Step Backward for Youtube Phenom

I’m kind of bummed out today. I was hoping to take the little Ivanka to the range, but it seems kind of pointless until I can mount the laser.

This is a very small gun. I don’t think a rest would work with it, and using a bipod would be like attaching a rake handle to a fork. I would be limited to shooting with the iron sights, unsupported. I’m not knocking that. I mean, it’s what the gun is for. But I really want to find out whether I can hit anything from the hip, with the laser.

I’m hoping the rest of my shotgun parts arrive soon. I need to get that machine up and running. One sad note: once it’s converted to a real AK, it probably won’t fit in the nice Bulldog bag that came with it. I suppose I can retire one of my older bags. The quality of the Bulldog seems superior.

Here’s some other horrendous news. Zo from Macho Sauce Productions has decided to besmirch his reputation by doing Pajamas Media TV. This poor guy. He really has something, but he’s going to wreck it by associating it with the laughingstock of the conservative movement. People are going to call him “Zo the Plumber.”

This man was made for radio. He has a voice and style that will keep people from turning the dial. By doing PJTV, which has no hope at all of being anything but a stillbirth, he’s going to turn himself into media kryptonite. I’m a fan, but there is no way I’d pay to see him or anyone else on the Internet. And I’m right in line with the vast majority.

I never dreamed that the PJ curse would get him. I can understand why people who are really bad at what they do and have no other hope have signed up to do video. But if you have a marketable talent, what’s the point? Joe signed up because PJTV was his only option. He seems like a fine person, but no one at a real media outlet would ever give him a job. Zo is a highly marketable young black conservative with original ideas. Surely he didn’t have to settle for this.

Speaking of video, it looks like the Internet personal broadcasting revolution has stalled. Nowlive will not be able to give members video as a matter of course. In the past, anyone who signed up could have a video broadcast. Now only a few will be so privileged. I don’t understand why they don’t do what real broadcasters do. Interrupt for commercials. Choose advertisers suited to the content of the shows. It worked for Blogads.

This stuff will eventually work. That’s my prediction. Bandwidth’s natural tendency is to become cheaper. But for now, no joy.

I never realized they were in such straits. I don’t know what they pay for bandwidth. I just assumed they had a business plan, and that they weren’t emulating the PJs by running on venture capital with no strategy for generating revenue.

The Internet is like the New World. At first, everyone who showed up was like a king. Then it got crowded, and success began to require more effort and ability. If you start a web media enterprise, the odds against you are astronomical.

The other day I realized that there are still people who do very well for themselves, using the web. If you can offer something unique and valuable, the web is a great way to sell it. Example: Tromix. It’s a couple of guys who machine gun parts and modify weapons. The things they do are not rocket science. There are millions of Americans who have similar skills. But there’s a strong demand for their parts and services, they promote themselves on niche websites, and they are highly competent. So they have to turn away business. That’s fantastic. It gives you hope, doesn’t it? America is sliding down the socialist drain, but individuals can still do well.

It occurred to me last night that it would be wonderful to market an invention on the web. The problem with this plan is that I have no invention. Another problem: you can put your inventions in the public domain by revealing them on a blog. So if I invented anything, I’d have to keep it to myself while I worked on it, and I wouldn’t be able to benefit from showing it to readers and asking for advice.

Last night I watched more milling DVDs. Man, it was beautiful. They skimmed layers off a block of aluminum using a fly cutter. I could watch that all day. Don’t ask me why. They machined aluminum at the start; this is a clean operation, because the only lube you need is WD40. When they went to steel, the guy had to hold a squeeze bottle and shoot oil onto the cutter continuously. What a mess. I didn’t realize it was necessary to do that every time you cut steel. Still cool, however.

Maybe I’ll get off my butt and hit the range. It has been too long.

Every Girl Loves Presents

I think one of the most irritating things you can do to a gun-grabber is to tell him you named your gun. So I think I’m going to call the new Vz 58 “Ivanka.” It’s a nice Czech name, and it applies to a hot babe who takes no crap.

Also, “Vera” is already taken. First by A Man They Call Jayne, and then by Doc Russia.

It’s hard to think of a sexy Russian name for the Saiga. Russian girl names tend to sound like “Agripena” and “Ludmila.” I considered “Mariska,” but it’s more Hungarian than Russian.

Ivanka has some new accessories on the way. I got her a cute new laser/light mount, plus a nasty strobe to put on it. A reader told me about these things. Supposedly they make people nauseous, which is a good thing, when those people are in your house toting weapons. We shall see. I went Chinese again. My Chinese laser is gorgeous, so I figured they were also capable of making flashlights.

The Saiga will have a laser on the side rail, plus a light under the barrel. The Vz 58 has limited (i.e. no) mounting options, so it will have the light and laser on the barrel, riding the same mount. If a criminal enters my home, it will be very hard to choose. I know one thing. The pistols will remain asnooze in their bags. Pistols are great, but long guns mean more shots on target, plus much greater capacity and stopping power.

Okay, the shotgun does not have greater capacity. But it has a whole lot, and one shot on target ends the game.

I think the Vz 58 was an excellent move. It’s like an M1 carbine that has taken tae kwon do. I got one magazine all loaded up with Wolf ammo, and I am itching to get to the range.

With enough prayer and a lot of luck, I will be able to go to my grave without shooting either of these things anywhere except at the range. But you never know. I don’t plan to have wrecks, but I still have airbags.

