Tag Archives: guns

Nuts with bolts

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The $199.99 upper I ordered from PSA to go with my $60 lower arrived yesterday. As I was looking it over, I noticed that they apparently use M16-style bolt carriers. That is to say, the back of the bolt carrier is not ‘cut out’ like on an AR-15 bolt. You know what, its easier to just show you…

I recall way back in the 80’s/90’s, the prevailing wisdom was that any machinegun part, regardless of whether it actually made the gun full auto or not, was a no-no. Apparently nowadays an M16 bolt in your AR is not a cause for concern (perhaps it never was, but with ATFE they tend to write their own rules depending on how the coffee was that morning). The M16 bolt by itself doesn’t make your gun full-auto…you still need a handful of other parts and the magic little DIAS.

I have no love for ATFE. (Heck, I don’t even have a ‘but I don’t DISLIKE you’ for them.) But I also have no love for spending years in a federal rock-hockey farm. To avoid any ‘grey area’ issues I usually just keep far away from things that might cause problems with overzealous or ignorant enforcement types. (And, over the years, I have had plenty of people try to offer me parking lot deals on things that were definitely of a shady nature.)

So, even though apparently its cool to have the M16 bolt in the AR, it still kinda caught my eye.

Anyway, regardless of M16 bolt legalities or non-legalities, the upper showed up yesterday and I now have a little AR that I am into $260. And I can remember back when Obama took office seeing someone in my shop sell an AR to some panic-buying kid for almost two grand. How the market changes!

Estate sale

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Minding my own business…not hurting anyone…just trying to go about my life without interference and pain. And I get a text message:

“Estate sale near your place with lots of gun stuff…” and an address.

Okay, maybe it’s worth checking out. Hop on my bike and ride over.

So here’s how you know the decedent was a serious gun guy.. he had cleared out his dining room, shored up the floor, and parked a four foot bed lathe and a milling machine in there and made it his machine shop. I got there in time to see a guy buy it for a ridiculously low amount of money and then come back with a flatbed and a forklift.

Indeed there was a  lot of reloading stuff…Berger bullets, Lapua brass, etc, etc. Heck there was freaking quiver of Dewey cleaning rods. I started chatting with the gal selling it all. Her dad passed away in February. Turns out, it was someone I knew. I hadnt seen him in about a year and his diabetes finally got the better of him, but not before cruelly making him a semi-blind, fuzzy-headed, nursing home candidate.

Since it was someone I knew, I had a good idea of what would and would not be there. Lotsa 6.5 stuff, plenty of .223, and lots of expensive reloading gear. The kids were up from Florida and wanted to get everything sold and outta there. Pretty much the perfect storm of motivation to allow one to make some…somewhat profitable…deals. So..yeah..I bought it all. Some of it I’m keeping, like the Lapua brass and a fw of the micrometer dies, the rest Im going to try and flip for quick cash.

And I gotta buy some beer for the guy who turned me onto the deal.

And I was trying so hard to not spend money this week. Mmmph.

Achievement unlocked: Bargain AR

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Last week I made the mistake of stopping in a gun store and found a complete PSA AR-15 lower, w/ Magpul furniture for $65. Well, shoot….wouldn’t you have snagged it too? There was some confusion on the paperwork and I complained a bit and they knocked $5 off the price. So, complete Magpul’s PSA lower for $60.

Then today, PSA sends me an email about this. A complete upper, with bolt carrier group and charging handle, for $199 delivered. Ok, that’s not gonna be easy to beat. Order up.

Final total? A brand new, ‘economy’ tier AR15 for $260.

What a… (wait for it)….bARgain.

:::drops the mic:::

They won’t make that mistake twice

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The preening for the 2020 election has begun. And, as usual, I look at it from a gun perspective.

After Trump won when virtually everyone expected a Clinton  victory, gun manufacturers were loaded down with inventory hey had produced in the run up to the election anticipating some crazy panic sales when Clinton won the election. As we know, that didn’t happen and businesses were stuck sitting on mountains of inventory.

