God’s Own Cake and the Devil’s Music

I took the Tower of Babel cake to church to get rid of it. It was a great success. Now they want more. I have piles of bananas scattered on the kitchen counter, fresh from the trees in my yard. I guess I’ll freeze what I can’t cook immediately and put the rest in cakes.

My nam wa banana tree finally produced. The bananas are very nice. They’re finger-sized bananas, but they’re not like the lemony guineos we always have in the markets in Miami. They’re very sweet, and they have a smooth texture. It’s a little like banana ice cream.

God keeps working in my life. Last week I led some of the armorbearers on the first Armorbearer Freedom Fast, and Mike joined in. Some of us were fasting to beat gluttony. I was fasting in support of the others. Mike called and said he went to a restaurant after the fast and ordered a kid’s portion. He couldn’t face a regular-size meal. In the past, it has always been hard for Mike to face regular-sized meals, but that was because they were too small. His new attitude is incredible.

I worked at church on Sunday, and when I left at nearly 4 p.m., I hadn’t eaten anything except a piece of cake. I didn’t want more food, but I made myself stop at Five Guys. I got a bacon cheeseburger, Cajun fries, and a large Coke. I ate two thirds of the burger and a third of the fries. I drank half of the Coke. I threw everything else out. I didn’t want it. Today I went to breakfast with my dad, and I left a fourth of my nova bagel on the plate. Not bad. My Armorbearer friend who was fasting because of his weight said he tried to eat something he usually enjoys, and it made him sick, so he couldn’t do it.

Fasting works. My pants and belts do not lie. We are getting supernatural results. And my dad is witnessing all of it, which is also great. One day, we’ll get him.

Church continues to amaze me. I keep meeting extraordinary people there. One of the new Armorbearers is a drummer. His name is Travis. I started talking to him yesterday. I asked him if the drums were his only instruments. He said he played TWELVE, and he listed them. And he said he played them WELL, so apparently it’s not like Prince, who claims he can play forty but probably includes instruments that made noises because he accidentally sat on them in the studio.

I know everyone thinks Prince is a genius. When I see him do something that indicates talent, I will agree. So far, all I’ve seen are weak pop tunes. And he holds a purple guitar sometimes. Wait. I think it’s white. Anyway, I haven’t heard any solos yet.

Travis got a full scholarship to college, based on his ability. That’s what he does now. He said it was largely based on his sight-reading skills. He actually knows who my trombone-virtuoso cousin is, which is astonishing.

So now we have two professional musicians in the group, and they’re not three-chord wonders or rappers. They are real musicians.

The other musician, Zachary, is trying to find a hundred-watt tube amp he can afford. He said he would consider building one, if he had the skills. I used to build temperature and current controls for diode lasers in college, and I have a ton of tools. He sent me links to some sites that have amp plans. Interesting.

One of the guys bought a Bushmaster AR-15. He brought it in for us to look at. We were handing it around and admiring it in a back room. I said, “You know, church has CHANGED since I was a kid.” That cracked Travis up.

My music is going really well. The bluegrass is coming up to speed. My left hand has only had five weeks to get strong, and that’s not enough. When I use a capo (makes fretting easier), I get a taste of what my playing will be like in another month or two. I plan to continue playing bluegrass, simply because it’s great for my technique and it’s wasteful to throw away a whole genre you’ve already learned.

I was suffering with online blues lessons, but I couldn’t take it any more. I got a ZZ Top book, and I started working on “Tube Snake Boogie.” I realize this is not good music for a Christian to work on, but hear me out. The guitar stuff is all blues-based, and it’s HOT. It will get me into electric blues via the side door, and it will help me get familiar with my instruments and amps. I don’t plan to sing this filth in the sanctuary.

I struggled for a week, but today I got it working. I put new strings on my flamenco guitar (like a classical guitar, with a cutaway and a different sound), and I started using it for practice. This is much easier on me than my dreadnought and heavy hollowbody. It allows me to practice pretty painlessly. I actually got through the first page and a half.

I may get hollered at for saying it, but so far, as I expected, this stuff is a complete joke compared to bluegrass. True, you have to go up the neck more, but so what? I’m using elevens, and the guitar’s action is very light. I’m playing at half the speed of bluegrass (or less), the strings are kinder to my hands, and the licks are child’s play. The only real problems are getting used to playing over pickups and coping with the light strings. When you’re used to blasting thirteens at maybe eight notes a second, you can barely feel elevens.

When I used to try to play Stevie Ray Vaughan material, it was difficult, but then he played very fast, and he didn’t cheat by using his left hand to play the notes. He did it just like a bluegrass guitarist.

I’ve noticed that some rock guitarists play runs that seem very fast, but their right hands aren’t keeping up with the notes. Evidently, you can effectively double your speed by hammering on and pulling off and bending the strings with your left hand, between right-hand notes. I wonder how many of these guys could cope with bluegrass. I know some of them have been there; Steve Morse does both styles.

I had a feeling this would turn out to be easy, simply because I know the kind of people who play rock. They are not known for being industrious. Rock guitar isn’t about artistry and sacrifice. It’s about looking cool and attracting shallow women so you can fornicate. That’s what got Pete Townshend started. I know there must be many rock guitarists who woodshed all the time and aren’t afraid of difficult material, but a lot of this stuff appears to be based on using two fingers, the way you might when you’re stoned in the back of a tour bus. And everyone loves nines, and I don’t think that’s totally based on professionalism. It just might have something to do with lack of character, in some cases.

When you play an electric guitar, the gadgetry does a whole lot of the work. It’s pretty cushy compared to killing yourself to get music out of an acoustic.

I look forward to getting a grip on this form of music, and then I want to do a reverse Ray Charles. I want to use bluesy sounds to make music for God. I know you’re supposed to go the other way, ripping off gospel and using it to play secular music. I don’t see why I can’t turn the tables.

I’m glad I held onto that flamenco guitar.

Tisha B’Av is about to start, so if you’re fasting in sympathy with Israel and the Jews, it’s time to get on it.

Life is wonderful.

Fast Over

This morning, my church’s Armorbearers ended a two-day fast. I wrote about it earlier.

Man, do I feel better. Some people say they feel closer to God during a fast. I feel farther away. I get a headache. I feel depressed. It’s pretty bad. I always look forward to the renewed sensation of his presence that comes when I finally eat.

Last night, I felt a powerful sensation of faith as I ended the day in prayer, but that’s not the same as feeling God’s presence. Imagine you’re in prison. This is the difference between a visit and receiving a care package. The care package is great, but you still want the visit.

I hope this fast accomplished things. The person who got it going is a fellow AB with a bad weight problem. I would really like to see him get free. I would like to see the others get free, too, and I would like a renewal of my own weight-loss miracle, as well as better discipline to handle things like lust and covetousness.

The fast was not fun. On the first day, I noticed it was hard to practice the guitar because my hands were weak. On the second day, I decided to skip practice. My arm was sore anyway, so it needed the rest. I had a nutritious Pop Tart breakfast today, but I am still not 100%.

Through an interesting set of circumstances, I learned about a great Christian singer yesterday. Her name is Grace Williams. I won’t bother you with the details, but I came across her on TV, and it turned out I had an unopened Grace Williams CD in my house, so I played it.

It’s wonderful stuff. As music per se, I would not call it great art, but as music intended to help you get in touch with God, it’s first-rate. It’s what Enya might have done, had she been a Christian.

Grace Williams says she startled her family by praying and singing in tongues at a very early age, and she says this is the “new song” the Bible mentions prophetically. I was startled. I have had the same idea run through my mind. Ever since our church’s Rendezvous conference a while back, I have had the ability to sing in the Spirit. It’s very strange. When I’m at church, I just open my mouth, and I automatically get harmony. Very helpful, since I can never learn all the words to the songs they play. It brings a powerful sense of peace and God’s presence.

Here is what Psalm 40 says:

1 I waited patiently for the Lord; and he inclined unto me, and heard my cry.

2 He brought me up also out of an horrible pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock, and established my goings.

3 And he hath put a new song in my mouth, even praise unto our God: many shall see it, and fear, and shall trust in the Lord.

We tend to dash right by language like that, assuming it’s just intended to be flowery and poetic, but it has to have a real meaning. God does not flap his lips just to hear his head roar. His word does not return to him void. Every word means something. If the Psalms say there is a new song that will convert people and make them believers, it has to be true, and I very much doubt that David was referring to the Psalms themselves. Nobody every listened to Psalm 40 and “feared” because of it and “trusted in the Lord.” It’s a fine psalm, but it’s not that fine. If God led David to say this about Psalm 40, God exaggerated, and he does not do that.

I’m assuming David wrote this psalm, because he wrote so many. I don’t know that he wrote this one. Whoever it was, God spoke through him.

The rabbi of a nearby Messianic synagogue wants to go shooting with us and get our help in forming an armorbearer squad. Pretty cool. Hope that happens in a week or two.

Life is good. I can’t wait for lunch.

Scope Advice

One of the Armorbearers at my church is very gung-ho about shooting and other AB stuff. In fact, if he were any more gung-ho, I would suggest he change his radio call sign to “Francis.”

See the movie Stripes if you don’t get the joke.

He wants advice on scoping an AR-15 rifle. I don’t know what to tell him. I assume he will want something useful for self-defense, not varminting.

Help a bruhhh out.

On Second Thought, Don’t

I can no longer keep up with the good stuff God does in my life. I just don’t have time to blog it all.

On Saturday, I cooked for our church’s Rhythms Lounge event. Young people come to the cafe and perform. Some play music, some recite, and others sing. This weekend, we had a guest performer: Zach Freeman, the son of two of our pastors. He plays guitar and sings.

