30 October 2020
Enjoying The Exploration
The Sigma's sear rides in a slot in a pivoting arm. The trigger bar pushes rearward on this arm which causes it to pivot, driving the sear against the sear block. This pushes the sear backwards, which pulls the striker back to firing position and then down, releasing the striker. There are three springs that return it to the rest position.
Two push the sear to the end of the arm, this will push the sear to the rest position by sliding back against the sear block. One is on the pivot pin and pushes it back to its rest position directly.
The two that push are nested inside each other.
If you delete the smaller, inner, spring; there's nothing to hold the outer spring in place.
If you delete the larger, outer, spring; and drop the slide from slide lock, the sear doesn't catch the striker.
This is bad.
The spring on the arm axis doesn't appear to affect if the sear can catch the striker. Its sole purpose appears to be to make the trigger pull more "New York," which was the style at the time for plastic fantastics.
Compared to the two other Sigmas here, the trigger bar on the 9mm gun does not pull the sear all the way down to its stops. But the other two both have Apex triggers in them, that might be all the difference in the word.
The lack of movement might also explain why the previous owner had been grinding on the sear stud.
With many guns, this is less of a problem. You just order a replacement from the vast stocks of spares made to service the guns over their decades of production or the extensive aftermarket support base.
Um... About that. There isn't such a supply.
So if we find that the sear won't reset under actual firing conditions, this pistol is a paperweight. With the trigger's refusal to actually trip the sear when I bought it, it was a paperweight before too.
Which is a bummer, but it's been fun seeing if I can fix it.
I'm not blaming the gun shop. They really can't test fire every gun that comes in the door and the Sigma is famous for a shitty trigger.
29 October 2020
Fixing What The Other Guy Broke
The "new" Sigma's trigger would, occasionally, run all the way against the over-travel stop and then not trip the sear.
¡No es bueno!
So I endeavored to figure out why.
Someone had already been grinding on the sear engagement surface of the striker.It wasn't even square with the sear.
SIGH.
Herr Dremel, we meet again.
So I took apart The Lovely Harvey's SW357V and FuzzyGeff's SW40F and measured the protrusion carefully.
There were three springs on the sear return instead of two like Harvey and FG.
So I took my own dremel to the striker and got it square and flat with the sear.
Removed the "extra" spring.
Polished up where the sear grinds against the sear block.
Now the sear trips where it's supposed to instead of nearly too late.
It's also down from 10 to 8.25 lb.
UPDATE:
Trial and error! That third spring is needed to shove the sear back up when the slide is banging hard, like when you use the slide stop to release the slide...
Re-nesting the two springs seems to have cured the sear not dropping far enough.
UPDATE 2:
It's possible that the previous gunsmithing effort is not reversible by me. I'm prepared for that to be true, and there's hardly any parts for Sigmas out there. We'll see when I get it to the range.
Channeling My Inner Willard
Marv decided to shop the Glock blue-label sale. I tagged along.
He ended up with a brand new LEO version M&P 45C.
I couldn't resist the barely over $200 price on a Sigma SW9V
Bog standard, two-tone with regular old 3-dot sights. The trigger breaks at a crisp 10 lb. and with the trigger nearly bottomed out. I think I need to get that fixed with some Apex Tactical love.
The magazines were not meant for mere mortals such as I! They hold SIXTEEN rounds of deadly 9mm!
It even came with the box. From the label I've figured out that it's a January 1997 made pistol, not sure if the SKU was an LEO only one or not (120034) but that would explain the stop crime and violence markings on the magazines.
My 1994 made Glock 17 has similar markings.
All Thumbs
I watch a lot of shooting on YouTube.
It appears that shooting with your thumbs pointed downrange has become de rigueur.
I am sure it's taught in every gun-school there is.
Gun-schools I don't have time to go to, let alone pay tuition, travel, lodging and ammo.
Because I have a little 'flick' to the right just as the sear breaks on some guns, I've been dry firing trying to kill it off.
The grip I've been using for years and years doesn't have this 'flick' with 1911's or High-Powers.
It's the plastic and striker guns which frustrate me.
Just for shits and giggles, I tried several variations of the thumbs forward grip, including changing stance just a little bit...
I think I figured it out!
I tried all the problem guns and with my right thumb lower than I thought it should be from watching vids, the 'flick' has disappeared!
Next I need to expend some ammo to confirm.
Ugh.
28 October 2020
Godless Foreign Money
The Twilight: 2000 revival game just sent their version of the backerkit survey.
I'd already paid for the game, I just needed to settle shipping.
139 SEK!
That's Swedish Kroner.
That's $15.74 in the common currency.
I'm getting kind of excited to see the end-product.
CUCV III
The Chevy Colorado, Milspec edition.
Proving, yet again, that there's need for a fucking Jeep that isn't intended to stand up in an environment where a Bradley is getting stressed.
I remember when the Humvee was that vehicle...
Let Them Have It This Time
Merkel may have effectively neutralized the German parliament.
When Germany decides to invade France, because that's what German dictators do, I says we just let it happen this time.
What good has come from stopping them?
Fight to protect Poland, but let 'em have France.
As depleted as France and Germany have let their armies become, it might be a very long and low energy war.
Doing The Math
Florida is reporting a bit of a surge in new Wu Ping Cough cases.
Florida does not track recoveries, so how many of the 790,426 people who've tested positive since March first are still sick? How many of the 48,722 hospitalized since April sixth are still there?
Rice Rabies takes 2-3 weeks to run its course completely, on average, so we'll just say by 21 days the patient is done.
For number of active cases we're going to take the current total, minus the total from 21 days ago then subtract the number of dead.
