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.

My Whole World View is Crumbling

Most of the time, being absent-minded is a minor inconvenience, but sometimes it’s embarrassing. Example: I received a prayer request and forgot to post it. It comes from JeffW.

In addition to your prayers for Mish, could you also lift up a boy by the name of Russell? He is a 13-year old student at my daughter’s homeschool co-op that has a cancerous brain tumor. The family was informed last night that the tumor had grown 3-4 times it’s previous size in the last six weeks and the prognosis is not good. The family are all committed Christians, so they value prayer.

I had no business going about my business and forgetting to put this up. Prayer is powerful, and sometimes it is needed desperately. I should have mentioned this earlier. And don’t forget Mish. Her fever is going up and down. I assume that’s a good sign, since it suggests the bacteria are not getting their way.

Overall, my own walk is going well. Lately I have let things disrupt my routine, so prayer and study have suffered somewhat. I am working to fix it, and I’m going to succeed.

For many Christians, faith is all about not going to hell. As I keep saying, I don’t focus on that. I can’t recall ever having concerns about going to hell; I have no idea when I became a Christian, but it was a long time ago, and since then, I haven’t thought a lot about my own salvation. What I do think about is leading a blessed and productive life. I can’t tell you what heaven is like. I’ve never been there. But I know the difference between life close to God and life far from God. It’s huge. So to me, Christianity is mainly about holding onto that difference.

My life was consistently miserable until I was about 30. Everything I touched turned to garbage. I was depressed. I worried. I never stopped fighting the problems; I kept trying to improve my life. I learned all sorts of wonderful self-help tricks. But I could not make things better on a long-term basis. It seemed that the things I wanted were dangled in front of me and then jerked away, over and over. I was healthy and free, but other than that, I was incredibly unlucky and there was nothing good about my life.

I became increasingly religious in my twenties, and for a while, it seemed to help, but I got in with a self-oriented prosperity-theology Assemblies of God church, and things stalled. That stuff does not work. You can’t just go to church twice a week and beg God to heal you and make you rich and so on. You have to focus on serving God and helping other people, too. The word-of-faith people didn’t teach that. Many still don’t. Listen to their sermons, and you hear the word “money” over and over. God wants you to be rich. God wants you to be perfectly healthy at all times. Give money to the church and do everything just right, and it will work out. If it doesn’t work, come back next week, give the church more money, and find out what you’re doing wrong. It’s like chasing a carrot on a string.

It’s a sink. You dump your time and money and effort into it, and you don’t get much out, and the farther in you get, the more you think you’re not doing enough. Sooner or later, you realize it’s not working, and you get discouraged. You may get the wrong idea. You may think your preacher is a dud and your church is no good, and you’ll be right, but the danger is that you’ll decide God is imaginary or that he doesn’t care about you.

I realized my church was a dry hole, and I quit. Stupidly, I didn’t find another church. I figured I could do it on my own. And of course, I fell away. Still believing, but lazy and not very obedient. I would go days without prayer. I rarely looked at a Bible. When I needed help, I prayed. And in the mid-Nineties, I had the disturbing experience of feeling as though I were praying in some sort of tank or cistern, and that my prayers simply bounced off the ceiling. Maybe that was because I was asking for help, but I wasn’t offering anything in return. I didn’t think I had to change.

I had problems in my thirties, but on the whole, the trend was positive. Things have been pretty good since about 1997. I would say that was when I became a happy person. Since then, things have gotten better and better. I don’t think I’ve had more than two or three consecutive days of sadness in all that time.

After 911, I started praying every morning. I developed a prayer list, which is something everyone should have. Since then, the improvement in my life has accelerated. And lately, the acceleration has accelerated. Incidentally, I believe engineers call an increase in acceleration “jerk.” Appropriate in so many ways. I feel like I’m being jerked out of the state of being a jerk.

