I Wish Lieutenant Dan Were Here

It looks like I was spazzing over nothing, RE crimping .45 cases. As readers have pointed out, these cases aren’t supposed to have much of a crimp. I just assumed they needed one, because they looked unfinished. But I took out a sample of the closest thing I have to .45 ammunition–.40 S&W–and I saw that the case edges were perpendicular to the barrel axis.

On the up side, I learned how to adjust the die so it crimps. The instructions are completely wrong. I’m sure there is some way to construe them so they work, but I haven’t found it yet. It works like this. There is a sliding deal inside the die which seats the bullet. The body of the die does the crimping. So to crimp a case, you lower the die body until you get a crimp, and then you adjust the sliding thing down until you get the overall length you want.

I ran off a couple of crimped shells without primers or powder, just to see if I could do it. They looked okay, except that I think I may have belled the cases a little too much. If you don’t open them up a certain amount, the bullets may fall over in the cases as they are pushed up to the seating die. Instead of perfectly straight sides topped by a crimp, I got a very slight bulge around the case mouth, just below the crimp. Doesn’t matter, since I have to adjust the die all over again.

Not sure how accurate the OAL has to be. I got it as close as I could, using Vernier calipers. May be off by a thousandth or two.

I was going to try to run off 50 shells today, but I’ll never make it to the range if I do. I guess I’ll take Glocks, since I have ammunition for those.

A reader is taking me to task for being an “avowed fan” of Tucker Max. I get the weirdest comments. Anyone who read what I wrote about Tucker can see that I’m not comfortable endorsing his work. But the guy was very decent to me, when people whose values are more like mine were doing nothing to help me or even working against me. He didn’t know me from Adam, but he took the time to send me a priceless document full of PR tips. And Maddox was helpful, too. And unlike some conservatives I could name, who count every bean and extract payment for everything they do, they didn’t want a single thing in return. Neither of them has ever asked me for anything. So I’m not going to spit in their faces in order to look holy. When my spam book came out, the only conservatives I knew who mentioned it were Lucianne Goldberg and a generous contingent of small-time bloggers. And the same thing is going to happen when the cookbook comes out. At best.

Chastity is part of Christianity, but so is helping other people without demanding anything in return. So is gratitude. Think about that before comment rage compels you to tell me who I should be nice to.