I love pizza. It’s not healthy, but the way Sue and I make it it’s probably healthier than the stuff you get in a restaurant, and it’s definitely way better (and way healthier) than any frozen pizza. Any recipe should start with the ingredients list, so here goes:
Pizza dough. We buy ours from a local Italian deli, Claros, and it makes the best pizzas. If you don’t have an Italian deli in your area, Trader Joe’s has good pizza dough. And if you don’t have a Trader Joe’s nearby, you’re on your own. Don’t give up; pizza dough is not always easy to find. But look around for it. Don’t go with prepared pizza crusts; your pizza won’t be nearly as good.
Olive oil. Don’t cheap out here. Get the extra virgin stuff. Costco has good olive oil.
Garlic. Get fresh garlic and squeeze it with a garlic squeezer. Don’t use the pre-diced garlic. Squeeze it fresh.
Shredded mozzarella cheese.
Shredded parmesan cheese.
Ricotta cheese.
Green onions (also known as scallions).
Kalamata olives. Some people like to use black olives instead of Kalamata olives. There’s no accounting for some people’s tastes, I guess.
Large mushrooms (I use 6 or 8, depending on the size of the mushrooms).
Sun-dried tomatoes. Get the kind that are bottled in oil; don’t get the dried kind. We prefer the sun-dried sold by Costco, but our local Costco doesn’t always have them.
Corn flour.
Preheat oven to 475 degrees.
Spread the corn flour on the pizza pan (the idea here is to prevent the pizza from sticking to the pan).
Flatten and spread the pizza dough on a large pizza pan. I like a thin crust, so we make it as thin as we can. It’s probably about 1/8-inch after we do this.
Pour a puddle of olive oil onto the pizza dough so that it forms about a 4-inch circle.
Separate one large garlic clove and use the garlic mincer to mince it over the olive oil. Spread the olive oil and the minced garlic over the entire top of the crust.
Spinkle a handful of shredded mozzarella cheese over the pizza. Don’t get carried away here; less is more. You want the cheese to come close to the outer diameter of the crust.
Dice three or found green scallions and sprinkle on top or the mozzarella cheese.
Chop up 15 or 20 Kalamata olives and sprinkle on top of the mozzarella cheese.
Slice the mushrooms into thin pieces and arrange these on top of the mozzarella cheese.
Sprinkle about 15 or 20 pieces of sun-dried tomatoes on the pizza.
Sprinkle another handful of shredded mozzarella cheese on top of the pizza. Again, less is more. Don’t try to cover the entire pizza with cheese.
Sprinkle about a half a handful of shredded parmesan cheese over the top of the pizza.
Dab about 20 quarter-to-half teaspoonfulls of Ricotta cheese on top of the pizza.
Place the pizza in the preheated oven. In our oven, it seems to heat more evenly with the pizza on the bottom rack.
We bake our pizza for 14 to 15 minutes. This cooks everything through and lightly toasts the cheese.
Remove the pizza from the oven and allow it to cool for a few minutes. Slice it with a pizza slicer and serve.
It seems like a lot of work, but making a pizza like the one you see above only takes about 30 minutes, and the pizza is outstanding. It goes good with a salad, a glass or red one, or maybe a Peroni. Try it. You can thank me later.
Other ExNotes Recipes
Yep, we’ve got a few, and we’ll have a few more in coming weeks.
We have several recipes planned, too. These include grilled salmon, Italian stuffed shells, bacon-wrapped filet mignon, chile relleno, fish tacos, stuffed orange roughy, and more.
Here’s the bottom line upfront: Don’t expect stunning accuracy from DKC’s 9mm bullets.
I bought 1000 of them from Raven Rocks after watching a YouTube video about FBI handguns and ammunition, in which an FBI ballistics expert explained why the FBI uses 147-grain bullets in their 9mm Glocks. The YouTube fellow didn’t specify which 147-grain bullet the FBI uses, although a friend later told me it’s the Speer Gold Dot. The DKC bullets I bought were cheap at $98 per 1000, and my testing showed why. You get what you pay for. Sometimes.
Full metal jacket, 147-grain, 9mm DKC bullets.