What a show we had. We have a regular house band composed of church members; oddly, it’s not the same band that plays during worship. They jammed with Zach for maybe an hour. We heard a lot of blues and even a long funk session.

I can’t describe the quality of the playing. I had no idea these kids were this good. They were so tight, you would think they had been playing together for years.

Zach started off with his Strat and some effects, and he created an ambience you could almost swim in. I wish we had recorded it. Ordinarily I’m not a big fan of reverb and sustain pedals, but he used them to draw us into a world that did not exist before he started playing.

When the other players got going, we heard bass licks that started and stopped the show at will. The keyboard player, who claimed he couldn’t play blues, performed gymnastics that had everyone gasping. When it was over, the whole crowd started yelling and crying out. A friend of mine leaned over and said, “They’re praising God in Creole.”

I couldn’t ask for a better end to my first week of renewed guitar practice.

It gets even weirder. I have a new guitar! For a long time, I’ve wanted a thinline Gibson guitar with single-coil pickups and a Bigsby, but doubting that I would use it, I never gave in to temptation. This week I started reading up on Epiphone guitars. This is Gibson’s Asian line. Ordinarily, I won’t go near an Asian instrument; Japanese dreadnoughts sound like cigar boxes and have actions that tear up your hands. But I kept reading reviews, and I thought to myself, “If I get one of these things, I have 30 days to try it out, and if it works, it will be a fantastic asset, and the price will be so low, even if I get a better instrument later, I’ll be able to drag this one when I travel without worrying about what happens to it.”

I drove down US1 to buy some bird seed, and I was praying in the Spirit while I drove (good way to redeem the time), and I started thinking about Guitar Center. I felt I couldn’t stop myself, so I decided to go with it. I went in and found an Epiphone Riviera on the wall. I still didn’t intend to buy it. I asked the salesman a few questions, looked it over, and told him I would take it. I felt like I had to do it. I think he nearly fainted. I didn’t even ask to play it. There was no point.

This guitar was made in China. They get spotty reviews that go in two directions. Some instruments are written off as junk. Other buyers say they can’t understand how Epiphone can sell such gorgeous instruments at this price point. It looks like I’m in the latter group. This thing is virtually flawless. It sounds good. It plays well. So far, I’ve only been able to find one tiny imperfection in it. And it cost about 13% of what a new Gibson would cost. I could put a thousand dollars’ worth of upgrades into it and still be way ahead.

I don’t know what the story is. Maybe it was God. Maybe I just like shiny new stuff too much. But I try to walk by faith, and this felt like God’s urging, so I didn’t want to screw it up.

On Saturday, the music materials I ordered arrived. I got a copy of Tony Rice Guitar, plus Dan Crary’s Flatpicker’s Guide, plus a giant tablature book called The Big Slab of Tab. I used to play things from these books, many years ago. Back then, I had some trouble with a little bit of the Tony Rice stuff, but as I noted the other day, my practice habits were completely wrong. Fifteen minutes a day.

I got these books because I feel that God is restoring my life and undoing past failures (and also because I owed Tony Rice a royalty).

I’ve been working on the tunes, and it’s crazy, but there is a big long Tony Rice lick I could never conquer in the past, and after two days, I nearly have it beat. I figure I should be able to play coherently, with the correct super-heavy Dunlop pick, within a week. Maybe I’ll upload an MP3 when that happens.

To get back to church, I cooked for the first two services yesterday, and then I served as an Armorbearer at the last service, and I attended a meeting at which we welcomed four new ABs. Guess who one of them is? Zach Freeman. He goes to college in another state, but he’ll be here all summer. I spoke up and informed him of the rule that ABs have to give each other free guitar lessons, and he said, “I GOT you.” Ha!

I keep meeting remarkable people at my church, semi-ghetto though it may be. The background of the people is totally unrelated to their potential and the contents of their hearts. Some are from the neighborhood, which is pretty depressed. Some are from areas that are more affluent. But there are incredible human beings there, from all sorts of different areas.

When I met Zach on Saturday, I was looking forward to meeting a young man everyone admired so much, but he treated ME like a celebrity. He kept talking about my cheesecake and how great it was. I’m just the guy in the kitchen. He, not me, was the talk of the church. It’s wild, how God raises up powerful people and keeps them humble. With his help, an camel really can go through the eye of a needle.

I may have to make him pay off on that lesson thing, although when he sees how hopeless I am, he may wish he had kept silent.

Another new AB has a wonderful trait we needed badly: he’s Cuban. That means he can FISH. And we need that, if we are going to keep angling for my dad. We talked about dolphin fishing, and he told me a few things even I didn’t know. So I’m hoping we can get him on the boat in a few days. He’s also a professional photographer, so maybe we can preserve a few images.

We don’t get very many Cubans in our church. Strange. I know a bunch of Puerto Ricans, though. God tends to recruit from the bottom of society, and Cubans are at the top.

Today I got up, hoping to rest after a busy weekend, and what did I see on Drudge’s page? The Supreme Court has INCORPORATED THE SECOND AMENDMENT. At least, that’s my understanding of it. I don’t think I’m exaggerating, but I haven’t read the opinion. I’m sure liberal judges and lawyers will do their best to interpret incorporation out of the decision. Anyway, Wayne LaPierre says firearms bans can no longer be enforced anywhere in the US. This is gigantic news. God has worked a real wonder.

For a long time, I’ve believed God was going to preserve and expand our gun rights, even as our government pushed farther and farther in the directions of sexual perversion, anti-Semitism, military weakness, weak boarders, and socialism. It looks like I was hearing from God, and not from my own limited mind.

An evil time is coming. When it does, people will remember the Jewish names Madoff, Stearns, Goldman, Sachs, Bernanke, Emanuel, Frank, and Geithner. I think these names will be used to justify a wave of anti-Semitic barbarism. In that day, Christians and Jews who have armed themselves, bought rural land, and learned how to use tools will be way ahead of the game. I strongly suspect God is getting us ready. This decision will certainly help.

What will God do next? I can’t even guess. The spectacle is exhausting me.

King of the Closet

Yesterday I had a major guitar breakthrough. I think I connected with an amp and electric guitar.

I already had two amps. One is a Fender Blues Jr. (tubes) and the other is a cheapo solid-state Crate. The Crate is just unforgivable; I only got it because it gave me some hope of getting distortion at low volumes. The Blues Jr. sounds fine but doesn’t do much until you turn it up (or maybe I don’t know how to use it).

I picked up a Vox AC4TV (tubes), and I cranked the power down to 1/4 watt, which is 1/60 of what the Blues Jr. consumes. It didn’t sound all that great. I had the tone control up pretty high, because I thought this would fuzz up the tone, and I had the volume control very low, because…silly me…I thought this would reduce the volume.

I decided to try it the other way around. The amp only has two sound controls, so it’s not like I had a big choice. I turned the volume way up and turned the tone way down. What did I get? Neat fuzzy distortion, like Otis Rush. Actually, it’s more like his voice than his guitar. It sounded wonderful. I couldn’t put the guitar down.

A long time ago, when I was shopping for an electric guitar, I found an ES355 (or was it an ES330?) which had a similar sound. This is the sound I like.

Don’t try to help me understand why “volume” means “tone” and “tone” means “volume.” I don’t care. It works.

“COINCIDENTALLY,” I’ll be cooking for my church’s Saturday-night Rhythms Lounge event tomorrow, and guess who the guest is? Zachary Freeman. He’s a jazz and blues guitarist. His mom is a pastor at the church. Pretty cool. I haven’t heard him, but people at church rave about him.

IT’S COINCIDENCE! DARWIN! DARWIN! SOCIALISM! VIVA CHE! OBAMA WILL SAVE US!

Whatever. You believe what you want. I’m going to stay connected to the power supply.

My miracle weight loss is continuing. I put on a few pounds while I worked on desserts for my church, and I also discovered Five Guys, so I have been concerned. Today I weighed myself, and it appears that the weight loss is progressing again. Fantastic. Only God could do this. I don’t diet; I’m not gifted with perfect willpower. I’m just not a fat person any more. It’s as if I had been born to be thin. I hope I knock off ten more pounds, so none of my pants will be able to intimidate me. I wore my super-thin black jeans to church on Wednesday. I still need to lose an inch to make them comfortable. I bought them for riding motorcycles; grease and dirt don’t show up much on black jeans.

I got to the range yesterday and chronographed some 10mm ammunition. I don’t have the results before me, but it looks like 12 grains of No. 7 powder will give me good results, and 12.5 might be ideal. At 12 grains, I get 1200 fps, and I want 1250. One disappointment: my Wolf primers seem hard. Two out of twenty failed to go off on the first try. This is fine for target practice, but for self-defense, I’m going to need something like Federal. I am told Federal primers are the softest.

The primers and cases looked okay after firing.

The gun shoots great. My accuracy was affected by the way I had to contort myself to fire through the chronograph, but I shot more than well enough to splatter an assailant’s brains. The recoil tires my hand a little, though, so I think the gun would tend to lose accuracy after a dozen or two dozen rounds. Not enough to matter in a self-defense situation, but it would be annoying in practice sessions.

The consistency of the handloads (especially the low-powered target rounds) was very good. I plan to load defensive rounds one at a time, for total confidence, but for routine target shooting, I think I can rely on my powder measure.

I also tried my Bill Springfield AR trigger. It’s better than the stock trigger, which is not exactly a surprise. I’m not sure I love it, though. Still seems a little balky.

I had to buy cheesy PMC .308 ammo, because I left my Radway Green at home. I don’t know how good PMC rifle ammuntion is, but their pistol ammunition is the worst I’ve tried.

