I had to take a few guns to the range this weekend to function test them or sight them in before cleaning them and tucking them away. I had to test fire the Beretta 92, another PSA JAKL I picked up, and, most interestingly, the Sig P320.

The SIG P320 was a delight to shoot. The particular model I was shooting had a polymer frame but had tungsten weights installed in the grip area to give it some weight and heft. And, interestingly, it really did make a different. The pistol was quite accurate and very pleasant to shoot. But, then again, how often do you hear anything bad about SIG stuff? (Except for the usual charge levied against any made-by-blue-eyed-blond-haired-people firearm – price)

The Berttas shot just fine, so they’ll get cleaned up and tucked away. I need to play with the JAKL a bit more. But that SIG….well, I did what I needed to do but now I just want to shoot it some more for fun. Its a very nice gun.

I also need to load up some more .338 Lapua ammo and take the Ruger out for some more work. I fired 40 rounds through it last month to get the gun sighted in and, using bog-common components, it held about 1MOA. But I want better and need to source some Gold Medal Match Magnum primers. I shot 225 gr. hunting bullets which is fine, but I have some 250 gr. Horndy SST bullets sitting here and I expect better results with them.

I suppose at some point I should go play with my hunting PTR to make sure everything is just the way it needs to be. I’d like to go hunting more than a handful of times thus year, but work schedule always seems to have something to say about that.

I have a Springfield Armory 1911 (my only 1911, in fact) that I bought used many years ago….I’m talking back in the late 80’s or very early 90’s. It has a Baughman ramp front, target rear, full length recoil guide, extended beavertail, adjustable trigger, and at least another half dozen modifications. The previous owner had all this work done because when SA made this thing you couldn’t buy the gun with all those options. Back when this gun was born your only real choices were if you wanted a parkerized or blued copy of a GI 1911. Maybe there were one or two options available like different sights but that was about it. If you wanted all those other bells and whistles…well…you had a trip to the gunsmith in front of you.

Nowadays you can just pull a SKU out of SA’s catalog and get a pistol with even more and better options right off the shelf.

I mention this because I was re-reading an old blog post of Tam’s about the cost of custom guns. The things that she put into a custom .300 Blackout rifle are things that are, to a degree, now available ‘off the rack’ from several different makers. Notably, my Ruger .300 Blackout comes with a threaded barrel, an adjustable trigger, can take detachable magazines, has a good stock, a solid attachment point for optics, optics-ready bolt handle, and a few other features that, for the time period she as doing this in, were ‘custom’.( Her .300, though, is much prettier than my .300 . I wonder if she still has it.)

But what those two guns have in common is that the features we wanted, insisted on actually, eventually wound up becoming ‘standard features’. Other good examples would be pistols from the factory now coming with optic cuts already done. The sudden craze of every rifle barrel from a manufacturer being threaded. Adjustable triggers on everything. It goes on and on.

It used to be that a bespoke boomtoy was so personal and unique an item that it was practically a persons ‘signature’. Elmer Keith’s No. 5, Patton’s Ivory handled SAA, Diaz’ Winchesters, etc. And now, someone somewhere is making exact copies or at least guns that have all those features. Even my BBQ gun isn;t really unique since its a cataloged item with machine engraving…rare, yes. Custom? Absolutely not.

I have one bespoke gun and it’s story is very similar to Tam’s – I bought a bunch of clapped out Mausers from Sarco back in the late 80’s, threw away the stocks and barrels, and cleaned up the actions. I bought a brand new 29″ stepped military barrel in 7×57, put it in, added some Williams receiver sights, blued the whole mess, dropped it into an old commercial Mauser stock of ancient vintage, and made an ugly rifle that I thought was perfect. It doesn’t win any beauty contests but I love shooting it.

I’m not sure you can call anything made of drop-in parts custom, but the most recent might-be-custom gun I have is the Glock I put together a few months back. There isn’t a single thing thats ‘custom’ about it except for the combination of parts which is probably not terribly unusual. But, it’s certainly custom to me.

Custom guns never really ‘pay off’ in the long run. You’ll never get your money out of them, but you do get a higher degree of satisfaction and pleasure, I think, than you would have gotten out of the plain Jane version that was ‘off the rack’.

But it is interesting to note that what used to be considered custom years ago is now, to a degree, mainstream…or at least avaialble on a non-custom basis.

Aesop over at Raconteurs Report throws out a Chuck Norris-like joke about yesterdays event…

A sniper shoots at Trumps head, and its the snipers head that explodes.

Thats actually a pretty good one.

I put yesterday’s events behind me because a) the next President is still alive (see what I did there?) and b) I’m the pebble in this avalanche…nothing for me to see or do.

So…off to the range.

The Mini-14 has always had a reputation for AK-like accuracy. That is to say, there’s a reason the A-Team never hit anything. The Mini-14 was notoriously inaccurate and that was that…go buy an AR.

