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I happened to watch Jess shoot his winning Revolver table. Eight pins, with a reload, in 8.3 seconds, from the start to the last pin on the ground.

Six clean hits, with the pins going straight off the back, a smooth reload, then two remaining pins hurtling to their doom from the top shelf, not touching the table on the way to the ground. Beautiful.

Not that I am a pin shooter, but 8 pins in 8.3 seconds with a reload... that seems very impressive:)

Wish I had seen that.

There is constant action at The Pin Shoot. You are shooting and/or friends and family are shooting (there are twenty-seven tables!). You want to see your people shoot. Sometimes several of them are shooting at the same time, so you just can't watch them all. You want to listen for your own name to be called and be ready so you're loading magazines, consolidating ammo, answering trivia questions being thrown out while the pinsetters do their work, and trying to maintain a conversation with an old or new friend. And trying to stay up with hydration!

So I missed that one, unfortunately, but over the years I have seen Jess shoot it many times and he might miss a pin once in a while but he's sure consistent on that reload. Gun comes down, gun goes up, and he's shooting again. Having worked on that gun I know it does not have huge chamfers on the chambers-- they would be a lot bigger, but his 625 has that square extractor star that I think does not lend itself as well to chamfering as the old style. I'd like to see it again as I'm now thinking the fingers of the extractor, rather than being left weak and break-ready, could simply be removed at the tips, leaving basically stubs. We are ejecting clips, not individual rounds. I don't have one in front of me-- Patrick, what do you think?

Between TPS and this week's Patrol Rifle, and house guests, it's been a busy month. Looking forward to getting back in the saddle for a while.

I feel like I made a little history this week in Patrol Rifle class. Or revealed it, perhaps.
The Winchester Model 1907 in .351 WSL caliber is well-known of as a favorite rifle of deer hunters for a time, and, of course, G-Men and gangsters. Name the gangster shootout and chances are there was an ’07 there on one side or the other, or both. 180 grain bullets of .351 diameter at 1800-plus FPS, well it’s no .30-06 but it’s not nothing, either.
In each 5-day class we do FBI-protocol ballistic gel testing to show students what the capabilities and limitations are of their AR15’s. I waited until it was over, and pounced on two fresh blocks of gel left over.
My big question was, were the 180-grain soft points in use at the time any good? My presumption was that they were not, based on another presumption that the whole expanding bullet thing was far from fully developed then. While I’ve been through some info regarding the guns and their progression through the years of manufacture (1907-1956 with ~59,000 made), I’m not sure when the soft points came out. Ammo in the caliber is long out of production….. I make my own from .357 Maximum cases. You can still buy old stock but it is expensive. I recently acquired a handful of unpackaged vintage ammo of mixed brands (UMC and WRA). I don’t know how old they were but they had the soft point bullets- between UMC and WRA they were almost identical looking.
Into the gel they went, and here are the results. I was pleased to see that I was wrong about this bullet. It performed rather well and if you look at the FBI specs, these .351’s came very close to staying within those standards.
V- velocity
P- penetration
R- retained weight
D- diameter expanded to
Retrieval:

Through heavy clothing:

Through Bonnie and Clyde’s windshield. If you look at the pictures from that day, and confirmed by a little research into auto glass, by that time laminated windshields had already been in use for a few years:

I wonder what a .350 Legend, with bonded bullets, would do?

I'm loading those, the 170 Interlock, in .351, sized down with a die I made, from .355 to .351. I'm hoping for maybe another 50 FPS with the same charge of 4227..... which is still ~ 300 FPS slower than the same bullet in a Hornady .350 L. factory load. Hopefully there will be some leftover gel in the next class.

The 170 does not seem to group better than the other bullets I handload with... but I've done very little of it due to the brass, being labor-intensive, is rather precious. I wish I'd had some of these when I was testing the .351 at 500 yards, it has to shoot flatter. Once I got the elevation I was making consistent hits-- a torso-sized group even.

