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HEADDESK

February 14, 2015, 9:41 pm
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From reading Book of Faces...

There are people who think that the ammo makers are the chief beneficiaries of a ban on M855.

Really?

So having a huge mound of bullets they cannot sell is a benefit to them?

Check the wiring in your headgear Troubleshooter.

The reason that M855 is cheap is that it's failed some check from milspec someplace along the line.  Most often it's a minor cosmetic issue, next most common is not making the very tight window for velocity.

That shit-cans the entire lot of ammo for the manufacturer and being able to sell it to the general public means they can, at least, break even on the costs sunk into the rejected lot.

If they cannot sell it to us, then they lose the money that went into making it because no component of a rejected lot may be used to fill any mil order.
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Flax Juice

February 14, 2015, 9:58 pm
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Still wet from the second coat for the Star.  I decided that the Ruger needed some TLC too.



Coat three for the Star and coat two for the Ruger.  The Star stocks are getting noticeably darker.
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Finished Finishing

February 15, 2015, 5:30 am
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Ammo Ban

February 15, 2015, 9:49 am
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While we're writing comments in a vain hope to head off the ATF...

Have our comments ever changed what they've planned on doing even once?

All of this goes away if we could get a different, smaller, group to just eliminate the regulatory jurisdiction from the agency in question.

Congress could pass a law exempting M855 tomorrow.

It's their fault that BATFE has any authority at all in this matter.

It's OUR fault that Congress does nothing about it.  Collective our.  I am sure every one of my readers gets out there and votes and votes for liberty expanding candidates...

The thing is the loyal opposition isn't pro-gun for the most part.  They are merely not anti-gun.  I think we've got a bit of Stockholm Syndrome going on here sometimes.

The thing about M855 is that it really is armor piercing ammo according to 18 U.S.C. §§ 921(a)(17) (B) (i) because it has a steel core in it.  It's actually a miracle that we got an ATF ruling exempting it in the first place.

What needs to change is the law.  That means someone in Congress has to actually introduce such changes to the floor.  Something that's been conspicuously lacking from the loyal opposition for a long damn time.

On the "plus" side of the coin is that with both the US Army and USMC going to "green" projectiles from green-tip projectiles...  Production of M855 was going to stop soon anyways.  Just look at the ready supply of .30-06 M2 AP...

There is even less doubt that M855A1 is an AP round with its entire composition being steel or copper alloy.

And judging a round AP based on composition is stupid.  .50 BMG M2 ball is a lead core FMJ, and it's going to punch thicker armor than even the most exotic 5.56 round made.  Changing the composition of the bullet makes it armor piercing compared to ball ammunition of the same type.  And even then not by much depending on the composition and thickness of the armor.
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Alternative States

February 15, 2015, 11:34 am
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Since we're probably going to have a panic run on 5.56x45mm ammo here, what's the state of the alternate AR calibers?

6.8x43mm SPC: 15 loadings listed from 6 makers. 7 available from 4.

6.5 Grendel: 5 loadings listed from 2 makers. 3 available from 2.

.300 AAC Blackout: 12 loadings listed from 10 makers. 12 available from 9.

.300 Whisper: 3 loadings from 2 makers. None available.

.30 Remington AR: 4 loadings from 1 maker: 3 available.

None of the alternates got more variety since last time.  All of them are more in stock now though.  The lack of variety in the loads could very well be due to the market deciding what they want to see, especially since the "same" load from two different makers is counted as two loadings here.
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Descendant

February 15, 2015, 12:50 pm
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Do you think your Colt Mustang or SIG P238 are tiny M1911s?

While playing around I noticed that the have a lot more in common with Star than they do with Colt.

Pivoting trigger, no grip safety, manual safety that can be engaged with the hammer down...

The Ballester Molina has a similar relationship to the Star.
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Originality

February 16, 2015, 7:40 pm
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Colt's Patent Firearms...

Have they had a completely original in-house design since Sam Colt passed on?

