November 2019 – Page 2 – The ExhaustNotes Blog

The Model 659 Smith and Wesson

After reading one of the blogs I posted on my most capable, TJ-customized Smith and Wesson Model 59, good buddy Tom commented that he had a Model 659. “I always wanted a Model 659,” I said.

My custom Model 59. I’ve been sending lead downrange with this one for close to 50 years.

Well, you know how these things go. One thing led to another, and now I do. Own one, that is. A Model 659. Tom gave me a super deal on his Model 659, and after a visit to an FFL dealer and waiting the Peoples Republik of Kalifornia’s obligatory 10-day cooling off period, I had (in Kalifornia’s infinite left-leaning wisdom) chilled sufficiently. I took possession of this latest addition to the ExNotes Armory, and let me tell you, this new-to-me 9mm is a honey.

My 659, along with a few 9mm reloads. The 659 has an ambidextrous safety. Mine also has Pachmayr grips, which make it easier to get a good grip.

The Model 659 was the follow-on in Smith and Wesson’s 9mm semi-automatic handgun evolutionary arc, and it sold riotously well. The 659’s all stainless steel construction gives it a comfortable heft and provides a stable firing platform. High capacity, 9mm, stainless steel, and an American manufacturer with a storied reputation: What’s not to like? Police departments turned to the Model 659 in droves. It was the right gun at the right time as police departments abandoned their .38 Special six-shooters and moved to 9mm autos.

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As the police armament evolution advanced, the Model 659 Smiths were superseded by yet even newer wunderguns, and used 659s became widely available when the police departments traded them in. I don’t know that this is my 659’s heritage, but I suspect it was. My 659 was well worn externally with lots of fine scratches in the metal work, it didn’t have hardly any internal wear (it hadn’t been fired much), and the safety decocker didn’t work the way it was supposed to. All these things were signs that pointed to lots of carry but little actual shooting.

First, the safety decocker. It’s that gizmo on the rear of the slide that drops and blocks the hammer, and on mine, when it was fully depressed, the hammer wouldn’t drop the way it was supposed to. I guessed it wore out from having been actuated a ton of times, which is probably what happened when whoever carried it put it away for the night every night. This issue was slightly complicated by the fact that Smith and Wesson no longer supports these pistols (that’s the bad news). The good news is that the old Numrich corporation purchased Smith and Wesson’s entire inventory of Model 659 parts (Numrich is now known as the Gun Parts Corporation, but everyone still calls them Numrich). That’s where I found what I needed. Numrich has exploded drawings of these (and many, many other) old guns on line, and you can dope out how older guns work and identify the parts you need. With the help of their isometric drawing below, follow along with me as I explain how this safety decocker thing works.

The 659 Smith decocker is activated by a thumb lever. It’s Find No. 1 in the above drawing. The thing fits into a through-hole at the rear of the slide. When you rotate the decocker down to the safe position, a slot in it pushes the sear release lever down, which is Find No. 63 in the above drawing. When that happens, the sear release lever rotates and acts on the sear, which is Find No. 29. When that happens, the sear releases the hammer (Find No. 61). When the hammer falls, it can’t hit the firing pin because the hammer’s fall to the firing pin is obstructed by the decocker having been rotated to the safe position (which brings us back to Find No. 1). It’s all very clever.

So, like I said above, when Smith went to their newer series of handguns, they sold all their remaining parts inventory to Numrich. Numrich had the new sear release lever, and it was only $4.50. Weirdly, I could have bought a used part from Numrich for $3.50, but the used part would be worn and it would probably not correct the problem I needed to fix (a problem which resulted from wear). It was a no brainer to me, so I splurged for the extra $1 and bought the new part (I’m cheap, but I’m not stupid). My new safety release lever arrived in the mail a few days later.

The 659’s original safety release lever. This one was worn beyond serviceable limits and I bought a new replacement. The upper arrow points to the part of the safety lever that rides along the decocker drum. The lower arrow points to the part that actuates the sear. It was this area (the area designated by the lower arrow) that needed to be fitted to assure proper function. That .22 Long Rifle cartridge? It’s only in the photo to provide a sense of scale.

When the new sear release lever arrived, I had to strip the gun down to the bare frame. I installed the new sear release lever, but it needed to be fitted so that it actuated the hammer drop at the appropriate point in the decocker’s rotation. It was a matter of assemble the gun, try it, take it all apart again, file the sear release lever a little bit, reassemble the gun, try it again, and repeat the process until the decocker worked the way it is supposed to. The whole thing took me about an hour of disassembling, testing, filing, and reassembling. I like doing this sort of stuff. I imagine it’s a lot like resurrecting a 900cc Kawasaki.

The next step was to go to work on all the minor scratches on the gun’s slide and frame. That’s one of the great advantages of a stainless steel firearm. With a little bit of 600-grit sandpaper, you can keep a stainless gun looking new forever. I was really pleased with the way this one turned out. It looks like a new gun now. Nah, scratch that (pardon the pun). I think Smith finished these guns with 400-grit abrasive, which is a little rougher than 600-grit. Mine looks better than new. Polished, almost. It really is a thing of great beauty.

My standard 9mm load is 5.0 grains of Unique behind a 124 grain roundnose bullet, and I’ve got a bunch reloaded and packed away in my ammo locker. It’s an accurate load and it’s reliable. Yeah, I know, you can buy 9mm ammo cheaper than you can reload it these days. I don’t care. I like to reload. Logic doesn’t always prevail when it comes to guns and ammo.