Its great to have inventory in reserve to smooth out little bumps or hiccups in the manufacturing  or delivery process. Receiver milling machine #11 broke down and will take two days to fix? No problem, we have enough extras on hand to keep on schedule. Thats how it works.. But if you have too much inventory on hand, like, say, three thousand AR-15s when you normally only keep 200 in the warehouse….well, thats a problem. You’re tying up all that money, paying interest on that money, paying on the warehouse storage, and exposing yourself to the risk that the market could go soft and those rifles become worth a lot less. And…that’s exactly what happened.

You and I saw some amazing sales in the world of guns for the year or so after the election as distributors and manufacturers tried desperately to turn that inventory back into cash. And, half a loaf is better than none, so a lot of guns got sold at a loss or break-even price. Great for you and me, not so great for some of the vendors who got caught without a chair when the music stopped. (Most notably, US Sporting Co which owns Ellet Bros.)

So, what do you think will happen this next election? Gun industry folks will be very, very cautious about getting too deep into inventory or manufacturing. And that means …scarcity. Which means….Econ 101, people..anyone? ..Bueller? Bueller?…it means you will not be seeing $399 AR’s after the election. Even if the the race looks tight, and a panic buying market emerges, I think there will still be a huge reluctance on the part of manufacturers to ‘go long’ on production like they did in 2016.

The practical up shot, as I see it, is this: if there’s gun stuff you want, buy it before the election season really heats up because the usual every-four-years panic buying will occur and with reduced availability of product there will be some higher prices.

 

Scope blues

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Hmmm. I’m trying to find a scope for the big Ruger .338 and I’m hitting walls.

I’m looking for a fixed-power scope somewhere between 15x and 20x, with as big an objective as I can find.

Closest thing I can find is the IOR Valdada 16x-56mm which is pretty much exactly what I’m looking for. Problem is, no one has it in stock. They also make a 16x-42mm but why would I get that when I could get a 56mm?

I prefer a fixed-power scope for the long range stuff because, to me, it’s one less thing to worry about. Yes, I’m sure the so-n-so brand of variable scopes are 100% repeatable and all that. But…I want fixed-power.  Having said that, I’ll get fifteen comments to this post – two will tell me where there is a scope in stock somewhere, the other 13 will be people trying to tell me to get a variable scope. No means no, dude. No variable.

I cant find any other major manufacturer who makes a scope in that 15-20x range, fixed power, with a large objective. I can find a few fixed 10x scopes, and plenty of fixed 25x, 40x, 50x scopes but thats too much magnification. Leupold, Nikokn, Zeiss, etc… nada.

So, it looks like I’m on a unicorn hunt until I find this 16x-56mm. I’m not married to that particular scope, its just that so far I can’t find anything similar.

I can see its gonna be a while before I get this .338 up and shooting.

 

Wayback Machine: Ruger/Smith ad flamewar

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I was talking to someone about Ruger revolvers today and it reminded me of one of the more direct in-your-face advertising tit-for-tats that Ruger and Smith and Wesson have back in the late 80’s/early90’s. Ruger had some print ads out stating that their guns were more stout that the Smiths and you could tell this immediately because the Rugers were thicker, beefier guns.

S&W didn’t take this laying down and came up with an awesome drop-the-mic without using Ruger by name, but those grips left no doubt who the ad was pointed at.

Smith goes on to call out the ‘bulkier’ competitor revolvers and their porous castings. Honestly, I hadn’t seen a flamewar between two bigtime gunmakers like this since then.

And, you can really tell how old this ad is by the fact that it’s two big name manufacturers defending revolvers.

Ah, those were the days.

Moar Ruger

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Annnnd…that happened:

A Ruger SP101 in..wait for it….9mm.

