March 2022 – The ExhaustNotes Blog

The Six Worst Moto Buddies

Oh boy oh boy oh boy…another listicle! Our focus this time: The six worst folks to bring along on a motorcycle ride. Are you on this list?

Always Late

I can’t be around people who are late. If we say we’re going to leave at 7:00 a.m., then be there at 6:45. You know, in the Army we used to joke about the other services and their punctuality. In the Army, 0800 meant you were ready to go at 0730. In the Navy, it was something like 8 bells. In the Air Force, 0800 meant, you know, eightish, give or take. In the Marines, 8:00 a.m. meant Mickey’s big hand was on the 12 and his little hand was on the 8.

Hey, be on time. Better yet, be early. Buy a watch. Don’t make other people wait. Don’t be late. Ever.

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Too-Long-To-Get-Ready Richard

You know the guy I’m talking about. He’s the clown who takes 15 minutes to put his jacket, helmet, and gloves on. It’s almost like he needs someone to help him put his gear on. If you suffer from that disease, I’ll ride with you one time. Next time I’ll know better.

Rude Richard

I’ve ridden with a lot of folks on a lot of rides, and rides often involves stopping to eat. One character flaw I won’t tolerate is rudeness to the folks who work in restaurants. It’s just stupid, if you think about it. Why would you demean people who handle your food? But it goes beyond that…it makes me uncomfortable when another rider talks to the help like he’s a plantation owner. Restaurant people work hard, and they’re doing the best they can (just like the rest of us). One guy I rode with was a total horse’s ass, and to compound the felony, he wouldn’t leave a tip. I did (for me and for him), and while he was still putzing around putting on his riding gear, I left without him. For all I know, he’s still in that restaurant parking lot wondering where I went. On this topic of rude, this excerpt from Lonesome Dove says it all. Wait for Tommy Lee Jones’ last line. It’s a classic.

The Peloton Weenie

I am particular about who I ride with, and basically, if I haven’t ridden with you before, I’m not going to. Yeah, I’m old and I’m particular. What lights my fuse is the guy who thinks he’s in a peloton (you know, that’s the deal where the bicyclists ride within inches of each other). I don’t like people following me too closely, and I definitely don’t like anyone riding alongside me in my lane. Back off, Bucko!

Never Brings Enough Money

I had a friend like this I went to jump school with at Fort Benning. Let’s call him Dick. Dick rolled into the Benning School for Boys with the rest of us and didn’t bring any money. He was hitting us up at every stop to spot him a few bucks. I finally asked Dick how he planned to get through the three weeks of Basic Airborne. “I planned on borrowing,” Dick answered. You know, we were basically kids then, so I suppose I should make allowances for that Dick’s behavior. I can’t tolerate it in an adult. But we see it on group rides sometimes.

Ricky Racer

You know the type…every ride is a race. I won’t play that game, and if you want to slide through the canyons and pass on blind curves, that dot you see growing smaller and smaller in your review mirror is me, dude.

I don’t have anything against people who speed, unless they’re late, or they take too long to put their helmet and gloves on, or they’re rude, or they didn’t bring enough money for wherever we’re going, or they crowd me. If you want to treat every road like your own personal racetrack, you go on ahead. You ride your ride, and I’ll ride mine.

Did you recognize any of your riding buds on this list? Worse yet, did you see yourself in any of these description?

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Manzanar National Historic Site

This is a blog I posted a few years ago for CSC Motorcycles. It was a one-day road trip headed north on the Three Flags Highway. That’s US Highway 395 in the photo below, which runs from the border with Mexico all the way up to Canada. My destination was the Manzanar National Historic Site, and I went there to do a story for Motorcycle Classics magazine.

Highway 395 is magnificent, but I wanted to scoot up there quickly and do a bit of exploring in and around Manzanar, which is 210 miles north for me.

Any road trip through this region wouldn’t be complete without a peek at the Cottonwood charcoal kilns (and a peek from within the kilns).

The Cottonwood charcoal kilns are about 10 miles south of Manzanar and about a mile to the east of Highway 395. It’s soft sand getting there. It was no problem on my KLR 650.

When World War II broke out, Franklin Roosevelt had Americans of Japanese descent from the three western states on the Pacific interred in what were basically concentration camps. It was a national disgrace, it’s hard to believe such things occurred in this country, and if I had to choose a single word to describe my visit, it would be “disturbing.”

The camp was just to the right of the guard tower you see above. Even though it was 104 degrees down on the Mojave floor when I shot this photo, you can still see snow in the eastern Sierras.

There were 10,000 Japanese-American prisoners kept at Manzanar. This is the inside of one of their barracks.

One of the Japanese-American internees was a kid named Bob Uragami. When I worked for Aerojet (in another life a few decades ago), Bob worked with me in the cluster bomb business. He was a test engineer.

