green CAP on the Glock 37 and shot it so well that I replaced the TFOs on the Robar 17 with CAPs as well.

A bunch of shooting with both setups is called for...
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Child Rescued From Abusive Parent.

Well. That was excellent. Now we can all forget the balls-up Lucas made of his own franchise and pretend things segued smoothly from ROTJ..

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) December 27, 2015

A sense of wonder...

An annual watching of Hogfather is rapidly becoming as much of a Christmas tradition at Roseholme Cottage as turducken with bacon mushroom gravy is a Thanksgiving one...

Happy Holidays! Joyeux Noël!

Every year Indy turns the Soldiers' & Sailors' Monument into a 284.5' Christmas tree.

Merry Christmas to all the people in my computer!

Hope Santa brought y'all all cool things and not lumps of coal.
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Nearing the halfway point...

After my shift yesterday, I stepped out onto the range and put a hundred rounds of Lucky Gunner's Fiocchi .380ACP through the P250. There were no malfunctions to report.

That's 920 rounds fired since the gun was last cleaned or lubricated, with one failure to go completely into battery (#447). 1,080 rounds to go.
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Well, I certainly feel safer.

New rules apparently say that even if you opt out of the TSA's porn-o-scan machine at the airport and ask for an old-fashioned hands-on probulation instead, they can still make you pose for the porn-o-scan.

They say this will make us safer, and I'm sure they'll only do it to bad people. Right?
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A New Era

Back in '94, when I first started working at the gun store full-time, I traded my Ruger P91DAO on a Glock 23. I mostly carried one of a succession of Glock 23s from then until 2000, when I switched to a Glock 29. Mostly. (I was still in that stage of my gun ownership where I thought having a "carry rotation" was a cool thing.)

I wasn't until 2003 that I made a commitment to carrying the same gun in the same place every day. Well, actually I had several 5" 1911s set up more-or-less identically, but that was what I carried and shot.

In 2011, I switched from the 1911 to an M&P9 for a host of reasons, capacity and weight foremost among them, but also a desire to stop nerding on the gun so much and concentrate on the shooting more.

I've come a long way shooting the M&P, competing with it and using it in a bunch of training classes, but I'd reached a point where I got to feeling like I'd reached a plateau with that gun. It's probably mostly psychological, but the fact remains that I feel pretty confident that I could pick up my CCA 1911, Sig P320, or that Glock 37 and shoot Dot Torture clean at three yards, yet I've never cleaned that drill with my M&P.

Since I was playing with that G37 so much, I took it as a hint. The other day I cleaned out my old Waller range bag, moved the contents to a new G.P.S. pack, added a Lasergrip to my Glock 19, and holstered it up.

Looks like 2016 is going to be the year of the Glock for me.
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Six-fitty...

At the company Christmas party Saturday night I ran a box of S&B 230gr FMJ through the Glock 37. There were no malfunctions.

The Glock 37 has now fired 650 rounds since it was last cleaned or lubed, with one parts breakage. 1,350 rounds to go.
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Oh, it's a Christmas miracle!

Ambo Driver and Squeaky joined forces to make me the most wondrous Christmas present!

Flintlocks and Flop-tops
And Number Three Russians
Black-powder Mausers
From jackbooted Prussians,
Shiny Smith PC's from limited runs
These are a few of my favorite guns.

Socketed bay'nets
On Zulu War rifles,
Engraved, iv'ried Lugers
That make quite an eyefull
Mosin tomato stakes sold by the ton
These are a few of my favorite guns.

Rusty top-breaks!
Smallbore Schuetzens!
And all of Browning's spawn
I just keep on browsing my favorite guns
Until all my money's gone.

Automotif CXIX...

A silver mid-Eighties Monte Carlo SS in the local grocery store parking lot...

...but the oddly distended rear window marks it out as a rare "Aerocoupe". This body style was sold in fairly limited numbers in '86 to homologate the car for NASCAR racing, with several thousand more being sold the following year. All 200 sold in 1986 were white with burgundy interiors, while the 6,052 1987 models, like this one, were available in four different colors.
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Fixing a G-lock...

So, I bought this used Glock in a local gun store. It's a Gen 2 Glock 17 with a serial number that dates it to 1992.

It looked like a Robar custom, or at least a gun that someone really wanted people to think was a Robar custom, so I plunked down the dough for it. Close examination showed that the finish was really NP3 and confirmation on Bookface from some folks who would know pretty much made up my mind that what I had here was indeed an early Robar Glock.

It was pretty schweet except for one thing: That goofy Siderlock trigger. I refuse to believe that anybody savvy enough to send their gun to Robar would be derpy enough to put this useless dingus in it. I have to think that the guy who had it Robar'ed then sold it and the new owner dropped in the useless trigger. 

The new owner also did a bit of a trigger job, polishing all the bearing surfaces of the cruciform so that...B-BAM!...the gun doubled on the regular. Good thing I was only loading two in the mag, or I might have put more rounds into the overhead target carrier trackway than I did...

Off to Brownells.com I went, ordering a completely new set of fire control parts in a fit of excess caution.

I'll probably wind up putting the original striker group and firing pin safety back in the gun, since they're all slick and NP3'ed and the trigger itself was the problem part.

The stuff I learned futzing around with the G37 has proved invaluable. This 17 now has the same ZEV connector/NY1 trigger spring combo that I installed in Project Whimsy. A box of Blazer Brass and a box of American Eagle later, all is well.

Let this be a reminder that if you buy someone else's gun with Bubba Dremel's action polishing job custom trigger work, function check it while unloaded and then load only two or three rounds in the mag for the first few mags to make sure everything's working as it should.
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Automotif CXVIII...

Early non-"S" Porsche 928. For record-keeping purposes, let's call it a '79, although the styling barely changed for nearly a decade on the base models.
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Excuses. Again.

Overslept. Free ice cream machine is on the fritz this AM. Check back in the evening.
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