Yesterday, I was shooting into an area the size of a baseball at 100 yards. Acceptable under the circumstances, but I would like to do better. A range officer who shoots .308 says reloading is the only answer. If I start reloading, I think it will be time to consider a .260 Remington upper, which was my real goal anyway. Maybe the .308 upper was a mistake. It looks like I can’t do precision shooting with cheap ammo, so the money I save may be a hollow blessing. Still, if times get really hard, cheap ammo in large quantities may be a real asset, and I can’t get that in .260.

The Leupold scope is a dream come true. I don’t even understand all the knobs yet. The field of view is gorgeous, and everything is sharp.

Speaking of hard times, a man named Hank Kunneman appeared on Sid Roth’s show yesterday, claiming to be a prophet. He said God had showed up a couple of things. First, the next couple of years will be pretty rough, and it will seem like Obama is doing very poorly. Second, God intends to reverse some of the bad legislation Obama has signed, and he intends to change the Supreme Court.

He reminded us to pray for our leaders, and he was right about that. I think Obama is an embarrassment and an obstacle to God’s work, but I have resolved to pray, daily, that God will change his heart and the hearts of our other leaders. The Bible tells us we have a duty to pray for our leaders, so I’m going to stay on it. I also pray that God will take down leaders who refuse to change, replacing them with godly men. So I’m covered either way!

I hate to say it, but I feel bad for Obama. I believe he is in for a long stretch of humiliation, and if he doesn’t get right with God and the Jews, there probably won’t be any end to it. Remember Nebuchadnezzar, wandering around on all fours, eating grass.

I don’t know if Hank Kunneman is the real thing or not, so caveat emptor.

I’m out.

“Did You Just See Something Fall Out of the Tuna Tower?”

Today I achieved an important goal. I got my pastor and a few of his relatives to go fishing on my father’s boat.

It was wonderful. They hung out on the flybridge, shooting the breeze while the rest of us tried to catch fish. Now my dad knows Christians don’t have horns, and we don’t come from Mars. We are reasonably normal people.

Actually, “normal” isn’t right. My church is full of nuts. Ordinarily, you would expect Christians to be more reserved than other people, but we’re the weirdest bunch I’ve ever seen.

This weekend, my pastor preached a sermon with a live lion on the stage. A bunch of us had to push the silly thing around in a cage. I told one of the other Armorbearers, “If that lion barks at me, I’m turning his lights out.” I was fully prepared to buy the owner a new lion if I had to. But he turned out to be very good-natured, like a big gentle dog that was upset over being stuck in a travel kennel.

I was worried because I went on a private tour of Miami’s Metrozoo a few years ago, and they hand-fed a white tiger a few feet away from me. This thing was NOT good-natured. It hated the keeper and tried to kill him. I would guess this animal weighed 250 pounds, and it flew up and clung to the bars with all four feet, in less time than it would take a human being to snap his fingers. It hung there like a giant suction-cup Garfield in a Prius window, trying to eat the keeper through the steel grating. I realized how fast it could move if it wanted to. If one of these things got irritated with you, your efforts at self-defense would be about as likely to succeed as the effort a slug would make if it tried to outrun a kid with a salt shaker.

I have no faith at all in people who keep exotic animals. Remember the Siegried and Roy thing? And what about the two people who lost faces to “tame” chimpanzees in recent years? Every wild pet is tame and trustworthy until it rips your genitals completely off and throws them (the way one of the chimps did) or until it takes your neck in its mouth and bites through a major blood vessel (the way Roy Horn’s tiger did). Remember Timothy Treadwell? He believed he could “commune” with bears and make friends with them, until one ate him. Animal nuts can talk all they want about their status as “experts.” There are no experts. There are only amateurs who haven’t been attacked yet.

So anyway, I was completely ready to blow this lion’s brains out if it managed to outwit us (not difficult) and escape during our highly questionable attempt to move it from one cage to another. I guess there would have been some hard feelings, but I would have gotten over it.

Next week, we’ll have a horse on the altar. I don’t think firearms will come into play. Unless he aggravates me.

Week before last, we had a couple of bald eagles in church. Before that, we had a really fat Indian python, trying to climb the drum set. This is not a normal church.

RE shooting lions with a pistol, I had an interesting conversation with a fellow customer when I went to the gun shop to order my 10mm. A commenter here had expressed surprise that Miami Cubans hunt wild pigs with .22 rifles. I mentioned that to this customer, and he said he did it all the time. He said it had sounded wrong to him, too, until he proved it to himself by shooting a wild pig in its bony forehead. So it looks like my commenter is behind the times.

Shouldn’t be a big shock, since the .22 is the standard implement for slaughtering huge hogs on farms.

To get back to the subject, we had a big time on the boat, and we managed to catch a nice cow dolphin. Unfortunately, I was up on the tuna tower when it hit, and nobody bothered to tell me, so we lost the school and two sets of end tackle before I could sort things out.

On the way back in, we stopped in Biscayne Channel so my pastor’s son Taylor could jump off the tuna tower and cool down. First thing you know, the pastor was nowhere in sight. I asked someone where he was, and they said he was with Taylor. Up on the tower. He went up there and jumped off! Talk about a time for prayer. I could see myself trying to help the church staff understand why I had allowed the pastor to leap to his death at the age of 56. But he came out of it okay.

The crew was extremely helpful cleaning up the boat, and they made a good impression on my father. I’m hoping that will make him interested in hosting more Christians. Some guests get tanked on beer and then hide when the scrub brushes come out, which infuriates the other guests and causes problems. These folks were not like that.

If this is the kind of work you have to do to be a good Christian, count me in. I’m really pooped, and I don’t want to fish twice every weekend, the way I did over the last four days, but I achieved something of lasting importance, and I had a good time doing it.

Now I finally feel like I can relax. For four days, I’ve been running around like a chicken with its head cut off. Two fishing trips. Three cheesecakes for the church kitchen. My prayer group. A Saturday service. Now I want to DO something. By that I mean something which has nothing to do with church or fishing. I don’t know what I want to do. I just know I want to do it. I have free time. I want to FEEL free.

As soon as I can make myself get up.

Sometimes a Christian Has to Face Hard Jobs Like This One

Tomorrow is going to be an interesting day. On Friday, I finally got one of my church’s Armorbearers out on the boat. Sadly, all we caught were triggerfish and grunty-type things, but we had a great time, and my dad was exposed to Christians, which is the main thing.

Funny sidelight: I gave my dad the last names of the guests I expected, so he could inform the marina guard. Their names are “Victory” and “Christian.” Seriously. He asked if I was joking. Only Victory showed up.

Tomorrow, I am planning to take my pastor out on the boat, with some of his relatives. At least one of them is also a pastor, and my AB friend will make another appearance to help me take care of everyone.

This is tremendous. My father finally has an excuse to associate with Christians. He loves to fish, but my secular friends have dwindled in number, and suddenly we find ourselves supplied with courteous, responsible, industrious, grateful Christian guests.

In other news, I nearly blinded myself today. I decided to put a new trigger in my AR10. I got it from Bill Springfield, who modifies stock triggers for a reasonable price. I started yanking pins out of the gun, and as I was trying to get the old hammer out, the hammer flew out so fast, I couldn’t see it take off. It spun so hard I could hear it, and it flew by my left eye so closely my eye could feel the wind it generated.

I was horrified. I had no idea this thing could jump out. I would have worn safety glasses, had I had any clue. I have to thank God for watching over me. Right now I could be at the ER, listening to a surgeon debate the feasibility of saving my eye. Is there ANY job you can do with tools that doesn’t require safety goggles? I’m starting to wonder.

I hate brushes with disaster. For hours after they happen, I relive them over and over in my mind. I can’t help thinking about what could have happened.

The AR10 is wonderful, even though it tried to kill me. Everything fits so well. It’s nothing like an AK, where they sort of hammer the parts in any way they’ll fit. The pins that hold the upper and lower together are extremely precisely fit, but I can remove them with my fingers. The pins for the hammer and trigger are nearly as easy to deal with. The whole job took maybe 20 minutes.

I don’t want to sit around dry-firing it, not knowing whether the gun will be damaged, but I had to dry-fire it a couple of times, and it feels great. One thing I noticed: I can’t activate the safety unless the gun is cocked. I can’t remember whether it was that way with the old trigger, but I don’t think the new trigger and safety have any differences that could account for a change. All the obvious differences in the fire control group are in the front end.

Can’t wait to get to the range.

I also want to try out the new 10mm. I made up 70 rounds of ammo for it, including 20 rounds of defensive stuff, in two batches of 10. They carry different charges. I want to chronograph them and look at the cases after I shoot, so I can see if they’re safe to use. I’ve never used my chronograph. I hope I don’t shoot it.

I like the 10mm so far. I got some Hornady factory ammo for it, and I tried carrying it. It’s only half an inch longer than my 9mm, and the width is not much greater. It fits in the same pocket holster and has the same capacity, but the ballistics are infinitely superior. Nearly equal to .357 Magnum. I think this may be the best possible compact carry gun, barring obscure calibers I’ve never heard of.

Supposedly the 10mm is “inherently accurate.” I have never understood what this means. You would think any uniformly made ammunition in any caliber would be accurate, since you would expect it to repeat its performance reliably, but I guess that isn’t how it works. Ballistics is a black art. Mankind has been creating new calibers for centuries, yet we get big improvements all the time, which suggests that it’s not an easy puzzle. If the answers were obvious, we would already have them, right?

I considered getting an AK pistol for the truck, and I still might do it, but I took the Vz 58 out to the truck to see how it handled in the cab, and it was very easy to deal with. Fold it up, turn on the laser and flashlight, and you are ready to obliterate any assailant within a hundred feet, with no need to shoulder the arm. A pistol would achieve the same result, but it might be heavier, since it’s an AK, and it would be a fresh cash outlay. Of course, one attraction of the AK is the knowledge that it’s a cheap piece of junk. Were it stolen, I would care very little. I would hate to lose a pretty Vz 58, though. Maybe a second-rate Century Vz 58 is a good solution. Functional and light, cheaper than the better models, and equipped with a buttstock.

