Tag Archives: guns

Going green

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I am very rapidly becoming a fan of cerokoting (cerocoating? Cerro coating? Screw it..gonna go with ‘coating’) firearms. As you guys may recall, a couple years ago I came into a HiPower that spent some time underwater (fortunately, it was fresh water). The gun had zero finish and pitting that made it look like an aerial map of Utah. Although the coating didn’t do much to fill in the great holes, it did clen the gun up a bit and give it a good look. You can see the story of the Watergun here. I liked the look and, honestly, wh odoesn’t like personalizing a gun in a unique manner that makes that gun truly ‘theirs’? I guarantee you, ain’t no other HiPower out there like the Watergun.

Anyway….

An LMI buddy of mine is going to gunsmith school and, apparently, he’s something of a gunsmithing prodigy. The classes have gotten to the point where he needed a gun to practice coating. He came to me. Did I have a pistol that I would let him experiment on? Mmmmm. Yes. I have some ancient NYPD police revolvers from waaaaaaay back when that have been sitting in the safe for the last twenty years. I got them for around $125-150 back in the 90’s and just kinda tucked ’em away. Pulled one out that had a goodly amount of bluing missing, a bit of pitting here and there, but was otherwise mechanically sound. (Most police guns are cosmetic nightmares but mechanically sound. Why? They get carried and banged around every day but they are almost never actually fired except at the occasional qualification once or twice a year for maybe a hundred rounds a year total. If that. And considering its NYPD it may have been a lot less than a hundred.) I told him to go ahead and see what he could do. I preferred olive drab or forest green and, while youre at it, slap a lanyard swivel on the butt for me, mmmkay?

He came by today and I had completely forgotten about the pistol until he pulled it and its holster out of his coat, shoved it at me and said “Here’s your pistol that you wanted coated.”

Oh. My. Crom. This was exactly…and I mean exactly…what I wanted. A nice dark military OD and a lovely lanyard ring. The trigger, hammer, and cyclinder release were were done in black and contrast nicely against the dark green. A lot of the technical details went over my head, but he toook the gun apart, even removing the barrel, and degreased everything coated it in some sort of vibranium-adamantium based coating, baked it on, and, I am told, the thing is virtually rustproof. It’ll  never be truly 100% rustproof but I can apparently abuse it pretty well and not have it turn into a puddle of oxidized metal. (I just received a text back from the LMI…he says “manganese parked on everything but the cerekote, that is zinc parkerized.” So there you go.)

TPIWWP, so here you go:

That is some seriously sexy lipstick on that pig. Now, to be honest, I gave him this particular gun to use because I had no idea how it would turn out. He’s new at this, right? For all I know the thing was gonna come out looking Jerry Garcia’s shower curtain. But after seeing this I am kicking myself for not giving him my old Ruger Security-Six .357 to do this to. And now, having fallen hopelessly in love with this color and finish, I’m gonna see if I can cajole/bribe/beg him into doing a couple more guns for me. In addition to the coating, he also polished up some rough spots and put that swiveling lanyard ring in there for me. I’ve always had a fondness for those archaic touches like lanyard rings and leather flap holsters.

I’m no photography expert, so I have trouble taking pictures that give accurate representations of an items true color…but its a very, very military olive drab that just looks darn good. Pretty much the exact same green as your average ammo can, in fact. Tell you what, I’d have happily paid some decent money for that level of work. I’d really like to have a Mauser .308 done up like this.  I think my buddy needs to start a portfolio of before-n-after pictures on stuff like this because the work he did was amazing.

Lego guns

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Someone asked me in email about gunsmithing/armorer courses. I thought about it a minute and realized that, for me, while I know enough to (usually) get a gun apart, back together, and diagnose problems, I try to avoid the issue altogether by selecting guns that don’t usually require ‘gunsmithing’.

If the end of the world happens to occur, the odds are pretty good that taking your malfunctioning thundertoy to the services of a competent gunsmith will not be an option. So, whats a survivalist to do? Well, the most obvious thing is – don’t break your gun. Some guns are more prone to breakage than others. But since we can’t always be confident our gun won’t break, the next reasonable step is to have a gun that, if it does break, does not require gunsmithing but rather a simple parts swap. For that, two guns spring to mind – the typical survivalist pairing of a Glock and an AR. (Yes, an AK wins on durability, but when it does break youre going to need a welder, rivets, a mill, or other specialized treatments.)