That's 47,842 people max who are actively sick who've been tested positive.
For the number of people hospitalized it's simply subtracting the 21 days ago number from the current one.
3,239 people, at the most, are still in the hospital.
I say 'max' and 'at the most' because most people shed this with little to no symptoms in two weeks.
Most people who go into the hospital with it either leave in a week, or leave feet first.
The same math also lets us track when the number of cases peaked.
July 27, 2020 was peak COVID in Florida with, at most, 213,022 active cases.
Hospitalization peaked on August 15, 2020 with, at most, 9,597 patients.
What was that whole thing about flattening the curve so hospitals wouldn't be overwhelmed?
They weren't overwhelmed at 9,597; so they're not going to be worse with 3,239.
The number of people in the hospital has been riding pretty steady at 3,300 ± 200 the past month too.
By the way, that surge of new cases? Achieved by doubling or tripling the number of tests. The percentage of new cases against new tests has fallen. 5.48% with today's 75,067 tests.
What was that whole thing about keeping the new cases below 10% of the new tests?
Based on the metrics they told us back in April for this being successfully contained and dealt with, we're there.
Hurray for Florida!
How Many Are Still Around
Four years ago I looked up all of the magazines that Chris Bartocci tested.
Here's an update.
Amend2 30-round: They claim to have distribution, but you cannot buy from their listed dealers..I'm actually surprised at how many are still available. This is a competitive market.
ASC USGI Aluminum: GunMagWarehouse $11.99.
Brownells USGI Aluminum: Brownells $14.99.
C-Products Defense SS: Primary Arms $16.30.
CAA MAG, CDMAG, MAG17: CAA Gear Up $22.00.
Daniel Defense DD Magazine 32-round: Midway $20.00.
D&H Tactical Aluminum: Palmetto State Armory $10.99.
Elite Tactical Systems Group 30-round: GunMagWarehouse $18.99 with coupler, $13.99 without.
FAB Defense E-Lander: Valhalla Tactical $22.50
FAB Defense Ultimag: FAB Defense USA $24.50.
FN SCAR-16 magazine: Brownells $29.00.
Hera Arms H3T: Rainier Arms $11.30 for H3T.
Hexmag HX: Midway $11.99.
Hexmag HX CFC: Midway $16.79.
H&K High Reliability: Florida Armory $99.99 (!!!!!)
H&K 5.56mm Polymer: GunMagWarehouse $25.99.
Lancer AWM: Midway $15.99 for opaque $18.99 for smoke and clear.
Magpul D-60 Drum: Brownells $124.99.
Magpul PMAG M2 MOE: Brownells $12.99.
Magpul PMAG Gen M3: Brownells $14.99.
Mission First Tactical MFT Standard Cap.: Palmetto State Armory $9.99.
MWG IK-510, IK-520: MWG Co. IK-510 $16.75, IK-520 $20.95.
Okay Surefeed: GunMagWarehouse $11.99.
Okay Surefeed E2: GunMagWarehouse $14.95 for black or gray; $16.45 for tan.
ProMag PM-30 Roller-Mag: ProMag Ind. $17.99, $18.99 for steel lined.
SureFire MAG5-60 60-round: Brownells $130.99.
Tango Down ARC 30-round: Tango Down Inc. $16.45.
Troy Battlemag: Brownells $13.99
X-Products X-15 Drum: X-Products $149.44 for solid, $219.99 for skeletonized.
27 October 2020
Slightly Ahead Of One Curve Anyway
I've been trying to find an unredacted copy of:
M855A1 Conformance Testing on Commercial MagazinesATEC Project Number: 2014-DT-ATC-M4CAR-F9278Report Number: ATC-11684
It's the test that the Marines used to decide to make the tan bodied USGI EPM magazine training only and to start buying Magpul's PMAG M3 with window in Medium Coyote Tan.
Since I first noticed and made my post tracking the NSN's, the Coast Guard and the Air Force have joined the Marines in making the PMAG the standard. Even the Army is doing it.
I started buying M3 PMAGs when I first discovered them in the sand color and started playing with Rit Dye, in 2017. I'd officially converted my "go-bag" to M2 or MOE PMAGs in foliage green some time in 2016.
Behind the Marines, but ahead of the Coast Guard.
Why PMAG?
Proven design. Extensively tested by entities who wished to stay with a metal body magazine, including one who had a favored in-house design.
I admit, I'm a bit miffed at the lack of colors in the new generation and the discontinuation of those colors in the previous gen.
It was relentless improvement in the design that led to those colors going away.
With the M3 came a new material. A material that couldn't successfully be dyed in the boutique colors without compromising the mechanical properties of the new materials.
The MOE line was updated to the new material at the same time.
Anticipating the outcry at the loss of the colors, in addition to black, they offered a beige color they called "sand" along with an ad campaign showing all the fun things one could do with Rit Dye.
Don't feel bad if you missed that campaign, I did too. But some internet sleuthing reveals that it did, indeed, happen.
About the time I noticed the two years old sand color, it was being discontinued.
Why?
Lack of sales. I got most of my sand mags for $5 each on clearance from Midway.
If you're going to complain you've been abandoned by a manufacturer, you'd better have bought a ton of the model they're shedding; otherwise you're part of the reason it's gone.
Magpul even stated at the SHOT show they introduced the M3 that the flat dark earth, foliage green and olive drab magazines were not hot sellers and an occasional run was enough for years of supply to the distributors.
Black plastic magazines sell. Notice that everyone has a black one?
I dug around a bit and found that you can get other colors from other maker's plastic magazines.