I could put a pistol foregrip on the Vz, which would be illegal on the AK.

I guess it sounds silly to have a long gun in a vehicle, but it’s not. Watch videos of actual gunfights. People with long guns hit things, and people with pistols miss. That says it all. Add superior ballistics and high capacity, and you end up with a picture in which pistols, not long guns, seem silly. If you arm yourself at all, you tacitly acknowledge that you want effective protection, and a pistol ain’t it. Not even close. A pistol is a very dumb idea, except when there is no other choice. In a vehicle, you have a choice.

I hope we get some fish tomorrow, and that my dad makes a good connection. I put in a lot of preparation today, and my AB friend is donating a day of his time. Let’s see what God does for us.

His Price is Far Above Rubies

Went to church tonight to do some work on the kitchen and work security for the Tuesday service. While I was there, THREE women stopped me to tell me how amazing my cheesecake was!

I knew this would happen!

More

I got my press ready for 10mm today. Problem: since the gun isn’t here, I can’t check the ammo to see if it chambers and ejects. I made five rounds without powder or primers, and when I get the gun, I’ll see if the external dimensions are okay for the chamber. Once I have it working, I don’t think I’ll need to adjust anything but the seating die.

I have relatively cheap Laser-Cast bullets for practice. I plan to use a recipe that gives about 1060 fps in a 5″ barrel. Internet sources say I’ll only lose about 5% of optimal velocity with a 3″ Glock barrel. When my Speer Gold Dots arrive, I’ll be using a 1250-fps recipe, so I should come in at about 1200.

The modified primer feed on my press is working great. There is nothing like having your own machine shop.

RETRACTION

Lots of stuff to do today.

Tonight, I serve as an armorbearer at church. Before I go, I need to weld the church’s handtruck back together. Now that I’ve seen a few Chinese welds pop, I am a little nervous about trusting welded products.

I also need to make 10mm ammunition before my new pistol arrives. I have the makings, but I need to get the press set up and start cranking the handle. I looked around for 10mm practice ammo, but it’s hard to find here. Some people would recoil in horror at the thought of endangering a Glock warranty with reloads, but I think that’s stupid. For a single repair, which is all you’re likely to need over the life of the gun, the warranty has a maximum value of about $500. In reality, you probably won’t use a Glock warranty, and if you do, it will probably be a repair you could have gotten for $20. You save at least $12 per box with reloads. Over $200 per thousand rounds. Let’s see if we can figure out the right choice! DUH!

Good defensive rounds cost about $45 per box, delivered. I can save something like $30 per box. And I can run them through a Chrony and make sure they’re right.

They wouldn’t even be reloads. I found new Starline brass online. Probably a mistake. I think I should use it to make some defensive rounds and buy once-fired for everything else.

I don’t know why people get so spastic about gun warranties. You have to weigh what you’re getting against what you lose.

I also have to order some pots for the church. I have to take care of Father’s Day. And I should take my angle grinder to church and remove the 24″ piece of 5/16″ angle iron protruding from the kitchen floor. Maybe I should take my rotary hammer and try to remove the stub from the concrete.

It’s too much for my tiny brain to handle.

My cheesecake and brownies are selling really well at church. I’m thinking I should put an oven in a warehouse and see what I can sell to bakeries and restaurants. How hard can it be? I already have an empty warehouse.

Bye.

Cheesecake Assault

I had an incredible weekend.

First, I made three blueberry cheesecakes for church. I stuck two in the walk-in cooler, and we sold the third. People were oohing and ahhing. If I could only get the women to quit dieting…

It’s no wonder they want to diet. They refuse to drink diet soda. Must be an island thing. We don’t even have diet soda in the fountain. I guess all those Pepsis add up, and then you can’t have cheesecake.

Second thing: I got a key to the church kitchen. FINALLY. I was driving the guy who passes out keys crazy. I even went to his Facebook page and posted “Isaiah 22:22!” Now I can get in there and DO things. Today a bunch of us plan to tear through the kitchen and utterly abolish the disorder. I’m going to take some tools so I can hang a clock.

Third thing: I was feeling frustrated and sort of unappreciated because I could not get a key to the kitchen, and it seemed like the Armorbearers were in a rut. I couldn’t help them get them to communicate so we could organize to do things. But I got the key, and then the Armorbearers had a fantastic meeting after church. We managed to get a couple of things worked out. We’re planning to bring a guy in to give us krav maga lessons, and we’re gearing up for paintball. One of the younger guys suggested it. He said it builds unity. I don’t know about that, but it sure builds welts.

I had dinner with some Messianic Jews on Friday. They want to form an AB squad for their synagogue, and they want to go to the range with us and get CCW permits. Hopefully, we can work that out.

I talked with one of my chefs yesterday, and we made some tentative plans about equipment and food. I’m checking stuff out at Instawares. I plan to take some of my beautiful Chinese cookware with me today so people can check it out and see if we should order some, and I think I’m going to donate some of my useless, overpriced Japanese knives. They have gathered dust for three years, at least. I don’t like giving cast-off stuff to the church, but these are too good to throw out, and I refuse to use them here.

Life is sweet, thanks to God.

More

This is from a friend named Celeste. Found it on Facebook.

I cry out with my whole heart; hear me, O Lord! Psalm 119:145
Family, PLEASE I am asking for urgent prayers for my brother Jim who is in the hospital. They are running tests and we are praying for a miracle. Thank you. xo

Not by Sight

I should finish writing about my trip to Washington, DC, for the National Day of Prayer. I left you at the National Holocaust Memorial.

After our tour, Mike and I were stuck in the city. The International Fellowship of Christians and Jews had a dinner scheduled, and we did not have enough time to go home and shower. We made our way to the Crowne Plaza on K Street and headed downstairs to the banquet room.

They had a table set up, with little gift bags for everyone. I got a package of Dead Sea girly stuff. Mud pack or something. We also received Rabbi Eckstein’s latest CD. He sings.

We met a number of donors and IFCJ staffers. One of the staffers is a food critic. She said she would like to see my cookbook. I didn’t know what to say about that. It’s not the kind of material Christians ordinarily read.

The Rabbi showed up, and each of us got to pose for a photo with him. Very nice guy. Not stand-offish at all. No entourage. No hovering assistants to keep donors away. He even posed with Mike, who, as I have noted before, isn’t even a donor!

We sat at our tables in the banquet room, and food started coming out, and speakers appeared. I was amazed that prayer in the name of Jesus was tolerated.

I shouldn’t even have to point out that almost all of the donors were Christians.

The Rabbi spoke. He said he did not want to talk politics, but he referred, in a general way, to the problems Israel was having with the current U.S. administration. Barack Obama is not a conservative Christian, and he does not have the pro-Israel attitude conservatives expect when they nominate a candidate. He sees Israel and the Jews as spoiled by previous administrations, and he is determined to bring about “even-handedness” in our dealings in the Middle East.

“Even-handedness.” There are about 15 million Jews on earth. They have one tiny country they can flee to when persecuted. They have 1.2 billion Muslim counterparts, many of whom are determined to destroy Israel, and many of whom hope to exterminate the Jewish people. But our President wants “even-handedness.”

I can’t tell you how good it felt, watching an Orthodox rabbi tell us he was frustrated by a liberal administration and pleased to have the support of conservative Christians.

He gave us a song or two, using a beautiful guitar a supporter made. And we heard from some other speakers, and then we had conversation.

My table was wonderful. We started talking about weapons and tools and so on. We had a Pentagon employee (Army, I think) and a retired military guy and his wife, and most of us were on exactly the same frequency. Linda (the IFCJ rep who invited me) told everyone about my cookbook and my guns and tools, and we started exchanging information and opinions.

I think Mike was a little weirded out. We were sitting with total strangers, yet there was an instant rapport. We were talking about prophecy and how America was declining, and one of the guys started quoting Perry Stone, whom I have mentioned to Mike many times. Everyone wanted to know about concealed carry and reloading and so on, and I told them what I knew.

There was one couple–Baptists, probably–who seemed almost taken aback by the passion and conviction we all displayed. But the rest of us were completely caught up, like no other group at the dinner. I told Mike that when you start walking by faith, this kind of thing happens all the time. I said, “It’s going to keep happening for the rest of your life.”

By the end, we were talking like old friends.

The next morning, Mike and I got up and headed for DC again, to hear the Israeli ambassador. His name is Michael Oren, and we were scheduled to hear him at the Ninth Annual Israel Solidarity Event, at the Israeli Embassy!

I spent four months on a kibbutz in 1984, and for a long time, I’ve longed to return to Israel. The embassy is considered part of Israel, so it was a pretty good substitute.

We met some of our new friends outside the security building, and we made our way through the metal detector. It was odd to hear the peculiar, brusque Israeli accent again as the guards and staffers worked to get us checked in.

Before we began, a pianist and singer performed Hatikvah, the national anthem of Israel. Funny thing, it’s based on the same folk melody as Smetana’s Die Moldau, which was one of my mother’s favorite pieces of music. When Hatikvah was banned by the British Mandate, some radio stations played Die Moldau in order to get around the prohibition.

The Star-Spangled Banner followed.

Christian speakers including Gary Bauer preceded the ambassador. They talked about the worldwide increase in anti-Semitism and the need to stand by Israel’s side in these strange times. Once again, prayer in the name of Jesus was permitted. Amazing.