DKC is relatively young Turkish ammunition and reloading components manufacturer. One of their importers is Raven Rocks here in the US. I’ve ordered components from Raven Rocks before (in particular, their composite 9mm and .45 bullets) and I’ve been pleased with the results. I was hoping the same thing would happen with these 9mm full metal jacket bullets, but it was not to be. Win some, lose some.
I fired my 9mm DKC bullet handloads at the West End Gun Club using the 147-grain full metal jacket bullets. I tested the bullets in three different handguns (a Springfield 1911, a SIG P226, and a S&W Shield), with a light load and a heavier load for each of four different propellants (Red Dot, Bullseye, Unique, and Power Pistol). For the initial accuracy testing, I shot two 5-shot groups at 50 feet for each configuration.
How did the new bullets do? All the 50-foot groups were disappointing from an accuracy perspective. A few of the groups dipped below 2 inches, but most were above (and some well above), and at 50 feet, that’s not the kind of accuracy I’m used to. Here’s how it shook out:
The results. I fired 400 shots in total for this blog’s test series. I used my Garmin Xero to chronograph the velocities. Click on the table to make it bigger.
The above table is data intensive and correspondingly small (ah, if only my groups were the same). If you click on the table, it will open in a new window and be a little easier to read.
You can see from the above that the group sizes generally were mediocre to poor. As a point of reference, what I consider good is a group of an inch or less from a 9mm at that distance. None of the loads I tested met that threshold.
I added a column to show the best of the two groups fired for each load in each pistol (this is highlighted in yellow), thinking that maybe it was my shooting that returned the mediocre groups and this might give a better feel for what worked best. None of the groups met my 1-inch threshold. I had been h0ped that a few of them would, as had occurred when testing previous 9mm loads (see, for example, A Tale of Two Nines, A 9mm Comparo: Cast Bullets, and A 9mm Comparo: Jacketed Bullets). On the plus side, all the loads functioned all three handguns reliably. There were no failures to feed and no failures to extract. I guess that’s something.
Surprisingly (especially when considered in light of the mediocre accuracy), the velocity standard deviations were all relatively low, and in some combinations, surprisingly low. Bullseye was generally the winner from a standard deviation perspective, although its low standard deviation did not translate into superior accuracy.
I averaged all groups for each handgun (both high and low loads and the different propellant loads). Predictably, the SIG returned the best groups overall, and the short-barreled Shield was the worst. The SIG has always been a stellar performer.
Average group sizes for all loads in each pistol.
I then considered the results across the three pistols to try to select a powder that I could use for all three handguns. To do this, I averaged the three pistol’s performance with the light Red Dot load, the average performance with the heavy Red Dot load, etc. Nothing emerged as a significantly better accuracy load, as you can see below.
Average group size for different loads across all three handguns.
By this time, the data were confusing me. I was also feeling my age a bit, thinking maybe my old eyes just aren’t what they used to be.
At the end of the session, I had 20 rounds left in each load combination. I fired the heavy loads (for each powder) into each of four targets at 50 feet using the SIG only. By this measure, the heavy Power Pistol load had maybe the best group. I didn’t do the same for the other two handguns. The Power Pistol load had perceptibly heavier recoil, and it averaged over 1000 fps (a lot, I think, in a 9mm 147-grain load). I don’t know if I want to subject an aluminum-framed handgun to a steady diet of this load (see my blog on the Smith and Wesson Model 59).
The targets you see above are (clockwise from top left), the heavier Red Dot load, the heavier Bullseye load, the heavier Unique load, and the heavier Power Pistol load. If you eliminate the one or two flyers in each group, there’s not a lot of difference between any of the heavier loads.
I also had 20 rounds left for each of the four loads at the lower end of the propellant charges. I took these 80 rounds and one of the Alco mini-4 silhouette targets to my indoor range. I again fired all rounds through the SIG, shooting the groups you see below at 10 yards. Here’s what that target looked like:
These are targets shot at 30 feet with 20 rounds each of the lighter loads. Clockwise from top left, these were shot with the lighter Red Dot load, the lighter Bullseye load, the lighter Unique load, and the lighter Power Pistol load.
The experimental design for the lower and higher load comparisons with the SIG you see above would probably earn a failing grade from a competent statistics professor. The sample size is too small, I shot at different distances for the higher-level loads versus the lower-level loads, and I probably broke one or two other statistics rules. That notwithstanding, here’s a summary of what the group size data looks like:
Data from the above two targets summarized in tabular form.