But are they as good?
The Aberdeen report indicates; maybe not. But I can't find an unredacted copy telling us who each manufacturer is. We know know that "Foxtrot" is Magpul because they mentioned it in an interview.
Rumor has it that "Golf" is Lancer, and they're the most colorful of all.
Alpha, Delta, Echo, Foxtrot, Juliet, Kilo and Lima all had no stoppages that could be attributed to the magazine. Bravo had 8, Charlie had 5, Golf had 23 (!), India had 16 (rumored to be the Army's pet EPM).
But I don't want rumors, I want data.
Availability is another factor. There's magazines I've read about but have never seen in the wild. Looking for some of them online gives discouraging results. If Cheaper Than Yellowcake Dirt is the only vendor selling them, the company making them is probably not very healthy.
Looking right now shows a lot of out of stock for a lot of models, but Midway and Brownell's still have PMAGs.
Again?
California's renewed lockdowns is causing another run on paper products.
Is there nothing that fucking shithole can't fuck up from all the way across the country?
Do You Recognize This Table?
If you recognize this table, do you have the glossary telling us which vendor is which?
The Magpul PMAG M3 is Foxtrot.
I'd love to hear who the others are. Especially Golf and India.
First It Was Bumpstocks
The ATF is rumored to be changing their rulings (shocking, I know) on pistols based on AKs and ARs.
They will no longer be pistols, they will be reclassified into "any other weapon" or AOW.
Pistols with a brace will be reclassified into "short barrel rifles" or SBR.
That's two of the three NFA work-arounds... Your "firearm" is probably going to be reclassified into a short barrel shotgun or AOW next.
There might be a bright side to this.
Armor piercing rifle ammo is currently illegal because of the chowderheads who made pistols out of rifles, thus making rifle ammo pistol ammo, thus making it banned. If a "pistol" made from a rifle is no longer legally a handgun, then the ban on AP rifle ammo cannot be legally sustained.
Warm up your lawyer and sue for 7N6 and M855A1.
26 October 2020
What If
What if the Dems hold their breath and stomp their feet and prevent any new legislation by stuffing a poison pill into everything?
What if that causes no new laws to be passed?
What if that ends all federal funding?
We already have enough laws, we really do need fewer. A stoppage of new law wouldn't be a negative because everyone could solidify how they're dealing with extant law.
Every time they threaten, or manage to accomplish a shut-down of the "non-essential" Feral Gubmint, people start thinking, "if it's non-essential, why do we have it at all?" While they go about their normal, everyday lives.
Eventually it will hit "essential" government, and people will likely be shocked to discover they don't need that level of government either.
On top of being upset about the recalcitrance of these poison pills that have kept the government they actually want from returning.
This, of course, assumes someone on the Republican side of Congress finds a spine and actually stands up and doesn't cave in.
Nine For Mortal Men Doomed To Die
We welcome Justice Amy Barrett to the United States Supreme Court.
A solid 5-4 court in our favor now instead of the 5-4 against we had with RBG.
Cue The Cricket
The Lovely Harvey has a couple of work acquaintances on Facebook who're strong staunch rabid Biden supporters.
Viciously rabid supporters.
The kind of rabid where they advocate for violence by condoning others committing violence against the Hated Bad Orange Man®™.
Since the Hunter Biden laptop scandal...
It's been cat pictures and video game memes.
They've stopped talking about politics altogether.
I wonder if they've searched for, "can I change my early vote?".
Two For Two
I know what kind of an asshole I can be, so I often seek second opinions when I get accused of being the kind of asshole I can be to make sure I wasn't being that kind of asshole when I wasn't trying to be that kind of asshole.
Intentionally being that way and accidentally being that way are different.
So far I'm running 100% "Thag not asshole this time" on a conversation.
Technically, it's three for three. The Lovely Harvey is far more critical of me than the other two people whose opinion I solicited and rarely takes my side when I'm on one of my tears. Her agreeing with me carries a lot of weight.
The Elves Are Not Seamless
I have an app on my phone that lets it communicate with my Canon M50 and do lots of neat things.
But the Magic Elf Box is clunky when it comes to transferring the images off the camera to the phone.
They download to... a folder. Not to a folder I specify, but to where the app thinks they should go.
Now I have to dig around with the file manager looking around for images so I can stab the "share" button and post them to Flickr for your viewing pleasure here.
Ironically, it's easier to pull the card and stuff it in a computer to share the files.
25 October 2020
Mail Order 1911
I needed a pistol for my Halloween costume.
It would be a faux pas to tote a real one at the party.
Amazon has Airsoft.
It's exactly the correct size and except for the 9.4 oz. total weight and the orange tip, it's very hard to tell from a real one.
The slide racks.
The hammer cocks and drops when you pull the trigger.
The safety works.
The grip safety works.
It even has a lanyard ring!
The slide stop is decorative and it doesn't disassemble.
I can definitely see how someone could get their dumb ass shot by the cops brandishing this thing.
I need it for one photo for the costume contest and I'll be done with it.
Need A New Music Player
Not a player, per se, but an app to play my mp3's on my phone.
Google Play was willing to let me flick a switch and see only the music I'd placed on the SD card and the interface was intuitive for me.
Google Play has been disabled and supplanted by YouTube Music (YTM).
I don't like the interface and it won't be limited to showing me just the music I've downloaded.
It's primarily a streaming service, not a music player.
Even worse, I've read reports that once you've "transferred" the music on your SD card to YTM that's it you're done adding to the SD card and having YTM see it. Unless you subscribe for $10 a month, which includes just playing everything via streaming.