I believe the only Israeli speakers were Noam Katz (Minister for Public Diplomacy) and Michael Oren. If memory serves, Mr. Katz openly admitted that American conservative Christians were the best friends Israel had. It may have been Ambassador Oren, but I don’t remember it that way. In any case, it was stirring. What a change in the Jewish perspective.

Ambassador Oren was wonderful. He’s a historian (born in the US and schooled at Princeton and Columbia), and he told about American’s long association with Israel and the Jews. He told us that one of the Founding Fathers proposed putting Moses and the Hebrews on our national seal, as a metaphor for our crossing the Atlantic and leaving the British behind. The British were our Egyptians. Ambassador Oren also pointed out that a surprising number of early Americans were schooled in the Hebrew language, and many believed it to be the language of heaven.

When the Israelis spoke, a serious-looking young man stood to the side of the podium, staring out over the crowd. I took him to be a Mossad bodyguard. An armorbearer! Just like me, except he actually knew what he was doing.

I found myself seated next to a donor I hadn’t met before. We found ourselves talking a great deal. She and her husband had been at the dinner, and a group had prayed for him, and his ear had been healed. She complained that now he could hear her muttering about him!

She asked about my church, and I told her about Trinity, and that we belonged to the Assemblies of God. The woman I was talking to said she thought it was a sign that she should check out a local AG church she had wanted to visit. A lady in front of us turned around and said she was AG, too. I seem to have made a much better impression on people than I had any right to.

I told her what I could about charismatic Christianity. I believe prayer in the Spirit builds us up (as the Bible claims), and that it gives us faith and changes us from within.

Naturally, I also talked to her about food. I took her email address and told her she could have any recipe she wanted. Since then, we have corresponded. Her husband’s ear, which had been screwed up for years, is still fine.

I was glad I had managed to be of some use. When you walk by faith, God chooses the people you meet.

I touched the stones of the courtyard on the way out, saying goodbye to Israel once again.

I can’t tell you everything that happened on Saturday; it’s fairly private. We went to the air and space museum at the Smithsonian. I felt like God was showing me the wonders he had done for this country before it turned away from him. I wondered what was in store, as our rebellion continued.

On Sunday, Mike and I went to church. His wife wanted to take their son fishing, so they didn’t go. But Mike was very gung-ho. I got him to go to Trinity Assembly of God in Lanham, Maryland. I found it on the web a while back, and it looked promising. And how about that name? Same as my church in Miami Gardens.

We got to the church, and I told Mike to pick seats for us. I was confident that God would do something weird with his choice. We ended up near the back on the right.

The music was very good, and I even knew some of the songs. I guess charismatics tend to gravitate toward the same hymns.

Mike has been having some difficulties with his family. I don’t want to say more than that. Guess what day God picked to get us in church together? Mother’s Day. The whole service was about wives and mothers. Very appropriate.

Before things really got going, we heard some testimony from a lady whose prayer for a baby had been answered. When I heard her voice, it was another great surprise. Many of the people in the church were black, but until she spoke, I didn’t know they were island people. Just like Trinity in Miami Gardens! How did that happen? We were in Maryland, not Florida. They had Hispanics, too. The pastor’s name is Tino. The only other Tino I know goes to Trinity.

The pastor had us pray sort of randomly early on. This is not unusual at a charismatic church. Mike and I went at it, and as we did, each of us felt a big hand land on his shoulder. An older man in the row behind us was praying for us, asking God to take us in hand and change us and make us his instruments. It was wonderful. I turned and thanked him.

When the prayer was done, the pastor sent a Mother’s Day bouquet to his own mother, who was attending. The person with the flowers walked right toward us and then past us. To a lady in the row behind us. Standing next to the man who prayed. Evidently, Mike chose seats directly in front of the pastor’s dad.

The pastor’s wife gave the sermon. She talked about great female figures in the Bible. Ruth, Esther, Deborah, and so on. But toward the end, she became agitated and kept saying she felt like she had to talk about restoring marriages and families. She started talking about all the things the church had to offer. Counseling and prayer and so on. And she kept repeating, “You have to do the work. You have to do the work!” This is exactly what I tell Mike all the time. You can’t wait to get your life in order before you turn to God, because he’s the one who fixes your life. You have to make time and go.

She became so agitated, she began speaking in tongues, which Mike found a little alarming. But that’s part of the package.

He has gone back to the church since our visit, and I’m hoping he’ll join. How many “coincidences” do you need to witness before you give up and get on board?

I accidentally left my IFCJ gift bag in Mike’s car. Now he’ll have everything he needs, if he decides to do a Dead Sea mud pack.

There wasn’t much more to the trip than that. We went to Five Guys again, and then I got on a plane.

If you read all three installments of the story, it should be obvious to you that I was guided on this trip, and so were the people around me. This is what my life is like these days. I am not perfect in obedience or faith, but I am on the path, and I am seeing God’s power in my life. The Bible says he lifts us out of the miry clay and sets our feet upon a rock and establishes our goings. It is absolutely true.

I wish I had time to write up all the things I’ve seen. I can understand why the Gospels say the world could not contain enough books to hold the complete story of Jesus’s ministry. I’m a nobody, and I can’t even cover what happens to me.

Escalation

I’m making the jump to 10mm. I decided it was worth it to spend the money and tolerate a slightly larger carry piece.

After reading all the BS, I have come to the tentative conclusion that you need speed to make a handgun bullet expand, and you need a big bullet with lots of penetration if expansion doesn’t occur, and that adds up to “not 9mm.”

The argument never ends, and it is impossible to draw a firm conclusion. Six months from now, I may think I made a big mistake. But you have to make the most of the information you have.

At the gun shop, I talked to a guy who has fired the AK-47 pistol. He says it will do exactly what I want, i.e. provide excellent accuracy and stopping power at short distances. With a laser, it should be the ultimate non-registration vehicle weapon. I may be wrong; I need to take my Vz 58 outside, fold it, and see how it behaves in the truck. If it handles okay, it would be considerably better than the AK, because of the option of using the buttstock.

I would need to be able to secure the rifle when I’m not in the truck. I think a bicycle lock might be the simplest way. I can carry it legally in a nylon bag, but that won’t keep thieves from grabbing it. When I park in an iffy area, the bike lock would add enough security to defeat most of the goofs who are likely to try to steal the gun. There is no way to keep it away from skilled people who really want it.

It’s legal to carry a long gun in a vehicle in Florida, but you have to have it “securely encased,” which means almost nothing. Same rule for pistols. If you put a pistol in the center console of your car, it’s securely encased under my reading of the law. It should be legal to have an AK pistol in a box or zippered bag.

Our gun laws are pretty stupid. Ted Nugent says the Second Amendment is his carry permit, and he’s right. It says we can “keep and bear” arms, and “keep” means “own,” and “bear” means “carry on your person.” The Constitution says we have the right to “own arms and carry them with us.” Unfortunately, the courts and some state legislatures have screwed it up. Imagine living in a state where you can’t have a gun rack in the window of your pickup. It’s un-American.

I can carry the nastiest pistol made just about anywhere I go, as long as I conceal it, but if I let people see it (so they have a chance to react appropriately), I can be charged with a crime. I can’t leave it out on my car seat, even though that’s better concealment than a long shirt. I can’t carry it onto school property, so if I see a young coed being gang-raped, all I can do is wave and say, “How’s it going, guys?” None of it makes any sense. Anyway, I can put an AK pistol in my truck, and I may very well do it. Ordinary pistols just don’t cut it; they’re desperation weapons, for times when you can’t get to a long gun.

One nice thing about 10mm is that it appears I can make handloads which will work beautifully for self-defense. The Speer Gold Dot hollow point has great performance, and they are readily available as components. The .45 HPs I got from Hornady are said to be lame because they don’t expand; I just use them for practice. I found good recipes for 10mm, so I shouldn’t have to do anything but load and shoot. I got a Chrony a long time ago; maybe I could set it up and test the ammo.

Guess I’ll sell the 9mm. Or keep it in case the new gun pops a spring or something.

Shopmade Primer Feed Cap

I made a cap for the primer feed on my Hornady Lock-N-Load press. Pretty exciting. By my standards.

I took a piece of aluminum bar stock and turned it down to 0.875″, within a thousandth or two. I used the lathe to drill a 0.316″ hole down the length of the stock. I parted 2″ off and put it in my rotab. I used a 1/4″ mill to bore it out to 0.625″ inside, to a depth of about 3/8″. Then I stuck it back on the lathe, faced it down to size, and put a nice bevelly surface on the top. After that I stuck it on the drill press and used the slide table to put two holes in it for set screws. Now I have to tap the holes and get two screws.

Problem: my tap handle won’t deal with taps as small as the one I need to use, so I have to go to the hardware store and see if they have a cheapo I can get.

This should be pretty sweet. The set screws are a little bit of a risk, since one of them could deform the primer tube, but I think that’s incredibly unlikely. It’s pretty sturdy, and the screws don’t have to be very tight.

If this works, it should solve a lot of the problems caused by Hornady’s cheap plastic primer feed cap and the lack of any meaningful attachment at the lower end of the tube.

Photos eventually.

More

Here’s a photo of the part I made. The blue thing is a coat hanger segment I put in there to keep track of the number of primers in the tube (and to supply the force to push primers into the slide–another thing Hornady didn’t provide for).

If you make one of these for yourself, make the outer diameter about 0.850″. This one is 0.875″, and it almost touches the powder measure on the way up.

The hex screws are not a problem, and they never will be. The amount of force needed to hold this part in place is tiny, so it will never be necessary to tighten the screws to the point where they damage anything.

This thing is infinitely superior to the one that came with the press. It even has more area up top so you can easily feed primers by hand when you need to.

