Clausing!

I just got back from the gun range.

Aaron’s trap-shooting exploits made me want to take the Sweet Sixteen, but I had other things to do today, so I let it drop. I focused on two jobs that had to be done. I needed to test the laser with the Vz 58, and I needed to see how well my new Hornady .45 bullets worked.

The Vz seems to be working out. I didn’t shoot much, but with the iron sights and no rest, I made a group as big as a baseball at 75 feet. Good enough. Sooner or later I have to get proficient with iron sights, but this is not the gun to do it with, since it’s very hard to use a rest. At burglar distances, you can’t miss with this gun, so I’m not worried.

The laser was worthless. Two reasons. First, in bright sun, it takes a while to pick it up at 75 feet. If you’re shooting from ambush (not too likely in a self-defense situation) I suppose that’s okay, but when you’re popping a bad guy in a hurry, it’s no good. At dusk or later, however, it would be fantastic. The other reason it was a waste of time today is that the mount loosened while I shot. Looks like another job for Loc-Tite. When I realized the mount was sliding around, I put the gun away and moved to the pistol side of the range.

The Hornady XTC bullets gave me great results. Tighter than Laser-Cast, but that’s almost certainly because I shot last week and benefitted from the practice. The recoil seems a bit sharp. Maybe that’s the additional powder. Anyway, nothing blew up, and the bullets fed perfectly, so I guess the bullets are fine.

I did have one failure to fire. However, I think I can rule out the bullets as the cause. Because it happened after took the magazine out, reloaded it, and began shooting…without reinserting the magazine. A bullet is very unlikely to fire when it’s two feet from the firing pin.

I’m considering making up 50 bullets, all with powder charges that are identical to within 0.1 grains. Right now, even with the pistol micrometer thing on the press, the charges vary within about a 0.2-grain range. I’m sure some charges are even farther out of spec. Maybe Unique’s coarseness makes it hard to meter. Whatever the story is, I suspect it is stupid to expect the Lock-N-Load to give you really accurate charges. You probably have to size the cartridges, prime them, take them out, fill them in a tray, and then run them through again to seat the bullets.

I’d like to take the XTC bullets and make up 50 “perfect” rounds and see if it makes any difference. I would estimate that apart from a couple of flyers, I shot within a 5/8″-3/4″ radius at 7 yards today, and I know my trigger pull and sight picture are far from perfect, so I very much doubt that uniform charges will matter at all. But it would still be fun, and fun is crucial.

I am not quite totally done dithering about the lathe. Today for a few minutes I seriously considered getting a 7 x 12 Grizzly lathe so I could learn how to use it and then approach big-lathe shopping with some degree of knowledge.

I wish I could justify getting the Clausing. It may be in wonderful shape, and however good a Grizzly may be, getting a used Clausing in good shape is like getting a used Rolls-Royce in good shape. I think that’s literally true. The quality of older American machine tools is so far above the quality of new Chicoms, it’s probably fair to say it’s like comparing a Rolls to a Ford. Even if the performance is the same, the love and care that went into the assembly of the old production lathe will surely show. And the Clausing already has variable speed, which would be a $300 upgrade to the Grizzly.

Insert One-Hour Pause Here

Okay, call me crazy, but I decided to try the Clausing. I kept thinking about it, and I finally decided that the pluses were too big to ignore. I lose the gap bed. But I get variable speed, lower RPMs on the bottom, higher RPMs on the top, better potential for precision, all-around better parts and construction, and a much cooler machine.

Now let’s pray it doesn’t fall off a truck.

It’s Happening

Is it depraved to put a TV shelf in your garage?

I hope so, because I’m working on it. When my dad’s tenant ran off, he left some very nice furniture-quality plywood, and I just cut it up and made a platform to mount in a corner of the garage, about seven feet off the ground. How cool will that be? Watching tool videos while sitting on my Craftsman backrest stool. Too much.