How do you get a .351 to land even close to the target at 500? I calculated 19', that's nineteen feet, of drop. I made a sight from Kydex, put it on with contact cement and Gorilla tape. Being of almost no mass, it didn't shift around in recoil. I guessed about right; the peep was drilled in with, shall we say, not a lot of precision, just ":way high". But it was actually pretty close. I had to hold maybe another 3' high and about 3' of wind.

Ned,

The paths you choose to go down, and the methods you choose to solve problems encountered, are - - - well, hugely entertaining!! And clearly indicative of a mind that shuns the mundane in favor of "the path less traveled".

And we can't wait for each new installment!!!

Buzz

I'll try to keep it comin', Buzz.

The above 1890 velocity is a mis-comm, should have been 1819.

Agree!!

Attention! A really nice 1911 is being raffled for a good cause. It's not an LTW thing. The gun looks awesome, done up by some very capable smiths:

https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipM ... xXUGV5NnNn

Read about the cause here and get tickets:

https://rafflecreator.com/pages/32636/j ... lMqyddPKZg

Edit 7/12/22, sold out!

I always thought my logo was pretty OK. I ran across a couple things lately-- the below pic, which I think is about five years old despite the "10" date on the one Trijicon sight. And some of my original artwork for the logo, 1984.

It was easier, saying "1984" than to specify the number of years between then and now. Please, don't do the math I have some very old T-shirts with the logo.... I look at them today and I still think, "cool". Then I ask, "how did they get so small!?"

Every once in a while I get an itch, I stop everything and start roughing-out a new logo design. I have a couple good sketches but they aren't, like, 4X better than this one. This one, last ten years you'll see it on all manner of vehicles, at least here in Michigan, as window stickers. I like that. It's nothing I have anything to do with. If I was better at sales and promotion I'd be selling the hell out of them but, not only am I not better at it, I am pretty bad at it. I know I've expressed disappointment before about certain original ideas of mine being copied without attribution or compensation, and I still feel strongly about that in terms of signature features on a 1911, but this for some reason is different. I've had a few people tell me I ought to get after whoever took my logo but.... I can't explain it, but..... I'm kinda honored to share it with my fellow Michiganders who are also gun people. We are many here and if they are using my logo to express it, I think, "happy to help!"

Prior to about 2013 the logo was CNC'd in, then I got the electro-chemical set up to do it. These look like they're done the new way. I recognize one or two of the guns since I don't really have a huge output, but the others, not sure without further research, which, it doesn't matter and I don't have time.

I am still a fan of the original. Not sure why but that's me

_________________
Be safe and keep the brass flying

Terry Peters

Do your research but you get what you pay for front end or back end
http://www.pt-partners.com
@ptpartners_tx

Ill say this, when I see that logo I know exactly with what I am dealing with:)

Quality
Reliability
Accuracy
INNOVATION

OK I tried to make a cool acronym outta that but did not get there

Ref: Jason's post about a nice SIG P210 that he transformed into "super-nice":
https://forum.ltwguns.com/viewtopic.php ... 399#p69399

I commented there about a few things relative to my cuz from Denmark and his P210 duty pistol but I didn't want to hijack the thread and make it about Jess (few names are more Danish than that).

He served his country with distinction. He and his friend Alex shared a deep interest in firearms and participated in all kinds of organized competitions such as were "allowed" by government officials. "Officials", mind you. "Allowed", by "officials". Officials without any reference to or knowledge of actual laws.

Jess and Alex wanted only to do what was "legal" (bad enough compared to the liberties we enjoy here) without their activities being further dampened by what imperious ivory-tower individuals thought was the way things should be. A small cadre of Danish shooters found that despite all efforts to comply with the law, it was practically impossible to not run afoul of the "the officials". The "officials" had such a poor understanding of firearms and shooting, and were so completely unknowing of the laws they were entrusted to enforce, that they simply defaulted to a "no" answer to everything, and a statement of "that's illegal", to all inquiries.

This small group of Danish gun enthusiasts was forced to ride the edge of, not what was legal, but the ever-changing version of what bureaucrats said was legal. It was impossible to comply with the moving target of what the officials said was "the law". These shooters often found themselves targeted by, not the actual Danish legal system, but the "enforcers". The words that come to mind here are "constipated", "condescending", "uninformed", "arrogant", "devious". I'm sure I'll think of more later.