Half of Success is Being Willing to Do Other People’s Jobs

I think I’m going to go out in the garage and start fixing the problems with my Hornady Lock-N-Load press. Stabilizing the primer feed tube should be pretty easy; Hornady supplied a very flimsy piece of plastic–about as sturdy as those tiny tables that hold pizza boxes off the cheese–to do the job, but I should be able to produce a more realistic part on the lathe or my rotab. I may open up the slot the primer slide rides in. It’s so tight, a few tiny grains of No. 7 can shut it down, causing even more powder to spill.

The press comes with one primer-feed assembly with two interchangeable feed tubes in different sizes. I think it would have been smarter to make two separate assemblies. They would have been more rigid, and there would be no flimsy plastic involved.

It’s too bad there is no easy way to determine whether a case is primed before sending it to be filled with powder. You can stop the press, lift the case, examine it, and put it back, but that takes a long time, and if you’re making 200 rounds, it takes 200 times a long time.

I am wondering if I should remove the wood I used to shore up the bench under the press and replace it with 5/16″ angle iron. Anything that reduces flex will help. And it would be great to have a lever handle that works, so I can take the existing plastic ball to the gun range and punish it for making me suffer. Some guy makes an ergonomic handle, but I think I can manage to make one for myself.

I don’t know why the dies spin in their sockets. I’m going to look the press over. I hope I didn’t misplace an O-ring or some other part that stabilizes the dies. The set screws are tight, so they’re not the problem. It’s not that the dies turn on their threads. The whole mess turns in the press.

It’s strange that .38 Super causes so many problems, while .45 ACP works pretty well. One problem is that the powder is much finer. I use Unique for .45, and the grains are so big, they take longer to get into the works and cause jams. And the shape of the cases and the level of the powder are such that powder is harder to spill. I use fine-grained No. 7 for .38 Super, and the cases are tall, and the powder fills them pretty far, so spills are much more likely.

Maybe I should start using case lube. It’s supposed to be unnecessary with carbide dies, but “supposed to be” isn’t “is.” I wanted to be able to dye my .38 Super brass, and case lube will make that hard to do, but I should be using a brass catcher instead of relying on paint.

It would be nice to have a steel hub in the press to replace the existing hub, which appears to be pot metal. I’m not positive it’s pot metal, but whatever it is, it’s weak. My first hub broke like cheese, the same way pot metal does. I think the hub will be okay, though. The loss of the first one appears to have been a fluke. I don’t remember what caused it. Maybe a round caught on the old ejection wire and stopped the plate.

The way the plates attach to the press is very primitive. There is a screw which goes down through the plate into the hub, and the plate rests directly on the press table. The amount of pressure between the table and plate depends solely on the torque you put on the screw, and users are advised not to tighten the screw too much, because when the pressure is high, the plate and bed will act like a disk brake. If the screw isn’t tight enough, it can back out. There is nothing to prevent it. There are better ways to do this. In fact, the way Hornady did it is the crudest way possible, apart from relying on gravity and happy thoughts to hold the plate down. It would be nice to have a bearing under the plate and some sort of attachment which can’t be tightened or loosened by the action of the press.

I don’t know if the retainer spring is as good as it should be. They tend to snap after a few hundred rounds, unless you get lucky and get a press that doesn’t pinch the spring too much. I’m wondering why a nitrile O-ring wasn’t used. Maybe they break even more easily. But the existing spring is maybe five thousandths of an inch in diameter (across the wire, not the coil), so there isn’t much metal there to resist wear.

I’m going to look at the press as a fixer-upper, not a failed purchase. I don’t think the problems are fatal. It’s like buying a Harbor Freight lathe; you don’t expect it to work right out of the box. You take it apart, replace the bad stuff, put it back together, adjust it, and THEN it works.

You know what? Grizzly needs to start making ammo presses. Shiraz Balolia is a match shooter, and he developed their gunsmith lathes. I’ll bet they could come up with a superior product for a lot less than what the US makers charge. I’ll bet he already considered it and decided there was no money in it.

I know of no way to fix the wear under the primer-insertion piston. It’s in a location a drill won’t reach, without some sort of exotic 90° adapter. Maybe I can mount the press sideways in my mill and use a Woodruff cutter to gouge out a hole so I can put a sacrificial shim in there. I have to wonder what Hornady’s plan was. I guess you just throw out the press once the hole gets too deep. It’s not a problem yet, but someday it will be.

Spend the Savings on Tagamet and Band-Aids

I just made a bunch of .38 Super rounds on my Hornady Lock-N-Load progressive ammo press.

I have concluded that “progressive” ammo presses are a myth, much like “progressive” politics. If you want the LNL to work, you pretty much have to prime the cases in a separate operation, which takes the “progressive” out of the job. A progressive press should size, deprime, prime, and reload cases, all in one circuit. If you try to do that with the LNL, you will suffer.

The press’s functionality seems to depend largely on the brass and caliber. I do okay with .45 ACP and old brass. Today, sadly, I’m using new Starline .38 Super brass. I don’t know if the primer pockets are tight or what, but you have to smack the lever pretty good to get the primers seated. That causes all sorts of problems. The dies move. Powder spills. The flimsy primer feed apparatus gets shaken out of whack.

When power starts spilling, it creates a cascade of issues. It lodges in the little thing that inserts primers, causing it to stick in the extended position and block the primer-feed slide. It obstructs the slide directly, by getting in the too-tight groove in which it rides. It gets in the threads of every screw, making them hard to remove and insert, and you WILL be removing and inserting them often, as the powder problems escalate.

When powder screws up the primer-feed system, guess what happens? Primers fail to seat. Then you get cases that are open at the bottom when they’re filled with powder. What happens then? More powder gets on the press. It’s a vicious cycle.

I learned some new things about the press’s deficiencies today. Guess how the little piston that inserts primers is activated? The rear end of it–hardened steel–bangs into the cast-iron frame of the press every time you make a round. They made it this way intentionally, if you can believe it. This means a hole gradually opens up in the frame, so the piston doesn’t get pushed as far up as it used to. And how do you fill the hole? Beats me. There is no way to get it under a drill press or mill, so I have no idea how I would open it up enough to put a sacrificial insert in it.

The primer-feed tube has an aluminum inner tube held in by…wait for it…friction. I’m completely serious. A set screw would have been the obvious move. When the press bangs around, an aging primer tube which is looser than it used to be (due to wear on the parts that press together) comes loose at the bottom, creating a cavity where primers pile up. Guess what happens then? Primers don’t seat…and POWDER POURS ONTO THE PRESS.

If someone drew a comprehensive flow chart describing every problem this press can have, I think every path would eventually lead to a box labeled “POWDER POURS ONTO THE PRESS.”

People have told me my press needs to be mounted more securely. It’s on a workbench made from two-by-sixes and two-by-eights. It’s held in by big lag bolts seated in lead retainers. I reinforced the wood directly under the press. You could literally rest a car on this bench without stressing it. The only things that would be sturdier would be concrete, stone, or solid metal. The mounting is not the problem. If the press needs to be mounted more rigidly than this, it’s not fit for consumer use.

Here’s another fun issue: it looks like the spring that lifts the press’s table back into position after every round is too short. It probably got that way after being whacked so hard, thousands of times, to seat primers. When the table doesn’t rise high enough, the primer insertion piston remains raised, obstructing the primer feed slide. Guess what this does? It prevents primers from feeding. No primer, powder in case: POWDER POURS ONTO THE PRESS.

I took the spring out and stretched it a sixteenth of an inch. May be helping a little, but there are so many other problems, it doesn’t matter. I tried putting a washer under it before stretching it, but the table wouldn’t lower enough to seat the primers. The washer raised it too high.

I removed every die except the sizing die, and I tried to run the cases through just to size and prime them. Didn’t work. I had to adjust it over and over. I should have been able to process one case every two seconds, but I got a failure rate of maybe 40%, resulting in many minutes lost while I sorted out the unprimed cases and fiddled with the machine.

Once you get past the nightmare of case priming, the other operations go pretty smoothly, although the press still spills a little powder.

People defend this thing as if their kids made it in shop class for Mother’s Day, but it’s pretty crude. Let’s just admit it; it’s not an insult. There is no shame in making a somewhat less-than-slick product, when you’re a small company in a niche market.

I have lots of Chinese machinery which is made to much higher standards. My Northern Tool band saw is the cheesiest machine I own, and it’s considerably more reliable than the Lock-N-Load. Once the press is set up, I should be able to make fifteen cartridges a minute. I’m lucky if I can make one .38 Super round in that amount of time, although .45 is not nearly as bad.

I think I can fix it. I’m going to put a set screw in the primer feed system, the way Hornady should have. If I don’t do that, I’m going to make a better device at the top of the feed tube, to replace the cheap plastic deal Hornady put up there. One way or the other, I’m going to make that tube stay in place. I’m going to polish the primer slide groove so the slide won’t freeze when three grains of Accurate No. 7 fall behind it. I may even put Loc-Tite on the dies so they quit rotating on me. I’m also going to make a T-handle to replace the horrible ball at the top of the lever. The ball screws on, so every time you pull the lever, you have to be careful not to apply counterclockwise torque, or it starts to come off. The necessary effort can actually cause blisters. I’ve had enough of that. I should go ahead and WELD a handle on it. I’m also going to make a weighted rod to rest on top of the primers in the tube. They don’t move reliably under their own weight, and my old reliable coat-hanger segment is not doing the job.

This thing is just not engineered well. There are too many obvious flaws. I know nothing about engineering, but I am easily able to spot the weak points of the press. A good engineer would have seen these things and fixed them before putting the press on the market.

The new EZ-Ject system works great; I’ll say that. I have had no problems with it. And I think the press is a fine platform to start with, PROVIDED you have a lot of spare time and a garage full of machine tools and scrap metal.