Where’s all this going? The bottom line is none of the results were anything to write home about. Why, I wondered? Other 9mm loads had done significantly better.
To further assess why my results were as mediocre as they were (and recognizing but not fully accepting that 100% of the mediocrity could have been due to me, the shooter), I next evaluated the bullets themselves. The first parameter I measured was bullet weight. In a random weight sample of 20 DKC 147-grain 9mm bullets, here are the weights I recorded (all weights are in grains):
Weights for 20 of the DKC 147-grain 9mm bullets.
That first bullet was right on the money at 147.0 grains, so I thought these would prove to be good bullets from a weight variability perspective. But I was wrong, as the remaining measurements above showed. Here are the particulars on weight variability:
Bullet weight variability parameters.
I think that half a grain weight variability (0.55 grain, to be exact) is a lot for a jacketed pistol bullet. I would have expected the weight to be within ±0.1 grain, so an extreme spread of 0.55-grain is not good. It’s also not likely that the weight variability is symmetric to the bullets’ axes, which further aggravates the problem. As the bullet spins, any weight asymmetry will induce larger group sizes.
That had me wondering about bullet diameter. After zeroing my calipers, I measured the diameter of 10 bullets. Note that these are stated by the supplier to be 0.355 inches, which is what I would expect on a 9mm jacketed bullet. Here’s what I found:
0.355 inches in diameter? Guess again, Bullet Boy!
Damn! Four of the ten bullets I measured were out-of-round by 0.001 inch (these are Bullets 1, 2, 4, and 6), and where this occurs, they are undersized. Small wonder the group sizes were not that good. The undersized bullets would have rattled down the bore, with perhaps some propellant gas sneaking around their periphery. I think the reason the hotter Power Pistol loads did a little better is the higher chamber pressure probably deformed the bullet to fill the bore better.
Here’s the bottom line from an old ordnance engineer: These bullets are (ah, what’s that ordnance technical term again…oh yeah, I remember): MAB (or mediocre, at best). They are cheap at $98/1000, but in retrospect, they are at best plinkers, nothing more. Maybe I’m expecting too much. Maybe a 9mm handgun just won’t group that well with a 147-grain bullet. I don’t think that’s it, though. I’ve done better with other 9mm 147-grain bullets.
I relayed the above results to a few of my buddies and one of them asked me if he could have some of the DKC bullets because, as he put it, he is more of a plinker than a wannabe ballistics engineer (like yours truly). Done and done, I immediately answered. Then the question becomes: How should I load the rest of these bullets? I still have several hundred left.
I realized this would not be a decision based on accuracy, as none of the different recipes I tried resulted in impressive accuracy. I don’t need big time penetration and I don’t need high velocity, as I’m not an FBI agent preparing for a rerun of the Miami gunfight. I decided I would go with a load that offered:
A low velocity standard deviation (which held at least a promise of better accuracy).
Reliable performance.
Lower recoil.
A load that was adequate (if not stellar) across all three 9mm handguns.
Any of the loads I tested with the 147-grain DKC bullets meet the above criteria, so the choice came down to which powder I had the most of on hand. That made it easy. I’m going with the lower Red Dot load of 3.2 grains. That will give me just under 900 feet per second from the 1911 and the 226, and just over 800 feet per second in the Shield. That’s as good as or better than a .38 Special with a comparable weight bullet, and the .38 Special is a great cartridge. I’ll be flush with these 9mm handloads for a while, and then I won’t buy any more of the 147-grain DKC bullets.
I like to read, and when I hear about a good book, odds are I’ll pull up Amazon and order a copy. The Wall Street Journal had a positive review on Operation Wrath of God, and that was enough for me. The WSJ is the only paper we take any more, having given up on the LA Times, the NY Times, and local Daily Bulletin rag. The other papers were just too biased in their reporting (and people wonder why print is dead).
Operation Wrath of God is about secret ties that have existed for decades between the Israeli Mossad, the European intelligence services, and our intelligence community. The premise is that although the Europeans were outwardly incensed when the Israelis struck back at the terrorists for the Munich massacre (and continued for years to do so on European soil), they (and we) continued to share current intel on their whereabouts. On the Munich massacre, you may recall that was when the bad guys murdered Israeli Olympians.
