Clinton Damage Curable

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Auntie Entity for President

Ob*ma continues working his magic on the stock market. As I write, the Dow is down about 30 points.

I’m not sure why I keep citing the Dow. It’s a somewhat narrow index. The S&P contains a bigger number of companies, so it is presumably more reflective of the state of the economy. I guess citing the S&P on a blog is a waste of time, though, because most people don’t know what it is.

Someone or other has put out a list of troubled companies. I’ll cut and paste part of the article.

A lot of big, well-known companies are in danger. On the list: Advanced Micro Devices; AirTran; AMR (parent of American Airlines); Chrysler; Duane Reade; Eastman-Kodak; Ford; General Motors; JetBlue; Krispy Kreme; Palm; R.H. Donnelly; Reader’s Digest Association; Rite-Aid; UAL (parent of United Airlines); Unisys; and US Airways.

That doesn’t disturb me too much.

1. AMD makes silicon chips. I don’t think we’re in any danger of running out of those.

2. Airtran, AMR, Jetblue, UAL, and US Airways don’t bother me, because airlines go broke all the time. The industry is crowded, and people keep getting into it anyway, thinking they can still make a profit. I’m not sure why they do this, but it is a fact of life.

3. Chrysler, Ford, and GM overpay for labor, they are badly managed, and they make boring products, so they need to fail. One of the important functions of the free market is to get rid of dead wood so better companies can move in.

4. Duane Reade and Rite Aid operate drugstores. I would guess that they are getting hammered because of the presence of better companies like CVS and Walgreen’s. The drugstores are still here. They just have different signs out front, the service is better, and the prices are lower.

5. Krispy Kreme makes grade B- doughnuts, and for some reason, people got the crazy idea that this was an important and unique product line. A retreat to sanity was inevitable.

6. Eastman-Kodak? They still exist? Do they even have a purpose now that every electronics firm in the universe is making digital cameras?

7. The problems at R.H. Donnelly do not upset me, because I have never heard of R.H. Donnelly. I hope they don’t supply something really important, like oxygen.

8. Reader’s Digest. Replaced by the Internet. Like your daily newspaper.

9. Unisys. That’s a tech, isn’t it? Techs fail. No news there.

I suppose all sorts of bad companies are going to get spanked before Obama is finished working his economic miracle, in which he will bring North Vietnam-style prosperity to the misguided capitalists of the United States. The streets may one day be filled with panhandling Pointy-Haired Bosses.

Too bad Obama won’t be among them.

If you’re still in a Geithnerian dither about buying a gun, you better snap out of it. Life may be very weird in the depression. Stuff you can afford to have stolen now may be more important in 2011. It may be possible for Obama to outlaw the sale of all truly useful guns. He’s already trying. But outlawing possession is much harder. It’s good to have what you need before the bans go into effect.

The other day it occurred to me that wealth may be redefined over the next year or two. For example, right now, a Manhattan condo is a concentrated bit of wealth. A lousy little apartment two hundred yards from a violent ghetto may be worth seven figures. Will that be true when Americans start using their yards to grow vegetables? Maybe five acres of farmland will be more desirable. I think people in suburbs and cities will envy everyone else. The best situation, probably, is rural land twenty or so miles from a city. Close enough for trade. Far enough away for security and a relative degree of freedom.

Some people say gold has no intrinsic value, and that it may be worthless in the future. I understand the argument, but I think they’re wrong. Gold only becomes worthless in very strange situations, like those involving lifeboats and concentration camps. Paper money represents promises, and promises are only as good as the institutions that make them. But gold is gold is gold. We will always need currency; it’s stupid to think an economy can run on barter. Imagine trying to run a store, where everyone barters. It would take five years for ten people to check out at the groceries. “I need these corn flakes. Here is a cord of firewood.” “We don’t need firewood.” “Okay, here are fifteen pairs of shoes.” “Sorry, we don’t take Crocs.” “How about this small block Chevy?” “I guess that will do. How do you want your change?” “Chainsaws and diesel, please.”

That’s barter. It does not work on the kind of scale you need to keep an economy running. You’d have to take a forklift with you every time you went to the mall. No, you’ll have to have currency, and if paper money loses its power, currency will mean coins, and coins will mean precious metals only. And there are only two of those that matter. Gold and silver. I very much doubt we’ll have platinum coins. It’s hard to melt, for one thing.