There was a list inside the museum at Manzanar, and I found Bob’s name…he was rounded up with the rest of his family when he was a boy.

Here’s a view looking out the door of one of the barracks toward the Sierras.

This is the Manzanar cemetery. It’s about a mile away from the barracks on a dirt road, but the road inside the prison grounds is hard pack. It’s not a problem on a motorcycle.

And the exit…the camp was guarded by US Army MPs.

I had my Nikon with me, and I made a bunch of stops to take photos as I rode through the desert on the home. Check out this unusual house, guarded by a rusty T-rex.

You see a lot of unusual things out in the Mojave, not the least of which was a collection of iron art.

One final shot, folks…a selfie.

The ride to Manzanar and the National Historic Site was a good one. You’ll want to check the weather before you leave. Highway 395 has temperatures well over 100 degrees during the summer, and it can be a very, very cold ride during the winter.

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Shinya Kimura

When I was consulting with CSC, one day Steve Seidner (the CSC CEO) asked me to go with him to visit Shinya Kimura, a man who builds custom bikes. Steve thought I might enjoy grabbing a few photos of Mr. Kimura’s shop and a few of his bikes. Little did I know about what I would see.

From the outside, all I could see was a small shop, but when I entered I was stopped dead in my tracks by one of the most beautiful motorcycles I had ever seen. It was an early CB750 Honda Shinya had customized and it was visually arresting. I had never seen anything like it. The lens cap came off my Nikon, I dialed the ISO up to 800, and I had started snapping away.

Steve introduced me to Shinya, who invited me to look around the shop and photograph whatever I wanted. And I did, not really knowing who this guy was. But the shop…wow! It was more of a studio and a museum than a shop and it was amazing. The place was a working shop, but the tools, custom motorcycles with a unique, retro-futuristic-formed-aluminum theme, the motorcycle accoutrements, the patina, and more somehow made me feel immediately like I was in a place where I belonged. It’s hard to describe and I know these words are failing me, but if you’re a gearhead, I think you’ll get it.

But don’t take my word for it. Take a look.

Later that day I Googled Shinya Kimura. It’s good I did this later, as I might have spent more time asking him questions than taking photos, and the things I photographed were amazing. I didn’t know anything about Mr. Kimura, but Google gave me perspective on the man I had met earlier.

That night I went through the raw files I had captured with my Nikon and processed them in Photoshop. I think they are some of the best photos I’ve ever taken, but that’s not me bragging about my photography or my Photoshop skills. It was what I was shooting that made the photos what they are.

A Tale of Two Hi Powers

Good buddy Robby has been a friend for 30 years. I first met Robby on a consulting gig in Georgia. He’s a fellow engineer, a firearms aficionado, a reloader, and a hell of a shot. Robby and I see each other whenever our paths cross, and more often than not the talk is about guns and reloading. Robby is a competitive pistolero and a hunter, he enjoys a finely-figured bit of walnut as much as I do, and we both appreciate the finer points of Ruger No. 1 and bolt action rifles. Robby shared with me that he recently acquired an FN Hi Power. I asked him if he would do a guest blog for ExNotes and what follows is the well-crafted result.

My grandfather: The man who taught me basically everything I know. Hunting, fishing, archery, how to shoot, how to walk through the woods silently, how to approach anything that needed fixing. Everything. He grew up during the Great Depression, he was a highly decorated recon scout during WW II, he was a cop and a security guard and he retired as a postman. I saw my grandfather as the definition of a man. He owned two handguns, one centerfire rifle (a Model 70 Winchester), a .22 and a very illegal shotgun that he sawed off because his brother split the barrel.

I own one of his handguns (a Colt Detective Special) and I have the .22 and the Model 70. The Colt Detective Special is a fine little snubby with a black paint job because someone let it rust while I was in college. I painted it and took it into my possession.

My grandfather’s Nazi war trophy with artillery sights.

My younger brother has the other handgun. It is an automatic that my grandfather took from an SS officer after dispatching him in northern Italy. It is the first automatic that I ever saw, held or fired. My grandfather kept it in the car when he delivered mail on the rural route he ran, he took it on camping trips with my brother and me, and he kept it close everywhere he went. He kept it in a holster with the German’s name written on the flap. It was a mystical gun that seemed more like Excalibur to me than some manmade object. I had all of the other firearms, so I was fine with my brother hanging on to Excalibur.

Another view of the World War II German Hi Power.

What was this mystical weapon, you ask? Just a fine Belgian copy of John Moses Browning’s “improvement” of the 1911. A 9mm Browning Hi Power, to be exact. The design was unfinished when JMB departed this mortal world, but a Belgian named Dieudonné Saive finished the design and after incorporating a few of Browning’s older patents, created the most widely-issued sidearm in history. Anyway, I am making a short story extremely long.