Every morning and every night, I literally get on the floor and thank God for the way things are going. And I mean it. I don’t have all the pieces of my conception of a whole life, but the quality of life is not determined primarily by whether you’ve achieved your goals. What matters is the trend. If you know you’re on the right track, and things are consistently improving, chances are, you’ll be happy. And for that to be true, it is necessary that you be among the things that improve. Your behavior, your feelings toward others, and so on.

Goals are important, but here’s a funny truth: once you achieve them, you are likely to feel a tremendous and painful emptiness. Sometimes I wonder if this contributes to post-partum depression. Before you get something you want, you’re excited, because you’re anticipating and working toward something good. It gives your life meaning. It fills your time. Once it arrives, all you have is the thing itself. And it may be less rewarding than the process of getting it, even if it’s a child. Your hopes may be so unrealistic that nothing you receive can fulfill them.

I’ll bet brides have to cope with that a lot. They have the most unrealistic hopes of anyone in society. It’s a little disgusting. You spend thirty thousand dollars on one day of self-worship and concentrated attention, and then three hours after the wedding, everyone has stopped focusing on you, and all you have is the same old boyfriend and a bunch of junk from Williams Sonoma. And maybe a lot of debt. It’s never fun paying for something you have ceased enjoying.

Watching a big, self-indulgent wedding is not significantly different from watching a morbidly obese man get in bed and eat five pies with his fingers.

I think women have an unfortunate tendency to turn new husbands into messiah figures, expecting them to solve all their problems and provide things only God can give. It doesn’t work like that. You don’t enter your own personal messianic age when the ring goes on.

New things that bring me satisfaction keep coming to me. I don’t mean objects, although I have found objects essential to some parts of the process. I mean new outlets for creativity. New growth as a Christian. New knowledge. New interests. I think this all comes from God. I believe that making a sincere effort to believe and serve has brought me a certain measure of protection and reward.

I am not stupid enough to think I’ll never have a problem again, or that every good thing I have will be with me until I die. But I suspect that regardless of what happens, the sensation of being blessed and looked after will be with me the rest of my life. After all, what does Psalm 23 say? “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life.” What does Psalm 1 say about God’s servants? “And he shall be like a tree, planted by the rivers of water, that bringeth forth his fruit in his season. His leaf also shall not wither, and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper.” What about Psalm 34? “Delight thyself also in the Lord, and he shall give thee the desires of thine heart.” This stuff isn’t lip service from a fat rich Jewish king trying to impress people with his piety. It’s truth. These are promises from God. Either you believe in God, or you don’t. If you believe, you should believe these words are not empty.

God does not necessarily make your life problem-free, although it is very likely that he will shift it strongly in that direction, ending many of your troubles. He makes the problems unimportant and brings good things out of them. That’s actually better. It increases your faith and makes you stronger, because it teaches you that troubles are not to be greatly feared.

Christians who only worry about where they go when they die are blowing it. Life in the kingdom of God starts while you’re here. Literally.

So anyway, I am determined to get back on track. The course deviations I experience these days aren’t all that bad, but they are not acceptable, either.

Finally Found a Person Who is Scared of Me

To the incredibly pitiable individual who is trying to change the password on my Youtube account: it is an amazement to me that people whose time is as utterly worthless as yours are part of my species.

Honestly, why do genes for this kind of cowardice even exist? How can someone be so terrified of me that their only means of getting at me is to weasel around with my Youtube account? This person would probably have to wear a diaper to confront me in person without making a mess on the floor. Here’s what I have to say to them: BOO!

Even if they somehow manage to get into the account, I can have a new one up in half an hour. Don’t know if I’d bother, but I could.

Maybe it’s some kind of bot from Eastern Europe. This is the kind of thing that keeps former communists busy these days.

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?

Enterococcus

I just checked Mish Weiss’s blog. Her fever is fluctuating. Here is the bad news:

Enterococcus is the bacteria, and with counts as low as Mish’s sepsis can occur. Because this bacteria is sometimes antibiotic and multi drug resistant, it is especially difficult to treat.