I grabbed a few hundred rounds and it was off to the range for me and the 659. I was more than pleased with the results. I didn’t have a single failure to feed, fire, extract, or eject, and the 659 is accurate. It’s a lot of fun to shoot and the 9mm is a great cartridge.

50 rounds at 50 feet, fired offhand from the standing position. The 659 is a keeper. It’s a lot of fun to shoot, and the bullets go where you tell them to. Nearly all shots were in the 10 ring, and only a few dropped into the 9 ring. The shots that went low? I mostly likely shifted my focus from the front sight to the target. That’s what makes shots go low, and that’s the subject of an upcoming blog.

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ExNotes Review: Ford vs Ferrari

Caution: Spoilers ahead!

When did two sodas and a bag of popcorn top 15 dollars? I mean, come on dude! I’m not a big movie-goer because it seems like everything is either superhero stuff or some depressing Nazi thing. Anyway, us gasoline burner types are starved for content when it comes to full-length movies. We get nothing on the big screen but engine sounds mismatched to the motorcycles and grease monkey stereotypes. When something like Ford vs Ferrari comes along we tend to fall all over ourselves praising the damn thing. And it’s not a bad movie. People are clamoring for Oscar nominations. I don’t know, man, it makes us look kinda thirsty.

Matt Damon does a good job playing Carroll Shelby, although my wife says you never forget it’s Matt Damon as Jason Bourne playing Carroll Shelby. I didn’t recognize any of the other actors so I could accept that they were who they were. There were a few unpleasant characters planted by Hollywood to give the story a villain.

One Ford executive was made out to be petty and vindictive. I have no idea if he was that way in real life. Lee Iacocca was an eager sort, the company man trying to make stuff happen between the stuffy corporate world and Shelby’s hot rod culture. Henry Ford II was shown as cold and authoritarian, much like you would expect him to be. The Ferrari driver had a Simon Legree, comic-villain look that brought me back to the movie theater every time he glared at the hero Ken Miles.

Ferrari was a foil for Ford in this movie. We really don’t get to see much of them. After the Le Mans race begins Ford II flies off to dinner in a helicopter while Mr. Ferrari stays in his seat to watch. I guess that was to show the different level of commitment to the sport. It seems like old man Ferrari never slept the entire 24 hours of Le mans.

One of the movie’s main story arcs was how Ken Miles was forced off the team for Ford’s first attempt at Le Mans. That bad-guy Ford executive is to blame. Of course real life is less complex and Ken Miles ran that 1965 event breaking down after 45 laps due to a bad transmission. Little things like that make you suspect the rest of the story.

Ken Miles’ character was a sort of rebel against the car sellers. The Suits irritated him to no end. I know we are supposed to cheer for him but he seemed like a pain in the ass to me. I’ve known guys like that: Bitching about the company while drawing a check. I figure that if Ford is paying you stacks of money to represent them, suck it up, you know? At least fake it, man.

Some of the Le Mans race scenes were pretty hokey looking, like something out of the old CHIPs television show. “Ponch, we got a freeze up!” Don’t get me wrong: I enjoyed Ford vs Ferrari. I think you’ll probably enjoy it also. You shouldn’t watch a Hollywood movie expecting to get the facts (see Cinderella Man’s portrayal of Max Baer) and us gasoline burners don’t get many chances to hear the audio match the engines.

Gear’d Hardware ZX2 Features

This puppy rocks! A 40-year-old Model 659 S&W that I picked up for a song!

I’ve been wearing my Gear’d Hardware ZX2 watch for a few weeks now and I’m enjoying it. The watch has stood up well after being subjected to lots of miles on the motorcycle and repeated poundings from the recoil of my .45 Compact, my custom Colt 1911 bright stainless, a .30 06 M1 Garand, a Marlin 336 Texan, a Ruger No. 1 in .257 Weatherby Magnum (finally got that one back from Ruger), and about a thousand rounds of hot 9mm ammo through a new-to-me Model 659 Smith and Wesson. I’ll have stories on each of these here on the blog in the near future, but I digress. In this blog, I want to give an update on the Gear’d Hardware watch and its features.

For starters, the Gear’d timepiece includes both digital and analog displays, which you can see in the photo below. The analog display is consists of standard analog watch hour, minute, and second hands. The digital display shows the date (day and month), the day, and the time in hours, minutes, and seconds.

The ZX2’s hands display the time in analog fashion, while the LCDs display the time digitally. You can set the digital time to use a 12-hour or 24-hour clock.

When you press the upper left button, the digital display illuminates. It’s bright enough to see easily in the dark, but not so bright that it lights up the entire area. That’s cool, because I remember from my Army days that some watches can actually reveal your position if you light them up at night. This is just right, in my opinion.

Pressing the upper left button illuminates the digital display.

There’s a mode button on the watch’s lower left, and that steps you through the stopwatch, the alarm, and the time setting functions.

The Gear’d’s stopwatch mode. The time starts and stops with the upper right button, and resets with the lower right button.

The alarm mode. You can set the watch to start beeping at a time you select.

One thing I noticed on the Gear’d watch is that you can set two different time zones, one on the analog display and another on the digital display. This in effect makes the Gear’d watch a GMT watch (at least by my definition of a GMT watch). I didn’t realize that at first and it’s not mentioned in the Gear’d literature, but it’s a powerful feature. I travel a lot internationally, and it’s important to me that I know what time it is where I am as well as the time back in the United States. I don’t want to call a client in the middle of the day when I’m in China and wake them up at 2:00 in the morning back in the world. In fact, about the only kind of new watch I’ll buy these days is a GMT watch (that’s how important that GMT feature is to me).