My brother possessed Excalibur and I needed one for myself. I bought lots of different pistols, including a couple of 1911s, and built a few custom polymer pistols with all the trimmings, but I still didn’t have a Hi Power. I was super excited when I saw Springfield and FN resurrecting the Hi Power, and I was determined to have my own.

Well, after looking for unicorn teeth in the retail shops and online, I was thinking my Hi Power was a pipe dream. The SA and the FN are made of unobtanium and the one I found online was priced accordingly. Before heading off to find The Lady of the Lake, I stopped by a local gun shop to see if I could find a 9mm AR lower. Yes, I have wide and varied tastes when it comes to things that go BANG. The owner and his minions were all tied up, so I decided to window shop a bit. I saw the Hi Power before I made it to the case. I pretended to look at everything else, hoping that no one would notice that Excalibur’s brother was RIGHT THERE in the open!

Once I got the attention of a person employed by this fine establishment, I asked to hold “that one.” “That one” had oversized, red, laminated wood grips that were apparently sized for Andre the Giant and looked much like lipstick on a large sow. I asked the owner if he knew the vintage and he replied that he thought it was a 1980s production gun. The tag affixed to the trigger guard said “consignment” and the price was $1199. That was a quick “nope” from me and I headed back to the truck with no AR lower and no Excalibur.

A week or so later, I ended up at the same shop again after dreaming up some other materials that I might need to finish the AR 9 I started. I asked to hold the Hi Power again. I noticed that it had been marked down $100 and the owner told me that it came with a spare mag and another grip. The red, behemoth handles needed to go, so I was glad to hear there was an immediate option. I still wasn’t keen on paying north of a grand, though. If it had been an actual Browning with that deep Browning bluing, that might have been much harder, but it was a well-worn FN with circus handles and non-OEM sights. It didn’t even have the “artillery” sights that my grandfather’s had. That’s what he called the adjustable-to-500-meter sights that Excalibur wore. I handed it back again and left.

My 1952 Fabrique National (FN) Hi Power with Hogue grips.

Viewed from either side, the Hi Power and its new grips look good.

A couple more weeks rocked on, I received my yearly bonus from work, I finished the AR 9, and I couldn’t get the Hi Power out of my head. We were headed that way to pick up one of my daughter’s friends and I decided to stop by and see if I could talk the guy down to $900. I walked in, eyeballed the cases and found it nestled between a couple of other pistols that I didn’t even look at long enough to identify. I asked the guy that offered to help me how much was being asked for the Hi Power this week. He yelled across the shop and asked the owner. $850 was the answer! I holstered my negotiating skills and said, “I’ll take it!”

When I made it back to the truck with it in a plastic grocery bag, I took it out and showed it to my very unimpressed better half. She said,”That is the “gun-est” looking gun I have ever seen…”

I responded, “Exactly, it is beautiful!” And off we went.

I got it home after a few hours of birthday shopping with my 15 year old, her friend and the wife and had to go straight to the yard and shoot my newest acquisition. It did not disappoint! The aftermarket sights are installed properly and are right on the target. The trigger breaks cleanly, there’s no hammer bite, and there were no failures or hiccups of any kind. Perfect…just like I hoped. Except for the furniture. I ordered a set of Hogue hardwood grips in Kingwood after a pretty thorough scouring of the internet in search of something fitting for my wooden desires.

I started my research on the serial number and completely struck out. Apparently, FN is pretty liberal and somewhat random with their numbering system, so I dug deeper. Thumb print on the right side, *S on a couple of parts, internal extractor and the five-digit serial number helped me narrow it down to a 1952 production run.

Both Hi Powers shoot well. These are 50-ft targets. My grandfather’s (and now my brother’s) Hi Power shot the group on the left; my FN Hi Power shot the group on the right.

I messaged my brother and asked him to drop Excalibur by so I could compare the two. I shot both and they are equal in all things. Except mystique. Hopefully, in time I will add a bit to mine.

Robby, that’s an awes0me story and a fine-looking pair of Hi Powers. Thanks so much for sharing it with us and our readers. You and your brother are a couple of lucky guys. Always a pleasure to hear from you, my friend, and our best to you and your family.

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Flipper Nation: How To Ruin a Fun Hobby By Squeezing Every Dime That You Can Out Of It

I realize we all have to make a living. Food has gone up, gas costs more and the rent is too damn high. Look, I have nothing against businessmen, as long as they play it straight and don’t scam customers. Go for it. Make all the money you can; see if I care. No, this story is about how all of us grease monkey types have forsaken the cool and the funky to become a bunch of soulless stock fluffers: a nation of pump-and-dump Hobby-Hawkers concerned only with what they can extract from the other, equally soulless fluffers.

Take Jeep YJ’s for instance. The square-headlight YJ has been the entry-level vehicle for 4-wheel drive buffs for the last 30 years. Shunned by other Jeep owners, despised for the simple crime of having headlights that actually align with their bodywork, Jeep YJ’s were the bottom rung. You could pick up a running YJ for a couple thousand dollars and hit the trails later that day. Light weight and simple suspension made the YJ very capable off-road and easy to fix when it broke down.