All I need now is a little bag for the Vz. I’ll keep it folded, right where I can get to it. At last, real home protection. Now I can go back to buying utterly frivolous guns that serve no purpose.

And Rahm It

This is pure sex. Check it out.

That is a Czech-made Vz 58 rifle in 7.62x39mm. It has a milled receiver. It has two super-light alloy magazines that hold 30 rounds each. It’s a side folder, made so the stock doesn’t interfere with the gun when folded. It’s two pounds lighter than an AK-47. And it was made in a country whose president says Al Gore is an idiot.

Hard to ask for more.

What a contrast, between this and the Saiga 12 shotgun I ordered. The Saiga is completely feminized, with a bunch of bizarre components that make it unrecognizable as an AK; all that crap has to be taken off and flushed. This baby, on the other hand, is ready to rock right out of the box.

You should see how tiny it is. The photos don’t do it justice. I don’t have an M1 carbine on hand, but this thing looks even smaller, and it has much more potential as a home defense gun. That’s saying a lot. An M1 carbine is a great thing to confront burglars with.

I could have had plastic furniture on this thing, but I chose the crazy particle-board stuff. I figured it would increase the gun’s value if I sold it. I picked a folder because I wanted to be able to shoot from the hip, using a laser. Which I already have. The gun has no place to mount optics, but I think of it as a short-range weapon, so I’m not planning to get a scope. If I can put the laser on the barrel, that should be enough to get the job done. If I decide I want a light as well, I am pretty sure I can order a new foregrip.

I can feel sweat oozing out of my body as I think of shooting this piece at the range. I can’t wait until tomorrow.

It bothered me that I couldn’t find a good milled AK for an acceptable price, but now I’m glad I didn’t get one. The AK is an immortal design, but it has zero class, and the style is crude, and it’s made with very little precision. This, on the other hand, is a real gun. With actual TOLERANCES. And it’s…CUTE.

I finally have some decent weapons for defensive purposes. I can rest easy while Obama and his stooge Holder try to trample our civil rights. They don’t have the guts to go after guns people already possess; they always divide us using grandfather clauses. That means I’m safe. Until they decide the grandfather clauses need to expire. I don’t think they’ll be able to do what they want to do. Gun control, for Democrats, has become like abortion for Republicans. They can’t get serious about it without risking a lot of precious votes.

Thank God I live in a state where it is still possible to get some use out of the second amendment.

If you don’t have serious defensive long guns yet, you better jump. For $550-$680, Classic Arms will give you what you need. Not a Vz 58, but a good stamped AK.

In other news, I received four new machine-tool videos from Smartflix. Honest to God, porn could not be any better. Which is good, because I can’t watch porn. The videos are from ATI (Accelerated Training Institute), and the ones I’m looking at are about the Bridgeport vertical mill. The guy in the videos runs some kind of firearms-related company, and he uses his machine tools in connection with that. He showed me all the parts of the mill, and he showed me various types of cutters, and by the time he was ready to cut some aluminum, I was in a trance. Like a crowd of moonbats, awaiting Obama’s next sneeze.

I’m not even kidding. I love watching people use tools. And I love big iron things made in America. I can’t really explain that.

I still have two and a half videos to go. Thinking about it almost makes my hands shake.

I better go sit on the couch and fondle my new rifle some more. Maybe I’ll be able to limit myself to two new guns this year.

By the way, I ordered this thing from Czech-Point. It’s a whole lot easier than trying to locate a new CZ-USA job. They claim some of the parts are reconditioned, but the barrel is like a mirror, and the only parts that look like they could conceivably have been used are the butt, pistol grip, and foregrip. It took them a while to get it delivered, but for a flat price, they cover everything. You just show up and do a background check. They pay the dealer fee.

Humorous Errors Logged for Posterity

I managed to use up the last of my Laser-Cast .45 bullets today. By that I mean I managed to make them into ammunition. I must have had every conceivable type of ammunition press malfunction by now. And not all are inevitable problems caused by the nature of the press. I made up a good number of completely new and unnecessary glitches.

The first die a casing hits in a Hornady Lock-N-Load AP has a pin in it that pushes the old primer out. The primer falls into a tube and goes out of the press. If the pin doesn’t push it far enough, it sticks halfway out. This locks up the press. It can’t turn because the primer obstructs it. Lots of fun.

The safeguard is to adjust the pin correctly and tighten it so it can’t slip back into the die. I do this, but you really have to crank down on it, and I’m reluctant to put too much pressure on the parts. So once in a while, the pin manages to work its way into the die, and a casing gets stuck.

My genius response? No, I didn’t throw away a two-cent .45 casing, of which I have piles. I put the casing on top of the shell plate and ran it up into the die, figuring the pin would poke the primer out. Here’s the problem with this idea. The same die has a sizing part in it that squeezes the casing back into shape, and when a casing goes into it, it gets wedged in very tightly. What pulls it out? The shell plate. IF the casing is situated so the rim is under the plate. If you do what I did, the plate pushes the casing in, but it can’t pull it out. So you have to find a way to pull the casing out, and then you have to readjust the pin. In case you’re wondering, Vise Grips don’t work too well, but a flat screwdriver does.