Stones will lose their value. They already have. The value of precious stones is artificially maintained. Those stupid diamonds women insist on receiving are not rare at all; when a man is forced to spend $20,000 on a rock, the vast majority of the money buys nothing except a fiction maintained by a greedy cartel. It’s the single dumbest buy most people make in a lifetime. Well, after an expensive wedding. You have to love the way people celebrate their devotion by starting their lives with five figures’ worth of new debt. Idiocy.

I think if I got married, I’d suggest a modest ring and some bullion. Romance is romance, but flushing huge sums of money down the toilet is only romantic to the stupid.

Here’s another thing: you can’t melt stones down into standardized coins.

Useful possessions will have increased value, but that doesn’t mean gold won’t.

I think a lot of things that are valuable now will be relatively worthless in a couple of years. Antiques. Luxury vehicles, including cars, motorcycles, aircraft, and yachts. Art. Most collectibles. I expect Las Vegas to have very hard times; who will want to fly to a far-off city to lose money, when people are standing in line to get free soup? I think this is a scary time for cruise ship operators and people who run resorts.

It’s an interesting time to be alive, and it’s fun to try to make predictions. It’s fun now, I mean, because things haven’t gotten really bad yet. Later it won’t be fun at all.

Baby Pictures

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

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

Closer shot:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I hear bad things about Kimbers anyway.

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

Although a Benelli would sure be nice.

Forget I said that.

Bird Guts as Reliable as Pundits

This morning I watched the Dow-Jones Average, as it sort of almost went positive. I wish I had copied the little headlines I saw. I don’t recall the exact words, but the basic message was something like “Dow Breaks Out as Rally Continues! Obama to Appear at Press Conference, Turn Evian into Wine!”

Can I tell you something about financial gurus? Almost none of them know anything. They make money when the market is strong, and they lose money when it’s weak. Listen, anyone can swim downstream. If you want to know who has a brain, find out who can make money in a prolonged bear market. I don’t know of anyone who fits that description. They exist, but I can’t think of any, offhand. A lot of people have gotten very wealthy by buying blue chips and forgetting they owned them, but I don’t think that makes them experts.

Here’s another fact for you. Many of the talking heads you see on cable have a gigantic interest in seeing the market do well. Many of the heads live off commissions and fees, and when people think the market is dead, they stop trading, and the heads don’t make as much money. So generally, you should weight their predictions heavily toward the negative. They usually overestimate the strength of the market, and they do it because confident investors and traders make them money. Want to find out how the housing market is doing? Ask a mortgage broker. “THERE HAS NEVER BEEN A BETTER TIME TO BUY! Excuse me while I sell some more blood so I can get some McNuggets.” Same thing.

Back when I was in law school, I traded. I don’t really know anything about finance, but I know what momentum looks like, so I made money easily. I went an entire year with only one negative trade, and it was a small one. People don’t believe me when I say that, but it’s the gospel truth. I remember the stock. Microsoft. I lost about $600. I also sold out before the tech crash, with a juicy profit that paid a big chunk of my law school tuition (all three years’ worth). People don’t believe that, either. Because it makes them feel stupid. Sorry; some people avoid getting burned in tulip-bulb crazes. That’s just how it is. The fact that I was one of them in 1998 or whatever the year was doesn’t make me a bad person. If you thought Dell was going to 5,000, maybe you need to go back and retake third-grade math.

I knew a law student who said he was going to start a fund. He may have done it. I can’t remember. He was making money hand over fist. He had a Quotrek with him all the time. He had investors who wanted to let him handle their money. Guess what he’s doing now? Practicing law. The tech crash separated the wheat from the chaff, and he was chaff.

When stocks went bad, I didn’t know what to do, so I didn’t invest. Maybe that will make you feel better, if you think I’m claiming I’m a financial genius. I was smart enough to know when it was easy to make money, but when it got hard, I was as lost as anyone.

The investment gurus are the same way, to a much greater extent than you would think possible. There are professional fund managers who end years with net losses. How is that possible, for someone who claims to be a guru? It shouldn’t be. If they actually knew half of what we think they know, they should make money every year. There are people who do, even if they’re not famous.