The plywood was half-inch, and one side was beaten up, because the tenants were slobs. That worked out fine. I cut two pieces and Titebonded them together with the bad sides against each other. Now I have a one-inch piece that won’t bend with the weight of the TV. One brace should be all it needs. It’s clamped up right now, and I’ll finish after it has time to dry.

Here’s something really irritating. Even with a giant table saw at my disposal, I am not set up well to make half a three-foot square, cut on the diagonal. I can make the square, but after that, it’s a pain. Maybe I could have set it up against a miter gauge. Instead I clamped a drywall square to the wood and used it as a guide for a circular saw.

This will be fantastic. TV off the floor, scrap plywood out of the way, DVD capability established.

Oops, I need to add a second shelf for the DVD player.

“Professor, Can You Make me Some Botox?”

It’s amazing how the cracks in the bizarre Obama infallibility facade are beginning to appear. They’re coming one by one, from different directions. It is gradually becoming obvious that everything the critics said about this man is true. His ego is disproportionate to his abilities. He is immature and inexperienced. And he has no idea what he’s doing.

I honestly thought the Gilligan analogy was my own invention, but I just looked, and it turns out other people have seen the resemblance.

For what it’s worth:

I think I captured the botox particularly well.

When Paul Krugman manages to be honest enough to criticize a liberal President, you know things have gone south. I think he has gone after Obama twice. That is just plain bad news for Obama. It indicates a substantial scrape in the Teflon.

The market is up this week, but the simple fact is, we are trying to buy our way out of a recession, with money we don’t have, and which Obama’s policies will probably prevent the next generation from being able to repay. What Obama is doing is like buying shoes from yourself and trying to live on the commissions. I’m starting to agree with Rush. If this SEEMS to work in the short term, it could be very bad for America, because it will convince non-bright people that socialism and overwhelming debt are good ideas.

George Santayana will then have his pound of flesh.

As for me, I’m fairly sure I’m going to get a Chicom lathe. I think the dealer with the Clausing in Vermont is honest, and I am sure he’ll send me something that is a good deal. What scares me is that a good deal may be an older machine that won’t do what a new Chicom will do.

Maybe I’m wrong. Still have to think.

One nice thing about tools is that because they are not money, it will be hard for a future socialist government to take them away or destroy their value. I may be wrong, but I think it’s a lot easier for socialist thieves to go after real estate and liquid assets. And if I have good tools and a little skill, and the Obama Depression gets so bad I can’t earn a living with my writing or my education, I’ll be able to provide useful services in exchange for money. Or Soylent Green.

I have to make a shelf so I can put my old TV up in the garage. This is a must. There are too many tool videos to ignore. They could be very useful out there. Also, TV in the garage is cool. Which is weird, because TV in the house is decadent and almost trashy.

Guess I better get to it.

Also

Relief

Today I blue-Loc-tited the left pawl screw on the Hornady LNL, and then I pounded out a couple of hundred rounds of .45 ACP. I had maybe eight bad rounds, none of which were related to the left pawl problem. My own stupidity was clearly the cause of maybe four, and it was a strong suspect in a couple of others. This is acceptable performance. From the press, I mean.

You really have to shove the lever hard to make sure the primers go into the cases. I had several rounds that ended up without primers (I am not including the ones I tried to prime after the primer tube emptied), and I suspect that I either forgot to shove the lever, or I didn’t shove it hard enough. Also, I have gotten lazy about cleaning cases, and I have taken the advice of people who say not to bother with lube, so it’s possible that dirty primer pockets have caused a problem or two.

In case anyone is Googling “Hornady Lock-N-Load AP” and trying to solve an indexing problem, I’ll spell the name of the product out.