It doesn't seem like it when you see they shopped Browning heavily, hit both Star and Astra up pretty hard plus Stoner y Sullivan de Fairchild.

Compounded that they were the makers of Thompsons and many many outside machinegun designs (and Browning surfaces here again).
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On A Hot Summer Night

February 16, 2015, 8:12 pm
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Would you offer you throat to the wolf with the red roses?
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That Can't Be Good

February 16, 2015, 8:16 pm
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Went to have the tires on The Precious balanced since they were messing around with the tire pressure sensors and had the wheels off anyway.

The left front went on the dynamic balancing machine...

AND FUCKING FLEW APART!!!!

Woah!

Dude!  I drove down to the shop on that thing!

New front tires are on order.  No money for rears, which are likely in just as bad a shape and like all things Corvette, they are fiendishly expensive.
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Minding Our P's and Q's

February 18, 2015, 11:20 pm
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I lost the link, but...

I read a nice article about wondering if it was our business to fix things in the middle east anyway.

It also indicated that are several parties who want us to rearrange things to their liking so they don't have to get their skirts wet.

First of, I think we do need to fix this shit with ISIS.

Second I think that when we do, we should do it without regard to the interests of others except as the coincide exactly with ours.

It's time for America to look out for America and Americans.
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Out Of The Thirty Aught Six Business

February 18, 2015, 11:32 pm
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I decided that I wanted tires for The Precious more than I wanted a Garand.

Turns out that Willard wanted a Garand more than he wanted an unspecified here sum of cash.

Rational self interest on the part of both parties yields an agreeable transaction on all sides.

I enjoyed my time with the M1, but truth be told it went to the range far more often as a "you've never fired a Garand?" than as a "I want to take out MY Garand and go shooting."

I like my FAL a lot better for a .30 caliber battle rifle.
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M855 Letter

February 19, 2015, 9:58 am
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First, M855 and other SS109 variants aren't armor piercing ammunition by bullet construction under 18 U.S.C. §§ 921(a)(17) (B) (i) because the bullet core is not constructed entirely of steel. It is lead and steel.
Second, it's not covered by 18 U.S.C. §§ 921(a)(17) (B) (ii) because it is literally .22 caliber not larger; also the jacket does not consist of 25% of the total projectile weight.
Third, target shooting is sporting purpose and a change in the legal status of this ammunition creates an undue burden on the private citizen by eliminating a large supply chain of readily affordable ammunition.
Fourth, this ammunition is in "common use", (see Heller vs DC for definitions) and as the courts continue to expand on the meaning of that term it will expose this reclassification as a waste of taxpayer money and agency effort.
Fifth, because this ammunition is in widespread common use, if there were a marked tendency for it to be used against the police or for other nefarious purposes, there would be abundant stories and cases to cite pointing to the misuse of it.
Thank you for your time.
Angus McThagSuncoast, FL
This is my second attempt to send this.  The email address for ATF appears to be bad.
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Look What I Just Bought!

February 19, 2015, 12:07 pm
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Found an ad online, sent them the money and they shipped it right out!


Of course, it's not entirely complete...


I got two of them, I am thinking of trimming them down a bunch and making a key-fob out of them.
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Quote Of The Day

February 20, 2015, 9:27 am
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Just like we can't drill our way to lower energy prices and energy independence, we can't kill our way to victory. I guess next it will be we cannot eat our way to obesity.

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UPS Truck Is A DeLorean

February 20, 2015, 10:33 am
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The oddities of the international date line and time zones make real time tracking give strange results sometimes.
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ARts And Crafts

February 20, 2015, 11:02 am
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Took my shattered remnants of the M16A1 lower receivers and made a key fob.


The 9,xxx,xxx serials supposedly indicate they were destined to be military assistance.  These rifles probably were never issued and were likely destroyed for a lack of customers.