Amazon Music appears to work as well as Google Play, so there's that.
VLC gets stuck "parsing" the library on the card at 67%. It's really crunching away at something too because my phone gets very toasty.
Any other suggestions?
Always Late To The Party
They did this last year too. I got my Glock 45 using it.
I am kinda curious about an Austrian based company doing this every year and none of the US based companies are doing it loud enough for me to notice, or anyone else to mention; that is if they are doing it at all.
I Swear I Saw Most Of This At An Antifa Site
The socialist agitators are so amazingly un-self aware about how they echo Fucking Nazis it's not amusing at all.
Wanna Bet They Get Busted While Hunter Walks?
I read that the sex tapes contained on Hunter Biden's laptop are being released.
Reportedly, he refers to a girl he's having sex with as "Nattie."
The name of his, now, 16 year old niece.
In a video that is approximately two years old, making her 14 at the time of the filming.
Making the video child porn.
I have to wonder how many people have this video on their hard drive right now and don't make the connection to his underage niece and it being possession of child porn.
24 October 2020
Yeah Yeah
I really did replace my foliage green furniture with the exact same thing in black.
There's zero functional difference between the colors, this is pure whimsical aesthetics.
Racists Promote Policies Which Help Minorities?
The message to minorities I'm seeing from the Democrats appears to translate to, "Don't vote for Republicans! They will make you work for a living!"
They don't gel it down to two sentences like I have.
The thing that they're desperate to hide from the minority voter is the pure joy of independence that comes with working for a living. Pride.
The Democrats fear that their captive minority voters will discover that when they're working, they don't need the Democrats and the hand outs.
That the health of businesses and the jobs that spring from that vigor are more important than a government program that is surely keeping them from any measure of success.
In the past four years, thanks to being hard on China in the main, jobs for minorities have blossomed.
Riding hard on the heels of this, fewer minorities have been incarcerated.
Almost as if having a job removes much of the motive to commit crime.
A hard reality of working as opposed to welfare and crime for Democrats is that even the shittiest job is better than crime. The street level criminal isn't going to be pulling in much more than a minimum wage job. Even if the paydays are bigger, they're farther apart and entail a lot more risk.
All we need do to continue this trend is to change the laws to incentivize family structures in the welfare system. Right now the incentives break up families and discourage stability and the nuclear family model, which is a proven, working, known functional model for success.
It's doable. We need only find the will to employ it. A will free of racism and the desire to subjugate minorities by trapping them in a no-escape subculture of government hand-outs and crime.
23 October 2020
Upgrade
I decided that one of the 6.8 guns didn't really need an optic (actually that it doesn't need an unmagnified optic) and that FuzzyGeff's middy was desperately lacking in the red-dot department.
Happy Birthday!
I hope that someday you will be allowed to store them where you live.
Did You Know?
Were you aware that a substantial amount of time and effort was expended by the US Government in keeping settlers and prospectors out of the Indian treaty territories?
Even going so far as to seize and destroy all of their possessions summarily at the point of apprehension?
Army commanders routinely expressed despair at the task because of a lack of resources to stem the rising ride of white people heading west.
The later Army campaigns to pacify and contain the American Indian are a textbook case in "the law and moral highground are on your side; here's what you do to make that not matter even the slightest," on the part of the tribes.
All they needed to do was to sit back and let the Army handle it, as agreed in the treaties.
Read that again.
They had agreed to let the Army handle the white settler problem.
Taking matters into their own hands when the Army, admittedly, failed to handle the white settler problem was a treaty violation and the original violation in nearly all cases.
And, as many don't seem to know, once one side violates then all bets are off for the other side.
The Indians escalated when the punitive clauses of the treaty were activated against them for taking the white settler problem on their own.
The deeper I get into this the worse everyone looks, but the Indians are not completely innocent and the whites completely at fault.
Where the whites are at fault is individuals not respecting the borders of the treaty territories and grossly underfunding the Army tasked with enforcing those borders.
While, we might add, the absolute corruption of The Bureau of Indian Affairs who took their lavish funding and lined nests which never got closer to an Indian than a wooden cigar display in Philadelphia.
Bizarrely, the failings of the US Government to prevent the settlers from violating the Indian's reserved territory don't constitute a treaty violation.
That sounds like it makes us White people more at fault, but the Indians signed the damn thing and agreed to be bound by the terms.
Signed at the end of losing a war they started, I might add.
Everyone forgets that part.
Joe Lies People Dies
Nobody lost healthcare under Obamacare?
Fuck you Joe!
*I* lost healthcare under Obamacare.
Obamacare caused The Lovely Harvey's employer to upend the health insurance offered and when the smoke cleared she was paying more for substantially less coverage and I had no coverage at all.
We both lost healthcare under Obama care. I lost it all, The Lovely Harvey lost a great deal.
By the way, with the gigantic deductible The Lovely Harvey is literally not covered by insurance until we're out of pocket for $3,000. It discourages her from seeking preventative care.
While we watch people who don't work and don't pay taxes (in fact getting back more than they pay every year) get 100% health coverage with zero out of pocket.
WHICH IS THE EXACT SAME HEALTHCARE THEY HAD BEFORE OBAMACARE!!!
Obamacare *IS* an epic fucking of the middle class and I refuse to let you lie about it Joe.
Also, to let you be aware how popular it is, people stayed home to allow someone they absolutely LOATHED be reelected rather than elect Mittens Romney, author of Romneycare.
22 October 2020
Traditional
Checked out the new location of an old gun shop with Marv and The Boy.
Easier to get to, more space.
Bought a couple of PMAG's to help keep them in business.