Just to make the point, I set two different time zones on my Gear’d watch. In this case, the analog time displays 2:06, and the digital time displays 15:06. Being able to show two different time zones is a cool feature.

My Gear’d watch is running just fine, and it’s keeping what appears to be perfect time. It hasn’t gained or lost anything since I first set it. And it just soaks up the abuse I’ve been throwing at it. I like this watch a lot.

That’s it for today. I’m headed to the range. As always, more to follow, and you’ll see it right here on the ExNotes blog. Stay tuned.

Book Review: Berezina

Berezina, by Sylvain Tesson. Save your money, folks. This one’s a snoozer.

Damn, it sounded good, and the book review I read last week in The Wall Street Journal (which I must have read too quickly) made it sound like an interesting read. And the cover looked good, too. It had to be good: Five guys riding from Russia to France in the dead of winter, retracing Napolean’s retreat from a military disaster, on three Ural motorcycles. I love motorcycle adventure books. How could it not be great?

Well, let me tell you how. Berezina is the name of a river Napolean crossed on the way back from Moscow in 1812, and in colloquial French it’s become a term for anything that’s a disaster. It’s an entirely appropriate title for this book. I was hoping for stories about riding in the cold, riding from Russia to France, the challenges in riding motorcycles not known for reliability…in general, a good adventure read. What I found was a lot of intellectual drivel laden with three-dollar words talking almost exclusively about Napolean and his retreat. Somehow, for the most part, the author managed to do this without describing the areas he rode through, and without hardly mentioning the bikes or the ride. He spent a lot of time imagining the misery experienced by Napolean, his army, and bizarrely, his horses. I would estimate that less than 5% of the book was about the riding. Getting through this story was a slog, even though the book was mercifully short.

I realized all of the above in the first few pages, but I kept reading and hoping it would get better. It didn’t. Berezina reminded me of another motorcycle adventure that was mostly about things other than motorcycle riding (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which I also found to be a slog when I read it 50 years ago). Zen, however, at least spent some time on the bike and the riding. In Berezina there was precious little of that, and what little there was wasn’t nearly enough. Save your money, folks. The best thing about Berezina was that it was only $15.

There’s an old saying: You can’t tell a book by its cover. In this book’s case, never were truer words spoken.

If you want a great read about a real motorcycle adventure, buy a copy of Riding the Edge, Dave Barr’s epic story about his ride around the world on a constantly-failing Harley. If it has to be about riding Russia in the winter, try Riding the Ice, Barr’s sequel about a trip across Siberia in a sidecar-equipped Sportster. Either of those books is a great read. Better yet, buy both books. You can thank me later.

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Good food, good meat, good God, let’s eat!

Thanksgiving is right around the corner, and I remember saying that prayer whenever it was my turn to say grace before a family dinner. It was always good for a laugh. Thinking about those big turkey dinners turned my thoughts to the best parts of any motorcycle adventure, and that’s the food. I’ve enjoyed some fantastic meals on the road, and you know what? People tell me the photos have been the best part of any writing I did along the way. I like photos of scenery and people on our adventures, but readers consistently tell me the food photos are the most interesting. Allow me to share with you some of my favorites.

Colombia

Wow, was Colombia ever an adventure. Everything about that ride was absolutely world class, including the dining. Take a look.

A fish lunch along the Chicamocha River. Good Lord, it was fabulous!

Chicken and mushrooms. It was way more than I could eat.

Beef? Pork? Nope, neither. It was pig stomach lining. Very tasty, I’m told.

Carlos, yours truly, and Juan at dinner in Mompos. It’s the oldest town in Colombia, and to say it is off the beaten path would be an understatement.

We had dinner that night in Mompas in a restaurant run by an Austrian, where I had the best pizza I’ve ever had in my life. The beer helped, too!

China

What can I say? The ride across China was amazing in every way, and the food was one of the best parts of it.

Sean took Gresh and me to a hole-in-the-wall place for lunch on the main drag just outside the entrance to Zongshen’s 100-acre manufacturing campus. It was one of those places I would have looked at and thought “who would ever eat here?” The food was amazing.

Fried lotus with pork in Shandong Province. I could do a book about eating my way through China.

A seafood selection, including a starfish, outside of Qingdao. I’d never heard of eating a starfish before the ride across China.

Donkey burgers in Hebei Province. Kong, one of the Chinese riders, told me there’s an old Chinese saying that goes something like “people in heaven eat dragon burgers, and people on earth eat donkey burgers.” Cue in the music from Indiana Jones.

I was leery of the super spicy stuff in China at first. Then I developed a taste for it. It was exquisite.

Except for the tourist hotels in the big cities, folks don’t drink coffee in China. Gresh had a Nescafe stash, which he graciously shared with me each morning.

The Canton Fair has a restaurant row that must have 100 restaurants. This delicious beef dumpling soup was a whopping 25 RMB (that’s $3.96 in US dollars), and it was delicious.

Baja

Hey, no discussion related to adventure riding and food would be complete without touching on Baja!

The man, the mystery, the legend: Tony, fish taco chef extraordinaire!

Tony’s fish tacos, worth a ride south all by themselves.

Street tacos in Ensenada. It’s hard to go wrong with just about any kind of food in Baja.

The above is just a small sampling of delicacies I’ve enjoyed on the road. You can find more by reading about our other rides, and you can get to those on our Epic Rides page.

That’s it for now. For some reason, I’m hungry. Later, my friends.