Starting with the AR, it’s hard to think of any other semiautomatic non-pistol-caliber carbine that doesn’t require the services of a full-service gunsmith to tweak, maintain, or repair (note I am not talking about making a match-grade target AR..I’m talking about just a rack-grade hand-it-to-a-grunt level of AR.). FAL, G3, AK, whatever…most of the common ‘battle rifles/carbines’ require some degree of professional skill to swap a barrel, or fit internal parts that need replacing. The AR is pretty much plug-n-play. I suppose the metric to be used is ‘can I repair this without needing a lathe or a milling machine’? Bad barrel on the AR? Swap the upper or change out the barrel. Broken sear or somesuch? Trigger group parts drop in. There seems to be, in my experience, very little, if anything, that requires hand-fitting or machining to be done to keep, or return, an AR to functionality.

Even more so with the Glock. If you’re building some type of uber Glock for competition, maybe theres things you want to polish or hand-fit. But for running around during a crisis I don’t believe theres a single part on the Glock that wont just drop in and function. To be fair, virtually every modern polymer gun is like that, though. Glock seems to have gotten it right first, though. The antithesis of this would be the 1911 which, with modern machining specs, has improved in terms of drop-in parts but I would bet you money that you could take a stripped frame, order a buttload of Wilson parts from Brownells, put it all together, and it won’t run because something, somewhere needs a bit of stoning or metalwork. Not so with the Glock.

Typical Glock repair kit

Typical 1911 repair kit

So, for me, my need for learning advanced gunsmithing skills is obviated a bit by selecting guns that, broadly, don’t require them…or require so little of them, skillwise, that it isn’t a challenge (or expense) to develop those skills and acquire the tools.

Shotguns? A bit trickier, but I have taken apart a lot of Mossberg 500-series and they’re pretty plug-n-play as well. Not as much as an AR, but Id say they are the least ‘skill intensive’ shotgun in terms of repairs.

When you get into things like hunting/’sniper’ rifles, all bets are off. The Savage series of rifles are probably the easiest to deal with since you can headspace and remove/install barrels with simple tools and not need a mill/lathe operation.

By the by, even if youre not a tinfoil-hat-type like yours truly, there are still some scenarios where you won’t have gunsmithing as an option even without bombs falling and boogaloos in the street.

Under a Biden administration, for example, your AR or FAL becomes a ‘Turn them all in‘ sort of item and then your option of taking it to a gunsmith is about as viable as taking your unregistered machinegun in for a tune up. You’re either stuck with a broken gun, have to find an ‘underground’ gunsmith, or DIY. And DIY is a lot easier with a Lego gun.

Whatever you get for that upcoming uncertain future, keep in mind how easy (or not) it will be to repair and maintain. For now, I’d say the Glock and AR kinda sit at the top.

Wheat in the chaff..or..still deals to be had

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Ok, so after being rather disappointed over a lovely PTRGI on ArmsList that was basically cheese in a trap, I went back to the well for another sip.

  • S&W M&P-15, new in box (And, indeed, the bolt face and inside of the receiver supports that)
  • Magpul BUIS
  • 360 rounds of assorted ammo..some steel, some brass, some match
  • (4) 30-rd Pmags and a cute 40-rd Pmag
  • and…..no paperwork. A free-range AR.

The punchline? $650. In the current market I’m factoring the ammo at $0.40/rd and the mags at $10. So $194 for the accessories That makes my allocated basis for the gun about $450~… but the no paperwork part? That has an intangible value. This ias pretty much the exact sort of deal a paranoid survivalist like myself wants – new guun, reasonable manufacturer, accessories, ammo, decent price, no paper trail. 10/10.

And, since TPIWWP….

Do not be lonely, little AR….your brethren are coming soon……very soon….

Election years are always expensive…Pt. 3

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Election years are always expensive…Pt. 1
Election years are always expensive…Pt. 2

I have, literally, a bucket of stripped AR lowers.
I have hundreds of AR mags.
I have, at least, a half dozen complete AR’s scattered about.
I have a few ‘investment’ AR’s sitting around as well.