Denmark is a pretty enlightened country. It's not Russia, it's not North Korea, but this happened. I think in general there is a compliance culture in Denmark and this devolved in the post-war years in to simply expecting to be told what do do, and being expected to do it. This made for these ivory-tower bureaucrats getting into a position where they could simply dictate. I'm not Danish so I could be wrong..... but we gun people world wide tend to be just a little bit liberty-minded, don't we? It doesn't sit well with petty, stuffy, all-knowing "officials".

Jess and Alex both emigrated here to the US legally, got jobs in the firearms industry, and prospered, doing what they could never do in their home country. I will go so far as to say that both are "notables" in our culture here of firearms freedom.

There is, believe me, plenty of 1911 work to do. Somehow I have to squeeze my own stuff in, plus, I now have a couple of "shooting dependents".

The Savage 720 I have enjoyed the last few years was not extracting reliably. These are not that hard to get apart and put back together once you've done it a few times but still..... tedious. As a refresher the Savage 720 is Savage's rendition of the Browning Auto 5 / Remington 11. The Rem and Savage are often called Browning "copies" but they were made under license, to the same specs. There are some subtle difs but for the most part, parts will interchange. Savage made these from 1930-1949; this one has a 3-digit SN so pretty sure it's a 1930.

I got a new extractor spring for the Auto 5 and successfully installed it. In the process, I found that the locking block had a piece cracked off of the semi-circular rib that guides the block into and out of the locked position. No complaints there as this gun is ninety-two years old and had a lot of miles on it when I got it without a barrel and fore-end. I conclude that this rib is a known weak area (whaaa, it "broke already"), because other variants have one on each side. I found the broken-off piece and was considering welding it back on, but easily found a replacement on GB. It was a Remington part and was actual new old stock, so-- unused. It had the rib on both sides, I simply surface-ground it off the side where I didn't need it. It took quite a bit of fitting of the locking surface-- which, when I was done, was kinda like a nice 1911 barrel fit-- free to move; no slop but nothing tight. I believe part of the reason the old one broke (besides the nine-plus decades), was loosey-goosey fitting at the factory, or actual wear, resulting in the semi-circular rib taking some of the locking pressure. I was able to fit the new one so the rib is "neutral" and all it will do is guide this part up and down.

I don't know how many rounds I put through it post-breakage but it worked for "some" of them with the piece broken off. It didn't cause any malfunctions and I think it might have been OK for another century as-was, but..... fixed is better. The parts:



This BTW is the final version of "Spoonful's" front sight, made from deer antler:

Yep, lots of overlap, since they were licensed. i overhauled my Rem 11 for IPSC 3-gun and pins, by installing more than one FN part. the two-piece lifter, in particular was a great upgrade. there's a lot to be said for all-steel and railroad-grade design and engineering, when ti comes to firearms. yes, there's weight involved, but weight helps with recoil.

Heh..... you want to know if Sweeney is watching....? Just post something about the Rem 11

Putting this here as some of the above posts related to breech face "topography". More on this in "High Mileage Comes To Town", here:
https://forum.ltwguns.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=8365

Notes from the last two weeks of Patrol Rifle:

I don’t remember what brand this rifle was but I sure gave it points for having a pinned gas block (instead of just set-screwed. But for some reason the gas tube pin was backing out. I pushed it back in and staked it with an automatic centerpunch.


This seemed an insecure way to attach a single-point sling, in fact is was brought to me because to the shooter it was a mystery piece rattling around on the buffer tube. In our classes, single-points seem to be at the end of their popularity.


I really, really don’t like unnecessary sharp edges. This flash hider has plenty. Should we be handling the gun by the FH, not really, but when guys are moving and shooting and who knows what, why have skin rippers.


One of the venues we use has new V-Tac barriers, blow molded from what I would say is polyethylene—very low melting point. SAW gunners (not part of our program!) rest their barrel on the ledge and push up against the barrier with the gas block. Interesting results.