It appears that Bernie Madoff was so inept, he couldn’t make money in a bull market. That’s incredible. Things went well prior to the 2007 bust, yet Madoff was not able to make money. He decided a Ponzi scheme was the way to go. And he was one of the most respected investors in history. He would literally have been better off putting the money in CDs.

Tim Geithner. He was supposed to be the savior. Or rather, the undersavior. Didn’t pay his taxes, but that was okay, because he was somebody’s Wonder Boy. He claimed he was too dumb to understand the tax code–that is actually the excuse he gave Congress–but we just KNEW he was smart enough to fix the economy. Never had a private sector job. Never proved that he knew anything, except how to steer a government desk. Was in charge of New York’s Federal Reserve Bank while Wall Street (which is in New York, hello?) imploded, and did nothing about it. But he looked smart sitting around at hearings, and his name sounded sort of Jewish, so presumably, he knew all about money! I really believe that was what people thought a couple of months ago. People are just that crazy. After all, they buy BMWs because they think the Nazis were smart. That is absolutely true.

Geithner has turned out to be the biggest disappointment since Ishtar. No one seems to understand how he suddenly got so stupid. The better question is, why did we think he was a brain in the first place? If he was smart, wouldn’t he have done something helpful while he was running the New York Fed? Why didn’t we try to hire Jack Welch or Warren Buffett? How about Jim Rogers? Don’t tell me we couldn’t afford them. Look what Geithner has cost us. A salary of a billion a year would have been a bargain.

If you ever expect to make money in stocks, you have to learn how to pick stocks for yourself, and you have to have a set of buying and selling rules, and you have to follow them. For example, when your stock drops 8%, you sell. That’s Peter Lynch’s rule. You don’t wait around, pretending the money is still in there somewhere, compressed like a spring, waiting to bounce back to its correct size. It’s gone, baby. It no longer exists. Your stock’s past value has no relationship whatsoever to its future value. Find another stock which is more likely to do well. Don’t sit on a stock that has dropped 50% because you still have faith in the story that caused you to buy it. Make a set of target buy and sell prices, and stick to them. Otherwise, you’re just playing the ponies.

Don’t pay attention to the crowing Cramers and the tendentious Wall Street bookies who depend on account churning to keep them in Ferraris. Use your common sense. If you don’t have common sense, don’t play the market. Get a savings account. Buy a house you really intend to live in, so you can ride out the hard times. Winning is a good thing, but not losing is much more important.

Geithner knows absolutely nothing. Obama is hopelessly incompetent. We have not found our deus ex machina yet, and anyone who says things are shaping up is making a wild guess that goes against all the evidence.

HA! I see the market went positive again while I typed this. Guess what it means when the market seems weak part of the day and strong the other part of the day? It usually means it’s WEAK.

Squirrels Must Pay

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

Now back to my exciting life.

I am suffering serious frustration here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How do You Like Your Squirrel?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do Some Shopping in Honor of Pelosi

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

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

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

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

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

SHTF Food

I decided to check into survival food. I am not planning to maintain a one-year supply; I think if things get so bad I have to eat out of a closet for a year, it means the world is coming to an end and death is the preferable option. But having a month’s worth of food is not a bad idea. I learned a few things.

1. White rice keeps for eternity. Just keep it dry.

2. Dried beans will stay at top quality for one year. After that, they slowly get harder and take longer to cook. If they get so hard you can’t cook them normally, you can make flour out of them and bake them. How you’re supposed to do that, I do not know. But dried beans are cheap, so there’s no excuse for not having relatively fresh ones.

3. Canned tuna and salmon last nearly forever. Ten years, at least.

4. Acidic canned goods should be used within two years.

5. Oatmeal is a great idea. It lasts a long time, it’s light, it’s cheap, and it makes you poop, which is important when you’re eating survival-type food.

That’s about all I’ve come up with, but it will do.

I got curious and tried to find out whether the local lizards are edible. They probably are, if you discard the guts. Cats eat them and develop temporary hind-leg paralysis, which confuses them greatly. But cats eat the whole lizard. Here’s why I think the rest of the lizard is safe. Most lizards here are anoles, which are related to iguanas, and Latin Americans chow down on iguana meat all the time. In fact, some of them do it right here in Miami.

It’s a guess. I know.

One bright spot in the survival picture: I would have a great excuse to kill squirrels. Hateful little beasts. Hateful, but tasty. And I could drive around shooting Muscovy ducks and peacocks, which spend their lives generously fertilizing our sidewalks and porches. And forget the fishing regulations.