I also ran several rounds through the machine, with the part that loads primers sitting on the bench beside it. One of the irritating things about this press is that it’s easy to screw up the primer apparatus; there are several things that can keep primers from seating. When I started getting rounds with no primers, I figured it was time to diagnose a problem and fix it. In a sense, that was true. I looked at the part sitting on the bench next to the press, and I instantly diagnosed the problem: epic operator FAIL.

At one point I managed to do something really original. I somehow got a bullet stuck in the die that seats bullets in cases. I found this out when the stuck bullet mashed the next round halfway into a casing. I had to take the die out, put it in a vise, and drill out the stuck bullet. This may have been caused by an indexing problem. When the indexing gets messed up, you can have a situation where you can only push casings partially into the dies. In a situation like that, you could easily push a bullet halfway into a casing and then pull it back off, leaving it stuck in the seating die. If you didn’t catch it, you’d end up with the problem I had.

Other than my own interesting screwups, the press works as well as it ever did. The pawls were easy to adjust, but they crept out of adjustment while I made ammunition, ruining two primed cases and necessitating use of a hex wrench. I think this thing could use some Loctite to keep the pawl screws from creeping in and out. The little slide that moves fresh primers into the press got stuck once. As far as I know, this is normal. It has happened ever since I got the press. You can clean it and dry-lube it all you want. It’s going to happen once in a while. If powder spills on it and you don’t clean up every trace, it happens a LOT. Finally, the ejection wire caught one round, obstructing the press. Ho hum. I can deal with that. You just pull the round out.

On the whole, it’s a good thing. Five-dollar boxes are better than fifteen-dollar boxes, and it’s nice to know a little bit about ammunition, instead of just going to the store and pointing at the box I want.

I still have 1400 rounds of Hornady hollow points that I got as part of a sales promotion. I guess I should look up a recipe and start using them. I have read that they’re not optimal for self-defense, because they don’t always open up. I don’t know whether it’s true, but they’re fine for the range. Even if they’re not the best, this caliber does the job pretty well even with ordinary ammunition, so it would be comforting to have a few hundred rounds of hollow points in the closet.

With any luck, I’ll be shooting the Vz 58 at the range on Thursday. I bought .38 Super brass, so maybe I’ll take both 1911s and have a real session.

Buy a Gun Day Approaches

What are you buying for Buy a Gun Day?

I went to my local gun shop and asked for a surplus ICBM, but apparently the bedwetting liberals have managed to make it impossible to buy them.

Free Stuff!

I got some comments touting the reliability of pump-action shotguns and implying that the Saiga I got is a product that lacks the pump’s long history of trouble-free use. I have no reason to doubt that pumps are reliable. I don’t know much about them. But I think I should point something out, if only to keep people from inadvertently making themselves look silly. The shotgun I bought is made by Izhmash, and the brand name is Saiga, but what it is, is a KALASHNIKOV. It’s an AK-47 shotgun. So maybe it’s best not to call it “untried.” That is my thinking, anyway.

I have had an interesting day. I got two new tools. Are you ready for this? One is a huge GENIE LIFT.

I know what you’re thinking. I have a giant Gomez-Addams-style vault under the floor, so I don’t care what I spend. No. Sadly. I got this thing for nothing. It’s really incredible.

My father owns some warehouses. The economy is bad. People are going out of business. He lost a tenant. The tenant was in construction. He told me the warehouse was full of “junk” up to the ceiling. He could not get the tenant to remove it. They called Habitat for Humanity, and they wouldn’t take any of it. It has been abandoned. He said there were “two big machines” in there, and he invited me to go look.

We drove out there today and opened the place up, and lo and behold, there was a Genie Lift in the back. And I don’t mean a little one. This thing looks like the suit Sigourney Weaver wore to fight the alien queen. It has the outrigger deals and everything. You could lower a 600-pound tool from the back of a truck with this machine. I have no idea what I’m going to do with it , but I know one thing. It’s coming home with me.

Can you believe that? On the way out there, I kept thinking how great it would be if one of the machines were a mill or a Genie Lift. I guess a Genie Lift is better, because I am willing to pay for a mill, but I would never have sprung for a Genie Lift.

It’s beat-up, but who cares? It’s in working condition.

The other machine, I could not figure out. It had two big tires on the bottom and a big flex shaft about eight or nine feet long, running from a Baldor motor to what looked like a platform for lifting drywall into place. I looked it up when I got home. It’s a ceiling grinder.

I would guess that even among my bizarre readers, there are few people who would recognize this thing. Here’s how it works. You make a concrete garage. It has cruddy excess material at the seams on the ceiling. So you go in with the ceiling grinder and grind them down. It works with wheels that look just like 10″ cutoff wheels. Google it. Very odd.

It’s in excellent shape. Unfortunately, I can think of no earthly use for it. So I plan to Craigslist it.

I plan to Craigslist a lot of stuff. My father wants no part of this mess. He just wants it out. He made me a key, and he told me it was my problem. I guess I’ll have to go out there and catalog and photograph it. Here is some of the junk I found.