Candidate for the makes-the-least-sense muzzle device—a fake suppressor. Not a fake one, really, but a “training” suppressor. Oh, this agency has the real ones….. I guess they are worried about wearing them out maybe…? Or letting them out? In this particular state the legislation regarding police and suppressors is very constipated. For police use they are restricted to (something like) “special applications”. In other words, “patrol” can’t have them. I think the agency might have been worried about running afoul of state law if someone were to come along and say “training is not a special application”. In training—fire thousands of rounds with a “not” suppressor. One the street—fire one or two rounds in extremis and have no idea what the POI will be, have no idea if the gun is going to function right with it, and do not be expecting gas-in-the-face. In training, fire thousands of rounds and risk hearing damage so you can be real quiet IF you fire the rifle in a situation.


I am the brake Nazi. We are getting fewer and fewer brakes in class but this week had no fewer than five. Four, I was able to change out for A1 flash hiders, which I buy out of my own pocket and give to students. The fifth was pinned and welded so he got to use one of my shrouds all week.


This was interesting. This guy was in last week’s class (and slipped through the Brake Nazi’s net, but not this week!) On the last day we got rained on and rained out, and he did not get a chance between last week and Monday this week to maintain his rifle. Verdigris went on a rampage.

The drone suppressors are there for use with frangible ammo.l No-one wants to be pumping frangible bullets through a real suppressor, with the risk of early-franging bullets and baffle strikes.

As far as the State restriction on LE and suppressors, irrational thought knows no bounds.

We spent the day yesterday at the International Manufacturing Technology Show at McCormick Place in Chicago. Don't worry, we never left the venue to roam the streets of the city. Used to love a weekend there but right now it's not a good place for that.

If you want to see about a bazillion square feet of the latest and greatest in CNC machinery and anything and everything else used to make.... anything, this is it (ends tomorrow, Sept. 16th). It's overwhelming but cool as hell. Everything from pocket CNC's from Taiwan to behemoth manufacturing stations from Italy, Brazil, Germany, USA, I mean-- you name the country with any kind of manufacturing / tech base and they are there. Israel has been a lesser-known player in this for decades-- their manufacturing culture is known for being willing to try radical new ideas and universally they wind up putting out something great, be it hardware or software. The Weapon Wizards details it very well on the weapons side but it all applies to industry in general.

Hospitality is off the charts. I universally announced up front that I am not a good prospect for buying a million bucks worth of machine tools, but-- maybe because I was accompanied by a nineteen-year-old-- everyone was happy to take some time to explain their product's capabilities. Indeed I saw a group of young people whose badges said "future customer" and they were from a trade school in WI. Red carpet for them too! That shows a lot of fore-sight and smarts in the manufacturing tech industry.

You walk around for the first hour and after that the unbelievable becomes the ordinary, almost. "Additive machining", what most of us call 3D printing, has its own area. There was at least one CNC machine, albeit kind of a light-duty one, whose large base was 3D printed and then filled with concrete. Lots of 3D printing in titanium. Jaw injured in an accident? We'll scan your mandible and 3D print a model of it, then use the same data to 3D print a titanium brace that will be screwed on. First we'll test for fit on the model. Turnaround time, two days.

Of course, some of the more "within reach" stuff appeals also. Wells Index makes several varieties of Bridgeport-type mills. One is a virtual clone and parts will interchange. When I told them the head of my Bridgeport was a little noisy, they proposed selling me a new head-only, a two-hour drop in job. At $3600, tempting! Especially when it's a company that started in my home town.

"Foreigners"-- always of interest to me. A Spaniard explained how parts could be polished to a mirror finish in their tumbler that was much more than a tumbler-- there was a slight electrical charge running through the medial that causes a micro-spark with each impact of the media against the part. The convo turned to Spanish dirt bikes-- of which I've had several. This turned into an iPhone slide show of his extensive collection of Bultacos, Montensas, and Ossas, all immaculately restored or in the process. He rides in Vintage-class English Trials, as any good Spaniard ought to , just as I did on my late teens (only back then, the word "Vintage" was, um, not yet in use).