I put Loc-tite on the left pawl screw, screwed it in, and ran the press in order to adjust it before the Loc-tite cured. Unbelievably, it was dead-on. I don’t know if you realize how weird that is. You can throw the indexing off with an eighth of a turn of that screw. I would say the odds of hitting the right spot by blind luck are something like 1:50. Maybe six full turns to set the screw. That’s roughly 50 eighths of a turn. In practice, maybe that estimate is high, since you can narrow it down to fewer turns before trying the press.

Sorry. Former physics grad student thinking out loud. I can’t help doing things like that.

I let it set up for about half an hour. I figured it didn’t need an all-night cure for a problem this undemanding, and I guess I was right, because I didn’t have to touch it after that.

Someone said I should not put a weight on top of the primers in the feed tube. I researched this a year or so ago, and I came to the conclusion that it was not a problem. Some guy on a forum responded to the same suggestion, and he seemed to know what he was talking about. He discussed what it takes to set a primer off, and how little that resembled the weight of a light iron rod. I think he was right. You can put a huge amount of pressure on a primer by stupidly trying to prime a primed case (not that I would know this from first-hand knowledge), and it doesn’t even begin to crush the primer.

If I blow up, you will have the satisfaction of saying you told me so.

Whenever you end up with powder in an unprimed cartridge, the powder spills onto the press. Eventually it may accumulate in the slide thing that feeds primers, and although I don’t think it caused me any problems today, it could conceivably stop the press by making a primer obstruct the little primer ram deal that pushes primers into cases. I don’t know; maybe it depends on how low the ram goes. Probably not. Anyway, I went in with a Q-Tip soaked in Hornady One Shot after a while, to make sure no gummy crud was in there.

I need to make a little alarm to tell me when I’m out of primers, especially since my primers and bullets are out of phase. I use 100-round boxes of bullets, and primers come in 100-round trays, but for one reason and another, I am starting every 100-round box of bullets with a primer tray that is already down to 80. That means there’s a pretty good chance that I won’t notice when I’m on bullet #81 and there are no primers left in the tube.

The design of a buzzer alarm would be simple. Put a contact on top of the tube. Put another one on the rod that sits on the primers. When the primers are gone, the rod drops and puts the contacts together. BZZZZZ.

I have the dumbest goals and dreams. I really do. A lot of men dream of riches and Ferraris and power and endless sex. I’m pretty excited because I have this:

I guess I should be pleased that I am capable of being satisfied. A lot of men are not.

Sometimes a Hundredth is Good Enough

Smartflix sent me a very interesting product this week. It’s a DVD by a clockmaker named W.R. Smith, and the title is Tooling the Workshop for Clockmakers & Modelmakers. You can find this gentleman’s website here.

I don’t know too much about W.R. Smith, but he’s pretty clearly a Southerner. I know he has been doing what he does for a very long time, because in the video, he presents a tool he made at the age of 14. He takes small machine tools and modifies and adapts them to do all sorts of things.

So far, I’ve only seen him use two machine tools: a Sherline lathe and a small Myford lathe. He’s extremely creative. He uses them in ways you would not expect. For example, he does milling operations on both lathes, using the chucks as indexing tables. If that sounds hard to understand, maybe I can give an example that makes it clearer. He placed a board across the ways of his Myford. He mounted a motor on the board, and he connected it to a spindle mounted on the ways, close to the Myford’s chuck. He mounted a brass disk behind the Myford’s chuck, and the disk had regularly spaced holes in it. He put a part in the chuck and rotated it by hand, using a catch and the disk holes for indexing. Each time he moved the part, he used a tool mounted in the spindle to cut a gap in the part. In this way, he was able to make a clock gear.

I guess you’d have to see it to get a clear picture. I’m pretty sure I’m describing it correctly.

It was a neat thing to watch, because it reminded me that not all machining is about anal retention and 0.00001″ tolerances. In the kind of work he was doing, a hundredth of an inch one way or the other probably made little difference. It’s like the difference between technical drawing and oil painting. Any artist knows that a soft brush is better for your creativity than a sharp pencil.