1. A huge Ridgid brand driveshaft. For what? I don’t know. It’s brand new, still in the box. It’s around six feet long.

2. Boxes and boxes of grey PVC fittings. Lots of “end bells.”

3. Nuts for electrical conduit. Many boxes. I’d say most are 3″ across. Maybe 2″.

4. At least four stainless in-wall restroom towel dispensers.

5. Five sheets of 3/4″ sheathing plywood, plus other scraps.

6. A ten-foot-long formica workbench.

7. Three air cleaners. These are huge box fans that take air filters. Very heavy. One is still in the box.

8. Miles of rigid and EMT conduit. I will never lack for scrap again, if I can just find a place to put it.

9. All sorts of leftover steel from a modular mezzanine put in by a previous tenant. Beautiful for welding.

10. About 30 sheets of painted 3/16″ steel, in one-foot squares. These are panels intended for some specific purpose, but to me, they are some of the most gorgeous welding scrap imaginable.

11. Lots of electrical boxes, including some about two feet high and two feet wide. Full of tasty salvageable breakers begging to be ripped out and stored for later use.

12. Gigantic commercial lighting fixtures, including at least one street lamp about two feet across.

13. Miles of Romex and Cat-6 wire.

14. A steel desk with a very sturdy plastic top. Looks like a solid sheet of nylon or polyethylene. It would make a pretty sweet workbench.

15. A big Ridgid tool stand with no tool on it.

What a mess. I guess I should catalog it, find out the retail prices, list it for 50% off, and see who buys.

Express Yourself

Today I got an email which sort of suggested it was silly to want a shotgun that holds more than five rounds.

I realize that the pump-gun people are almost a cult, like the .45 ACP people and the revolver people. I don’t think it’s possible to convince a real pump fan that there is anything better than a pump. It would be like trying to make me like soy. But I’ll ask anyway. Do you think there is a good reason–I mean a good reason, not some ridiculous BS like “three more ounces of weight will make it impossible to carry the weapon”–why you would not want to have lots of shotgun shells at your disposal in a gunfight?

Back in the days when the cops were slowly realizing revolvers were obsolete for law enforcement (because they were being killed by criminals with Glocks), the notion that more ammunition was better did not seem controversial. Even the TV news heads got it. They would say, “The standard service revolver holds six bullets. The WICKED SEMI-AUTOMATIC INVISIBLE-TO-X-RAYS GLOCK holds sixteen. The police are now outgunned.” And they were right. Is there some reason why that logic does not apply to long guns?

Liberals seem to believe it, although I know that’s a sorry authority to cite. They wet their drawers constantly over “high capacity” magazines, because they realize an armed man who can shoot fifteen times without reloading is a bigger threat than a man who has to fumble with a ridiculous speedloader after five or six shots.

I read an FBI document the other day. I’ll bet many of you have seen it. The authors pointed out a sad fact. I’m assuming the document is legitimate and the “fact” is really a fact. They said that most shots fired by LEOs miss.

Again, I am probably using a bad example. If you’ve seen the police shoot, you, like me, may have been tempted to turn to a life of crime simply because of the astronomically low odds that a cop with a gun can hit you. They are really bad most of the time. It must be ego; anyone who is willing to listen can learn to shoot. If you show up at the range in ludicrous black pants with 92 pockets, plus a SWAT T-shirt, plus insulated black boots, in the summer heat, you probably are not the kind of person who thinks other people can teach him anything. Also, I suppose many cops are primarily quiet, mature civil servants just hoping to get benefits and pensions, so they’re not all that gung-ho about marksmanship. They miss most of the time, but maybe that has more to do with their skills than the stress of the gunfight.

Anyway, most law enforcement bullets miss completely. To me, that suggests that more ammunition can only be helpful. The more you shoot, the more likely you are to hit something, and you can at least lay down suppressing fire a little longer.

I have seen at least one good argument for fewer rounds. I wanted to get 12-round magazines for my shotgun, but the Saiga nuts say the 8-round jobs are more reliable. So much so that you can actually buy a part so you can saw up a perfectly good 12-round magazine and convert it. Still, I think the people who do this plan to make up for it by carrying more magazines. That would be my guess.

You can’t hope that a shotgun’s spread will make up for a lack of ammunition. At self-defense range, a load of buckshot isn’t significantly wider than a bullet. It might be an inch and a half across, instead of .45 inches. That means you still have to aim. The advantage in short-range accuracy comes from a shotgun’s sight radius and the fact that you shoulder it, not from the width of the pattern. You shouldn’t think you can get away with a few shells just because you’re shooting a “scattergun.” You should think of it the same way you think of a rifle. I have a rifle that holds six rounds, and I wouldn’t even think of using it for home defense.

These things seem self-evident, but I am well aware that there is a difference between armchair experts like myself and people who actually fight criminals. So if there is some reason why I should stick with the tiny 5-round magazines that came with the Saiga, tell me what it is.

Clinton Damage Curable

I’ve been sitting here working on turning my Hillarized Saiga 12 into a functioning shotgun. It’s incredibly frustrating.

I don’t really know if the Clintons are the only ones who caused the problem. Feel free to comment.

It’s impossible to find a gunsmith whom I can trust to take off the gun-ban garbage, within an acceptable time frame. I am trying to get on a wait list, but that will cost me four months, minimum. Therefore I am doing what most Saiga 12 owners do. I am buying parts, and I am going to install them myself. I’ve confirmed that it’s not a major job. The only thing I have to be careful of is marring the gun so the pro I eventually send it to will have to repair the damage.

Here’s how it works. You have to get rid of the insane fire control group that has been put on the gun to move the trigger back and convince idiot bureaucrats that it’s a sporting weapon. That means buying a new fire control group and trigger guard. If you don’t do this, you might as well not even buy the gun. This is the keystone of a Saiga 12 conversion.