An enthusiastic guy from the Czech Republic demo'd his product which although relatively low-tech and ground-level, was one of my faves-- a laser "gun" for cleaning parts. It plays a laser back and forth from a hand-held unit and it pretty much strips any kind of crud from metal parts. We saw it stripping paint in a 1" wide swath (oops, I suppose it was 25.4mm) from car-body metal, and cleaning the head of a V-8. Oil crust and sludge deposits went up in flames and bare clean metal was left behind. Springs, valve stems, and all; parts are not heated to where you can't handle them, hardly even warm in fact. The "gun" has a hookup for a vacuum system so you're not breathing all the removed, vaporized, contaminants.

There was a wire EDM making a 32" deep cut. Unheard of, at least by me. Roku-Roku, I've seen them before but there's something about watching a CNC run at 40,000 RPM spindle speed and feedrates that make all the action pretty much a blur. On a work piece that's already heat-treated. The resulting finish is astounding. Hass CNC as usual had one of the largest displays, they really know how to showcase their stuff.

The firearms industry was seen in many displays as much of this equipment is in use making gun parts. One of the most interesting gun-related things was the outfit that makes equipment for drilling and reaming, then button-rifling, barrels.

Good stuff and a worthwhile trip, only complaint was that the $5 a bottle of water didn't seem to taste as good as the tap water at home......

I enjoyed this post very much... hit me up next year, I would love to attend this.

Sounds like you and the young man had a blast!

IMTS is every other year.

This week was interesting. Had to do a little traveling and turned the going and coming back parts into a day and a half worth of touring up by the thumb of Michigan. Frankenmuth: interesting little town, their claim to fame is a huge store that's all about Christmas. That is of no interest to me, but the oldest brewery in Michigan sure is! My aunt grew up in Frankenmuth and used to talk about going in there as a girl. "We kids could go in there and just draw a beer from a tap. We were only fourteen but nobody was worried about it!".

Bay City. We discovered what has to be one of the most interesting gun shops in the state, Duncan's Outdoor Shop. They have something I've never heard of-- in a gun shop-- a 200 yard underground range. Very hospitable people there.

Saginaw-- a journey into family history. We went to the site of the old Saginaw Steering Gear Plant 2, known simply as The Gun Plant. Mom and Dad worked there in 1944 and 45 making M1919A4 Brownings and M1 Carbines. The plant is gone, razed in, I think, the mid 2000's. It was interesting though to stand at the gate that Mom and Dad went through every morning for two years, and go down the street where they lived in those days.

Edit, one week to the day after visiting the gun plant we had a chance to shoot a Saginaw-made M1919A4 Browning. Not our first time pulling the weirdly-located trigger on one of these and hopefully not the last..... that thing is a little box of destruction. Browning machine guns figured prominently at Guadalcanal which actions resulted in the awarding of several Congressional Medals of Honor.

Edit 2! Exactly one week later and there we are working on and shooting another semi-auto Browning 1919! Providence has been smiling upon us.

I had a chance to examine a friend's CMP 1911A1 over the weekend. I will get some pics up, but it's a late WWII Colt with a WWI slide. When I shot it the light was just right and I could see that narrow little front sight blade perfectly and get a very refined sight pic. On steel at about 20Y I was pleasantly surprised to see that I have made about a 4" group. That was standing and with no definite point of aim-- I might have to go back and see what it will really do. Not braggin' on 4" at 20 but it's not awful, either. Function in three mags was 100%.

It was shot with appropriate ammo, EC43. This is USGI with steel cases and copper-washed steel jacketed bullets. Lots of people don't know we made it that way but we sure did-- also in .30 Carbine. In .45 they made, no crap, 3 1/2 billion-with-a-"B" of them. Funny we never hear, or at least I never did, of 1911's and Thompsons and grease guns breaking extractors, with all the conventional wisdom about steel cases breaking them. Lots of theories on this. It's not something I dispute but so far in this life the only broken extractors I've seen (not that many, small sample lot) were broken on brass-cased ammo.

The book, Bullets By The Billion, tells the story of this Chrysler plant in Evansville IL (hence "EC") and how they re-tooled to make this ammo and how they had to engineer the processes to do it.