I could get a cheap country ham and hang it in a closet. It wouldn’t rot. A ham site says they last forever, but the new ones don’t have enough fat on them to prevent excessive water loss. Guess you could paint it with melted paraffin.

I think these items, plus multivitamins, would keep me going until the food pipeline got working again.

I don’t really think we’re headed for starvation. I think we’re going to end up on the same level of prosperity as other socialist nations.

Therapy not Sustainable

Here is an update on Mish Weiss.

She had a marrow biopsy last week. The results were good. When you have leukemia, you produce immature blood cells called “blast cells,” and the percentage of your blood cells which are blast cells is indicative of the severity of the disease. Mish just went from 36% to 31%. That’s about a 16% decrease, using 36% as the initial figure. That’s good.

I wish I could say that were the whole story. She got positive results from her last round of chemotherapy, but she is so ill, a continuation of that therapy would be fatal. You have to wonder what would have happened had they started with this particular therapy back when she was stronger.

Treatment has now shifted to a different type of chemotherapy intended to prolong her life. There is a difference between curative therapy and life-prolonging therapy. As a lay person, I don’t know if there is hope that a person in this condition will gain strength until curative chemotherapy can be attempted again. I suppose that’s the obvious question.

Mish is not giving in. A total surrender would mean giving up chemotherapy and focusing on improving her quality of life. She is very, very tough.

My plan? Keep up the prayer. It costs me nothing, and miracles do happen, and it’s a gift to be given a chance to do something for someone in need. There is always a blessing in trying to do good. I can’t think of any significant reward for giving up. I hope people who found Mish through this blog, and who have been praying for her, will think about that. Even if you have doubts about what you are accomplishing for her, you’re doing yourself a lot of good.

Today Drudgebart links to a story about David Wilkerson, the famous preacher. He is predicting a horrible sin-generated American catastrophe, and it seems to center around New York City. He talks about “a thousand fires.”

I hate to say this, especially since I have been attending a church pastored by a man said to be a relation of his, but I would not get too excited about the New York prediction. David Wilkerson has a history of making predictions. I invite you to read up and draw your own conclusions about his batting average. I have doubts, to put it mildly.

Nonetheless, I continue to believe we’re in big trouble as a nation, and I do think it’s because we’ve tested God’s patience. People have always been sinful, but over the last fifteen years or so, we’ve gotten downright gross. In addition to our old sins, we now do bizarre things like cutting up our own bodies for amusement. Our sexual perversions are getting so strange, it is impossible to understand how anyone can find them erotic. And now we have a weird, vacuous, inept, idol-packing President who is the very symbol of human pride, and he’s starting to take an adversarial position toward Israel. He’s also taking our money and using it to fund convenience abortions.

Life is changing. A couple of months back, I noticed that the atmosphere in the US seemed to be altered. Things seem grubbier and dingier. The way they’ve always been in foreign countries that don’t do well. It’s really obvious here in Miami. The grass is brown, and huge trees are dying all over the place. Is it my imagination? It can’t be. I’m surrounded by vacant houses no one can sell. The stores are quieter. The restaurants are often empty. It reminds me of places like Greece and the Bahamas.

It looks like Iran is now a nuclear power. Isn’t that great? The vast bulk of the process of getting nuclear weapons is behind them. Only the easy jobs remain to be done. Obama tried to appease the Russians into negotiating with Iran for us, offering to give up our efforts to protect ourselves with a missile shield. The Russians dealt him a remarkable public humiliation, dismissing his offer as eccentric and half-baked. Good thing. I wonder what he was thinking? If we build a missile shield, it won’t just protect us from Iran. It won’t check a missile’s nationality. We have other Muslim nations to worry about, as well as North Korea. Where did Obama get the idea that Iran was the only reason we needed a shield?

It’s funny that the press didn’t get excited about the Russian slapdown. It was an extraordinary bit of public emasculation, and the MSM ignored it. Obama came across like a little boy trying to break into his dad’s poker game. We’re going to see more of that. He is not man enough for the office. We retired a pit bull who scared our enemies to death, and we replaced it with an attention-starved bichon frise. Obama has been called Carter II, but even Carter had more grit. And Carter wasn’t totally opposed to maintaining a national defense.