You have to remove four pins from the receiver, I believe. Plus a spot weld. Without gouging anything. Then you throw out half the gun’s guts and put the new FCG in. Then you put the new trigger guard on, with screws. And you add a pistol grip. The FCG move allows you to change the stock, which is an abomination straight from hell. You take off the stock, saw the tang off the rear of the receiver, and install something to bolt the new stock to. You can get someone to TIG-weld a back plate on, or you can get an adaptor that attaches to the receiver. The nicer ones go inside. The less-nice ones go outside.

Once you’ve done all that, you can bolt a stock to the rear of the gun. If you want it to fold, you have to add a foldy thing first. Folding is very good, not because you would ever shoot a 12 gauge from the hip, but because a folded gun is easier to store and move.

At this point, a real man would blast the gun with aluminum oxide (NOT sand or glass beads) and add a tough bake-on coating.

When all these things have been done, you have a relatively healthy AK-47 that shoots buckshot. You can add bigger magazines and various doodads.

It’s a giant pain. I wish I knew someone in Miami who could be trusted to TIG-weld the receiver when I’m done, but Miami has a very tiny skilled-labor pool. Oh, if you want something done, you can have it, but 98% of the people who eagerly volunteer won’t know what they’re doing. The conversion will leave several holes in the receiver, and you need a precision welder to fix them. And it’s better to weld on a trigger guard. But you can’t get it done here.

I figure I’ll do what other people do. I’ll put the gun together, and I’ll stick nylon plugs in the holes, and I’ll blue the bits of the gun where bare metal can be seen. Then I’ll take my time looking for a far-off gunsmith who will fix the holes and refinish the weapon. Then I’ll send it to him. It’s hard to find a Saiga rebuilder who has time to do anything, but it’s easy to find a gunsmith who can put the finishing touches on a gun you’ve already converted.

Interesting info: you can get 12-round stick magazines, but for various reasons I don’t completely understand, the 8-round jobs are better. If you’re truly nuts, you can get a drum that holds, I think, 20. There are two competing companies that make these, and they hate each other. They put up feuding videos on Youtube, trashing each other’s products. It seems like MD Arms has, far and away, the better reputation. In case you want to skip all that.

I’m pooped, and I didn’t even do anything yet.

I decided to go with 00 buck for defense purposes. I found a wonderful round that is relatively cheap and outperforms everything else. It will do great things at surprisingly long distances. I don’t care about shooting through walls. Don’t start with me. Houses in Miami are built from concrete blocks. To hit my neighbors, I’d have to go through four thicknesses of concrete.

Now I sit back and wait for UPS. Hope I can pull this off.

Baby Pictures

The newest baby in the nursery arrived unexpectedly today. Here she is:

That’s a Saiga 12 with a 19″ barrel. Pardon all the post-Clinton crap, such as the misplaced trigger and silly buttstock. Consider it afterbirth. It will be removed.

Closer shot:

Here’s the Bulldog bag that came with it as a freebie. This bag was not the reason I bought the gun, but it’s very nice. It’s better than my other gun bags, which were not free. Note the extra magazine.

I ordered this from Classicarms.us. They still have the offer up.

I’m hoping to ship this to a smith and have it restored to a Kalashnikov configuration, with the trigger farther forward and a folding buttstock for storage and easier carry. I found a first-rate smith who is not as backed up as Tromix.

The finish on this thing is pretty bad. But it’s considerably better than the Romanian bluing on my Romak. The parts all seem to fit well, and it strips and reassembles without too much trouble. I was afraid it would be bathed in cosmoline, but fortunately, it was not.

It’s possible to reconfigure one of these things on your own, using a drill and a Dremel and a vise. But I’ve seen video of the job, and it leaves the gun marred up, and you end up with holes that have to be plugged with nylon inserts. That’s not for me. I want the holes welded over, and then I want the gun blasted and refinished. It’s not that expensive.

It’s considerably heavier than my Browning Sweet Sixteen, which is surprising, since the Browning is milled and has wooden furniture and a longer barrel. The Browning swings and aims effortlessly. This thing is shorter and more maneuverable, though, and I would guess that it’s a lot tougher, given its lineage.

If I had a shorter barrel for it, I could see using the Browning for home defense. I have some buckshot for that purpose. I don’t know how I’d go about getting an 18″ Browning Sweet Sixteen barrel. It would almost amount to perversion.

While the FFL was doing the transfer paperwork, I asked him if he was getting a lot of Obama business. He said most of it was coming from cops who did not want to take a chance on getting caught in an Obama gun ban. He said he’d get me a price on a Glock in .45 ACP, so I’ll have a quote ready if the friend who wants my .40 ever takes delivery.

He had a 9x19mm Kimber he was trying to unload. Why would Kimber bother making a thing like that? You have a 1911 frame. It will hold .45 ACP, .38 Super, and 9x23mm. Help me understand. Who would want nine rounds of 9mm in a gun with that much potential?

I hear bad things about Kimbers anyway.

Wish me luck with the Saiga. FINALLY I have a defensive long gun to add to my hamster shooters, heirloom, and milsurps. When the Vz 58 arrives, I’ll have two, and I’ll feel fairly well prepared to defend my home.

Although a Benelli would sure be nice.

Forget I said that.

Squirrels Must Pay

First off, please keep praying for Mish Weiss. She is having some problems because she tried to get off IV painkillers.