All that and I still wound up dropping some coin and picking up another five AR’s the other day.

I am so vulnerable to my own second-guessing….

Life goals

Not an expert

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When it comes to guns, I’m not ashamed to say that I think of myself as a bit of an expert on most things…history, function, disassembly, etc. Oh, sure, you bring out something esoteric enough like a Gewehr41 or a Rast-Gasser and you’ll probably stump me on something like disassembly, but by and large I’d say I’m pretty darn good.

At least, that’s what I thought until working on the rather plebian Beretta 92. As a good survivalist, I figured I should have at least a couple 92’s laying around since the military uses/used them and therefore there’d be surplus (or ‘liberated’) parts and mags aplenty. But, I don’t like manual safeties on a double-action gun. There’s no need, since the gun is DA and usually carried with the hammer down.

Beretta eventually recognized this and has a variant, designated as ‘G’, where the safety acts as a decocker only. (Much like my dear Ruger P95DC pistols.) Beretta makes the conversion available as a kit for about $55. So..I ordered one. Step one was to disassemble the existing safety from the slide. I did so and as I looked at the back of the slide I saw this:

Well, bloody hell….the slide is cracked. And I kicked myself for not inspecting the gun more closely when I bought it years ago. Alright, let’s go to Beretta’s customer service and see if we can wheedle a new slide from them since this one clearly is broken. Their reply:

It’s supposed to look like that. I have to give kudos to Beretta CS for a) replying within 48 hrs and b) not calling me a dumbass.

I’ve taken apart a lot of pistols in my years of gun fondling. You look at the back of a 1911, Glock, Sig, HiPower, Ruger, etc, etc, and that hole for the firing pin is always solid. I’ve never seen a relief cut in that area of a pistol. But..I’m not a machinist, not a mechanical engineer, and not a metals stress expert. So, if the guys at Beretta, who have been making boomtoys for several hundred years, say “No, no, dude….it’s supposed to look like that”, well, I guess that’ll have to do.

But….it sure looked like a stress fracture to me.

Clearly I need more time tinkering with Berettas. But it was a bit sobering to realize that, maybe I don’t know it all after all. Maybe I should have read the warning printed on the slide:

By the way, the G conversion was a breeze if you ignore Beretta’s incredibly complicated online instructions and just YouTube your way through it. (ProTip: watch video, watch video again.) Took me about ten minutes to get it installed and it works like a champ. A lot of folks carry guns like this with the hammer down and safety off, which is reasonably safe. However, those same people are usually concerned about the safety accidentally becoming engaged as the gun is bumped around or brushed up against things…last thing you want is to grab your gun, bring it up, pull the trigger and have nothing happen because the safety you left in the off position has somehow engaged itself. This G conversion prevents that.

.357 ammo security

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I have a lovely stainless GP-100 that I consider to be my ‘primary’ .357. That is to say, of the half a dozen in the safe it is the one I take with me nine times out of ten when I need a .357. I got it from Caleb  years ago after he stopped using it for competition. Its been slicked up a bit and shoots rather nicely. (Trivia: serial number ends in 1337 so…its my Leet gun)

A few weeks ago I stumbled into a decent deal on 2600 158gr. JHP bullets. Before I load up 2600 rounds of .357 I’d like to find a load that shoots well in my gun. So, off to the range today to try out a few loads. Best results? 8.0 grains of the old favorite, Unique. On a side note, I find Unique to be the most versatile powder for reloading…if you have a can of Unique you can load pretty much any pistol cartridge.

Anyway, the 8.0 of Unique shot controlably , ejected cases cleanly, and shot a lovely group in the 2″ orange sticker at 25 yards. Seems like a winner. So…next step is to set up the DIllon RL1050, run some brass through the tumbler, fill up a buncha primer pickup tubes, and get ready to crank out an apocalypse worth of .357.

I stuff fifty rounds into some cardboard boxes I got from repackbox.com. Theyre smaller than the usual plastic boxes which lets me pack more into an ammo can. I have them for pistol calibers and rifle calibers…pretty handy.