I bought my ’92 YJ for $2800 about ten years ago and the thing has been running good-ish ever since. If you believe the YJ groups I habituate, YJ’s are $20,000 rigs now. I see people posting up rusty old YJ’s for $6000/$8000 dollars. The users of YJ groups love it. Just sitting on their hands their investment (note: It’s no longer a Jeep or something they enjoy; it’s just an investment, like oil futures) goes up several thousand dollars a day. When someone online asks what their YJ is worth, which is every second question after which oil to use, the shills pipe in with ridiculous amounts of money that they themselves would never pay. All in service of bumping up the YJ’s stock price.

I could understand it better if Jeep YJ’s were sort of rare, but Jeep made 685,000 of the things over a nearly 10-year production run. They are everywhere, in fields, rusting in driveways, stacked in Jeep specific junkyards. That doesn’t stop the flippers from trying to run up the price. Everyday the imagined value of a Jeep YJ goes up another few hundred dollars. We may have missed out on Bitcoin but we’re darn sure not going to sell our clapped out old Jeeps for less than the price of a 2022 model. This money grab turns a fun hobby into just another IPO stock offering, something to own for its upside potential, not because you enjoyed it.

It’s the same with old motorcycles. The prices people are asking for any minor part that fits a vintage Japanese bike are just silly. I’m not immune to fluffer-fever. Prices for old Z1 Kawasaki’s have gotten so high I’m thinking of selling mine to cash in before the bubble bursts. My funky old motorcycle has turned into a savings account. And that’s the truly sad part: I enjoyed building the Z1 but now have to worry about where I park it due to its inflated value. I was going to ride it to Mexico with Berk but what if it gets stolen? The bike is no longer fun. In my mind’s eye it has become a stack of dollar bills waiting to be blown away by the slightest wind.

I know I’m ranting here but just once I’d like to log into a vintage motorcycle forum and not be bombarded with Internet shills asking for valuations or offering Jeeps and motorcycles for sale at stratospheric numbers. Old Jeeps, motorcycles and for that matter, vintage cars should mean more to us than how much return on the investment we can get from them. They should reach back into our memories and emotions; they should recall hot-metal smells and loves lost or found; they should be valued and not commoditized.

I guess what I really want is to remember the fun we had with our old cars and bikes before it all became a race to the top. I know the air will rarify and these old clunkers will become like casino chips: traded but never loved except for their monetary properties. You know, I used to hate the way people chopped up vintage Japanese motorcycles and turned them into goofy looking Brat style bikes but now I’m having second thoughts. Maybe by so thoroughly destroying the value of their motorcycles the Brat Butchers are actually saving the old bike’s true value as a motorcycle.

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Read more about the Z1 and other projects here.

Gats and Hats II: A Jovino Model 25

The revolver you see in the blog today is a rare animal, one of 650 customized by New York City’s John Jovino Gun Shop. I guess the best way to start this post is with the John Jovino story. The Jovino Gun Shop is no longer in business, having fallen victim to the Covid 19 pandemic, but until then it was the oldest gun shop continuously in business in the entire country. John Jovino opened the store in 1911; he sold it to the Imperato family in the 1920s (the Imperatos are the folks who started and now operate Henry Firearms). Jovino’s was famous and it’s been in more than a few movies (and even in my favorite TV show, Law and Order).

The John Jovino Gun Shop in Manhattan, said to be the oldest gun shop in both New York City and the United States. Unfortunately, it is no longer in business.

Back in the 1980’s, Jovino’s built custom guns. Their primary clients were the NYPD and other police departments, as well as individual police officers, so many of the Jovino customs tended to be duty-oriented carry weapons. The one you see here is no exception. Jovino’s started with 6.5-inch-barreled Model 25 Smiths chambered for the .45 ACP cartridge and they turned them into 2.5-inch snubnosed revolvers. The conversion from a stock Smith and Wesson Model 25 to a Jovino snubbie, though, was not just a simple chop job. Here’s what the wizards at Jovino did to these guns:

- - Shortened the factory barrel to 2.5 inches.
  - Installed a crane lock to replace the ejector rod lock.
  - Relocated the red ramp front sight.
  - Rounded the butt to the S&W K frame round butt configuration.
  - Tuned the double and single action trigger.
  - Radiused the hammer spur (you can see it in the photos).
  - Polished the trigger face (you can see that in the big photo at the top of this blog).
  - Fitted Pachmayr rubber grips.
  - Reblued the cut barrel (the new bluing is actually a bit darker and more polished than the stock bluing).