Even though European governments and their press had their noses bent out of shape at the retaliatory Israeli actions, these same European governments continued to provide the Israelis detailed information about where the terrorists were located. Basically, the Europeans made things a lot easier for the Israelis to strike back, even though European governments publicly condemned the Israelis for doing so. The author makes the case that the Israeli Mossad provided such good intelligence on nearly everything going on in the world, it made sense to keep the lines of communication flowing both ways.
The book covered essentially all the major Israeli intelligence operations related to the Israeli payback, and parts of it read almost like a novel. That’s the good news in this book review. The bad news is that a lot of the book is painfully redundant. I found myself annoyed at reading essentially the same stories two or three times. The text comprises 255 pages (with another almost 90 pages of acknowledgements, citations, and index materials). I think the same information could have been presented much more concisely.
That said, Operation Wrath of God was a good read and I’d recommend it to anyone interested in these topics. I’m glad I bought it.
Back in the day when Steve Seidner and CSC Motorcycles were running full tilt on building replica Mustangs, the custom bikes were rolling off the production line fast and furious. Most buyers were in love with the little repliStangs, and most accessorized their bikes heavily. The bike’s list price was something like $3,995 or $4,995 (I forget which), but it wasn’t unusual for buyers to run the price up to $10,000 with accessories, extra chrome, and more. The typical buyer was 70- or 80-year-old person who had wanted a Mustang as a teenager back in the ’50s but Dad said no. It was time to get even with Dad, and get even they did.
We also did a few custom bikes on spec and it was great for me. I wrote the CSC blog back in the days, and with the constant stream of customs there was always plenty to photograph and blog about. One of my favorites, and one of my favorite photos, is a bike Steve built for himself. He christened it “The Sarge” for obvious reasons.
The Sarge had a lot of custom touches, including .50-cal ammo cans as saddlebags, a near complete dechroming, lovely OD green paint, brown leather seat, and more. It was a stunning motorcycle. My El Cheapo Bell helmet and its Army Air Corps livery completed the package. I found a stone wall somewhere in the hills above the CSC plant when the plant was at the La Verne airport, and that made for a nice backdrop. The Sarge photo at the top of this blog has always been one of my favorites.
Would you like to know more about CSC’s early days, the evolution of the Mustang replicas, and what it was like importing the Chinese RX3 to America? Read 5000 Miles At 8000 RPM!
Earlier Phavorite Photos? You bet! Click on each to get their story.
Imagine my surprise: I thought there would be but one 10-cylinder motorcycle. I thought this would be a quick blog. There’s the Dodge Viper-powered Tomahawk that was newsworthy maybe 10 years ago. But wait, there’s more (as my hero Billy Mays used to say). I found two more poking around on the Internet.
Two Dodge V10 Motorcycles
You may remember a Dodge Viper powered V-10 motorcycle a couple of decades ago. It was a weird one with two wheels upfront and two wheels in back. Between that feature and the weight, the handling must have been atrocious.
I thought Dodge had just built one as a showpiece, but according to online references they actually built and sold nine of the things (at a price of $550,000). The Dodge boys called it the Tomahawk. It has a theoretical top speed of 450 mph. Take a look:
Allen Millyard, a builder who created a number of mega-cylinder motorcycles and who has been featured in a few of our previous ¿Quantos Pistones? blogs, also built a Dodge V-10 motorcycle. It is more conventional (if a 10-cylinder can be called conventional) wheel layout, with one at the front and one at the rear.
Here’s a YouTube about the Millyard V-10. It’s cool, as it shows a 172-mph, two-up run.
The Bistella
The Bistella is an unusual 10-cylinder, 500cc, supercharged two-stroke , Jawa-based motorcycle designed by Czech engineer Marek Foltis. It’s a weird one, and I guess Foltis is living proof that if you have the talent, nothing is impossible. The bike used the cylinders and pistons from ten 50cc Jawas. Wow. Just wow. Take a listen:
You might be wondering: Is there more to come in our ¿Quantos Pistones? series? Yep, there is. Stay tuned.
Missed any of the earlier ¿Quantos Pistones? blogs?