I should make new parts and patent them. But how big is the market? Probably wouldn’t cover the cost of the patents.

I wonder if I could make my own press. I guess it’s a viable project. I have no end of scrap metal. I could not cast the frame the way Hornady does, but with all the metal I have, I ought to be able to build a rigid frame without casting anything. Then I could stick the Hornady parts in it and make it work. Maybe I could machine it from aluminum and then add steel parts in areas where wear is an issue.

I had what I think is a clever idea today. I don’t have a brass catcher, and I’m tired of losing .38 Super brass, so today I sprayed 100 bullets with Dykem. Now I should be able to spot my blue cases a mile away. I was worried that it might cause feeding issues, but then I realized, Dykem is so thin it doesn’t worry machinists, who have to worry about tiny tolerances. If it’s okay for them, it should be okay for me.

We’ll see. Worst-case scenario, I have to wipe it off with rubbing alcohol.

Some day I have to get a brass catcher.

Israel’s Enemies Poison Their Own Harvest

Busy day yesterday. Laid out 6 dozen garlic rolls, baked 4 dozen, and had to discard the rest. Made lots of pizza. Put brownies out in clear boxes for the customers to see. Fortunately, I had some help. The 11-year-old son of our church’s head servant leader showed up and worked with me. This kid is going to be a CEO some day. Show him something twice, and the third time, he’ll start without you.

Needs to realize that cleaning up is part of the job, however.

The guy who runs the church’s cafe during the week says the building’s business tenants go nuts over the brownies. The congregation isn’t as crazy about them. I decided to bake tons of brownies and store them in the walk-in cooler, so the weekday team can get them out as needed. Brownies keep for eternity, so I should be able to bake 6 half-sheets a month and cover our needs pretty efficiently.

The Armorbearers ended up talking in the parking lot. Unfortunately, one of the younger guys brought up paintball. So now I may have to participate in that. They say those paintballs sting pretty good. I may have to hide a sheet of MDF in my Depends.

We also talked about the need for martial arts training. I suggested krav maga. One of the top instructors lives in Miami. It would be pretty cool, defending God’s house with a system developed by God’s people, in God’s country. And you don’t have to be in great shape to do it, which is a plus for me. I contacted the instructor, and he’s available.

Speaking of God’s people, Israel is in the news. A “peace flotilla” including one ship full of armed hooligans approached her coast, and the IDF boarded the problem vessel, and Israel’s soldiers were attacked. Naturally, Israel’s enemies are portraying her as the aggressor. Pray that God will humiliate and abase the liars, and that Israel will emerge unscathed.

The Bible uses the terms “flood” and “waters” to describe the waves of slander and lies the enemy uses to afflict God’s people. You can see it over and over in the Psalms. False witness is a great evil, and it brings suffering on those who utter it. The Psalms tell us God protects the righteous from it.

The Old Testament uses the term “leprosy” (“tzara’at”) to describe the curse that comes from slander. It doesn’t mean the disease we think of as leprosy; that illness probably did not exist in the Middle East in the time of Moses. It refers to other disfiguring illnesses, as well as a type of rot that attacks a person’s house. God used to make the walls of the homes of liars rot, in order to publicly expose them as people who lied in private. If you routinely lie about people, and your home is falling apart, and your plans always seem to come to nothing, you might want to ask yourself if you’re causing your own problems.

I know a person who spews a never-ending flow of slander and accusation, and this person is a complete failure and outcast (like a leper) and lives in a home which is literally rotting. I know another who behaves the same way, and that person has a miserable life which has amounted to nothing. I believe tzara’at, in one form or another, is still with us. It reminds me of what Wiccans believe: if you try to curse a righteous person, the curse comes back to you. They’re probably right. Some slanderers have supernatural protection from the enemy, but that protection goes away when the righteous attack it in prayer or the enemy no longer finds the slanderers useful. My guess is that the delayed payback carries interest.

Since learning about tzara’at, I’ve been much more careful about what I say. Israel’s enemies could benefit from the same lesson. God spoke the world into existence, and he spoke the eternal blessing on his people into existence, and he speaks curses into existence, and everything he speaks eventually comes to pass, except for punishments which he decides to withhold. Our words have power, too.

I think that when a believer prays in tongues, he speaks God’s blessings and power into his life and the lives of those around him. That’s like having a fountain that waters your crops and drowns your rats and bugs (like a flood) every day. The words come from the Holy Spirit, which is God, so what you say is God’s word, as much as the Bible. Pouring that “living water” into the world has to be a good thing.

It’s surprising how much power words have, even in the natural sense. Think about it. Our laws are words, so when a criminal is imprisoned or put to death, in actuality, he is jailed or killed by words. When you spend a dollar, you are relying on the words printed on it, which say our government backs it up. The words, not the paper, buy the goods you need. A declaration of war is words. A marriage is made by pronouncing words. All contracts are made of words. When you face foreclosure, words take away your house. The Bible even tells us God dispatches his angels using words, and we know that one angel killed 185,000 Assyrians in one night.

When Edward Bulwer-Lytton said the pen was mightier than the sword, he was not kidding. A hydrogen bomb is useless without someone to write the words allowing its deployment.

Even computers are powered by words. How do you tell a computer what to do? How do you create an application? You use a programming “language.”

Understanding the power of words should help us grasp the importance of prayer. It is literally more powerful than anything you do with your mind or your hands. Everything is established in prayer, or in blessings and curses. The work we do in the natural is just execution.

Israel will never go under. God’s flood is deeper than Satan’s. It’s sad that her soldiers were hurt, but in the end, Israel will be buoyed up like the Ark.

10mm Looking Better All the Time

Here is some possibly useless news.

1. Midway USA has all sorts of pistol primers. I just got a cascade of product-arrival emails. Stock up, I guess.

2. Charlie Crist has suspended the fishing license requirement for the State of Florida, through the long weekend. Hooray for all concerned.

I may run by the gun shop today to talk about 10mm and an AK47 pistol. My big concern about the AK is that it may be impossible to find a place where I can shoot it. Trail Glades doesn’t allow people to shoot rifles with the stocks folded, and this is essentially the same thing. I better call.

A 10mm Glock looks like a really good defense choice. You can get ammunition that expands to about 1″ in diameter. That’s not bad for a pistol round. And it penetrates way better than a 9mm.

I keep reading up on this stuff. It’s very confusing. Back when I chose my first Glock, in .40 S&W, my understanding was that heavy rounds could work against you, because of conservation of momentum. I won’t go into the physics, but it works like this: the heavier a bullet is, the farther it can penetrate. There is more to it than that, and I am not going to publish distracting wise-guy comments about sectional density. Type them if you want, just for the finger exercise. Comments like that lead to boring comment threads that annoy everyone and don’t shed any light on anything. People who are interested in splitting hairs can always go to Stoppingpower.net.

Anyway, the theory was this: a round that penetrates too far before expanding won’t achieve much. You get a tunnel about the same diameter as the bullet, plus two small entry and exit wounds.

Now I’m reading stuff claiming that you want the deepest penetration possible, because handgun bullets don’t expand reliably, and that tunnel is all you can count on. If the bullet doesn’t expand, you want it to go all the way through the perp, to do as much harm as possible.

I’m also reading that there are 10mm rounds out there that reliably expand to about 1″ in diameter.

Putting all the BS together in a bag and shaking it, I tentatively conclude that 10mm is a very good choice, when you are limited to a sad little pistol instead of a long gun. If it doesn’t expand, you get good penetration, and if it does, you get lots of damage from the expansion. And it should do a nice job penetrating car doors and such.

I know I can shoot this round very well, because I shoot the .50 AE very well. I am not going to faint because of a little recoil. I shot the .50 AE well while the shells were coming back and hitting me in the middle of the forehead hard enough to cause bleeding, so I think I can deal with a gun that has half as much muzzle energy.

If you think you’ve done things at the range that made you feel stupid, wait until you find out you’ve been shooting yourself in the head over and over with spent cartridges. You don’t feel it until you quit shooting, and by then, you’re already bleeding.

I am convinced that worries about bullets exiting perps and hitting babies and Boy Scouts and visiting Popes and so on are the stuff of Internet-forum hysteria, and the FBI, in an internal document, has taken pretty much the same position. The odds of hitting an innocent person with a spent round are incredibly slim, while the odds of being killed by someone who wasn’t hurt badly enough by your wimpy pistol ammunition are very high. And if you shoot at a criminal and kill someone else, guess who gets charged with the crime? The criminal. It’s called felony murder. Look it up. I got confused and called it “capital murder” the other day. Hey, I’m not a criminal lawyer, plus I’m old. I’m sure there are exceptions for negligence and so on, but the solution is simple: don’t be negligent.

Felony murder is wonderful. Criminals can be charged with the murders of the accomplices the cops shoot. I think.

The idea that there is a wonderful bullet out there, which goes into a perp exactly the right distance, does exactly the right things, and stops without hitting your kids seems facially farcical to me. It’s a lot to ask from a mindless piece of metal. I say power up, shoot to kill, and use common sense. One of the cardinal rules of shooting is, “Be sure of your backstop.” I don’t care how nerve-wracking a shooting situation is; you ought to be able to make some minimal effort not to shoot toward a crowded playground or a session of Congress. If you can’t, then the perp has taken that option away, and he, not you, bears the legal responsibility.

I am not giving legal advice here; I’m just blathering on a blog. If it turns out the laws in your state are different, it’s your problem, not mine. I don’t see the “I read it on a blog” defense as highly viable. Even Tim Geithner had a better excuse than that.

The idea that all calibers are equally effective is also silly. Some do more damage than others, and more damage means a better chance of your survival, especially if your shot placement isn’t perfect. If a 10mm is 10% better than a 9mm, it seems like a smart move to me.