Ruger did a bit of product improving to the Mini-14 a while back and the reports are that they are now much more accurate than they used to be. I took this re-issue of the GB model to the range today to sight it in and see what sorta accuracy could be wrung out of it. TL;DR – much better accuracy than the old models.

I’m getting to be an old man, and open rifle sights aren’t as ideal for me to use as they used to be. Nonetheless, at 50 yards I could keep everything in a group about the size of a playing card. At 100 yards it was easy enough to ring the steel plates. I think with nicer sights the gun would benefit greatly. And, yes, I’m aware of the aftermarket options. In reality, I’ll probably throw a little red dot on this thing and go with that.

Considering I have something like three dozen AR’s tucked away around here it’s a curiosity to have anything in .223 that isn’t an AR. But you know what? Everyone has an AR, and they’re all over the place…..sometimes I like to try other stuff. So…the Mini-14, the JAKL, the BRN-180, and at some point probably an AUG and whatever .223 PTR is gonna come out with. And I’ve been toying with the idea of a 5.56 AK as well, although that itch is scratched by the JAKL.

The Mini-14 is about as rugged as any other Ruger gun, which is pretty impressive….good thing because Ruger, unless things have changed recently, has been notorious for not sending parts out to customers who wanted them. If a part needed replacing you had to send your gun to them, they weren’t just gonna drop a new bolt or trigger in the mail to you.

With the demise of Tapco (which, in itself, wasn’t necessarily a bad thing) the one trustworthy aftermarket magazine (Intrafuse Gen II Mini-14 mag) on the market is now unavailable. And, honestly, I’ve had some negative experiences with recent factory Ruger 30-rd mags although the 20’s seem to work just fine.

By the by, I have the Mini-14 and the other non-AR’s because I have enough AR’s for my preparedness needs and thus I can move on to having some ‘fun’ guns. But, for a .223 carbine for the sake of preparedness? You’d be a fool to go with anything other than an AR. Price, logistics, adaptability….can’t beat the AR.

So after finally getting a red dot sight (RDS) on one of my Glocks, it seemed like an interesting thing to compare it against a regular iron sighted Glock in a series of timed drills using my Mantis dry fire kit.

Before we get into it, let me tell you…guys, you really should have one of these kits. I have it set up in my living room and I can practice my draw-from-concealment-and-fire-one-shot drills. But more importantly, I don’t have to think I’m improving and by how much…there’s metrics – exact numbers – to tell me how if I’m improving. And I can do this in my living room when its -15 degrees outside or 105 degrees outside and I don’t wanna head to the range. This thing is awesome for honing skills and evaluating performance. I wish I’d gotten it years ago. I promise, youre not gonna regret it.

Anyway…..

Doing the ‘draw and shoot’ drills, my time with the RDS was usually a good .35-.50 second faster than with open sights. Accuracy was a little better also.

What I learned rather quickly was that you don’t bring the gun up and look for the dot, rather you bring the gun up and line up the sights and that lets you have the dot right where it needs to be. Still taking some getting used to, but there are measurable positive results.

This time, though, not another 9mm.

Something a little different from the run-of-the-mill cataloged pistol…if you know what to look for.

ETA: Its a Ruger #1740…stainless GP-100 .357 Mag with full underlug five-inch barrel. I am a firm believer that a 5″ barrel revolver is the ideal length. Not too long and front heavy like a 6″, and not so rear-heavy and stubby as a 4″. As a general-purpose do-it-all length, I find the 5″ to be ideal. Finding holsters however…….

I had decided I was gonna go ahead and tweak out one of my Glocks, and I pretyy much did everything I wanted to it. However, the last item..the final piece…came together today. I didn’t want a ‘match’ trigger for a pistol that is ostensibly for a more informal use. The new Glock Performance Trigger seemed to be getting good reviews, and the fact that it’s made by the people who made the gun itself carries a bit of weight.

So, the trigger arrived today. Took about ten minutes for me to put it in because it has been a while since I did enough of a detail strip on a Glock to have to drive a couple pins. But, its pretty simple…punch out the pins, remove the locking block, remove the slide release, remove the trigger, replace trigger, reassemble. Is the trigger better? Quite. The trigger pull doesn’t feel different, but the way it breaks and moves is much improved. It has far less stacking and creep. It’s rather like a two-stage military trigger…takeup and then break, with greatly reduced travel. I rather like it. Is it worth a hundred bucks? I don’t know… I mean, how good a trigger do you need for minute-of-bad-guy at seven yards? But then again, on the two-way shooting range I’ll take whatever unfair advantage I can  give myself.

Just dry firing right now, but I’ll take it out this weekend and put it through its paces. So far, though….thumbs up.

ETA: Just occurred to me that this pistol is just a muzzle comp away from being a Roland Special variant.