Now back to my exciting life.

I am suffering serious frustration here.

A couple of weeks back, I decided to take the plunge and get a Vz 58 rifle, to discourage people from walking on my grass. Okay, I got it for home defense. But a man’s grass is sacred. We need legislation to account for that.

The gun is still not here. The dealer had some kind of problem contacting the local FFL who is supposed to take delivery. And dealers are so busy, you can’t really get on their backs and push them to get things done. Thanks, Obama, for saving the American firearms industry. After the Obama gun panic is finished, it will be perfectly okay to outlaw the sale of guns, because everyone will already have five or six.

Meanwhile, I have learned that Obama has made it extremely difficult to get a Saiga 12 shotgun modified. By passing laws against it? No, by inducing a surge in sales that has resulted in a gigantic gunsmithing backlog. The best-known source of modified Saiga 12s is Tromix, and they (“he,” actually) are so busy, they would probably lay down suppressing fire if you tried to enter their property and place an order.

The stock Saiga 12 is very silly. They took a Kalashnikov and added parts to make it look like a deer gun. I don’t know why liberals are too dumb to realize that hunting guns are just as deadly as self-defense guns. I don’t know why it’s so easy to mollify them by talking about hunting and target shooting. But that’s how it is. They love to pretend the Second Amendment has something to do with sports, which it does not. And the gun industry has to play along.

The Second Amendment is about having the power to kill human beings, so they will refrain from oppressing you and committing crimes against you. It has nothing to do with shooting rabbits or quail. Still, we have nutty laws that result in the sale of odd-looking Frankenweapons that need to be modified in order to perform their actual purpose well.

If the Founding Fathers had cared about protecting our right to engage in sporting activities, they would have done something really useful and written an amendment forcing home builders to construct houses in such a manner that every one had room for a full-size pool table. They could have called it Frank Costanza’s Law.

There are a few other people out there who do a good job modifying shotguns. They have backlogs, but not like the Tromix backlog. Maybe the Obama panic will subside to the point where it’s possible to get a gun fixed up without losing the use of it for three months.

I think it would be great to get a tax stamp and have a shotgun with a 14″ barrel. Very nice for turning quickly in hallways and small rooms. Chris Byrne says the answer is to learn the technique for maneuvering a longer gun. I assume the technique consists mainly of pointing the barrel up. Up and not down, because you can’t hit your toes if you shoot the ceiling.

The defensive ammunition I ordered for my .38 Super arrived. It does not seem inclined to cycle well. Maybe this is the time to get serious and have the gun worked on. The .38 would be a marvelous carry piece for formal occasions, but not if the bullets won’t cycle. I guess the ramp needs to be worked on. And I never did get the defective rollmark fixed.

I think I have pretty well covered my survival needs, as regards food. I mentioned the possibility of shooting squirrels, and I said I needed a BB gun. Someone said I should use the .17 HMR. I think that in a national crisis, the local cops would have no problem with a BB gun, but they would be highly disturbed, to the point where they couldn’t digest their doughnuts and pastelitos, if they saw me wandering around with a rifle.

I’m pretty sure a simple Crosman pump would do the job. They do a number on birds, and the accuracy is more than adequate. The smartest thing, really, would be a trap. Let the squirrels come to me. A reader told me how to build a very efficient squirrel-drowning machine from a bucket and a piece of pipe.

I figure I’ll buy some dried beans and some oatmeal and be done with it. It will be easy to stay alive for a month. If things get so bad people need more supplies than that, it probably means there is no point in prolonging the misery.

The funniest suggestion I’ve heard is this: buy cartons of generic cigarettes and vacuum-seal them in bags. If the nicotine supply dries up, smokers will gladly give you their food, their jewelry, their kidneys, and their children in exchange for cigarettes. You could buy tobacco seed, for that matter. Grow your own cheroots. You could have a home staffed by groveling nicotine-addict zombies.

It won’t work with booze, because sugar plus water plus time equals alcohol. You can’t take away the supply. And real alcoholics will drink absolutely anything that gives them a buzz. Mashed raisins in toilet-tank water will do just fine.

I’m kind of stalled on the machine tool issue. I continue to believe machine tools are going to flood the market shortly, due to the effervescence of the amazing Obama/Geithner economy. I think businesses are going to disappear, and their machine tools will have to go somewhere. Also, a guy I want to buy a lathe from is in the hospital.

Man, I want a lathe. Just once in my life, I want to knurl something. Can you relate to that?

Anyhow, stay away from my oatmeal, and keep off my lawn. Let the piles of squirrel skeletons be a warning to you.

How do You Like Your Squirrel?

I’m very proud of myself. I hit Costco and picked up a few survival items, and I also received some very nice Cor-Bon defensive ammunition.

It’s funny, but if you own a few guns–just a few–and you stock a reasonable amount of target and defensive ammuntion for each one, you end up with a surprising capacity to defend your property. It’s not the goal, but I suppose it’s a positive side effect.

I don’t buy large amounts of ammunition so I can hold off the police while spouting half-truths about Ruby Ridge over a megaphone. I buy them because you can pay, say, $250 for a thousand rounds all at one time, or you can pay $650 for the same ammunition, in dribs and drabs. Bulk is the way to do it.