As you probably already know (and you certainly know if you follow the ExhaustNotes blog), the 1917 platform Smith and Wesson and Colt revolvers can fire .45 ACP ammo if the cartridges are mounted in clips, or they can fire .45 AutoRim ammo. .45 AutoRim ammo is essentially the .45 ACP cartridge with a rim. For this test series, I used reloaded .45 AutoRim ammo. It’s the ammo you see in the photo below.

A gat and a hat, with six rounds of reloaded .45 AutoRim ammunition.

The original grips that came with the Jovino Model 25 snubbie were Pachmayrs, and they probably make more sense (more on that at the end of this blog). I didn’t care for the appearance and for reasons it would take a therapist to explain, I wanted ivory grips (I think it has something to do with watching Patton too many times). I settled for fake ivory, which provided the look I wanted without the cost. Don’t tell the General.

The Pachmayr grips that originally came on the Jovino Model 25 snubbie.

When Jovino cut the Model 25 barrels down to 2.5 inches, there wasn’t enough room left in the ejector shroud for the front cylinder lock, so Jovino incorporated the ball-detent cylinder lock you see in this photo.

When the new grips arrived, I liked the S&W escutcheons and I liked the look, but I didn’t like the fit. I didn’t realize what I had in the Jovino and the extent of the customization that went into these guns. I ordered grips for an N-frame round butt Smith and Wesson, but they stood a bit proud on the revolver’s grip frame (the back strap). That’s because the Jovino customs reworked the frame from a square N-frame grip profile to a Smith and Wesson round butt K-frame profile, but I’m told the K-frame grips won’t match exactly, either. I bought the larger N-frame grips figuring I could take grip material off, but I couldn’t put it back on. I didn’t dare attempt to sand the grips on the gun, so I very gently went to work on them with sandpaper off the gun, repeatedly installing and removing the grips to take off just enough material to get a good grip-to-frame match. When I was just about there, I found that by stepping down to 400, then 600, and then 800 grit sandpaper, I could match the polished look on the rest of the grip. I was pleased with the result.

The grips look good. So does the revolver. One of the Jovino custom touches was to round the hammer spur profile. I like what they did.

I tested three .45 AutoRim loads:

- - A 200-grain Speer swaged semi-wadcutter bullet loaded with 4.2 grains of Bullseye.
  - A 200-grain Precision Cast semi-wadcutter bullet loaded with 6.0 grains of Unique.
  - A 233-grain Missouri K-Ball cast roundnose bullet loaded with 5.6 grains of Unique.

.45 AutoRim ammunitiion. Note the rim on the brass cartridge case. The case is identical to .45 ACP ammo in all other dimensions. From left to right, you see the 200-grain swaged Speer semi-wadcutter bullet, the 200-grain Precision Cast cast semi-wadcutter bullet, and the 233-grain Missouri Bullet cast roundnose K-Ball bullet.

I had already tested my Jovino revolver for accuracy at longer distances a few years ago; this test was to be different. Like the .38 Special Model 60 accuracy tests we wrote about a couple of days ago, I set up a few “Betty and the Zombie” targets at 7 yards and I fired double action as quickly as I could. I’m told the typical hostage rescue zombie gunfight occurs at 7 yards, so I wanted to get a feel how I would do in these encounters. You know, so I’d be ready.

What was surprising to me was just how incredibly smooth the double action trigger was on the Jovino. In a word, it’s amazing. Shooting double action was fun. The slick trigger and the Model 25 Jovino’s red ramp and white outline sights seem to glue the front sight to the zombie’s left eye, until that part of the zombie disappeared and I was shooting at a hole. These guns are impressive.

The 200-grain semiwadcutter with 4.2 grains of Bulleye was a very pleasant load (for me, not the zombie) with modest recoil. The 233-grain K-Ball Missouri load was a much more emphatic load. That one pounded me around a bit more, but it still hung in there on the zombie. All of the loads shot essentially to point of aim. Each of the targets below were hit by five full cylinders of .45 ammunition, or 30 rounds apiece. There was not a single miss among all 90 rounds.

Zombie versus .45 AutoRim ammo loaded with 200-grain Precision Cast bullets and 4.2 grains of Bullseye.

200-grain Speer bullets and 6.0 grains of Unique. Sometimes zombies don’t go down with the first shot, so I lobbed in another 29.

Betty was plenty nervous, but she held still. The zombie did, too. He took 30 rounds of 233-grain K-Ball Missouri bullets propelled by 5.6 grains of Unique.

So what’s the bottom line to all of this? The Jovino .45 ACP revolver is accurate, it has a superb trigger, and it is just plain fun to shoot. That last load was a bit much. The 233-grain K-Ball Missouri looks pretty much like their 230-grain roundnose, but the difference in recoil is both perceptible and significant. You can go quite a bit hotter with this load, but I won’t. When I finished shooting, I was surprised to see I had done a bit of damage to my thumb. I think it happened on the last round or two because there’s no powder residue where the skin tore away, and it happened because the faux ivory grips have a bit of a corner to them. The rubber Pachmayr grips wouldn’t have done this, but they don’t look as cool as the grips the Jovino wears in these photos. The gun doesn’t do this firing single action, but I guess my hand rode up a bit firing double action. Sometimes these things happen when you take on the odd zombie or two.