You can't expect law enforcement to pay for a rifle when they can nab an ex-Army one for free.  The A1 isn't stylish enough to market at foreign customers and The Hughes Amendment to the FOPA eliminates nearly all domestic interest...

What's left but to scrap them?

The saddest part is the entire gun was likely tossed into the shredder whole.  There are people who will pay good money for those retro parts, and our government policy is to shun that money.


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Opportunity Cost

February 20, 2015, 8:44 pm
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Maybe It Was Better

February 21, 2015, 9:55 am
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I remember a show called "Civil War Diaries" where famous actors read letters and journal entries from selected Civil War soldiers.  They were presented with just enough history lecture to give the letters context.

The troops writing these letters were predominately educated in one-room school houses that were funded locally.

These letters show excellent sentence structure, spelling and grammar.  The "selected" portion of the show was picking letters with poetic content or where the troop had something to say that underscored the history lecture.

I've seen web pages where tests from this era are put online to see if we modern folk can pass them.  After you get done taking it and saying, "shit, that was hard!" you see that it's a fourth grade test on the topic.  "But I went to college before I learned most of this," you meekly whimper...

Now we pour vast amounts of Federal money into education, orders of magnitude more (and that's accounting for inflation!) than the one-room model had available, and we're getting almost literally nothing out of it.

Need to see confirmation?

Go no further than any internet forum.  But you needn't go that far, most of us have "that friend" who still sends text messages from a smart phone that look like, "luv u 2 b bak l8r"...  I remember when that short-hand was developed, it was when the length of a text message was truncated so far as to make the limit on Twitter seem like War and Peace.  Plus text messages weren't free then, you paid a nickel each!
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I Think Your Bias Is Showing

February 22, 2015, 5:31 pm
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I'm watching a show where a lead character was just revealed to be gay.

The plot of the series is a little convoluted so I was trying to see if something that was mentioned earlier tied into that reveal.

I didn't get definitive confirmation on the plot point but I did find someone who was reviewing the show.

Did you know that the show had nothing worth watching until the reveal of a gay character?

I didn't realize that I wasn't enjoying the story, characters and plot until this last episode because there wasn't a homosexual male lead character.  Wait... I was enjoying this show before this!

I am still enjoying it, actually.  They did the reveal well and it made several things from the first season go click-clunk.  It's a period piece and they handled the situation in a manner consistent with the characters and the period too.  Not bad!

But to base your enjoyment entirely on there being a gay male character is alien to me.
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Inside A Star

February 24, 2015, 3:28 pm
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Star B that is...

The B is often referred to as a 1911 derivative, but there's not much similarity under the skin except for the way the barrel locks and how to field strip it.

They use different styles of extractors.  The Star is external.

The firing pin is retained by a pin that goes up through the slide, under the rear sight.  There's no firing pin stop to remove at the back of the slide.  Should you ever need to access the firing pin, you've got to drift out the rear sight to remove the pin.

On the frame, most people notice there's no grip safety and that the thumb safety can be engaged with the hammer down.  Many also notice that the mainspring housing is integral to the frame and not a separate part.

The trigger mechanism isn't the same either, I took some pictures of it.


The trigger pivots on the pin near the scallop in the upper right, that pushes the dog-legged trigger bar to the rear...


Which presses agains the sear (pointer), which releases the hammer and the gunweapon pistol goes "bang"...


The gun cycles like a typical 1911 so I'll skip that.  The next difference is the disconnector (pointer); when in battery the place the pointer is pointing sits in a recess in the slide...



When the slide moves to the rear, it pushes the disconnector down and that presses the trigger bar out of alignment with the sear.

Once the slide is back in battery, releasing the trigger pushes the disconnector back up into its recess and the trigger bar clicks back into alignment with the sear.

This trigger mechanism is much easier to make than what's in the 1911, which is likely why Star went with it.  In many ways it's a better trigger than what many modern 1911's end up with too.  This example breaks cleanly without any creep at all.  I've still to borrow Marv's trigger scale.
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