Even though I was an IT (information technology) Project Manager for 12 years, a weak point of mine happens to be IT. Yes, IT.
As an IT team leader one of my greatest strengths is not only placing others in positions where they can excel, but ensuring I do the same for myself. Living in Colombia I happened upon a new challenge. One morning my laptop refused to connect to the Wi-Fi. The laptop I had been using the past two or three years was gifted to me by a friend. This laptop had sort of “fallen off a truck,” or was “found in the alley.”
My guess is the problem I was now faced with was due to the organization it “belonged to” running an audit. I am certain the audit didn’t dig the Colombian IP address, so the laptop was terminated. I now had to purchase a new laptop here in Medellin, Colombia. Shouldn’t be a big deal, right?
Not the case, of course.
Finding a mall in Medellin wasn’t difficult. It was a huge modern three-story mall with nothing but IT and telecom stores. It was a bit overwhelming. I Googled reviews as I walked through the mall and it didn’t take long to settle on a store. I found a representative that spoke decent English to bridge the gap with my never-ending Spanish stumbling. He recommended a few basic machines. I began more research on reviews and picked out a basic laptop that would suffice (mainly for writing ExNotes pieces).
After installing Windows and basic MS apps, I returned to my apartment and noticed something was off. The keyboard was in a different format. It was a Spanish QWERTY layout. OK, not a huge deal: I could learn a new keyboard. What really confused me is they loaded the software for a standard American keyboard. This meant the keys did not match many of the symbols. I learned this on my own, but not before walking the streets of Medellin with my laptop asking locals to assist me. No one else could figure it out, either. This was becoming frustrating, but some relief that it wasn’t my incompetence that caused it.
Returning to my apartment, and after a bit more Google research, I learned to toggle the keyboard to the QWERTY format to match the keyboard, which is where it will stay. Yes, I am sure I could exchange the laptop and hunt down one with a normal keyboard, but what fun would that be?
I will be in South America for quite some time (more on that in another blog), so I thought I would just embrace the change. Also, it is now easier for me to do “¡” and “¿” symbols to impress the locals.
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Coming up…more on Cycle Garden and their impressive work on Moto Guzzi and other Italian motorcycles!
This is really cool: Pietta is coming out with a reproduction of the original Colt Python, and rumor has it that it will sell for about half what a new Python costs. That puts the pre-tariff price at $750. Pietta plans to call it the Blacktooth. I don’t know about that name, but I don’t make thousands of guns like Pietta does. I’m thinking something like Copperhead would be a good name for this handgun. Copperhead would make an obvious connection with Python and Colt’s serpent-themed sixguns, and it sort of ties in with copper-jacketed bullets. Maybe put a touch of copper plating on the gun, too, to complete the copper connection (the trigger or the hammer, the grip medallions, or maybe the screws). Maybe even offer a tuned version with an action job, and call it the Competition Copperhead? Eh, what do I know?
A Pietta Copperhead?
The Python story goes like this: Colt originally produced the Python in 1955 as a premium double action revolver, and then it was discontinued in 1999. The original Pythons had hand-fitted components, and it just got too expensive to make. I’ve heard it said that they went out of time quickly, and the frames tended to stretch with full bore .357 Mag loads. I owned a couple of these original Pythons, and they were beautiful guns, but they both went down the road when in my youthful ignorance I decided I needed something else more. Colt reintroduced the new Python with redesigned internals and frames in 2020, and I quickly snapped up one. It’s a beautiful handgun, and I’ve written about it a lot on these pages (I’ll provide links at the end of this blog).
How is it that Pietta, an Italian gunmaker known for producing copies of Old West sixguns, is able to copy the original Colt Python? Well, Partner, I don’t know, but I’m guessing Colt’s patent on the original Python expired and Pietta picked it up. That’s what happened on the Colt 1911 (the .45 Auto) and why so many companies are now producing the 1911.
I’m guessing that the Pietta Python won’t be available in California (at least initially) for a while (or maybe ever) due to our nutty gun laws, but who knows…maybe Pietta will succeed in getting the thing California approved. I sure hope so. Or maybe I’ll buy a house and live part time in a state that respects the U.S. Constitution so I can have access to the guns California prohibits. Texas or Tennessee come to mind.