Zombie combat. It’s a tough job. Somebody’s got to do it, though.

The Jovino Model 25 is probably the finest and smoothest revolver I’ve ever shot. It’s a keeper.

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More .45 ACP revolver stories….check these out!

Reloading .45 ACP for 1917-style revolvers.

Gats and Hats I: The Model 60 S&W

There’s a Facebook group called Snub Noir and I enjoy it. They have a lot of good info there about concealable revolvers, and it projects kind of a ’40s/’50s/’60s vibe having to do with private investigators and police officers (and movies, TV shows, and novels from that era). It’s centered on the Colt and Smith snubbies of the day, and on today’s snubbies, too. If you’re into snub nosed revolvers, you’ll like this place. If you visit it, you’ll understand the Gats and Hats thing.

That beautiful S&W Model 60 you see in the big photo above is my personal carry gun and it’s a sweet piece. It’s been selectively polished, it has Altamont grips, and it has a TJ action job (you can read more about TJ’s work on his website and I’ll give you a few more links on my Model 60 at the end of this blog). I’ve done a fair amount of load testing with the Model 60 and I know the loads it likes from accuracy and shoot-to-point-of-aim perspectives. The best load is the FBI load, which is a 158-grain bullet over 3.5 grains of Winchester 231 propellant.

Five rounds of .38 Special, with a 158-grain flatpoint cast bullet and 3.5 grains of Winchester 231. It’s a great load. You can read about it in the links provided at the end of this blog.

I wanted to try something different, though. I’ve shot the Model 60 at 50 feet, 25 yards, 50 yards, and 100 yards. I know, I know: Those latter two distances are not really what the snub nose revolver designers had in mind when they designed these guns. But I was curious when I did those tests. I know a retired police officer who can hit a clay target at 50 yards (the kind you dust in trap or skeet shooting).

The police sometimes qualify at 7 yards, and I think that’s more in line with what a snubbie is intended to do. And, you know, there’s this zombie apocalypse thing that’s coming down the road. I’ve done my homework, and I know that most zombie hostage incidents (i.e., where a zombie is holding a damsel in distress) occur at 7 yards. I wondered: How would I do firing my Gat double-action as quickly as I could at 7 yards? I want to be prepared, you know.

Five rounds is all the Model 60 holds. It sure is slender and it conceals well.

Fortunately for me, zombie-holding-hostages targets are readily available on Amazon, so I grabbed a couple and headed to the range to test my hostage rescue skills with two different loads. The first was the old bullseye target competition .38 Special standard: A 148-grain wadcutter (in this case, copper-plated wadcutters from Xtreme Bullets) over 2.7 grains of Bullseye propellant. It’s the load I’m set up to produce in large quantities on my Star reloader, and it’s the load you see in the top photo (the Dr. Seussian Gat in the Hat pic). The other is the FBI load mentioned above: A 158-grain bullet and 3.5 grains of Winchester 231 secret sauce.

So how’d I’d do? The short answer is not too bad. Not as good as I thought I would, but good enough and certainly close enough for government zombie work. The first target (the one immediately below) shows the results of six full cylinders (30 rounds, as the Model 60 holds five rounds). The good news is 29 of those shots went directly into the zombie’s noggin and none hit Betty (the hostage).

Betty and her zombie captor. He’s toast. Note the one round that tumbled just above Betty’s head. These were low-velocity wadcutter loads.

The bad news? One of the wadcutter bullets tumbled. Fortunately for Betty it went right over her head. You can see the bullet’s outline in the target above. It might have been that the Star threw a light load on that round, or maybe a case split and let too much pressure escape, or maybe these light target loads are marginal in the Model 60’s short 2-inch barrel. Win some, lose some. Betty’s okay, though…that’s the important thing.

Not surprisingly, the FBI load did much better (old J. Edgar know what he was doing against both zombies and commies, I think). The 30 holes you see in Mr. Zombie below went into a tighter group, none of the bullets tumbled, and most importantly, none of them went into Betty.

Betty liked the FBI load better. So did I. The zombie offered no opinion.

I feel better now. I know if I can keep my wits about me and I have my Model 60, and if I can get the zombie to pose with Betty like you see above at 7 yards, he’s toast and Betty’s going to be just fine. For any zombies who follow the ExNotes blog: You’ve been warned.

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As this blog’s title states, this blog is Gats and Hats I. Will there be a Gats and Hats II? Stay tuned, my friends. Two more days, and we’re calling in the heavy artillery.

More gun stories? Hey, it’s what we live for!

Want to know more about the Model 60 featured in this blog? It’s all in the links below:

Getting hammered, and the effects of incomplete primer seating.