Picked out the windowed ones just for spite. Same price at this store as the non-windowed.
Still don't know what use the window really has, other than amuse me with its presence and confound the more curmudgeonly among us.
21 October 2020
Try Writing Constitutional Laws Chuck
It occurs to me that if Chuck, Dianne, and Nancy would restrict themselves to
writing and passing laws which pass Constitutional muster, they'd be far less
panicked by the idea that an Originalist judge is a vote he's going to lose
away from being confirmed to The Supreme Court.
It's a problem the Democrats have, staying inside The Constitution.
I love their wild eyed terror that the court will be 5-4 in a few days.
I also have a problem with their characterization that the court is 6-3 once she's confirmed.
Roberts is not a conservative. Damn little that W did was, like his dad.
Speaking Of Porn
I hate to break it to the porn stars of the world, but...
You're not relevant to, well, porn.
The internet nuked you but hard (pun!)
RedTube and Porn Hub are amateur hour.
That production values are good on some of it has more to do with the price of equipment falling and ease of operation rising.
Besides, for it to matter at the supreme court level, you'd need to actually have cases where a law is suppressing the production of porn to climb above the state level.
It's just not. Not even in the conservative states where a good sized portion of it is made.
FFS, Florida has a Republican governor and majority in the state congress, but the porn makers in Miami-Dade haven't even gotten a warning.
I think they're upset that they don't even matter to the viewers any more.
Well That Changes Everything
The dancing monkeys of porn have come down from their mountain of... SHUDDER... to explain to we mere mortals that we should vote for Biden because Amy Barrett will be the death knell to the porn industry.
Wow!
Let me change my vote! The stars of porn have spoken!
I hate to break it to them, but Judge Barrett will be Justice Barrett regardless of whom wins the election in November.
Besides, if Bruce Springsteen threatening to ruin Australia like he's ruined rock music didn't scare me, what makes you think that your opinion of the situation will sway me.
Also, I don't think their supposition on LGBT rights and porn is correct. Oh, the article under the headline had a lot more to say about gay rights than the first amendment or porn.
Unless they're talking about the movement to normalize pederasty. I think that would be stopped by her vote in the court.
I love how they don't appear to actually follow the court or read decisions and dissents.
The conservative wing is not frothing at the bit to eliminate any of the things they're worried about.
Speaking In Code
The local media has a new term for "gang related violence" they've been getting a lot of mileage from.
"There is no reason to believe there is a threat to the community," when there's gunshot or murder victims extant and no suspect at hand or in custody.
I am not certain if this is a press term or a law enforcement public affairs term.
Don't Laugh Until It's Happened To You
I have glued a gun to my hand.
I repaired a set of bakelite stocks with superglue on a Colt 1903 and some of the glue seeped out of the seam and to my palm.
It did not take a lot of effort to remove the gun, but it was stuck until I did.
It's the kind of thing, though, that makes you wonder what would happen if the cops had knocked on the door that exact moment and I'd accidentally used a lot more glue.
"Drop it!" wouldn't have worked even with the small amount that got me stuck to the grip.
I needed the other hand and some careful persuasion to not take off skin. That took a couple of minutes of laughing at my predicament.
I Think This Might Backfire
I keep reading about postal workers ditching mail in ballots.
Weren't we just being lectured that Democrats were far more likely to be voting by mail-in than Republicans and that was why the election would take more than a week to decide?
Wouldn't that make it more likely that they're dumping Biden votes than Trump?
So far I haven't read anything about the seals being broken on cast votes, just ballots being found the the trash.
20 October 2020
Cue AC/DC
Because Kaylee is back in black!
Snagged a Damage Ind. M4 Carbine w/QD mil-spec stock in black.
It's identical to the foliage green one I had on the other day.
What's interesting is this stock is now genuine USGI issue! Well, not this stock. Damage Ind. sources them from P&S (you can tell from the cage-code 4U486) and if you're dot-mil and buy from P&S, you get one with an NSN.
Mutter Mutter Cheap Mutter Mutter
I was thinking about getting a new optic for one of the AR's.
So I checked on Primary Arms and Vortex.
Prices have gone up a tad.
Especially since I insist on quick detach for something with magnification, just in case.
I also stodgily insist on back-up iron sights. Also, just in case.
So many things to save for... Damned Gods of the Copybook Headings and opportunity costs!
Is Glock 19
In keeping with our theme of the Czechs not following anyone else's drum...*
The P-01 version of the CZ-75, not actually a Glock 19; but it fits the same niche.
I admit, it feels good in the hand.
2.3 lb. loaded with 14+1 rounds of 9x19mm. The safety is a decocker only.
On loan from The Chomps Collection.
*The running joke has been about Yuri, the long suffering Warsaw Pact commonality officer assigned to Czechoslovakia during The Cold War.
CZ official (showing Vz.58 rifle): Is AK, see is in M43 cartridge.
Yuri: No it isn't! It doesn't even work the same!
CZ official: Is same, see it has 30 round magazine? Like you said it should have.
Yuri (pounding vodka): It's not the same magazine at all! What did you do to the bayonet?
CZ official (pulling sheet off Vz.59 MG): I suppose you don't want to see our PK then? We fixed the belt links!
We've told this same basic shtick for the Vz.52 pistol (TT-33) and Vz.52 rifle (SKS).
Long Range Macro
 |
| Canon M50, EF75-300 IS-USM, f/5.6, 300mm, 1/25", ISO 12800, 26mm extender. |
I took this at a range of about four feet. I think it's very neat!
Not Quite What It Appears
Remember the Beretta Cougar? The 8000 series?