I don’t think real survival nuts will be impressed by the things I’m buying. I just don’t believe we could have a multi-year crisis in which things like flour and running water are completely unavailable. A tremendous number of improbable things have to happen in order for us to end up in that situation. But I do think Obama is a weakling, and he is going to invite terrorism, and it’s entirely possible that a nuclear blast on our soil could cause terrible screwups that would make food hard to get for a month or so.

I got canned fish and twelve pounds of rice. I now have a total of about seventeen pounds. I wanted dried beans, but Costco doesn’t sell them. Hard to believe. I guess I’ll swing by Gordon Food Supply.

The country ham idea is a winner. I can’t think of any reason why a ham can’t be made airtight in some way, to keep it from getting hard. The paraffin idea is okay, but you would have to get the paraffin off somehow. If I knew what kind of wax they put on cheese, it would be perfect.

If I had to go two months on country ham and rice and beans, I think I’d be ahead of most people.

I should go ahead and get a good BB gun. Squirrels are just too plentiful and delicious to ignore.

Do Some Shopping in Honor of Pelosi

I have some wonderful news. Aaron has just opened Buyagunday.net!

Just about everyone has heard of “Buy a Gun Day.” The idea is that you mitigate the pain of paying your taxes by buying a gun on April 15. What you may not know is that Aaron is the person who came up with the idea. A lot of people have used it without crediting him, but a quick Google will show that Aaron was promoting Buy a Gun Day six years ago.

Now Buy a Gun Day has its own website. Here’s the link. Buyagunday.com was unavailable, because an imitator bought it.

I don’t know what his plans for the site are. A forum seems like a natural. If I were him, I think I’d sell buyagunday.net email addresses.

Historical note: Aaron is opening the site on the 25th anniversary of the day I surprised him by showing up in Israel.

Guns Now; Expression Later?

Beth Cleaver’s profile photo was deleted from her Facebook account because it had a gun in it. These miserable people are trying to suppress acknowledgement and celebration of our precious right to keep and bear arms. I’m sure most Facebook employees are unaware of a couple of important facts, so I’ll spell them out: the right to keep and bear arms is a CIVIL RIGHT, and like freedom of speech and freedom of religion, it is guaranteed by THE BILL OF RIGHTS which is part of the US CONSTITUTION. It is not okay to treat it like a disease or a vice. In fact, if it were a disease or a vice, Facebook would have no problem with it.

Post gun photos in your Facebook profile. Let them know how you feel about having your rights threatened.

Void Your Warranty the Correct Way

In case anyone else out there has a Hornady Lock-N-Load ammunition press that needs taking apart, I am posting this entry.

I felt there was too much friction between the driveshaft and the rest of the press, and that this screwed up the indexing, so I decided to take the driveshaft out, polish it to make it more slippery, and put it back in. Unfortunately, this is kind of a pain, and even if you have the exploded drawings, you may get confused.

1. Lift the ram and fix it so it can’t go back down. How you do this is your problem. This is going to give you access to a couple of hex screws on the ram’s sides.

2. Take out the hex screws. Hornady says to tap the wrench with a hammer if they won’t move. Be patient and don’t bust anything. It works.

3. You have liberated the subplate from the drive hub and shaft. They’re still attached at the bottom of the press, so you need to remove the yoke. It’s held on by snap rings. Remove one of them and it will slide out. How do you remove snap rings? Simple. Go to Sears and buy one tool for each of the 952,000 types of rings, and see if one fits. Or do what everyone else does and push it with two screwdrivers until it pops off and flies into the rafters. A magnetic pickup tool may be useful when you finally locate the ring. It will land in the deepest crack in your garage, wherever that may be. If, for some reason, you want to find the least accessible area of your garage, popping off a snap ring and observing its trajectory is a good method.

4. Slide the shaft and ram and whatever down out of the press.

5. Pop the snap ring off the index wheel and remove the wheel. It will lift straight off.

6. There is a pin sticking out of the shaft where the index wheel used to be. Pull it out with pliers. Don’t mangle it.

7. The shaft is now free of the ram. Push it upward and it will come out.

8. If you need to take the drive hub off, there’s another little pin in the shaft you have to pull. You’ll see it.

There may be mistakes in this entry. If so, sorry. I’m writing from memory.

I took my shaft and mounted it in a drill and spun it in 200-grit emery paper. Having no lathe, I had no better way to polish the shaft. I stuck it back in the ram, and sure enough, it turns easier. I think the shaft is machined a little bigger than it really needs to be. You don’t need great precision in this area. It would seem to me that ease of rotation is a lot more important.

When my new drive hub arrives, I’m going to polish it, too, if there is any resistance to rotation. I squirted lithium grease down inside the ram so it would would have some chance of seeping into the shaft channel or whatever it’s called and lubricating the shaft. The grease fittings on the LNL do nothing to help the shaft spin, and there is no way to lubricate it from outside. Trust me, spraying the ends of the shaft is a complete waste of time. The shaft turns in a tight channel (help me with the jargon, nerds) maybe 1 1/2″ long and you are not going to get in there with a spray can while the press is assembled.

I took my press apart and got it back together. I am the King. All hail me.

Cheap Ammunition Makes You Pay Dearly

Yesterday I made some .45 ammunition, and as usual, there were little problems. I won’t mention the accident in which the clear plastic cylinder on the powder measure fell off and covered the floor with Unique. We’ll just omit that. There were other difficulties.