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Motorcycle Commercials and a Garand Accuracy Update

I mentioned last week that Speer offers 168 grain jacketed hollow point boat tail bullets, and that I was going to load a few rounds for the Garand to see how they performed. My initial results with the Speer bullets were not as good as with Sierra bullets, but I’m just getting started. The Speer Competition Target bullets are much less expensive than the Sierra MatchKings, and I want to make the Speers work. I’m basically a cheap SOB.

Speer’s 168 grain target bullets are just $25 for a box of 100; the comparable Sierra bullets are $37.

My accuracy load with the Sierra bullets was 47.0 grains, which did well in my Garand. That’s the load I used with the Speer bullets. Here’s what I did at 100 yards:

Two clips of 8 rounds each. There’s potential here.

I shot two clips of 8 rounds each at the above target. The promising part was that the second 8 shots grouped better than the first. Not quite as good as the Sierras, but the Speer bullets are hinting there’s more accuracy hiding in those shiny copper jackets. I didn’t exercise the care and consistency I normally would when I loaded these; I guess I was in a hurry. I used brass I had fired four times in the Garand, the brass is getting longer, and I didn’t trim it. I didn’t clean the primer pockets, either. For the next load I’ll trim the cases to a consistent length, I’ll clean the primer pockets, and I’ll use all the other little tricks I’ve learned over the years.

I called the Speer folks yesterday to see if they had any further insights on accuracy with their bullets in the Garand. Reaching the Speer guy was not easy; they don’t list a number on their website and I hate those website “ask us your question” pages. I finally got through to a guy who knew what he was talking about. The Speer rep said he couldn’t tell me the Garand accuracy load because they use a different barrel in their rifle and the harmonics would be different. After asking about the load I was using with the Sierra bullets, he told me their IMR 4064 propellant range with this bullet goes from 45.0 grains up to 49.0 grains (higher than the max load with the Sierra bullets). He also said that the Speer bullets do better with higher charges. He recommended I start at 47.0 grains of IMR 4064 and go up from there. The Speer bullets have ogive and boat tail profiles that are longer than the Sierra bullet, so the Speers have less bearing area in the barrel (that’s why they can be loaded hotter). The Speer dude told me they also load to a longer cartridge overall length of 3.295 inches (which basically defines how deep the bullets are seated in the cartridge case). For someone who couldn’t give me their accuracy load, he sure had a bunch of good information.

So, that’s my plan for the next load. I’ll pick up another box of the Speer bullets and I’ll shoot them later this week, assuming my component dealer still has the Speers in stock. It would be good if I can get them to shoot as well as the Sierras. They are way less expensive. Did I mention I am a cheap SOB?

On to that motorcycle commercial thing mentioned in the title of this blog. Good buddy TK sent this YouTube to me last week, and it’s a hoot. It looks like the Harley and Kawi commercials overseas are a lot better than the silly stuff we see here (although I don’t think I’ve seen any motorcycle commercials for at least a couple of years now).

TK, I enjoyed watching these. Thanks much!

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RIA Compact 1911 Update

I’ve done a few blogs on the 1911 handgun and, in particular, on a Rock Island Armory Compact I bought a couple of years ago. I love the Compact, it’s accurate enough, and it carries well. But I’ve had several issues with this handgun and because I’ve written about it before, I feel like I owe you an update.

Quick offhand shots with the Rock Island Compact 1911 at 50 feet. The load was a 185-grain wadcutter with a stiff charge of Bullseye propellant. It’s accurate enough for its intended purpose, and every shot was on the target. My 230-grain hardball loads are more accurate.

I’m going to share my experiences with you, but I want to make this point early on: I love my Rock Island Compact, and I would buy one again in a heartbeat. Yeah, it’s had problems, but let me make my point again: I’d buy another one in a heartbeat. I thought long and hard about doing a blog focused on the Compact’s failures, mostly because I’ve used the gun longer and harder than most. I’ve put several thousand rounds through the Compact, and nearly all have been full-power, hardball equivalent loads. Having said that, let’s get into it.

Firing Pin Stop Release

The first time I had the Compact on the range, it locked up a couple of times. The culprit? It was a weird one, something I had never encountered on a 1911 before. The firing pin stop was sliding off the firing pin.

The red arrow points to the firing pin stop. It is held in place by the firing pin (shown in the center of the firing pin stop) during recoil, but the firing pin has to be pushed back by its spring to do so.

This fix for this one was easy. After removing the slide from the frame, I depressed the firing pin, pulled the firing pin stop, and then I pulled the firing pin and its spring from the slide. I stretched the firing pin spring just a bit, figuring it needed a little more oomph to push the firing pin back to hold the firing pin stop in place. After that, this failure never recurred.

Staked Front Sight Failure

The Rock Island Compact front sight. It loosened within the first thousand rounds through the gun.

The front sight on my Compact came loose very quickly. That’s common enough on 1911s for staked sights (I’ve had it happen on a Colt 1911 and I’ve seen it happen on a couple of Springfield Armory 1911s, so it’s not a problem unique to the Rock Island handgun). If I was running Engineering at Rock Island, I’d specify a dovetailed front sight. The Compact replicates the look of the original Army 1911 (and I love that about the gun), but I think most purists like me would be willing to give up a tiny bit of the original GI look for a dovetailed front sight. Staked front sights on a 1911 (especially a Compact, which really gets knocked around by hardball-level recoil) are not a formula for long term reliability.

Rock Island made good on the front sight failure with their lifetime warranty. I sent the gun back and they fixed it, and the front sight is staying put.