More Python? You bet. Here are our earlier Python related posts:
I’m thinking of doing another book on guns. It would be a two-volume series. What I have in mind is a compendium of expanded articles based on our firearms-related blogs, with a working title of Tales of a Gun Collector. Volume 1 would be rifles; Volume II would be handguns. What do you think? Let us know by leaving a comment below, and thanks in advance for your inputs.
Speaking of Colt…did you know that the original Gatling guns were manufactured by Colt in Hartford, Connecticut? All that and more is in The Gatling Gun.
In the early days of the COVID pandemic, I bought a box of 500 240-grain cast lead .44 bullets from a reputable bullet supplier.
A reloaded .44 Magnum cartridge. This is one of my favorite cartridges to reload and shoot. Dirty Harry made me a believer.
When I opened the box to start loading these bullets, I was dismayed to see that the bullet bases were not clean. Most were plagued by excess lead that had flowed beyond the bullet’s beveled base. The conventional wisdom has always been that any deformations to a bullet’s base will degrade accuracy, so I was disappointed when I saw these.
A relatively good cast bullet, with no excess lead around the bullet skirt. This bullet is shown upside down.A defective cast .44 Magnum bullet. Excess molten lead flowed around the base of the bullet. This occurs when the lead has not solidified when the bullet is dropped from the mold, or if the slider above the mold is loose. The theory is that an imperfect base will cause the propellant gases to deflect the bullet as it leaves the barrel.
I contacted the manufacturer (whose bullets I had been using for many years) by email and asked if such bullets met their quality requirements. I included a picture of one of the deformed bullets. The manufacturer’s response was immediate: No, those bullets were not acceptable. They do not meet our quality requirements.
The manufacturer then went on to say they had previously been aware of this lot escaping, they had traced it to a particular inspector, and he was no longer with the company. I probably would have jacked up the inspector a bit, and I would have seriously jacked up the operator instead. After all, it was the operator who made the bad product. The manufacturer also promised to send me a new box of bullets, and shortly thereafter, they arrived.
I put the box of defective bullets on a shelf under my reloading bench and forgot about them for the next several years. Recently, while poking around under the bench, I came across them again. It’s always exciting to find forgotten stuff down there, and I half expect to come across Jimmy Hoffa someday hiding behind a coffee can full of .45 ACP brass. As I looked at the box of bullets, I wondered: Are they really defective? Would they shoot well enough for my purposes?
You can guess where this story is going. I decided to test good versus bad bullets. While I was at it, I decided to also test the effects of powder position within the cartridge case on velocity and accuracy (more about this a bit further down).
Deformed Bullet Base Accuracy and Velocity Testing
The first step involved sorting good bullets from bad. Most of the 500 bullets had deformed bases, but I was able to find 20 bullets with relatively clean (i.e., no excess lead flow) bases. I then selected the worst of the deformed bullets. I loaded 40 cartridges with 5.9 grains of Alliant’s Red Dot propellant (it was what I found to be a good load for the .45 Colt, it was in the range of propellant weight my manuals suggested for Red Dot in the .44 magnum, and I already had the powder dispenser adjusted to drop 5.9 grain from a batch of .45 Colt I had just finished loading). This would allow for firing four groups of five shots each with the deformed bullets, and another four groups of five shots each with the good bullets. It was a large enough sample size to allow making a quantified comparison of good versus bad bullets’ effects on accuracy.
For this testing, I used mini-silhouette Alco targets at distance of 50 feet (you’ve seen me use these targets for other handgun accuracy testing). I shot my Turnbull Super Blackhawk, a superb and elegant .44 Magnum revolver (it’s the handgun you see at the top of this blog). I captured velocity information with my Garmin chronograph. All loads used once-fired Remington brass and the CCI 300 primer, and all were loading using Lee’s superb Classic Turret Press and Lee dies.
Here’s a typical target:
Alco’s target with four mini-silhouettes.
So what were the results? Here’s what I found assessing the bullets with defective bases versus those with relatively clean bases:
Based on the average group size comparison between the good bullets versus the defective base bullets, the good ones group better than the bad ones (even at the short test distance of 50 feet). The good bullets grouped, on average, 1.901 inches; the ones with defective bases had an average group size of 2.432 inches. That’s a 28% accuracy degradation for the bullets with defective bases.