I have a Hornady Lock-N-Load AP, built before they decided the ejection wire was a bad idea and got rid of it, making upgrades to existing presses necessary. It is a turret press. There are, I guess, six stations on a little turntable (drive hub plus shell plate), and you pull a handle to turn it, and each station does an operation on a casing. For this to work, each casing has to be lined up pretty well under the tool that alters it, so the turntable has to stop at the right places. When it does this, in response to various mechanical doodads that are supposed to make it line up, it’s called “indexing.”

If your turntable doesn’t index right, you have problems. First, the sizing die will miss the case and possibly deform it. Second, the primer will miss the case and fail to seat, leaving a hole for powder to dribble out of. The powder will eventually find its way into crevices and cause friction, making the indexing problem worse. It’s a nice cascading effect.

If you don’t push the lever pretty hard on the upstroke, your primer may not seat completely. If this happens, the primer may project downward in a way that blocks the table’s movement. Or you may end up with no primer in the pocket, and the primer can also pop out of the press and find its way into various places where it will drive you crazy.

Pushing the lever hard on the upstroke–I am pretty sure–is hard on the left pawl. Pawls are little things on springs that turn the table. Once the pawls are out of position or damaged, everything goes to hell. And I believe the instructions for adjusting the pawls are backward. Until you realize that, you will find yourself making things worse by doing what Hornady tells you to do. I’m looking at a PDF of the manual, and it appears to be right, but I think the printed one I have is wrong. Maybe they changed it, or maybe I misread it. Anyway, I had to write my own notes in the manual to resolve the confusion.

On top of all that, the shaft that turns the table has a lot of friction, so the pawls have to work hard under the best of circumstances. And there is no bearing on the shaft, and while there are grease fittings, they appear to have no relationship to the driveshaft. So grease away; nothing will happen.

I think my problems are worse, because my press is bolted to a somewhat springy bench edge. The Lock-N-Load likes to rock and throw powder around, and bench movement just generally degrades the way the press functions. I am going to reinforce it today.

I got the press working yesterday, and I ran off around 70 rounds, and then the press started balking. I fiddled with the pawls. A pawl allows things to go by in one direction, and it may push them in that direction, but it shouldn’t push things in the other direction. I had a situation where the left pawl was hitting the drive wheel (“index wheel”) in both directions, so the tip of the pawl got eaten off.

I ground it down and replaced it, and it worked for a while, but eventually, things became hopeless. And while I was fooling with the press, I put pressure on the drive hub, a part with which Hornady has had serious problems. There is a little key sort of a thing on the hub that drives the shell plate that holds the casings. It broke off. Now the press is useless, and I have to wait for a new hub and pawls. I ordered two sets of pawls; I can tell this is a problem that is likely to happen more than once.

I’m really irritated with this thing. I don’t understand why they would build a rotating part that takes a lot of effort to turn, and which has no bearing and no means of lubrication or cleaning without disassembling the machine. I can improve it by taking it apart and sanding down the drive shaft so there is less friction. I think. still, I’m out thirty bucks, and I can’t reload, and this should never have happened. I’m sure the folks at Hornady are doing their best, and I understand that they give fantastic service, and the machine has a lifetime warranty (which does not apply to my problems). But this is bad.

Last night I realized how much better life would have been, had I had machine tools. I could have popped the shaft out and machined a couple of thousandths off of it to make it turn easier. I could have done the same with the drive hub. I could have made a new drive hub after it broke. Making pawls would be a piece of cake. If I really got mad, I could change the machine so it would accept bearings. And all this work would have been enjoyable and satisfying. As it is, I have to screw around with sandpaper and a bench grinder.

I have come to a tentative conclusion, and maybe my machinist readers can tell me if I’m right. It seems to me that it’s better to spend a few thousand dollars once, on a lathe and a mill, than it is to spend your entire life buying parts for things and putting up with frustrating things that a machinist could easily fix.

I suspect that my press is just plain defective, and that the defect is tightness in the lower hole the driveshaft goes through. I can’t think of any reason why the shaft would need to be hard to turn. I’m going to have to take it apart, and it’s held together with snap rings. I hope the pliers I have will fit . Otherwise, I’ll have to strip naked, set my hair on fire, and run down the street screaming. And in Coral Gables, that means pulling a permit.

More

I want to be sure I don’t across as an angry Hornady customer. I said I suspect this press is defective, but I don’t know that, and if it is defective, the defect is pretty small and easily cured. There are some things about the LNL that could be better, but I don’t claim it’s a bad product. Lots and lots of people use them with great success. And because my problem happened on a Friday night, like all warranty problems and veterinary emergencies, I did not call Hornady for help, so I don’t know what they could or would have done to help me. As I said earlier, they have a great reputation in the area of customer support.

It’s possible that I contributed to the problems I’m having now, back in the weeks when I was basically trying to make the press work by grunting and beating it with a stick. I feel safe in saying the machine has more friction in it than it should; if you could see it in front of you, you’d realize it doesn’t take a genius to figure that out. Maybe that wouldn’t matter if I had been more experienced when I bought the machine.

In any case, putting new pawls in is a three-minute job, and once you understand what they do, adjusting them is not a complex task. Neither is replacing the drive hub. Lots of people do these things. So I’m not going to wreck it by putting these parts in, or by smoothing the hub and shaft down a little.

I screwed a block to my workbench to make the press more stable. I think once the new parts are in, everything will be swell.