Extraction and Ejection Failures

I had a ton of extraction and ejection issues. I sent the Compact back to Rock Island on the warranty and they fooled around with the extractor, but it still had extraction problems (at a lower frequency, but they still occurred). After the gun came back and I fired maybe another thousand rounds through it, the extractor broke so I replaced it with an aftermarket extractor (at my expense, because I didn’t want to send it back to Rock Island again). The nature of the failure indicated the extractor steel was too brittle.

The fracture surface of the Rock Island extractor. The surface fractography indicates the material was too brittle (perhaps a consequence of an inadequately-controlled heat treat process).

Ejection was flaky, too, and the gun frequently failed to eject the last round fired. It would stovepipe the brass as the slide went forward, and that brings me to another problem: The slide frequently would not lock to the rear after firing the last round. I mentioned that when I sent the gun back to Rock Island for the extraction issues, but they didn’t completely solve this problem, either. It got better, but it still occurred.

I then took the gun to a real gunsmith (good buddy TJ, about whom I’ve written before). TJ looked at the ejector and immediately recognized it was cut at the wrong angle. He recut it and the gun now ejects flawlessly. To state the obvious, you shouldn’t have to do this on a new gun.

Magazine Issues

Regarding the slide not locking back after firing the last shot in the magazine, that problem required a couple of fixes. One issue was the relationship between the magazine follower and the slide release. I bought two extra mags from Rock Island thinking (and hoping) that maybe I just had a bad magazine, but all three mags had the same problem. The magazine follower is supposed to push the slide release up after the last round is fired with enough force to lock the slide to the rear, but on my gun it wasn’t doing this reliably. I believe it was because one of the magazine follower bends is in the wrong place.

The magazine follower. The arrow on the right points to the follower bend I believe positions the flat portion of the follower (denoted by the other arrow) too low to effectively engage the slide release. I think that bend needs to be about 0.030 or 0.040 inches higher.

TJ addressed the magazine follower issue by welding a bead on the bottom of the slide release where it engages the magazine follower. That made sure the magazine exerted positive upward pressure on the slide release after the last shot, and that made a significant improvement. I think what Rock Island needs to do is modify the design of the follower bend, or better control the manufacturing process to make sure the follower bend is in the right place (it might be that the engineering drawing for the follower places the bend at the wrong location, or it might just be the magazine follower doesn’t meet the Rock Island drawing).

A fully assembled loaded magazine, and a disassembled magazine. One of the magazine issues is a weak magazine spring. The fix was simple enough: I elongated it and that fixed the slide not staying back after the last round.

The other issue is that the magazine springs were wimpy. I pulled the springs and stretched them, reinstalled them in the magazines, and the problem disappeared. The slide now stays back after firing the last round every time.

Slide Deformation

I believe the slide material is too soft. This resulted in a big burr on the slide at the rear of the machined cutout for the slide release, which I ground off because it was scarring the inside of my leather holster and it just looked ugly. You can see the deformation in the photos below.

Metal deformation on the Compact 1911’s slide. A small amount of this is to be expected, but this is excessive.

Deformation in the slide’s release slot.

To some extent, a modest amount of slide material deformation is to be expected, and the problem is somewhat self-correcting. As metal deforms, it work hardens, and this natural work hardening tends to prevent further deformation. I’ve seen this occur on other 1911s I’ve owned (including one manufactured by Colt). I just saw way more of it than I expected on the Rock Island 1911.

Guide Rod Plug Failure

My most recent failure involved the guide rod reverse plug (I call it a bushing). I think this part failed because it was too hard (the fracture surface indicates a brittle failure); I’m guessing the heat treat made it too brittle. This part needs to be more ductile. I also think it is too thin in the area in which the failure occurred.

Rock Island calls this part a plug; I call it a guide rod bushing. The plug fractured and Rock Island shipped a replacement part to me at no cost.

The new plug installed on the guide rod. The paper clip is holding the plug in position while the 1911 is being reassembled.

The guide rod, recoil spring, and replacement plug installed in the slide.

The guide rod plug, viewed from the business end. My barrel and the guide rod have been polished; the stock parts have a Parkerized finish.

Poor Heat Treating Suspected

With the exception of the guide rod plug (which I think is a weak design) and the magazine follower, the issues described above are not faults in the basic design. I think they are being caused by inadequate heat treating process control. Heat treating was always a challenge in the defense plants I managed. To heat treat properly, you have to pull a partial vacuum to prevent hydrogen embrittlement, and it’s difficult (but not impossible) to get accurate temp readings in a partial vacuum. You think it’s one temperature, but actually it’s different temperatures at different locations in the heat treat oven. The result? You get parts harder or softer than specified on their respective drawings, which makes them more brittle or more ductile than they’re supposed to be. This issue of parts being too hard or too soft could be a contributor to the slide deformation issue, the front sight failure, the guide rod reverse plug failure, the extractor fracture, and the magazine and firing pin springs being too weak.

RIA Compact 1911: The Bottom Line

Yeah, I am putting more rounds through my Compact than most folks, who might get to the range once a month or more likely a couple of times a year. But the gun ought to be able to handle it. And yeah, the Compact has a lifetime warranty and the folks at Rock Island have been good about honoring it. I just wish I didn’t have to use it as often.

Having said the above, though, I’ll also tell you that new gun issues are not unique to Rock Island Armory. I’ve had to send three Rugers back for warranty service, my very expensive Smith and Wesson Performance Center revolver went back to Smith for repeated failures to fire (they took what I considered to be an inordinate amount of time to fix it), and my Springfield Armory M1A went back to Springfield for ejection issues (those guys took a long time, too). Two of my friends have Springfield Armory 1911s, and they both had to go back to Springfield for front sight failures (one of them had to go back twice because Springfield screwed up the repair). All of this has been in just the last few years. It’s unfortunate, but quality issues abound in the gun industry, and it seems like things are getting worse. When folks say they don’t make them like they used to, I can tell you from a lifetime of playing with things that go bang that’s true.