Why? Well, thats a case of numbers trumping tradition. I have a couple 5-shot snubbie Smith and Wessons in .38 Spl and they are, no two ways about it, fine guns. But the Ruger product, while just s tad bulkier, is substantially more rugged. And, when I buy guns for the long haul, ruggedness, durability, and survivability are what I’m after. Love or hate Ruger, the fact is they make extremely durable products.

I’d been wanting to up my snubbie game and was thinking an SP101 in .357 Mag would give me some nice options. But then I started reading and it appears, as I read it, that when you get into stubby barrels and cylinder gaps you wind up losing so much energy that a cartridge like the .38 Spl actually gives worse performance than the 9mm. Head on over to Ballistics By The Inch and you can look at the numbers.

What about .357? Surprisingly, not much difference when fired from the 2″ barrel. The 9mm and the .357 wind up being close enough, in some loadings, as to be virtually identical. However, .357 does it at the expense of significantly more muzzle flash and recoil.

So, since my handgun choices are predicated around 9mm and .38/.357 it seemed to make ballistic sense to go with the 9mm. As an aside, it appears I can also shoot .380 ACP as well using the moon clips. Why I would want to is a bit of a mystery but, hey, the option is there. What I would really love, love, love to see is a ‘convertible’ SP101…something where Ruger sells the gun and a spare cylinder so you can do .38/.357 and 9mm. They used to do it in their single actions, and even a few convertible .30/9mm autos.

Taurus was supposed to have the ‘Triad’ years ago that would shoot 9/38/357 interchangeably but it appears to have been vaporware. Colt experimented with the Survivor which eventually wound up as the Medusa…(or maybe it was the other way around)…and went nowhere. And, of course, Smith experimented with a 9mm (the Model 547) that did not need moon clips to eject. It was supposed to be the vanguard of a line of revolvers meant for rimless cartridges but, again, it never materialized. The relative small run of 547’s that did get made bring crazy prices now. Interesting to note that years later at least two gun companies, Ruger and S&W, brought out revolvers for the rimless 10mm cartridge. (And, come to think of it, while Im not 100% sure I think Taurus or Charter had a .40 snubbie at some point.)

Also, I believe Ruger was supposed to be coming out with a DA revolver that took .45Colt/ACP interchangeably. Not sure where they landed on that one.

Oh, and Charter also experimented with the ‘9mm Federal’ which was basically ‘9mm AutoRim’….a rimmed version of the 9mm cartridge, identical in all respects except for having a rim to facilitate use in revolvers. Why haven’t we heard more about it? Because it would fit and chamber in ancient .38 S&W break open revolvers and turn them into hand grenades when you pulled the trigger. (.38 S&W vs. 9mm = 14,500 psi vs 35,000 psi max pressure) [Similar to the problem with .375 Winchester being dropped into old .38-55 guns.]

The SP101 is also available in .327 Federal, which, ballistically speaking, is quite the cartridge. However, I own nothing in .327 Federal whereas I have a metric buttload of .38, .357, and 9mm handguns. So….no .327 Federal, thanks for asking.

This gun can shoot the 9mm cartridges without the moon clips if necessary, you just have to eject them with a stick. I’ll pick up a dozen more clips just for the sake of future availability. This is a gun that you really don’t anticipate reloading, although I’ll keep a spare clip handy just in case. Which reminds me, it is darn tough finding someone who makes a belt carrier of the non-competition style for 9mm clips.

Off to the range tomorrow to test fire and then go shopping for a holster.

 

Link – Police surplus….M249S?

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Before anyone gets their panties in a bunch and starts chest-beating about how police departments have no need for a semi-auto M249, it is worth noting that this is advertised as new condition and never been unboxed. Likely some department ordered these at the 11th hour to use up their budget so it wouldn’t get cut the following year.

But, if you have $7k to spend….although dealer on a new one is $7700 so its really only a 10% discount.

However, it is also worth pointing out that some departments actually use the M240…most notably, some Texicans.