Once, I Knew One Thing: An ExhaustNotes Review

When I first started working on boats there were only two choices if you wanted a generator: Onan or Kohler. This was in the 1970s. Most all the equipment on boats was still made in the USA and China was largely an agrarian society with little industrial capacity. It seems impossible with today’s global economy and seemingly unlimited options but we got along fine with just the two manufacturers.

Onan generators were the most popular in the territory I covered which was from Balboa Island up near Los Angeles to San Diego. The company I worked for, Admiralty Marine, was on Shelter Island right off of Rosecrans Street. Admiralty Marine sold a lot of Onan generators. One year, Woody Peebles and I installed 51 new generators. That’s only one a week but you have to realize we also did engine installations, ElectroGuard corrosion control systems and repaired and serviced all those Onan generators.

To install a generator isn’t as easy as it sounds. You don’t just plop it on the deck and plug it in. The California boats were pleasure yachts and everything was varnished if it wasn’t polished or oiled. You had to cover all surfaces with cardboard and plywood before starting any work. Making things worse, the generator was usually buried in the engine room behind the main engines, batteries and a zillion other components down in the bilge.

To get the generator out might mean removing the rug, lifting heavy hatches, taking off exhaust manifolds on the mains or moving water tanks and cross beams. Then you had to brace underneath the deck to support the portable A-frame hoist used to lift the generator out of the hole.

The portable hoist was portable in name only. The thing weighed a ton. Consisting of two steel uprights, a steel crossbar, a chain-fall and a metal box full of wedges, lifting eyes and the carriage that slid on the crossbar. All in, the hoist weighed about 300 pounds. We didn’t trust aluminum. You had to carry each piece of the hoist down the dock and onto the boat without causing any damage. Except that anything the hoist touched was damaged.

There were no store-bought portable hoists; you had to make them yourself or pay someone to build a hoist for you. I made my own and still have it baking in the sun here at The Ranch in New Mexico. You never know when you’ll need to pull a boat engine 500 miles from the closest ocean. Working with the hoist all those years I became attached to the thing. We’ve been through a lot of wars, you know? So much heavy lifting, I can’t bring myself toss it out.

It took about three days for me and Woody to remove an old generator, clean up the mess and install a new generator, roughly 24 hours labor times two men. At my hourly rate I made 78 dollars for the job. Admiralty Marine charged my labor at 600 dollars for the install, clearing 522 dollars once you deduct my pay. I never knew what Woody was paid. Probably more than me as he was the brains of the operation. The cost breakdown on these jobs was a great lesson in capitalism for me.

On rare occasions we worked on gas-powered generators but they were usually old wooden boats with cash-strapped owners. The Onan generators we worked on were almost all diesel-powered. The block was modular: 1 cylinder for the 3000-watt, 2 cylinders for the 7500-watt and 4-cylinders for the 12,000-watt version. The 4-cylinder used two, two-cylinder heads.

The early models used a CT (current transformer) set up to control the field voltage, which controlled the voltage output. In a nutshell, the power output leads went through these big CT’s on the end of the generator causing an inductive current in the CT’s and the CT’s sent power to the field. It was self-regulating, always varying the field current to suit the load. I never fully understood CT generators but luckily they were fairly reliable. Newer, solid-state voltage regulators superseded the CT voltage regulators.

The new solid-state Onan generators were a mechanic’s best friend. They broke down at such a regular pace you could forecast your income years in advance. The start-stop-preheat circuits were analog. It looked kind of funny: the top of the control box where the voltage regulator lived was all space-age but underneath that were stone-age relays, big brown resistors and purple smoke.

None of the Onans had counter balancers so they shook violently when in operation. The single-cylinder was the worst; it had soft rubber mounts that insulated the boat from vibrations. Fortunately for us repairmen the relays and wiring was susceptible to vibrations and would shake to pieces. Parts were always breaking off the things.

One time I installed a single-cylinder Onan in a boat and a week later the owner called saying it had stopped running. I went to his boat and found the flange that the seawater pump bolted to had fractured. Without sea water to cool the heat exchanger the engine overheated and shut off. The flange was steel and it was sandwiched between the timing cover and the block so you had to dismantle the front of the engine to replace it. It was such a crappy design.

The “One Thing I Knew” was the control circuits for the Onan. I understood them better than the other guys at the shop and could trouble shoot a problem in no time flat. I didn’t fall into this easy knowledge; it took a few years of trial and error before I could visualize the flow of electrons on their path through the various old-fashioned relays and resistors. All the wiring was the same color. Onan printed numbers on the wires to help identify which was which. These numbers were not always intact or positioned in a way that you could see them.