Rotary locking barreled spawn of the 92 series?
Anyone? Anyone?
Beretta stopped trying to sell them in the USA and set up a factory in Turkey for their subsidiary Stoeger to market here.
Stoeger Cougar 8040F Inox on loan from The Chomps Collection.
It's got that same horse pistol feel as the 92 series, but shorter framed.
The 8040F has a safety decocker and is chambered in .40 S&W. 2.3 lb. loaded with 11+1 rounds of your favorite load.
"They" say, on the internet so it must be true, that the magazines for Berettas don't work in the Cougar without some modification. I don't have a .40 Beretta to check with.
Family Lore
The other day I discovered I have something in common with Elizabeth Warren.
My family's lore is inaccurate.
I've got no Japanese blood. Great-grandma Kikiko is really my distant great aunt.
She married into the Oregon branch of the McThags and they moved to Iowa near our branch. Learning more about the history of the founding of Oregon, I can see why they fled to the relative tolerance of the Midwest.
I'd always been told by grampa that his grampa had fought in the Indian wars.
Nope. The timing is all wrong.
His grampa came straight from England and plunked down in Iowa in 1851 and started farming. His brothers settled in New Jersey and Oregon.
It appears that I'm the only McThag to have ever served.
Oh! How are we McThags when we emigrated from Jolly Ol' not Scotland?
We emigrated from Scotland to England first! This is a murkier part of the history for details, but the broad strokes are there.
During one of the wars between Scotland and England my ancestors took the land deal from the English. By the time everything had settled out, we only had lands in England, near Stafford. There's even a town bearing the name of the first English McThag. We were no longer called the McThags after that but the [realnames] consisting of ancestor's nickname and geographic association together.
The pettiest of petty nobility we were.
The three brothers who came to America were the youngest of many children, so no family wealth or titles to keep them.
Reading Not Writing
Sorry I've been spotty about posting lately.
I'm still reading up on the Sioux and trying to manufacture a Neanderthal culture from whole cloth which can make a credible threat to the combined forces of said Sioux and a cavalry expedition.
I've been expending my political vitriol at Facebook because I've two friends there who seem tantalizingly close to taking the red pill. They're genuinely surprised at some of the stuff I've shared because they've relied on the mainstream media and their liberal friends for information.
They've been disarmed by my telling them to, "look it up!" when they ask me if what I'm posting is true.
Apparently a true zealot would never send them off to do their own research unsupervised.
18 October 2020
Similar Holsters
We've got holsters for the Challenger and Sport King.
Obviously from a day when open carrying in the field wasn't a big deal.
Also from a time where access to your .22 pistol didn't need to be lightning fast.
They're very similar in design, but from different manufacturers.
Hunter for the Colt.
Brauer Brothers Manufacturing for the High Standard.
America
One of the things that made (makes?) America great is it doesn't (didn't) much matter who your parents and ancestors were with regards to how far you could go.
But I notice something about the agitators.
They keep bringing up things about those ancestors and applying them to the descendants.
Someone whose great-grandparents were slaves gets deference as if their own back had felt the whip.
Someone whose family never owned slaves, let alone owned any themselves, are condemned as if they wielded the the whip personally.
We've got people "leading" us whose interpersonal relationships can almost be called incestuous. Everyone in power is married to a relative of someone else in power and they rotate around.
That's how the fucking nobility we rejected at gunpoint did things, not America.
That we're in a situation where it matters so much who's "leading" in DC and the state capitols says volumes to how far America has degraded from the idealism of the founders.
The government was supposed to be a last resort for most problems not the immediate go-to for everything.
Comparison Study
Colt Challenger (1953), Ruger Standard (1957) and High Standard Sport King (1951).
2.1 lb, 10+1 shots; 2.4 lb, 9+1 shots; 2.3 lb, 10+1 shots.
The High Standard doesn't need any tools and is simple to take apart and put back together.
The Ruger doesn't need tools and is easy to get apart, but fiddly to get back together.
The Colt needs a screwdriver to remove the grips stocks but is simple to take apart and reassemble.
The High Standard fits my hand like it's made for it, but it's just the right hand it fits.
The Colt is next most comfortable and works in either hand.
The Ruger is still comfortable in both hands, but it's simply outshined by the competition.
None of these guns are still in production.
Ruger still makes a descendant, but the Standard, or Mk I, is long supplanted in the line up.
Sport King
This is a High Standard Sport King 4-3/8" barrel on loan from The Chomps Collection.
I know next to nothing about it.
Loaded with 10 rounds of .22 LR it's 2 lb. 5.5 oz. The loaded magazine tips the scales at 3.2 oz.
Very crisp 2 lb. 9 oz. trigger. Near telepathic!
From a quick sweep of the intertubes it appears to have been made in 1951.
As The Boy gets settled into his new educational routine, I hope to have some time to get it to the range soon.
16 October 2020
Trump Says
That's all well and good, but I really don't think his desk is in any danger of bearing the weight of that bill.
It'd have to get past Congress and thus The House of Representatives, so not until after the election.
I'm not really hearing a groundswell that people are looking to change the make-up of Congress like I'm sensing about keeping Trump over Biden.
I could even see Utah and Florida opposing it because they've got a nice sideline in selling non-resident permits.
Paraquedista
Willard has discussed the Paraquedistas before.
They're still in business, still in Africa, still rocking the G3.
14 October 2020
Fear
I am afraid, and that's what they want.
I don't like it.
The Democrats are teaching their fringe that being violent works.
They taught the early lessons with how they deal with Islam's violence.
It would appear that if you murder enough Americans, you can do anything you want as far as Leftist and Democrats are concerned.