This girl can’t seem to catch a break. Her parents are gone. She had problems with addiction. She got leukemia. She turned out to have a genetic makeup that made it harder to treat. Curative chemotherapy didn’t work. Now this. Yet she still fights. How many people would do that? I don’t know that I would. I know that the afterlife is better than this life; I don’t think I could hold on as hard as Mish has.

Please keep her in her prayers. Hopefully the variety of bacteria she has will respond to drugs. This is not the time for the people who care about her to give up. This is when faith matters most.

Help

Mish Weiss is unconscious. It’s not the leukemia. She has a bacterial infection in one lung, and her fever has hit 105.4, which is about as high as an adult fever gets.

Please pray for her. Her blood cell counts are up, which means she is getting some benefit from chemotherapy. It would be a terrible thing if she were to succumb to a bacterial infection while she was improving.

She’s Hot

I took the new Vz 58 to the gun range today. I also took a bunch of new .45 reloads, some Cor-Bon defensive .38 Super ammunition, and two 1911s.

The range people would not let me shoot the gun folded. This is because the range is public, and that means government stooges are actively working to make it less fun, because they resent having to maintain a facility where bad old guns are used. That’s my theory, anyway. This range bans lots of fun but safe things, like using silhouette targets, shooting at Xeroxes of Fidel Castro, firing more than once every five seconds, and using buckshot.

It’s my understanding that the county has to forfeit the land if they stop running a gun range on it. If that’s true, it would explain why they run it so badly.

I shot at 25 yards; anything longer than that is pointless. If I’m defending against garden-variety home invaders, they’ll be less than 50 feet away when I plug them. If we have a post-Obama meltdown and it becomes necessary to shoot people who want to steal my food and beer, I think a maximum range would be 50 yards. You don’t need to train to hit people at that distance.

The gun is very nice. Everything works smoothly, much unlike an AK. The safety is better. The bolt slides nicely. Very pleasant.

I started out standing, and I did okay. Here you see my first shots, at a 5-inch bullseye. Not good, but certainly deadly.

I then shot sitting down. I didn’t use a rest, because I think it’s stupid to train with a rest when you’re using a gun you plan to use for self-defense. “Wait, Mr. Burglar, while I go get my rifle rest.” No, I don’t think I’ll do that.

The results were a little better.

I was pretty lazy; this gun has a smooth but extremely long trigger pull, and I wasn’t working hard enough to cope with it. And I forgot to focus on the front sight.

Here’s how it ended up shooting. I thought this was more than adequate. I need to practice more and remember to deal with that crazy trigger. At the end, I was aiming at the bottom of the bullseye, and you can see it shot high. I had the rear sight all the way down. I may be the problem, or maybe the gun just isn’t designed so you can put it dead-on at 75 feet. I am too lazy to look at the manual.

Here is Ivanka resting on the podium.

I can’t wait to try it with a laser. I’ll have to go to a different range so I can shoot the gun folded. This is how I hope to use it if I ever need to defend the house.

It is my nature to irritate gun nuts, so I guess I’ll go ahead and get started. The other day I was reloading, and the plastic cylinder came off my powder measure, and Unique went all over the place. I was so mad, I couldn’t stand it. I decided there was no way I was going to throw out all that powder. I didn’t care if it had dust and bits of sawdust in it. I could not accept the thought of dumping maybe four ounces of this stuff. So I gathered it and put it back in the press!

I know I’ll get lecturing comments. I don’t care. What’s the worst thing that could happen? I could lose 2% of the power of a charge because of dilution.

Here is how it shot.

It’s funny how much better I shoot a pistol after shooting a rifle. I have been away from the range for maybe two months, and I should be all over the place. And I haven’t been exercising my hands. But I did pretty well!

And of course, the last 6 shots opened the target up by like 30%. I hate that.

I had a flyer that went high, but that actually pleased me, because I could tell it was crap shot right before I took it. Very often, when you have a flyer, you can’t figure out why it happened, and that’s bad, because it means you’re doing something wrong which you can’t identify.