Oh, and why .357? After all, I have a lovely (and, it appears, rare) Ruger .44 Mag. Well, the .44 Mag is for when I’m out wandering the boonies and am worried about the four-legged. A .44 Mag is a bit of overkill for the two-legged and I really prefer the controlability of the .357 vs the .44 for fast DA shooting. And I doubt very highly that there are any two-legged that would fall to a .44 that wouldn’t fall just as DRT to a .357. ( I know, some retired badge will chime in about how when he was a rookie they encountered some drugged up monster that took five 12 ga. slugs to the head and they finally had to put him down with a Carl Gustaf.) But for normal day-to-day situations, I think the .357 is about as good as you can get in a revolver cartridge for when you’re carrying a full-size pistol.

 

Power tool

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I had to buy a cordless power drill today. I’ve used a corded power drill forever but I really wanted the convenience of a cordless. Anyway, the package I bought came with, among other things, this little tool bag:

Now, that tool bag is about one foot wide, eight inches deep, and about eight inches tall. It’s a small bag…really about the size of a lunch box. I was looking at it and started wondering…..hmmm. Let’s see if this will work.

It’s been a long day of being in the office and as 6pm rolls around you hear the zombie hordes marching down the street, with their black hoodies and baseball bats. You reach into the bottom desk drawer and next to the bottle of Old Grandad you have this little tool bag that you unzip. And….

Remove the contents….

And you’re position on the food chain just shifted upwards in a dramatic way….

And there’s still room in the bag, but barely, for two 50-rd boxes of ammo, a good light, and a couple more mags.

I like that little Ruger PC Charger a lot. I’ve wanted a little packaway carbine for years and the Uzi was the first iteration of it, the PC Carbine was the second, but this little charge absolutely takes the prize for compactness. Not my first choice for Omega Man-ing my way out of a tight spot, but a far, far, better choice than just a pistol. And it fits in a tiny little gear bag. How adorable is that?

If you run the Glock 9mm (or .40 as Ruger seems to be bringing out a .40 version soon) you really need to look into getting one of these guns. Right now they’re about as hard to find as an honest politician, but very worth it IMHO. Figure close to $600-650 for the gun and another $200 for the wrist brace.

It’s funny…every time I pull the PC Charger out of its storage container and assemble it I have this scene from the old “Lost In Space” movie play, unbidden, in my head.

———————-
If you find this entertaining, please consider ….

Scenes from a gun shop

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Locus: Bob Wards & Son. Regional outdoors chain.
Me: Can I see that AR in the rack please?
Him: Here you go. [hands me carbine]
Me: [Looking at tag] I don’t see a price on this. How much is it?
Him: Hang on, I have to go back and ask. [Leaves and comes back]
Him: $2600*
Me: You guys don’t put the prices on there?
Him. We’re not putting prices on any of the tags right now.
Me: Because the prices are constantly changing?
Him: Well…Yeah.

I want you to roll that thought over in your mind for a second. Seriously…think about the possible (although possibly unlikely) implications of that sort of pricing. In retail, the price you charge is not always based on some factor of the price you paid…its based on the price to replace what you sell. If I bought an AR for $400 last year, and I normally sell for, say, 25% over, I sell that AR for $500. And when I sell it, I order the replacement for $400. Cut to today: I paid $400 a year ago, but replacing it will cost me $1000. So do I sell it for $500? No, of course not, I have to sell it with a price that reflects the fact the next one will cost me $1000. And if I don’t know, with reasonable certainty, what the next one will cost me…well…then I can’t really be sure what to charge. Saw this at the gold and silver shop earlier this year.

Reminds me of the hyperinflation stories where prices were changed every hour or so to reflect the devaluing currency. In this case, it’s to reflect perceived availability.

So what you’re seeing is a level of uncertainty that is so pronounced that a middlin’-sized retailer is willing to look like a jerk and not put prices on stuff. That should give you pause to think about what you need (or want) and how willing you are to do what it takes to get it (assuming you don’t already  have it).

Are ARs and ammo available? Of course they are. Everything is available to you for the right price. If you have enough money you can buy yourself a nuclear artillery shell and go hold a city hostage somewhere…with the proper amount of greenbacks there is nothing you can’t buy. Guns and ammo just aren’t available at prices you want to pay.

