Local Smith Prices Herself Out of Business

I am wiped out from installing a new dishwasher. It should have been pretty fast, but like most quick, easy jobs, it had complications.

I bought a Bosch dishwasher to replace a Bosch dishwasher in the same series, and of course, Bosch changed the inlet fitting and did not include a threaded elbow to connect to it. I went to the local Ace, and unfortunately, the person who helped me was a friendly and earnest young man who hasn’t learned everything about the hardware business yet.

We could not find the elbow, which was confusing to me because I knew it had to be a common part. Bosch equals Thermador equals Whirlpool and so on these days. He sent me home with a couple of parts to screw together as a substitute, and I had to locate the correct part on the web, go back to Ace, and show them the SKU.

I did an excellent job of installing it because a) I am capable of doing simple things well, and b) I actually care about the quality of my work, which may not have been the case with the guys Lowe’s wanted to send for $217.

I may want to adjust the dishwasher’s position in the sagittal plane by 3/32″ or so, but that can wait.

If you need a dishwasher right now, jump on one of these Bosches while they’re on sale.

I’m still waiting for something else I ordered. You will never guess. Yes, it’s a rifle.

Four or 5 years back, I bought a Thompson Center Venture bolt action rifle in .204 Ruger. I thought I was going to shoot a lot of varmints. So far, that has not been the case. I also hoped to use it for target shooting to improve my shooting without spending money on pricier ammo.

Until just now, I thought it was a Venture Predator, but it turns out it’s just a Venture. I believe “Predator” means “with a green plastic stock.”

We live in amazing times. Fifty years ago, which was the 1970’s, believe it or not old people, a rifle that shot maybe 5 minutes of angle (about 5.25″ at 100 yards) was considered very accurate. Now, any bolt rifle that doesn’t shoot 1.5 MOA is considered lame, and you can walk into any sporting goods store and choose from a selection of 1-MOA rifles.

I chose the Thompson Center partly because it came with a 1-MOA guarantee. Three shots at 100 yards. Based on photos of targets I shot back then with cheap Fiocchi ammo, it looks like the gun came through, although I also shot some bad groups. That guarantee was pretty clever, because any gun will eventually shoot one three-shot 1-MOA group if you keep trying.

I wasn’t ecstatic about the trigger, so I looked for options, and there were none. Sadly, TC was not doing well, and its guns were not all that popular. In fact, it was going out of business, even though it belonged to Smith & Wesson. I don’t recall how that worked.

TC has been bought by the guy who sold it to S&W, but I don’t think they’ve actually made any new guns. Will they ever start? Who knows?

If you buy a popular gun like a Remington or Tikka, you will be able to find a lot of aftermarket triggers for it. I suppose no trigger maker thought it was a good idea to spend time and money on a trigger for an unpopular gun, however.

I put a lighter spring on it, and that was about all I could do.

Flash forward to a year or two ago. Suddenly I had a silencer. I wanted to get back to shooting. But two bolt guns I wanted to shoot did not have threaded barrels: the TC and a Tikka T3x.

By the way, the Tikka IS a 1-MOA gun, with factory ammo and no excuses. I managed to shoot a few rounds to zero it. It seems like it always rained when I started shooting for accuracy, so I have had a lot of sessions cut short. Anyway, even the zeroing shots, made while I was turning scope screws, looked very good.

I’ll post photo of a target I shot with “garbage” Sellier & Bellot ammo. This is a modestly-priced deer rifle on a modestly-priced bipod, shooting cheap ammunition. I shot these rounds while still adjusting the scope. There is one flyer which was probably caused by me shooting one round and then cranking the screws, and then there are at least 6 rounds that are 1 MOA or extremely close to it.

Checking my blog history, I see that I went indoors because I wanted to see if the scope was loose, not because of rain. When I shot another target with different ammo, the point of impact changed in a way that didn’t make sense to me. And target above was shot at both 50 and 100 yards. I shot one round at 50. It was very low. I adjusted the scope and shot two rounds into the same hole. Then I backed up to 100 and shot pretty much into the same POI. I was confused, because the 50-yard POI was essentially the same as the 100-yard POI. I didn’t understand how flat the gun shot at these distances.