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I should also tell you that one of my good buddies tried my Compact, liked it, and he bought one. He hasn’t had any issues with his. None. Zip. Nada. So I can’t say my experience is representative of what you might expect. I’m only telling you what I experienced.

All the above notwithstanding, I’m happy with my Rock Island Armory Compact 1911 and like I said above, I love the gun. I’ve fixed the thing so many times that the Rock and I have what you might call an intimate relationship. We know each other. Like Gresh said about his relationship with the Royal Enfield Bullet, my Rock Island 1911 needs me.

You might wonder: Why not just buy a compact 1911 from a higher-end supplier, like Springfield, Kimber, Sig, or one of the custom builders like Les Baer or Wilson? Well, in a word, price. These other compacts start at roughly twice what the Rock costs (and go up sharply from there), and there’s no certainty they wouldn’t have problems, too. You could argue that you get what you pay for, and my response to that would be: Sometimes.

You can buy Rock Island 1911s for $499 all day long, and I’ve seen them on sale for as little as $429. That’s a great deal on a new 1911. I’ve had to work my way through the issues outlined above, but my Rock Compact is extremely reliable now and it’s a constant companion. Someday I may wear it out completely and if that ever happens, I’d just buy another one. If something goes wrong, odds are I’ll know how to fix it.

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Happy Veteran’s Day!

Veteran’s Day: It’s one of my favorite holidays. It’s a way of recognizing that some among us served, and I enjoy this day more than any other. If you’re a vet, we salute and thank you.

My wife reminded me this morning that one year ago today, we visited the Jack Daniel’s distillery in Tennessee on Veteran’s Day, and I remember well just how much fun that was (and how big a fuss they made over us). You might enjoy that story.

Our local paper ran an article yesterday about all restaurants in our area that offer free meals or discounts on Veteran’s Day (there are 26). Me? I’m going to enjoy a free Grand Slam at Denny’s today. Hey, why not?

If you’re a veteran, you know the feeling and the pride of having served your country. Our thanks to you, and enjoy the day.

A grand Garand load…

A cell phone photo by my daughter from an earlier Veteran’s Day at the range. She managed to catch an ejected brass case in mid-air. I’ll have to get her out again to see if she can repeat that miracle with the en bloc clip after the 8th round.

Veteran’s Day is upon us (it’s Monday), and I’ll do as I usually do on this fine holiday: I’ll be out on the range observing it with my M1 Garand and my 1911 .45 Auto. I’m a vet, I come from a long line of vets, and it somehow feels like bringing those two old warhorses out on Veteran’s Day is the right thing to do.

I’ve been shooting my M1 Garand a lot lately. A couple of weeks ago I gave the bore a gentle but thorough scrubbing with Hoppes No. 9 and Butch’s bore solvent. I finally got it down to where the barrel had no copper streaking in the bore.

The drill is you keep swabbing with a good solvent, wait 15 minutes, and then run another patch down the bore. When they come out blue like this, you’re not done yet.

The rifle needed a few rounds through it after that for its accuracy to return, but when it did, it do so mightily with a new load I tried. I tested several loads during that visit to the range, but one that the old Garand really liked turned in an absolutely stellar performance at 100 yards.

Eight rounds at 100 yards. Two shots went through the hole at the bottom. It’s the best I had done to date with the Garand. My targets? I get all of mine from Alco Target.

I shot the group above with the last of the 40 rounds I took with me that day, and I liked what I saw when I walked down to the target. For a 100-yard, open-sight group, that’s cooking. It’s about the best I’ve ever done.

It was a quick trip to the tumbler and my RCBS reloading equipment to reload my brass with the same recipe, and the next range visit allowed me to dial in the sights. Here’s what it did at 100 yards:

A near-repeat performance the following week, with six rounds in the 10-ring and two that dropped low. Maybe a fly landed on my front sight for the two shots that went low. Still, at 100 yards, that ain’t half bad with open sights.

The load is the 168 grain Sierra jacketed hollow point match boat tail bullet (their MatchKing bullet) with a CCI 200 primer, 47.0 grains of IMR 4064 powder, Remington brass, and an overall cartridge length of 3.240 inches.

I’m pumped. I’m finally getting used to the Garand’s aperture sights and I’m getting used to the rifle. The rear aperture is huge, and it takes every once of mental concentration I can muster to throw all my concentration on the front sight without worrying about where it appears in the aperture. That’s tough to do, and maybe I dropped the ball and that’s why the last two shots went low. Or maybe it was that fly landing on my front sight.

The only problem with the load I used is that the Sierra MatchKing bullets are expensive. They’re $37 a box (that’s 100 bullets), and that’s at the upper end of the price spectrum for me. But, a good group is a good group, and it’s hard to put a price on the kind of performance you see above. I stopped at my favorite reloading components place (Phillips Wholesale in Covina) to pick up another one of those green Sierra boxes and it was a good news/bad news story. The bad news is Phillips didn’t have the Sierra bullets in stock. But that’s the good news, too. Phillips didn’t have the MatchKings, but they had a new one I had not seen before, and that’s the Speer 168 grain Target Match bullets.

Speer’s 168 grain target bullet, their new Target Match jacketed hollow point boat tail. We’ll see if they’re as good as the Sierra bullets.