I have to wonder if a person who has a nice 12 x 36 lathe can get by without something small, like a Taig or Sherline. I would assume so; people make a lot of small parts with big lathes.

I’ve been re-reading one of my favorite books, Machining Fundamentals by John R. Walker. If you have any tools to speak of, this book is a great investment. He begins with things like hammers and files and works his way up to CNC milling and so on. Believe it or not, simple tools like hammers and files are not as simple as you think. You don’t just pick them up and start whacking, if you want the best results. You would be surprised.

The lathe chapters are packed with information.

I have been trying to understand why people were telling me I don’t need an extremely precise lathe to do good work. I just found a forum comment that seems to explain it.

All rotating bodies have an axial center which is theoreticaly true and if you remove material from the rotating circumference of that body with a STATIONARY tool the surface that you generate will be theoreticaly circular and centered with the axis of rotation.

The money in high precision lathes is spent in ensuring that the bearings are capable of absorbing the axial forces of cutting without allowing excess deflection, and in ensuring that the tool travels along the bed and across the saddle in a geometricaly precise relationship to the axis of rotation when under load.

Forums are funny. You can go to a forum where there are supposed to be a lot of experts, and you can get 40 answers to what should be an easy question, none of which make sense. Then some guy who actually knows what he’s talking about drops in, and he ends the confusion in a hurry. Maybe that’s what happened, above.

I thought runout was a big deal because it meant the work as whole, while rotating, would also travel in a circle around an imaginary ideal axis, and the diameter of the circle would be two times the runout. My head hurts when I try to picture it, but I believe that would mean sloppy results. If the axis of rotation is actually nearly fixed, and the cutting tool is mounted firmly, I would assume good work is possible with less-than-spectacular machine specs.

I’m learning a whole lot, even though my closest scrape with machining to date has been cutting a piece of aluminum on a table saw.

Hollow Points

I finally got started on my free Hornady .45 ammunition. And the press is getting on my nerves again.

You can do about 40 rounds before the left pawl goes out of alignment. So you have to stare at the shell plate while you run the press and make sure it lines up, and when it doesn’t, you have to compensate by hand and run through the shells already on the plate. That empties it so you can adjust the pawl without screwing up any cartridges.

On top of that, the slide that feeds the primers stopped on me, so I had to knock it loose and hit it with dry lube. I don’t think the dry lube makes any difference at all. The slide is either out of spec or not designed well, because it has never been reliable. It’s clean and undamaged, and so are the parts around it, and it still stops up every so often. I added a steel rod that sits on top of the primers in the primer tube. That presses them down into the slide and makes it less likely to jam, and I put a little mark on the rod that tells me when I’m out of primers.

Irritating, but probably a whole lot faster than a basic press that does one cartridge at a time.

I’m going to have to Loc-Tite the pawl screw. That will solve one problem. Of course, I have no Loc-Tite on hand. Going to the store kills half an hour of loading time.

If you got 230-grain XTC .45 bullets free from Hornady (#45160) and you like Unique, here’s a recipe from the Hornady manual.

LOA: 1.230″
WLP primer
5.1-6.1 grains Unique

I’m using 5.8. That is supposed to give 800 fps, I think.

I can’t believe how many .45 cases I have. If you go to the range and let people know you reload, they’ll actually bring them to you. Aren’t gun people nice? Proves what they say about an armed society. Hippies, on the other hand, are among the nastiest creatures imaginable.

One nice thing about jacketed bullets is that they don’t have grease or wax or whatever it is all over them. That stuff probably doesn’t make the press run any better.

Eeny, Meeny…

I am seriously considering drawing a lathe-purchase flow chart. In fact, I think I’ll do it. I am too stupid to work a spreadsheet.

Maybe I can do it in text.

I have three…damn…four possibilities. Let’s examine them.