That S&B FMJ 6.5 Creedmoor is nothing to sneeze at, at least at 100 yards. I bought a ton of it. It shoots great in the Tikka and also in my RPR.

If the domestic enemies of Christ finally started their war and I somehow found myself in a situation where I had no choice but to go out with the militia nuts and fend off guerrilla murder squads in floral print dresses, I would be able to do what was necessary over and over while they were too far away to see me without binoculars.

I think I paid $16.00 per box when I bought them one at a time, and I didn’t buy most of mine one at a time.

Of course, I have zero interest in participating in a civil war. If it weren’t for my family, I think I would prefer being among the early casualties than staying here and treating demonized jerks like paper targets. The word says David was a bloody man. I have no desire to follow suit. I would rather be a man of love.

So anyway, I had the Tikka and the TC, and they were not threaded.

I looked into having them threaded. In spite of living in a huge 2A area, I could not find anyone close to me who would do it, and I really did not want to do it myself. Most machining is easy, but barrels are not made to fit in the usual lathe tooling, and they are hard to remove from actions. Also, it’s easy to mar them up, and aligning them in lathes so the bullets won’t hit the silencers later is more complex than you would think.

I found someone in the next county, and she wanted $195-$275, which is insane. I paid $450 for the TC.

I let it go, but recently I learned something that changed the picture. Silencer Central now offers mail-in threading for $165, including muzzle protectors. The price is lower if you ship two barrels at once. The shipping is about $40 whether you send one or two.

Great. I am sold. It’s fantastic news. I’m sending the Tikka in, because even though it is not a high-priced rifle, it is 100% worth it. But the Thompson Center?

I can’t get a trigger for it. I don’t know if I’ll ever get fun-level accuracy out of it. Thompson Center has been bought and reanimated, but there is no guarantee they will provide warranty service or that they’ll exist next year.

It looks like a quagmire to me.

I figure I can sell it for $350, so that’s $350 I can put toward something else. That something else is a Ruger American Predator in the same caliber. I want the same caliber because I have a boatload of ammunition, and I still think the .204 Ruger has potential.

It has a light, fluted barrel. The metal bits are Cerakoted. It’s threaded. It has a pretty good trigger out of the box. There are lots of aftermarket parts for it, including Timney triggers. It will probably shoot 1 MOA the day I bring it home. Lots of guys are getting that kind of performance in other calibers.

I’m sold. I don’t need any more hassle.

I’m getting the rifle plus a Timney. I’ll take the scope off my TC and put it on the Ruger. Done deal.

Now I have to ask: is it really necessary for two different companies to put “Predator” in the names of their guns? It sounds kind of silly. AMERICAN HE-MAN HAIRY-CHESTED CARNIVORE PREDATOR!

Yes, I am a predator. I have killed more fish than red tide, and I have managed to make a tiny dent in the hunting realm by murdering squirrels. And I eat hamburgers. But come on. You can call the gun something a little less steroidy-sounding, and I will still buy it. I mean, I did.

It bugs me that people call the Tikka, the Ruger, and the TC budget guns. Why do they do that? I guess you get more refinement in guns costing two or three times as much, and you get walnut instead of plastic, but I feel like any quality gun should be respected. If a gun can hit rats repeatedly at 100 yards, it is durable, and it is pleasant to shoot, calling it a budget gun sounds a little snobby.

I think the Tikka ran me $950 or so. Budget? Really?

The TC may not be long for my armory, but it seems very well made to me. All the machining is neat and tidy. It’s actually pretty tight because of the tolerances.

I don’t know if I’ll stick with .204 Ruger. It’s kind of a novelty round. I like it because it’s modern, with modern ballistics something like .223 can’t match, but on the other hand, .223 is more powerful, and it can hit anything I am likely to shoot at. It’s just as accurate, even if it doesn’t shoot as flat. I could blow through my .204 ammo and then rebarrel.

I have another .204 rifle besides the TC, so putting a .223 barrel on the TC would not deprive me of the ability to shoot .204 well even if I sold the TC.

Maybe I shouldn’t have bought the new rifle. It just bugged me that the TC had so many issues.

It should be here soon. I hope I actually use it.