You could say that the extra bullet you get by staying at 9mm gives you at least a 10% advantage. But how likely are you to get to the point where you use that bullet? Besides, extra Glock magazines are small and light.

The stuff about expansion and penetration makes me wonder if I’ve underestimated the .50 AE as a defensive round. The big problems with it are the high likelihood of misfeeds, the low magazine capacity, and the distinct possibility that a stray round will enter your garage and kill one of your vehicles. And then there’s that bleeding-forehead thing.

There is no perfect solution, but trying to work it out is too much fun to quit.

Little Plastic Boxes Filling Up

I finally got my ammunition press going. Last night I produced 100 rounds of .38 Super.

Every time I start the press, I find a new way for it to screw up. Last night I had to remove debris from inside the little spring-loaded primer-insertion doodad. It was sticking up about half a millimeter, blocking the primer slide. What a pain. It’s almost as if Hornady worked on finding ways to make this press break down. I guess there is a limit to the R&D a small company can do.

I’m down to two shell plate retainer springs. This is a weird item. They break all the time, so you have to keep spares on hand. Midway sells them for $2 each or…$6.69 for three.

Buy in volume and lose money! What a concept!

Hornady advises people to smooth out the rough edges the spring contacts. Unfortunately, they don’t tell you this until you call them up and ask them why the spring keeps breaking. I don’t know of a good tool for removing a knife edge from a curved slot. Is a deburring tool the right thing? I don’t know. Hornady says to use sandpaper. If I had a tiny ball end mill, I could mount this thing in the rotary table and have at it.

In order to get 100 rounds of .38 Super, I had to run 105 cases through. Five times, the primer system failed, leaving the primer pockets open so powder escaped onto the press. I also had to guide the rounds into the sizing die. That may be a pawl-adjustment issue, but I don’t think so. I think the plate doesn’t grip the brass well enough to align it reliably. Maybe Hornady made the shell pocket too wide. As I recall, the .45 plate and die work much better.

I plan to make as much .38 Super as I can stand to produce. I think I have about 400 bullets left, and maybe 300 cases. Might as well crank it all out now so I don’t have to set the press up more often than necessary.

I may get a Hornady Powder Cop die, to make sure the charges are uniform. Seems like cheap insurance against death and mayhem.

I was upset because my powder measure, which has an expensive pistol micrometer thing on it, was throwing charges that were off by up to 0.2 grains. I started looking for a better powder measure. I read that the Lyman #55 was better, and I considered ordering one. Then I read that the accuracy I was getting was actually about as good as I could hope for without using a trickler, so I decided to forget about it. Now I’d like to do some super-accurate charges and see if it affects my shooting. If it did, I would be the king of the gun range. Then, of course, I would be obligated to lie and say I was reloading the same way everyone else does.

I did some research on 7.62x39mm ammunition last night. I learned something interesting. Most of the cheap Russian hollowpoints don’t expand too well. I have read that they do fall apart and yaw, and that’s good, but expansion is what you hope for when you buy hollowpoints. It turns out two brands expand: Wolf Military Classic and Silver Bear match ammunition. So if you, like me, like cheap Russian ammunition, this may be helpful to you. Now I have to shoot all my second-rate ammunition and make room for the good stuff!

Hornady makes V-Max bullets in this size (for reloading), and they’re supposed to be great, but the bullets alone run like 20 cents each, so the cost is not low.

Increasingly, I am drawn to the idea of getting an AK pistol for the truck. A truck allows for bigger weapons than concealed carry, but it’s not as big and roomy as a house, so there is good reason to look for a short gun. The AK pistol should give much better accuracy in real-world situations than a pistol, plus higher capacity and infinitely better ballistics. And you can even put a laser on it. I mean a real laser, not a dinky red one you can barely see ten feet away.

The more I think about the shortcomings of pistols, the more convinced I am that I should avoid depending on one. They are absolutely pathetic compared to long guns. Not even in the same ball park. I feel like Tom Selleck in Quigley Down Under. “Never had much use for one.” I’m a very good pistol shot and just an okay rifle shot, but an okay rifle shot is still many times more lethal than a world-class pistol shot.

I had another fun tool experience. My Sears Craftsman mechanic’s stool busted. It has two tubes under it which receive the supports for the backrest. One of the tubes popped off. It had been welded in place, but two welds were bad, and the third was mostly imaginary.

I considered calling Sears to see if their tool warranty applied, but their site says it only applies to hand tools. I decided to try to fix it. I got out my little Proxxon grinder and cleaned up the metal, and then I fastened the tube in place as well as possible with magnets. I fired up the welder and either welded or glued the part in place. I was working in a tiny area, and I can’t tell whether I achieved a real weld, but I stuffed lots of melted steel in there, so if it’s not a weld, it’s acting like glue, and that should be good enough. The part turned a little on its axis while I welded, but it’s straight. The little knob that goes into the tube to fasten the backrest in place now goes in at a slight angle, but no one will ever notice. This sure beats paying $80 for a new stool.

I wonder why Lincoln doesn’t make a skinny nozzle for tight places. Maybe they do. I would love to have a tiny TIG or MIG welder that only goes up to 20 gauge steel.

Tools are life. A man with no tools is wretched, indeed.

Time for 9mm to Go?

I wanted to write the third installment in the story of my trip to Washington for the National Day of Prayer, but I’m not feeling it right now. I got my reloading press working last night, I have piles of brass and powder and primers, and I want to crank out some .38 Super ammunition.

Yesterday while giving the birds some out time, I watched one of those reality shows featuring security videos and such. They showed a nutcase shooting up a tow yard office with an AK and a 9mm pistol. Learned a few things.

First of all, outer walls are really bad cover. I knew that already, from people yammering at me about it in comments, but it was really something to see it proven on video.

The tow yard was in a place called Lake City. I can’t find a Lake City Towing in Florida, using the web. There’s one in Wisconsin. If it’s the one in Florida, the walls are probably concrete. In any case, the rounds went through with no problem, nailing a lady in the rear end.

They had some kind of clear barrier between the office and the waiting area, and I guess it blocked bullets. But the wall below it was worthless. They probably didn’t think about reinforcing it when they added the plastic barrier. And the nut was able to shoot through the little hole where they passed papers and money back and forth.

If this character had been a good shot, he would have killed several people.

When the cops came, one pretty much emptied a pistol into him, but he kept making trouble until an employee came out and shot him some more. The shooter still lived to be jailed.

I’ve seen more than one video like this. Some criminal forces the cops to shoot, and it takes seconds or minutes for him to go down, even with multiple hits. During that time, the criminal can kill.

It makes me wonder if 9mm is a good idea. I like my Glock because it’s portable, super-accurate, and reliable, and it holds 11 rounds. But will it save me in a pinch?

I carry nice Cor-Bon ammunition, which is supposed to cause all sorts of damage inside perps, even in 9mm. If you can make someone bleed internally to a degree that it causes them to lose consciousness, you can put them down in a hurry. That’s the theory. But does it work? I feel like I ought to go hog-hunting and find out.

I have considered carrying a 1911, in either .38 Super or .45. The .38 Super is nearly as deadly as .357 Magnum, and the .45 is also excellent. But a big 1911 is a little showy for church, and the rest of the time, it’s just plain heavy. Maybe a compact Glock in .45 is where I need to be. Or the dreaded and disrespected .40, which is definitely better than the 9mm and has a similar capacity. I wonder if Glock does 10mm. That would be just about perfect. People moan about the recoil and controllability, but I have not had any problems handling high-recoil pistols.

Should I keep a shotgun in the truck? A short gun loaded with 00 buckshot would be much better than a pistol, if I got caught in one of Miami’s famous traffic-accident altercations.

An AK pistol would be hard to beat. Cheap and effective. Short, legal barrel. Lots of rounds. And if you lose it to a thief, you won’t lie awake weeping.

I’m also rethinking my ideas on pistol-grip shotguns. I have read that they’re impossible to control, but if you check out Youtube, you’ll see people firing them with very good accuracy, for short-range purposes. A reasonably talented shooter should be able to hit a perp reliably at fifty feet or less, over and over, unless the videos are rigged. With a shotgun, you don’t necessarily have to put the center of the pattern in a vital place. The pellets will go in different directions in the body, so presumably, you can expect probability to be on your side. If nine pellets enter and separate, one or two are likely to hit something important. At least you would think so. And the entry wound should be huge and bloody compared to the entry would made by a pistol round, which tends to make a little tear that closes up on its own.

Pistols are easier to control in theory, but that doesn’t seem to pan out in actual encounters caught on video. I can shoot a man in the eye at 7 yards, over and over, IF he’s not moving and the light is good. In a problem situation, I’ll be shooting 6″ groups, at best. With a shotgun, that might open up to 12″, but again, you have more lead, bigger wounds, and more trajectories, so aren’t you still way ahead?

So maybe a pistol-grip shotgun is a good thing to have in a vehicle. It’s compact, it’s lethal, it’s as accurate in practice as a pistol…what’s not to love? The Box o’ Truth says 00 will penetrate cars, so it sounds like it ought to go through any cover you are likely to have to worry about on the street.

I need to take the Saiga to a range and shoot it without using the buttstock so I can find out. If it works, forget pistols.

I have to get over the idea that pistols are okay for self-defense. They’re a whole lot better than nothing, but most pistol shots miss, and the ballistics are generally pathetic. I have to make myself think of pistols as what they are: something to keep me alive until I can get to a long gun (paraphrasing Col. Jeff Cooper).

Carbide is the Bomb

I found the AC adapter and lithium battery for my camcorder. I therefore present THIS:

I machined something successfully! This is a pivotal moment in American history!