1. Clausing 5914 in Vermont
2. Clausing 5914 in Hialeah
3. Grizzly G4003G
4. South Bend 13 in Vermont

Cost is roughly the same in all three cases. That’s a wash.

1. Clausing in Vt.: Seller has great reputation, so I probably won’t get screwed. If machine is in very good shape, it will do better work than the Grizzly. If something goes wrong, I have to fix it with no Clausing support, because it is OLD. Excellent gunsmithing lathe, in case I decide to try that some day. Came from men’s prison, so may be infested with interesting bacteria and/or coated with dried fluids of indeterminate nature. Probable loss on resale: $1000.

2. Clausing in Hialeah: Seller’s reputation unknown, but they’re local so I can always sue in small claims court if they stick me with a bad lathe. However, that is a pain in the butt, and they will probably sell the machine as-is. Not likely to be damaged in shipping, as this consists of paying a guy named Enrique to bring it over on a flatbed. Other than that, same as Clausing in Vermont. Except for VD germs.

3. South Bend in Vt.: Excellent lathe, but smaller spindle hole than Grizzly and Clausing. Better than Grizzly, if in good shape. Has external threads on spindle, which is bad. Parts easy to find. Bigger swing than Grizzly or Clausing. Probable loss on resale similar to Clausing.

4. Grizzly G4003G. Has a gap, which is supposedly a great thing, because you can open it up and turn very big parts. Factory tolerances not quite as good as old US lathes. Big spindle hole. Better bearings than other Grizzlies. Good reviews from gunsmiths. Has very tall stand which puts work too high for comfort; one operator used a plasma cutter to chop the stand several inches. Great customer support. Warranty. Parts easily available. Comes with egg rolls. Probable loss on resale (my guess) $1500-$2000. Way less cool than US lathes.

If condition is good, the US lathes will do better work. Will I ever notice the difference while farting around in the garage? Questionable.

If the US lathes stink, I get hammered on resale when I dump them. If the Grizzly stinks, I get hammered even worse.

Okay, let’s bail on the South Bend. That spindle bothers me. I wonder why you can’t put a new one on. I guess you would have to gut the lathe.

Maybe the extreme confusion I’m experiencing is God’s way of saying, “Do not get a lathe. Go back to barbecue.”

Maybe I’ll run up to Hialeah.

You Missed Me

I forgot to blog yesterday. Unbelievable. Maybe it’s a healthy sign. Also, the lathe search is driving me nuts. I keep asking experienced lathe users about the Grizzly G4003G versus an old Clausing 5914, and one day, they say, “The Grizzly is the most amazing tool yet created by the hand of man,” and the next day they say, “Chinese lathes are made from pot metal, plus they cause cancer.”

Mike says his brother wants to see the Hoginator, so here are photos.

That’s before I created the Teletubby smoke box, which can be seen below.

Apparently Mike got a good result on his angiogram, and his wife is annoyed. I think she was hoping for something she could use to persuade him to quit eating 9,000 calories per day.

I Suddenly Have a Clue

I had a somewhat productive day. Costco mission, got some stuff removed from the warehouse (Val Prieto found uses for it), and moved my scrap out of the garage.

I am going to miss that scrap. I kept some bits back; I could not go cold turkey. Life without scrap at hand is unthinkable now that I’m hooked on it. I still have the main stockpile, but it’s a hundred feet from my tools.

I decided arbitrarily to narrow my lathe search options to three: 1) Grizzly G4003G, 2) South Bend 13, 3) Clausing 59xx. The Grizzly gets excellent reviews from gun nuts, and it was apparently a pet project of Shiraz Balolia, the competition-shooting president of the Grizzly company. He made sure it had good stuff in it other Grizzlies do not have. The Clausings elicit soft cooing sounds from other gunsmiths. And the South Bends are supposedly not hard to get parts for, and there are a lot of them out there.

The Grizzly is almost certainly the best choice. The gap in the bed is something the other two lathes can’t match. And since it has hardened ways, I’ll have a hard time wearing it out. And warranty new customer support blah blah.