The muzzle velocity difference between the two groups of bullets is not very significant, with an average velocity in the 970 feet per second range and a relatively small standard deviation of only around 19 feet per second. This is a good load.
Powder Position Accuracy and Velocity Test
There’s a concern that powder position within the case will affect both accuracy and velocity. The conventional wisdom holds that if the powder is close to the bullet (instead of the primer), the cartridge will behave differently than if the powder is close to the primer (or so the theory goes). It is thought this affects both accuracy and velocity. I tested this parameter, too.
I had another 40 rounds to do the same kind of testing as described above for the bullet base testing. I did not sort the bullets this time. For the first 20 rounds, I pointed the muzzle down (to position the powder more near the bullet) prior to firing. For the second 20 rounds, I pointed the muzzle up (to position the powder more near the primer) prior to firing. I did this to assess both accuracy and velocity.
5.9 grains of Red Dot does not fill a .44 magnum case; it instead occupies about 70% of the case volume. When the bullet is seated in the case, that 5.9 grains fills even more of the available case volume because the bullet occupies a portion of the case above the powder.
It’s tough to get a photo like this. This is 5.9 grains of Red Dot in a .44 Magnum case. When the bullet is seated, most of that case volume is taken up.
There is a little space available (5.9 grains is not a compressed load), and the powder in the case can be biased toward the bullet or toward the primer. Would this make a difference in either accuracy or velocity? The test results here show positioning doesn’t make much of a difference:
As you can see from examining the above data, the group size difference between the two approaches is not very large, and can probably be accounted for by variability in my shooting. There is a small difference in average velocities, but it’s probably insignificant.
I think what’s going on is that because Red Dot is a somewhat fluffy powder, it occupies enough of the case volume that it doesn’t make any difference which way the powder is situation in the case when it fires. It might make more sense to repeat this experiment with a denser powder like Bullseye, which occupies much less of the case volume. I may get around to that one of these days. What this test says to me is that 5.9 grains of Red Dot behind a 240-grain cast semi-wadcutter bullet is a good load in the .44 Magnum. It’s even better when the bullet bases are not deformed.
More gun stuff? You bet. Buy yourself (or a friend) a copy of The Gatling Gun.
The knife du jour is the Rough Ryder 854, which is a gigondo folder that looked like something I couldn’t live without when I saw it on the Chicago Knife Works site. I’m hooked on the large folders, and at a price of $14, this thing seemed too good to ignore.
The Rough Ryder 854. No one has these in stock anymore. It’s a lot of knife at any price.Yessiree…a real pig sticker!
The problem, however, was that the design was defective, or the quality was terrible, or maybe it was both. It was a subtle defect, one that most folks wouldn’t notice until they stabbed themselves with the tip.
The Rough Ryder logo. I like it.
I first saw the knife online somewhere, and then I looked for it on Amazon. I hit paydirt and I used my Prime membership to skirt the shipping costs. Two days later it was at my front door. It looked beautiful, but the blade stopped a little bit short of the knife being fully closed. That’s not good, I realized. I tried squirting WD 40 and then adding oil to the knife’s pivot point, but the blade still stopped a bit short of being fully closed. Back it went to Amazon.
But I like the knife. It looked good and it felt good. So I called Chicago Knife Works and ordered the same knife from them. I called first, and asked if they would examine the knife before it shipped for the problem the first one had. Sure, they said. No problem. Chicago Knife Works is always slow in shipping, though, so I waited the obligatory four or five weeks before it arrived. But finally it did, and I was like a kid at Christmas time when it landed in my mailbox.
You can guess where this story is going. The new Rough Ryder had the same disease. It wasn’t as bad as the first knife, but the blade didn’t fully close. If I ran my finger along the knife handle’s edge, the blade tip still ran proud, and I still saw it could stab me if I wasn’t careful.
The red arrow on the left shows the area I relieved, thinking it would allow the blade to go further into the knife when folded. I was wrong. The red arrow on the right shows the knife’s liner lock, which prevents the blade from inadvertently closing after it has been opened.