The Speer bullets are new to me, they look just like the Sierras, and they’re designed to go head-to-head with Sierra’s MatchKing pills. More good news is that they’re only $25 per 100. So I bought a box. You’re probably wondering if the Speer bullets are as good as Sierras, and that would be something we have in common (I’m wondering the same thing). So I loaded another 40 rounds of .30 06 ammo for the Garand and this weekend I’m going to the range to answer that very question. Stay tuned, and I’ll let you know how they shoot.

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The Perfect Bike?

This was a blog I wrote for CSC about 6 years ago, and it’s still relevant. Earlier this year I posted a photo showing my Harley in Baja and Gresh made a good comment: Any motorcycle you take a trip on is an adventure motorcycle. I agree with that. The earlier blogs on my Harley Softail had me thinking about this question again: What is the perfect motorcycle?

Cruisers. Standards. Sports bikes. Dirt bikes. Dual sports. Big bikes. Small bikes. Whoa, I’m getting dizzy just listing these.

The Good Old Days

In the old days, it was simple. There were motorcycles. Just plain motorcycles. You wanted to ride, you bought a motorcycle. And they were small, mostly. I started on a 90cc Honda (that’s me in that photo to the right). We’d call it a standard today, if such a thing still existed.

Then it got confusing. Bikes got bigger. Stupidly so, in my opinion. In my youth, a 650 was a huge motorcycle, and the streets were ruled by bikes like the Triumph Bonneville and the BSA Lightning. Today, a 650 would be considered small. The biggest Triumph today has a 2300cc engine. I don’t follow the Harley thing anymore, but I think their engines are nearly that big, too. The bikes weigh close to half a ton. Half a ton!

I’ve gone through an evolution of sorts on this topic. Started on standards, migrated into cruisers after a long lapse, went to the rice rockets, then morphed into dual sports.

Cruisers and Adventure Bikes

The ADV bug hit me hard about 15 years ago. I’d been riding in Baja a lot and my forays occasionally took me off road. Like many folks who drifted back into motorcycles in the early 1990s, the uptick in Harley quality bit me. As many of us did, I bought my obligatory yuppie bike (the Heritage Softail) and the accompanying zillion t-shirts (one from every Harley dealer along the path of every trip I ever took). I had everything that went along with this kind of riding except the tattoo (my wife and a modicum of clear thinking on my part drew the line there). Leather fringe, the beanie helmet, complimentary HOG membership, and the pot belly. I was fully engaged.

Unlike a lot of yuppie riders of that era, though, I wasn’t content to squander my bucks on chrome, leather fringe, and the “ride to live, live to ride” schlock. I wanted to ride, and ride I did. All over the southwestern US and deep into Mexico. Those rides were what convinced me that maybe an 800+ lb cruiser was not the best bike in the world for serious riding…

The Harley had a low center of gravity, and I liked that. It was low to the ground, and I didn’t like that. And it was heavy. When that puppy started to drift in the sand, I just hung on and hoped for the best. Someone was looking out for me, because in all of that offroading down there in Baja, I never once dropped it. As I sit here typing this, enjoying a nice hot cup of coffee that Susie just made for me, I realize that’s kind of amazing.

The other thing I didn’t like about the Harley was that I couldn’t carry too much stuff on it without converting that bike into a sort of rolling bungee cord advertisement. The bike’s leather bags didn’t hold very much, the Harley’s vibration required that I constantly watch and tighten their mounting hardware, and the whole arrangement really wasn’t a good setup for what I was doing. The leather bags looked cool, but that was it. It was bungee cords and spare bags to the rescue on those trips…

Sports Bikes

The next phase for me involved sports bikes. They were all the rage in the early 90s and beyond, but to me they basically represent the triumph of marketing hoopla over common sense. I bought a Suzuki TL1000S (fastest bike I ever owned), and I toured Baja with it. It would be hard to find a worse bike for that kind of riding. The whole sports bike thing, in my opinion, was and is stupid. You sit in this ridiculous crouched over, head down position, and if you do any kind of riding at all, by the end of the day your wrists, shoulders, and neck are on fire. My luggage carrying capacity was restricted to a small tankbag and a ridiculous-looking tailbag.

I was pretty hooked on the look, though, and I went through a succession of sports bikes, including the TL1000S, a really racy Triumph Daytona 1200 (rode that one from Mexico to Canada), and a Triumph Speed Triple. Fast, but really dumb as touring solutions, and even dumber for any kind of off road excursion.

Phase III for me, after going through the Harley “ride to live” hoopla and the Ricky Racer phases, was ADV riding and dual sport bikes. The idea here is that the bike is equally at home on the street or in the dirt. Dual purpose…dual sport. I liked the idea, and I thought it would be a winner for my kind of riding.

A BMW GS versus Triumph’s Tiger

The flavor of the month back then was the BMW GS. I could never see myself on a Beemer, but I liked the concept. I was a Triumph man back in those days, and the Triumph Tiger really had my attention. A couple of my friends were riding the big BMW GS, but I knew I didn’t want a Beemer. In my opinion, those bikes are overpriced. The Beemers are heavy (over 600 lbs on the road), they have a terrible reputation for reliability, and I think they looked goofy. The Tiger seemed to be a better deal than the Beemer, and it sure had the right offroad look. Tall, an upright seating position (I had enough of that sports bike nonsense), and integrated luggage. So, I bit the bullet and shelled out something north of $10K back in ’06 for this beauty…

The Triumph had a few things going for it…I liked the detachable luggage, it was fast, it got good gas mileage (I could go 200+ miles between gas stations), and did I mention it was fast?