I've occasionally wondered if being gentlemanly and law abiding is 180˚ the wrong way to do things.
I mean, where has it gotten us?
Another thing about this gentlemanly behavior is there's such a thing as a RINO.
We have Mavericks and Mittens who vote with the Democrats as much as they vote conservative.
We got two Pauls who, while often taking admirable and principled stands, undermine efforts to thwart Democrat agendas.
Who's are the DINOs? Who are the people who vote conservative when their vote would cost the Democrats the vote.
The truth is Maverick, Mittens and both Pauls, had they been Democrats, would have been removed at the primary stage the next election after they fucked up a Democrat vote.
Republicans just don't punish their members who buck the party line.
And it costs us.
It gets us milquetoast candidates who don't want to do anything to reverse the damages done.
It gets us congress creatures who are afraid to stand up to the creeping socialism by cutting the purse strings.
It has members who cannot articulate that a smaller increase is not a cut. That not funding something is not the same as making it illegal. Those are simple concepts, but they don't even try to fight and explain, they just roll over.
I'm frankly sick of living in this hollow shell of the America I grew up in knowing that the criminal who attacks me will face no charges if there's a Democrat district attorney but I will be run through the ruinous Hell of "due process" for defending myself from them.
I am very sick at watching a handful of very rich people manipulating the system towards their own ends when we're all supposed to be equal in the eyes of the law.
On A Long Lonesome Highway North Of Tampa Bay
Had the cell phone charging on the window mount, so taking a pic was simple.
The weather was perfect to drive with the top off. The Boy and Mr Sloth enjoyed our outing.
13 October 2020
We Once Had No Prisons In Many Places
Colin Kaepernick apparently thinks we should abolish prisons.
Like everything he says, he's not thought about it very hard.
There was once a time when there weren't prisons.
Without the option of confinement to punish someone for their crimes, punishments were less ephemeral.
Branding.
Dismemberment.
Death.
Normally meted out at or near the scene of the crime and without all the niceties of an impartial judge, or legal representation for the accused.
No lengthy investigation to even determine if the right person is being punished.
There're many reasons civilization abandoned vendetta and ad hoc justice.
There's history books on the topic.
I doubt a sportsball player would ever have had to read them.
Dental Hello Jean
I admit, I've taken terrible care of my teeth over the years.
I have also be very lucky to have had as few dental problems as I've had over the years.
After watching The Lovely Harvey and Marv spend metric money getting fake teeth of one form or another, I resolved to actually do that whole brushing and flossing thing.
The first thing that hit me was all the blood. Holy shit did my gums bleed when insulted with the floss and brush.
But that didn't last very long. A couple of days.
The next thing was noticing that I could smell things that I couldn't before which was accompanied with being able to taste with more sensitivity too.
These things I sort of expected. I'd read about them.
What took me by surprise was the pain that started about two weeks in.
I recognize this pain. It's the pain of healing. My gums are coming back to life.
I am not dissuaded by this familiar pain, I'm encouraged.
I hope my breath is less demonic than it used to be too.
Scribbles To Myself
The primary purpose of this blog is really to talk to myself.
It just occurred to me with the crab-boat thing that it's not going to be clear to someone reading my scribbles that the entire point was to see if I could still do the math and calculate the difference in weight from replacing seawater with crabs.
That I could still think in metric when I wanted to.
I totally forgot that someone WOULD be reading it.
A thousand plus of you every day.
I remember being giddy about 100 visitors a day.
I offer my apologies for being cranky about the topic of the crab boat because it came on the heels of reading abject morons hurting my mind with their explanations of why a crab-boat on a treadmill couldn't take off with 500 thousand pounds of crab added to it.
Displacement
Traveller ships are expressed in dTons.
That's a displacement ton.
The volume of one metric ton of gaseous hydrogen.
For a ship that spends most of its time in vacuum.
It's not displacing anything... it's just a unit of volume.
Can you "displace" vacuum?
Buoyancy is an issue that's arisen in Traveller a couple of times.
Buoyancy is a function of weight and volume and thus density.
Traveller has a physics shredding device called contragravity. This machine allows you to reduce the weight of anything wrapped inside it's field.
Dial the weight to zero in an atmosphere and you're going to rise because you're now displacing the gas of the atmosphere with the zero-weight volume of your ship.
Yes, it's handwavium magic, but it's canon.
What contragrav doesn't do is affect the mass of the ship, it's not going to shoot off the ground because it still has inertia. But it's going to rise faster and faster... then slower and slower as the atmosphere gets thinner. But eventually it will pop to the top of the atmo and float there.
I never bothered to calculate how fast because, in game, you dialed it to zero floated up a bit, pointed the ship the desired direction with the reaction control system then kicked in the (also physics shredding) reactionless motors to power to orbit.
Contragrav hurts a lot of practical brains because the only "material" we have with no weight, also has no mass. Vacuum.
Where I learned my first lessons in buoyancy was from using vacuum to displace air.
Make a balloon filled with vacuum. In reality any container which can hold back the atmosphere against your vacuum will be too heavy to float in air. But what if you could "fill" a normal sized balloon with vacuum? It'd have a lot of lift, wouldn't it? A lot more than a balloon filled with hydrogen because vacuum has no mass. As an aside, that mass is why you can make a hydrogen balloon and not a vacuum one; the gas provides pressure to hold the light enough to float container from collapsing against the atmosphere.
Another aside, doing buoyancy calculations of heavier than air things is MUCH easier to wrap your brain around than lighter than air things. One tends to think that lighter than air things don't have weight. You can't put a helium balloon on a scale, can you?