This gun saw some use somewhere and shows it, but it is rock-solid, safe, and "accurate enough". CMP I guess, mixmastered it but did a good job of it. All the safeties work, extractor tension is perfect, and the barrel that's in it goes back a ways with the slide going by the mating surfaces, and-- highly unusual-- it locks up on al three lugs. I've never seen a 1911 do that without me going to considerable trouble to make it so.

In 33+ years in uniform with a 1911 in all but the last few. I saw several that shot much better than they had a right to per conventional wisdom. Loose as a goose, but somehow the moving parts had found their happy place with each other and seemed to fall into that every time, at least as long as you were standing with the gun in a normal orientation. Might not have been as good if in a prone roll over from cover.

I've got a copy of that book, it is amazing what they did.

Overall. As The Tubes would say, “she’s a beauty”. EC43 ammo, note the magnets stuck to the case and the bullet.

Something has changed with Imgur and editing is now wonkified. I got the pics up as best I could and got on with life as opposed to an afternoon of trying to figure out dumb changes.

The WWI slide has the old-style disconnector cut, compared here to a 1919-made 1911(bottom).

The bore is great, and pretty unused.


BBBbill, my gosh, more than three decades? That is an amazing commitment and accomplishment. I really wish I could hear all about it. I realize thought that it can hardly be described to one who has not lived it. Like a kid asking an astronaut, "what's it like"? Anyway-- thank you.

Edit: my opinion as to why disconnector cuts are different in the really old ones. I mean, this is just what makes sense to me as a machinist. The current method which as far as I know goes back to before WWII, is to make the cut with a key cutter. It gives a nice half-moon cutout, which easily cams the disconnector down when the slide moves to the rear, or in disassembly, forward. It's one operation with what is probably an off-the-shelf cutter although it might need a mod so the shank doesn't bump into the bottom of the slide-- I never really examined it that closely. The old way, it's multiple ops-- drill the hole on a drill fixture, mill one side with an end mill in a fixture. The fixture probably had a pull pin where after milling the first side you would pull it, rock the fixture the other way, and mill again. Or maybe, two distinct fixtures and separate operations. I short, a lot more work. The change smoothed up the material flow, reduced scrap, and it maybe even gives better function. Plus, is those (old) days, I'm sure using small end mills was avoided when possible. Small cutters now are much better than they were then just in terms of their form-- cutting edge angles, flute helix, all that.

The wife and I attended a police conference over the w/e. Part of it is a vendor's area, like a mini-mini SHOT Show, but the who's-who of the firearms industry, many or at least some, of the big names are there. The current line of Walther pistol, the quality is not in question, but some are 'rather large'. Some have really good trigger pulls, light and crisp, with no safety--other than a trigger safety. So, you can't pull the trigger until you pull the trigger. Not that that system is of no use, in fact if every pistol had it I would not beef it, but I definitely appreciate an external safety of some sort.

If the above makes me sound anti-Glock I'm not, in fact we both took a Glock class while there. They are so ubiquitous that it behooves one to be familiar. I've been to the "official" Armorer class, this was not that. It was put on by small group of officers who together have about eight decades of experience with Glocks. The primary instructor manages a fleet of 500 of them and has done so for going on twenty years, so she knows a thing or two.

What does all this have to do with 1911's....? Springfield was there with the new Prodigy, a high-cap 1911. At first glance it looked fine to me, but that's not "experience". A couple friends on the LE side will be getting them for T&E so I will probably get a chance to pull some info and maybe range time out of their arrangement. I'll just say that it seems pretty clear that SA felt pressed to get a piece of that delicious Staccato pie. Can't blame them for that I reckon.

Had dinner with one of the guest speakers, a prominent guy in LAPD, where Staccato has quite a following and there are many of them in LAPD holsters. Eighteen months ago I had a chance to get a Staccato with an LAPD s/n and I didn't go for it, kinda wish I had now. Not that I'm a huge fan or would use it, and I most certainly would not carry it, but a 1911 guy maybe ought to have one. Oh well, I have an old STI, that will hold me I guess. Staccato sure has been adept and getting the name out there, should be interesting to see how the Prodigy compares.

Then there's the S&W method of milling the disco cut which seems even simpler/better to my inexpert eye.