I really wanted an old American machine, but it’s a throw of the dice, and I don’t feel like gambling.

As for mills, I think it boils down to two possibilities. A rescraped Bridgeport from a guy in Massachusetts, or the Millrite I found in Hialeah. The Millrite has two advantages. 1. Cheap. 2. Less bulky. That’s really it. Other than that, a Bridgeport laughs at it. The table is bigger. It has no end of support from the aftermarket. I don’t know if it has more features, but it probably does. It definitely seems to have more knobs.

I think the motors are the same size, or close to it, so I doubt there’s a big difference in the tooling you can run.

I took notes while watching a Bridgeport video last night. It’s fun learning what all the knobs do, but I took a certain pleasure in the mystery. In any case, now I can go into a machine shop and pretend, for up to thirty seconds, that I know how to run a milling machine.

I can’t wait to start machining. I want to make a list of things I need but can’t buy, and then I want to make them.

Figuring out the garage layout will be a challenge. I think I can make a big dent by discarding my workbench. I enjoy it, but I have a table saw like nine feet long. I should be able to get by with that and the mighty Workmate. I’d need a place to mount my vise, though. I’ll figure it out. Here’s a wild idea. Put one motorcycle outside under a cover. Maybe it’s not really necessary to have three vehicles in the garage at all times.

Man, this is going to be fun. I am finally going to be nearly as weird as I really want to be.

Confusion Mounts

I’ll tell you what I need. I need someone to show up in my driveway with a lathe on a truck, and I need him to put it in my garage and drive away.

I cannot come to a conclusion concerning which lathe I should get. It is impossible.

At first, I thought all lathes were about the same. Then I thought it was a good idea to buy a 40-year-old American lathe. Then I found out a lot of them are beat up to the point where they’re not accurate. And Og complicated things by asserting that the Chinese stuff (not just Taiwanese) is now up to American standards.

Today things got worse. I realized that a lathe will utterly ruin and consume my life by allowing me to make CUSTOM GUN PARTS.

That’s just too much. I know it’s stupid that I didn’t think about this more in the past. It’s so obvious. But that’s how my brain works (or fails to work). Now I realize that whatever I get should be usable for gunsmithing.

Right now I have a Saiga-12 shotgun. It’s fundamentally a great weapon, but it was made in Russia, so that means virtually everyone who touched it was full of cheap vodka at the time, and aside from that, AK-based guns are always loaded with cheap parts that can stand upgrading.

Example: it has a stupid plug up front that controls the gas. To remove the plug, you’re supposed to use two metal tools. I managed it with a screwdriver and my fingers, I think. Most people say “coin and a key.” But it’s unacceptable. An AK you can’t strip without tools? Unthinkable.

Look what one of the guys at Tromix just did. I’m stealing his photos from the Saiga-12 forum, but I doubt he’ll care, since it will only serve to convince people they should give him money to fix their guns.

He started with a Home Depot flashlight. I am not kidding.

He turned the bezel or whatever it’s called, to make it less monstrous.

He installed it in front of his gas tube, and that meant he had to modify the plug. So he made a new one.

I can’t stand it. I would almost sell my admittedly worthless and undersized soul to be able to do stuff like that.

He’s going to make something to replace that thumbscrew, but even as it is, it’s great.

Okay, I realize this has nothing to do with gunsmithing lathes. You could do this on a Taig. But work with me here. Once you’ve started puttering with guns on machine tools, you’re not going to stop. Sooner or later you’ll want to make a barrel, and then you’ll need 36″ and a big spindle bore. And if you don’t have them when that time comes, you’ll have to kill yourself.

Arrgh. GET THE TOOLS OUT OF MY HEAD.