We rebuilt the engines and the fuel systems as the twins and 4-cylinders had a habit of breaking crankshafts. The twin had two main bearings, the four had three mains. The cranks would often break where the alternator rotor connected. They would break in such a way that the generator would keep running until it was shut down, then the crank would bind and the owner would call us saying “I don’t understand it, the thing was running fine when I shut it off. Now it’s stuck” After a few years of rebuilding engines we discovered that Onan sold a new long block for about the same price as we could rebuild an engine. It even came with a warranty. That made turn around much faster.

The governor (that controlled the engine RPM, thus the frequency) was a ball and cup type of deal driven off the camshaft. Centrifugal force would move the balls outward pushing a cup away from the cam. The cup was connected to an arm that controlled the fuel control on the injector pump. With the balls at rest the fuel was set for full throttle. As the balls slung out it reduced fuel. This seesaw effect could be fine tuned by adjusting a governor spring. Both tension and leverage were set by the hapless mechanic moving one thing affected the other.

After a few thousand hours of steady state running the governor balls would wear a groove in the backing plate of the cam gear and no amount of tinkering could get the frequency steady. Pulling the cam gear was the only way to get the thing to run without hunting. I liked to tell the owners that they were lucky the thing ran long enough to wear out the governor.

All those things I knew are just trivia now but they seem as real as this computer I’m typing on. The old Onan generators are long gone, replaced by modern diesel engines made overseas. Nothing breaks off the new stuff. My brain is full of things no longer useful, information that has no application in today’s world. I wonder about the knowledge the old ones that came before me took to their graves and if someone in the far off future will wonder about mine.

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ExNotes Book Review: The Devil’s Hand

As airport bookstore thrillers go, it doesn’t get too much better than Jack Carr’s The Devil’s Hand. Yeah, it’s a bit formulaic, and yeah, the ending is predictable (spoiler alert: the good guys win), but the plot basics are timely and a bit unusual. Instead of just plain old bad guys, rogue nations, and Middle Eastern terrorists, this one involves unleashing a bioweapon on US soil. The good guy, James Reece (why do they always have such WASPy names?), manages to thwart the effort and limit the death toll to about 5000 people. The parallels between the plot’s Marburg U virus variant and Covid 19 (and the riots and insurrections that follow) are eerily similar to what the world has gone through in the last two years.

Reece checks all the airport bookstore thriller main character boxes: Former special forces operator on a revenge mission, the US president’s personal assassin, martial arts expert, handgun expert, rifle expert, shotgun expert, knife expert, tomahawk expert, and on and on it goes. That’s the formulaic part. The plot basics are where the story diverges from what you might expect, and that makes The Devil’s Hand interesting enough to be worth a read. At 576 pages, you probably won’t get through it on a single flight, but that’s okay. You can finish it on the return leg.

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A Competition Taurus .44 Special

I recently visited with my good buddy Paul and he let me photograph his Taurus Model 441 .44 Special revolver. Paul and I grew up together in rural New Jersey. We’re both firearms and reloading guys, and I love getting together with Paul and talking about both topics.

Paul told me he purchased the Taurus new in 1986 or 1987 from Harry’s Army & Navy store on Route 130 in Robbinsville, New Jersey. That shop is no longer there, but back in the day it was a major gun store in central Jersey. Paul said he is 98% sure he paid $249 for it.

I know Paul likes this 5-shot .44 Special revolver very much. He used it extensively in monthly defense revolver matches. Those matches required a defense revolver with a barrel length of 4 inches or less and a caliber of .38 or larger. The matches were shot at distances up to 50 yards. Paul did well with the Taurus in the Eastern Regional Defense Pistol matches, taking many medals in his class. The matches attracted over 60 shooters from Maine to Florida and they were held over three days. The awards you see below are just a few Paul won with this handgun.

The frame size is between a Smith & Wesson K and L frame. The grips you see in these photos are from Hogue. Paul has the original grips. He told me the Hogue just feels better in his hand. Paul did all his match shooting with the original grips and changed them for the Hogue grip about two years ago.

Paul is a very competent machinist and gunsmith, and he modified the Taurus to his tastes. He did a trigger job on it and replaced the springs with a Wolf spring kit. He also added the trigger over-travel piece on the back of the trigger. That’s to limit any further rearward trigger movement after the hammer has been released. It helps to minimize gun movement and improves accuracy. I dry fired this gun both single and double action at Paul’s place and the gun is silky smooth. It’s a really nice weapon.

Paul is also a very experienced reloader and he does it all, including casting his own bullets. He’s the guy I call when I have reloading questions. For this gun, Paul uses the 429215 Lyman gas check bullet mould, but he does not use a gas check. Paul’s preferred .44 Special load is the 215-grain Lyman bullet and 7.0 – 7.1 grains of Unique. Paul told me it’s very accurate in this gun and the load has mild recoil.

While handling the Taurus, I was impressed. I was tempted to make Paul an offer on it, but I knew doing so would be pointless. When you have a handgun you shoot well, you modified to fit your tastes, and you have a history with, you keep it. It sure is nice.

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