That whole scientific STP deal sometimes works against us because it gets us to assume a set of conditions that makes other scenarios counter-intuitive.
12 October 2020
A Matter Of Perspective
Seeing as I have no paying job, I get labeled a lot.
I am a bum.
I am a mooch.
I am not a man.
People. Dear people.
You've got the terms all wrong.
I am a man. A kept man.
Anyone who disparages that is just jealous they didn't manage the deal.
GRIN!
Where Were YOU Born?
I've seen several screeds demanding we end Columbus Day and celebrate indigenous people's day.
The thing is, not even the indigenous people in America are indigenous to America if you go back far enough.
The "indigenous" people displaced by European settlers were merely the most recent residents of the area, not the first settlers from the Siberian land-bridge migrations out of Asia.
How long do you have to live someplace before you're indigenous?
The Sioux didn't live in the Black Hills during the written history of the place, yet they're considered indigenous and not the tribes they themselves displaced.
How long is long enough?
Me, I consider myself to be a native of this land. Indigenous.
I didn't move here from another nation.
My father didn't. My mother didn't.
My father's father and mother didn't.
My mother's mother didn't. My mother's father came here from Italy.
We were born here and are as native as someone who traces their ancestors to pre-historic and pre-columbian times.
I Woke Up Without A Headache
Can't live pain free... To social media!
I'm reading a thread where someone asks: "If you add 500 thousand pounds of crabs to a crab boat; is it 500 thousand pounds heavier?"
There's some genuinely funny responses, but it's the people trying to be serious that are hurting my brain.
People don't have any understanding of weight, mass, displacement, ballast, stability...
People who are answering authoritatively, but are not accounting for things you'd know if you'd watched a couple of episodes of The Deadliest Catch.
But since I have to figure it out, because I'm me...
The average density of crabs is 1.27. So crabs are 1.27kg/l.
500,000 lb. of crab is 226,796.2kg of crab.
226,796.2kg of crab is 178,579.7l of crab.
178,579.7 l of water is displaced by the crabs and that weighs 393,700.85 lb.
So the boat is 106,299.15 lb. heavier.
Update:
178,579.7 l of seawater, being denser and thus heavier than regular water weighs 403.543.44 lb.
So our boat gets 96,456.56 lb. heavier when we toss all that crab into the holding tanks and the boat settles a little deeper in the water.
Commenters: One of the givens is "crab boat" confine your rebuttals and criticisms to that.
Clearly it's an obscure fact that the holding tanks are full of seawater on a crab boat and that as crab is added, it displaces water overboard. That's why adding 500,000 lb. of crab to a crab boat doesn't add 500,000 lb. of weight to the total assembly.
Crab boats do not sink when they stuff those holding tanks with crabs which are heavier than the water they used to carry. No more than a canoe sinks when you put the cooler in the middle and it displaces the much less dense air that previously occupied the space inside.
Crab boats do not operate anywhere but Earth, so quibbling about 1g is just being... put in what will insult you the most here.
11 October 2020
I Don't Believe In The No-Win Scenario
The Antifa cells are talking about how they are keeping things at a simmer to create a no-win scenario for the conservative and law-enforcement side of things.
If law enforcement cracks down, they win and claim their rights are being suppressed.
If law enforcement does nothing, they win and can claim victory.
If a citizen defends themselves against them, they can point to how violent the right is (while their fellow travelers at the DA's office rapes the citizen).
They've overlooked a win scenario for the right.
The conservative side kills them all.
Their model depends on the right following the rules the left is exploiting to keep the right from flat out murdering them in case lots.
Raising the black flag and slitting throats is starting to look more and more like what's going to be necessary to stop this shit once and for all.
If the switch gets flicked to "kill every last one of them" then nobody is going to CARE what the other side thinks about them.
They're not hard to find and figure out where they hang-out and live.
Doxxing works both ways if it's decided to start doing that.
It won't matter how much money their supporters have in the bail fund, nobody's going to be calling the cops.
In fact, it'd be a damn poor idea, on law enforcement's part, to get in the way this late in the game.
Honestly, they've done such a shitty job of protecting the rights of the law abiding so far, why would we care if they were collateral?
Still time to stop it before the switch gets flicked.
Nobody wants what comes after, but it's becoming apparent that it's a genuine self defense situation coming and it's going to be illegal to defend ourselves from the anointed brown-shirts.
The cops could get ahead of this and start knocking some heads in while making arrests when they know the DA will just turn them back loose.
Or, they could stand aside while violence is answered with violence. Lord knows they stand aside to allow violence against anyone not on the left.
I don't WANT a civil war, but I don't think I'm gonna get a vote.
But, unlike a lot of youngins, I know its measure.
There's a lot of people who still feel bound by our service oaths and remember that domestic part of enemies.
PLEASE! Law Enforcement, give us another option.
PLEASE! Federal DA's, press some damn charges and lay on some billionaire crippling bail.
PLEASE! Keep the switch to off.
Update: Changed the wording because it sure sounded like I was making threats that I wasn't intending to make. I'm not threatening anyone, just trying to point out that one side is pushing the other side into fight or die territory. Never push someone with nothing to lose into a no-win scenario.
What Has Less Pigment Than Albino?
Minnesotans.
A car full of them were behind me today and they are so damn PALE.
Minnesota is a land the sun forgot.
Where "that garlic is too spicy!" is a real thing.
They're going to melt down here.
When The Colors Change
It's fall, time to put the foliage green furniture back on Kaylee.
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| Also a good time to test captioning in the *NEW* "improved" Blogger. |