The Tiger’s Shortfalls

Looks can be deceiving, though, and that Tiger was anything but an off-road bike. It was still well over 600 lbs on the road with a full tank of gas, and in the soft stuff, it was terrifying. I never dropped the Triumph, but I sure came close one time. On a ride out to the Old Mill in Baja (a really cool old hotel right on the coast a couple hundred miles south of the border), the soft sand was bad. Really bad. Getting to the Old Mill involved riding through about 5 miles of soft sand, and it scared the stuffing out of me. I literally tossed and turned all night worrying about the ride out the next morning. It’s not supposed to be like that, folks.

And the Tiger was tall. Too tall, in my opinion. I think all of the current dual sport bikes are too tall. I guess the manufacturers do that because their marketing studies show a lot of basketball players buy dual sports. Me? I don’t play basketball and I never cared for a seat that high. Just getting on the Tiger was scary. After throwing my leg over the seat, I’d fight to lean the bike upright, and not being able to touch the ground on the right side until I had the thing upright was downright unnerving. I never got over that initial “getting on the bike” uneasiness. What were those engineers thinking?
The other thing that surprised me about the Tiger was that it was uncomfortable. The seat was hard (not comfortably hard, like a well designed seat should be, but more like sitting on small beer keg), and the foot pegs were way too high. I think they did that foot peg thing to make the bike lean over more, but all it did for me was make me feel like I was squatting all day. Not a good idea.

Kawasaki’s KLR 650

I rode the Tiger for a few years and then sold it. Even before I sold it, though, I had bought a new KLR 650 Kawasaki. It was a big step down in the power department (I think it has something like 34 or 38 horsepower), but I had been looking at the KLR for years. It seemed to be right…something that was smaller, had a comfortable riding position, and was reasonably priced (back then, anyway).

I had wanted a KLR for a long time, but nobody was willing to let me ride one. That’s a common problem with Japanese motorcycle dealers. And folks, this boy ain’t shelling out anything without a test ride first. I understand why they do it (they probably see 10,000 squids who want a test ride for every serious buyer who walks into a showroom), but I’m old fashioned and crotchety. I won’t buy anything without a test ride. This no-test-ride thing kept me from pulling the trigger on a KLR for years. When I finally found a dealer who was willing to let me ride one (thank you, Art Wood), I wrote the check and got on the road…and the off road…

My buddy John and I have covered a lot of miles on our KLRs through Baja and elsewhere. I still have my KLR, but truth be told, I only fire it up three or four times a year. It’s a big bike. Kawi says the KLR is under 400 lbs, but with a full tank of gas on a certified scale, that thing is actually north of 500 lbs. I was shocked when I saw that on the digital readout. And, like all of the dual sports, the KLR is tall. It still gives me the same tip-over anxiety as the Tiger did when I get on it. And I know if I ever dropped it, I’d need a crew to get it back on its feet.

That thing about dropping a bike is a real consideration. I’ve been lucky and I haven’t dropped a bike very often. But it can happen, and when it does, it would be nice to just be able to pick the bike up.

Muddy Baja

On one of our Baja trips, we had to ride through a puddle that looked more like a small version of Lake Michigan. I got through it, but it was luck, not talent. My buddy Dave was not so lucky…he dropped his pristine Yamaha mid-puddle…

The fall broke the windshield and was probably a bit humiliating for Dave, but the worst part was trying to lift the Yamaha after it went down. Slippery, muddy, wet…knee deep in a Mexican mudbath. Yecchh! It took three of us to get the thing upright and we fell down several times while doing so. Thinking back on it now, we probably looked pretty funny. If we had made a video of it, it probably would have gone viral.

The Perfect Bike: A Specification

So, where is this going…and what would my definition of the perfect touring/dual sport/ADV bike be?

Here’s what I’d like to see:

Something with a 250cc to 500cc single-cylinder engine. My experience with small bikes as a teenager and my more recent experience has convinced me that this is probably the perfect engine size. Big engines mean big bikes, and that kind of gets away from what a motorcycle should be all about. Water cooled would be even better. The Kawi KLR is water cooled, and I like that.

A dual sport style, with a comfortable riding position. No more silly road racing stuff. I’m a grown man, and when I ride, I like to ride hundreds of miles a day. I want my bike to have a riding position that will let me do that.

A windshield. It doesn’t have to be big…just something that will flip the wind over my helmet. The Kawi and the Triumph got it right in that department.

Integrated luggage. The Triumph Tiger got that part right. The KLR, not so much.

Light weight. Folks, it’s a motorcycle…not half a car. Something under 400 lbs works for me. If it gets stuck, I want to be able to pull it out of a puddle. If it drops, I want to be able to pick it up without a hoist or a road crew. None of the current crop of big road bikes meets this requirement.

Something that looks right and is comfortable. I liked the Triumph’s looks. But I want it to be comfortable.

Something under $5K. Again, it’s a motorcycle, not a car. My days of dropping $10K or so on a motorcycle are over. I’ve got the money, but I’ve also got the life experiences that tell me I don’t need to spend stupidly to have fun.

It was maybe a year after that blog that the RX3 came on the scene, and it answered the mail nicely. A year or two after the RX3 hit the scene, BMW, Kawasaki, and one or two others introduced smaller ADV motorcycles. I commented that these guys were copying Zongshen. One snotty newspaper writer told me I was delusional if I thought BMW, Kawi, and others copied Zongshen. I think that’s exactly what happened, but I don’t think they did as good a job as Zongshen did.

If you’ve got an opinion, please leave a comment. We’d love to hear from you!

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