Next target:

The stuff at top left is .38 Super. I shot at the little cross. I wanted to see if the Cor-Bon I bought would cycle. It doesn’t cycle well when I rack the gun by hand, but it was flawless at the range. I would have shot better, but because I was off the best part of the target, I couldn’t really tell where the shots were going.

I no longer worry that my expensive Cor-Bons won’t work in the Colt. I would feel safe carrying it on formal occasions when a Glock would be declasse. And the gun didn’t explode, so I guess the pressure is okay.

I had never shot 7.62x39mm before today. It’s a very nice round. The recoil is mild, but it puts a pistol to shame when it comes to dissolving internal organs. I can see why the Commies liked it. At Wolf prices, I can afford to shoot a fair amount of it.

I can report that the Vz does, indeed, get hot. Others have said it, and I can confirm it. The metal parts of the handguard warmed up nicely, so you have to watch where you hold it. Other than that, no issues I noticed.

I am trying to deal with the fact that I am still not a good rifle shot. It seemed so easy when I was a kid.

Conservative Humor Takes Another Beating

Drudgebart.tv.com asks, “who is behind Obama Teleprompter Blog?”

After looking at it, I think the better question is, which friend of Andrew Breitbart’s forced him to mention this on the Drudge Report? It has to be someone he owes a major favor. It’s like reading the ingredients on a soup can.

I should add that I say that because I think it’s supposed to be humor, but it’s impossible to tell.

I have to wonder if the Half Hour News crew is involved.

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.

Powermatic 66 = Gunsmithing Tool

Since the weather is questionable today, instead of going to the gun range, I am going to try to modify the laser mount I got for my Saiga 12.

I suppose the relative newness and rarity of the Saiga are the reasons I can’t find a good laser mount. If you have an ordinary AK, and you want to stick aiming aids on your gun, you probably want some kind of scope. That means you need a mount directly above the receiver. You may not care if it blocks the sights. A shotgun is different. Those open sights are the only sights you are likely to use. You’ll want the top of your gun unobstructed by mounts. At least, that’s how I see it. Tromix mounts Tritium night sights on Saigas. You can’t do that if you have a mount in the way.

I want my laser fairly far back on the gun. I could put a laser and a light on the barrel, but I don’t want a ton of crap hanging off of it. A light seems like more than enough weight. And I want the light as far forward as possible, so it won’t shine on the gun. Add it all up, and you get laser in the back, light in the front. So it seems to me that there is a need for a side rail mount that holds a laser to the left of the receiver. Line it up so it’s in the center of the buckshot pattern at 50 feet, and you should be all set. If it’s a little off at 100 feet, it won’t matter. Under 50 feet, you can’t be off more than the offset between the muzzle and laser. Who cares? It’s a shotgun.

These are my theories.

Because it’s impossible to get a side mount for a laser, I decided to get the next best thing. I got a mount with two bases. One goes to the left, and one goes over the barrel. I’m going to take the top mount off…with my table saw.

I know it sounds insane. But it will work. If I put the mount in a jig and use the miter slot, I’ll be able to get a very nice cut. I can find some way to blacken it later. I hear a product called Aluma-Hyde is good. If I’m desperate, I can use grill paint.

Here are a couple of photos of the mount. The little arrow shows where I plan to saw it up. If I fail, I’ll discard the parts and consider it an experiment.

I see no reason why it wont work.

In a few days, my strobe flashlight and mount will arrive, and I’ll stick them on the barrel. Then I’ll be the happiest man alive.

It’s incredible how cheap this stuff is. Stuff that costs $120 from snazzy big-name companies costs $45 from China, and the quality is excellent. It’s too bad it’s illegal to use an imported kit to convert a Saiga to the proper configuration; on that score, I’m stuck with American goods.

Say what you want about the Chinese. They are doing a marvelous job of supplying Americans with weapon accessories.