Between Covid, ‘race discussions’, and an upcoming election, this is the worst possible time in a long while to try and stock up on guns and ammo. This is why, since the begining of this blog those many years ago, I have always harped on you to buy the things that will be easiest to render scarce.

My point, if there is one, is that even in a relatively bucolic minimally-affected place like Montana, the fallout of ‘the Covid tax’ and it’s attendant effect on the various markets (food, guns, metals, etc) cannot be avoided. Succinctly, unless you are willing to part with a rather larger dose of cash than you normally would, you are not going to be getting your boogaloo guns & ammo anytime soon. So I hope you already had them.

* = Colt-made modern repro of XM177. This is why Colt is not a going concern, folks.

Annus horribilis

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(Not to be confused with anus horribilus, which is the Latin name for Nancy Pelosi.)

One thing about running around all the time yelling that the sky is falling is that, on a long enough timeline, eventually you’ll be right.

This year has been an unholy trifecta of factors that make the guns and ammo market a bit…challenging…right now.

  • Pandemic
  • Presidential election
  • Race riots

Other than an invasion by Communists or the election of a Democrat President (But I repeat myself), I don’t think you could do much more to generate demand.

I keep an eye on the gun and ammo markets and right now it’s readily apparent that prices and availability have changed dramatically from what they were at the beginning of the year. This is, pretty much, one of the worst times to get into guns and shooting in recent memory.

Remember the gun-glut hangover after Trump got elected? You could practically get an AR free with an oil change at most garages. Rather a different story now.

What I’ve seen so far is availability of guns, when they’re not out of stock, is light and prices are a solid 25-50% higher than what they were at the beginning of the year. Ammo is, especially, a bit difficult and pricey. The sweet deal on 9mm I got in January is now showing up at twice the price, when available, for the same ammo.

.22 ammo, which was starting to amke a bit of a comeback, is drifting back into unobtainium country.

But…after my years and years of non-stop Chicken Little-ing about looming gun bans, you’ve gotten your stuff squared away, right? You’ve got your thousands of rounds of pistol and carbine ammo, the couple dozen magazines, the spare and backup redundancy guns…right? Right?

I’ve been at this sort of thing for almost thirty years so I’ve had time to do it gradually…an AR here, a case of mags there, a couple cases of ammo here…that sort of thing. Stretch that out over thirty years and it isn’t difficult at all. But if you’re new to the game, or if you’ve been a tad lackadaisical in getting stocked up….well….you’ve got two choices right now and neither one is great: don’t buy it or buy it at higher prices.

“My VA check is late”, “I need new tires”, “The wife wants to go visit her sister”, “Rammstein is playing at the stadium”….whatever excuse you’ve used in the past to justify why you didn’t spend the $100 on mags, the $300 on ammo, the $750 on the AR…..they all seem a little small right now, don’t they?

Sure, life happens….hot water heaters fail, alternators crap out, plumbing does it’s thing….BT;DT…but those events eventually get resolved and you’re back to wandering around with an extra $20 in your pocket. And it’s those times when you’re caught up on bills, the truck is running, the job is secure, and all seems calm in your world when you think to yourself “Y’know, instead of buying that XM radio for the truck, I think I’d rather have a case of .223 in the basement.”

So, I hope all of you have, at some point, made the grown up choices to exercise a little restraint and hold off on the ‘fun’ purchases to fund the ‘just in case’ purchases. Right now, I can walk by the depleted ammo shelves at Cabela’s and the sparsely populated gun racks at Sportsmans Warehouse and be…unconcerned. And that feeling of being unconcerned makes the little sacrifices in the past worth it.

Box O’ Joy

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This is what addiction looks like. Three Ruger PC carbines (the old style) and a half dozen P95DC pistols to match with the carbines.

It’s also a decent example of what will fit in the Boyt51 rifle cases that are for sale at the local CostCo right now. This is the sort of package that goes up in the rafters or down in floorboards to sit quietly for decades until needed. More importantly this frees up a bunch of needed space in the gun safe. I know that the fact that two of those pistols are blued versus the other four that are not is pegging the OCD meter on some of you..have no fear. I swapped them out after this picture was taken for a couple stainless ones that were in the safe.