I already want to make furniture for my Vz 58. I have a beautiful piece of untouched walnut sitting on the floor, waiting. And the stock furniture is definitely cheesy. Aside from that, it heats up. A better design and all-wood construction should solve that problem. I already have the tools to handle that. Man, they would hate me at the range. Me and my tricked-out Vz 58 furniture.

I wonder if there’s a business opportunity in this. I suppose there is. It takes years to become a real gunsmith, but a total doofus can confine himself to a limited number of simple jobs and do everything exactly right. You don’t have to be a genius to make a pistol grip or a flash suppressor. And nothing is easier than improving existing products. Manufacturers do all sorts of stupid things for ease of assembly or to save two cents or for NIH reasons. The opportunities are endless.

You probably have to be proctoscoped by Nancy Pelosi herself to get a gunsmithing license.

Doesn’t matter. I’d be perfectly happy even if I could only do this stuff for my own guns.

Why, oh why did I ever let myself get interested in tools?

Beauty, Eh?

I finished machining the laser mount for the Saiga 12. It came out perfectly. It could not have been much better had I paid a machine shop. I’ll show you the crappy cell photos of the jig, plus the after photos.

Here are three photos of the jig I put together.

Here is the basic idea. The miter gauge makes it run parallel to the saw blade. I moved it to the other miter slot and measured the gap with calipers to make sure both ends of the mount were the same distance from the blade. The wooden strap on top screws into the scrap on the bottom. It doesn’t mar the mount, and it holds it firmly.

Here’s how it looks on the gun. I don’t have stuff to blacken the aluminum yet, so…I used a Sharpie.

I can’t believe how well this worked out. A true anal retentive would put a better finish on the mount. Maybe I’ll do that.

I lubed the blade with WD40 (it sprays real nice when the blade starts spinning), and I blew the lube off with Gumout.

I’m thrilled. I think it looks great.

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.

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.

Still Waffling

Mish Weiss’s blood cell counts are showing some improvement, but she has another cold and a very high fever. Here’s what a faithful prayer warrior has to say in her comments:

Of course, we will pray. Thanks for the specific info so we know exactly how to pray. I believe G_d answers our specific prayers. So we will pray that Mish’s counts continue to go up and the fever goes down the the cold goes away.

I’m joining in these prayers, and I hope you will do the same. Posting for Mish, Marc says “I know that I don’t even have to ask for prayer, thank you in advance.” What a day we live in, when Christians and Jews cooperate like this and see each other as allies. Many denominations, especially mainstream churches, display disturbing hostility to Jews and Israel, but there are at least 800 million Christians who have been taught that the Jews are the apple of God’s eye, and that we are to help them whenever we can.

In other news, I’m dithering on the lathe issue. A certain sum will buy me one of these three items: a Grizzly G4003G with a stand and a warranty, a used Clausing 5914 that came from a prison, and a South Bend 13 x 36. Og says the Chinese stuff is as good as ours now. If that’s true, the Grizzly is a good move. It will have a warranty and great customer support, and presumably, it will work right out of the crate. Still, I’ve read about little quality issues where the old US stuff is much better, and it’s possible that I might be better off with an old lathe.

I should point out that the G4003G is a gunsmith’s lathe. It’s a G4003 with better bearings and a few gewgaws. It should be considerably better than most non-Taiwan Grizzly offerings.

I’ve decided I’m not comfortable buying a used local machine unless I can be completely sure it will perform as well as a new Chinese job. The risk is too big, unless the machine is so cheap I can’t justify not trying it. A person of limited skills can’t really restore an old lathe, unless it has damage limited to certain areas. The Clausing and South Bend come from a dealer with a great reputation; I’d rather pay him a fair price than buy an iffy lathe really cheap.

Complicating the issue, I keep thinking the smart move might be to drop a few hundred on a Harbor Freight job and learn about machining. If I did that, presumably in a few months I’d be knowledgeable enough about lathes to evaluate used tools.

I hope my next round of Smartflix DVDs arrives today.