I almost feel like God selected our leaders in the past, making sure that even when they were not the best available, they were not utter fools. And now we have served our purpose, and God has decided to let some other nation take the lead, so he is content to let us put rabble in our high offices, as less-blessed nations do. For now it’s Obama. Maybe next time we’ll swing to the other extreme and get a nut like Ron Paul. When no one guards the door, you don’t know who will come in and crash on the couch.

Wilkerson says each of us should have a month’s supply of food. That, I agree with. He’s not the only one saying it.

I think I’ll summon my nerve and check the Dow Jones average.

Pray for Mish.

Guns Now; Expression Later?

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

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

Nirvana

What a feast. Mike and I cooked for my dad and my sister. Everything was from my cookbook. We had spare ribs, a beer-butt chicken, my Yukon Gold casserole, barbecue beans, and Texas toast. Good God, it was wonderful.

I thought we had ruined the meat at one point. We had to leave the smoker unattended, and when we got back, the meat was very dark. I figured creosote had attacked. But at dinner, it was sublime. The best barbecue I’ve ever had, far and away. I didn’t notice any creosote flavor. I’m not sure what happened. Maybe it was residue from burned Budweiser.

The Teletubby smoke box is magical, but I need to fix on an on-deck box for getting the wood burning. As it is now, you get some bitter smoke whenever you add fresh wood. Still, the results were magnificent.

Mike claimed the wood was the problem. We started with Publix Greenwise hickory, and then we had to change to something from Home Depot. I wasn’t there when he changed over, but he said the Home Depot wood gave off much less dark smoke.

Whatever. This was a dining experience I will never forget. It’s sad that I didn’t have time to make the macaroni and cheese. But then human beings were never intended to know that much pleasure here on earth.

Mike made some good contributions. He showed me that high heat is best for frying hash browns. I didn’t know that.

Don’t listen to the foodies. You don’t have to use liquid nitrogen or squid ink to make good food. Just pick something simple and do it perfectly. That other stuff is for idiots.

Pork is Everywhere

Mike is in town. Last night, we hit Gordon Food Supply. For us, that’s like going to a strip club. After that, we dined on masitas de puerco, moros, and yuca at El Exquisito in Little Havana.

We’ve been working on barbecue all day. The Hoginator has been revived, and I’m burning hickory chunks in the Teletubby smoke box!

What a pleasure it is to have Mike here. Who else will go to GFS with me? Who else completely understands why I smear beef fat on my ribs while I smoke them? Who else agrees that removing the membrane is for girly-men?

We have two racks of spare ribs and a Budweiser beer-butt going right now. Everything is rubbed, and the chicken has been injected with Jack Daniel’s, dark maple syrup, cider vinegar, and a few other things.

It’s beautiful. Now I have to start planning the Texas toast and other sides.

I’m using an open flame for smoke. Bill Karau, inventor of the Karubecue, made me self-conscious about creosote, so I am not doing blue, bitter smoke today. Even though I actually like it.

Bill has spiffed up his site. Maybe we’ll get more info later. Here it is: CLICK.

Void Your Warranty the Correct Way

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cheap Ammunition Makes You Pay Dearly

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More

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

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

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

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

I am going to have to get electronic ear muffs. Reason: if I have to defend my home, I will need to hear ordinary sounds while I look for the perp, but I don’t want to go deaf if I shoot. And they should have stereo, so I’ll have directional hearing. At the range, my cheapo muffs and plugs are fine, because I don’t need to hear low-level sounds. And muffs don’t give you real protection at the range; you need plugs, too, if you’re shooting a long gun. So even if I got good muffs, I’d still have to wear plugs when shooting anything bigger than a .45. Much of the benefit of the electronics would be lost. The house is different. I’m willing to sacrifice a little protection when faced with a need to defend myself. That means no plugs.

I was considering getting a quality pair, like the better Peltors. I didn’t want something that would fall apart over multiple range sessions. Then it occurred to me: because I wear plugs at the range, I have no reason to take electronic muffs. That means I don’t need the toughest electronic muffs made. Maybe I would be better off getting a cheap pair for home defense. They only have to last long enough to get me through one encounter, and I don’t think cheap muffs are more likely to crap out at a bad time. I would guess that the big differences are durability, comfort, and sound quality.

What do you think? The price difference is gigantic.