The engineer in me took over. I examined the open blade profile and saw a bump stop. If I ground that down, I thought, the blade would more fully close. So I started grinding with my Dremel. That didn’t work. I ground some more of the blade stop off, and things didn’t improve. I examined the blade’s profile and the knife again, and I realized there was another stop of the blade (on the other side of its pivot point) that also controlled where the blade came to rest when the knife closed. But I couldn’t get to that one. Hmmm. Time for Plan B.
What’s weird (and what’s an ingrained character flaw) is that I was really stressing out over this $14 knife. I’ll do that sometimes, and this was one of those times. I’ve been a lot less annoyed at things that are a lot more expensive and aren’t perfect. I should have just returned the Rough Ryder. But I was fixated on fixing the thing. In the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders reference manual, it’s identified as Gresh’s Disease.
When thinking about potential fixes, I realized if I couldn’t get the blade to close any further, I could reprofile the blade to get rid of the tip, or, to be more accurate, to lower the blade’s profile so that the new tip would be below the knife’s scales when closed. So that’s what I did. The stone came out, I went to work, stroking the blade tip and checking how the blade closed every few strokes. Voilà, problem solved.
The blade tip lay above the scales when the knife was closed. I ground it down in the area indicated by the red arrow. Problem solved.A band aid fix, to be sure, but sometimes band aids work.
In the meantime, good buddy and craftsman extraordinaire Pauly bought the same knife. The guy is lucky; his Rough Ryder 854 closed the way God intended it to, and it did not have the same problem mine had. But he didn’t stop there. What the knives needed (both his and mine) was a holster.
The Rough Ryder and the holster Paul made for me.P.W. Berkuta Made. It’s a cool stamp.
I’ve known Paul longer than I’ve known any living person on the planet. Literally. We were next door neighbors back in New Jersey when I was born. Paul has always been good at creating things, and it turns out that leatherworking is among his many talents. Paul created custom holsters for these knives, and they look and work as good as anything I’ve ever seen. What’s really cool is the holster takes advantage of the knife’s curves. The holster is formed to the knife’s coke bottle profile, which secures the large folder when it is in the holster. It’s a hell of a nice gift.
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It was an impulse buy, the kind of purchase that folks who send out marketing emails hope to induce, and it my case, it worked spectacularly well. My new Citizen chronograph is rose gold (something I’m a sucker for), with a leather band (something else I’m a sucker for), and both the leather band and the watch face are Navy blue (something I’m…well, you know where this is going). As it was over $100, there was free shipping (something that always gets my attention). And finally, there was the sale price: $144, down from $395. I am a soft touch for great deals on wristwear, weapons, and other assorted toys that find their way into the ExNotes blog.
All that was cool, but after I clicked buy now and typed in my credit card info, I studied the chronograph bezel markings. I was intrigued by the notation “Base 30 Pulsations.” You can see it on the outer bezel between the 12:00 and 2:00 positions. As much as I like watches in general and chronometers in particular, I had never heard of such a thing before I bought the watch you see above.
It was off to Googleville, and like always, Google came through.
The Base 30 Pulsation system came about in the early days of watchdom as a tool for doctors to quickly measure a person’s pulse rate. The way it works is that you start the stopwatch (the chronometer) and count 30 heartbeats for whoever’s pulse you’re taking. When you hit 30 beats, you stop the chronometer. The chronometer’s second hand will point to the patient’s pulse rate. If the pulse rate is the normal 60 beats per minute, the second hand will point to 60 on the outer bezel, which makes sense because if you had 30 beats in 30 seconds, well, your pulse rate would be 6o beats per minute. This is cool stuff.
That got me to thinking: Are there other chronometers out there with bezels marked in the 30 Base system? Yep, and some are even by Citizen. They have an identical model to the one you see above in stainless steel with a brown leather band and an ivory face:
I’d seen the above watch (the ivory-faced one) in the display case at my local Costco, but I can’t remember what they were asking for it and I couldn’t find it on the Costco website. I’m pretty sure it’s still in the store. If you can’t find one at your local Costco, there are a bunch of retailers selling them on Ebay.
I also found a couple more stainless steel Base 30 versions of the Citizen in different colors on Amazon:
Amazon’s prices were in the $250 to $275 range for the above watches. Those might be decent prices, but Jomas (www.Jomashop.com) has them all beat at $144 (which is what I paid for mine).
A man with a watch knows what time it is. A man with two watches is never sure.
