As concealed carry powerhouses go, it doesn’t get much better than the CZ 25 Rami. One of my good buddies owns one and I had an opportunity to play with it. I was impressed. On the plus side, it is an all-metal gun with a flat black finish, a hammer (greatly preferred by yours truly over a striker-fired pistol), great sights, and a marvelous trigger. My bud had a trigger job on his, and it was awesome (light and crisp, with zero creep, just like it should be).
The three-dot sights on the CZ are crisp and non-gimmicky. There’s no glow-in-the-dark nonsense and they stand out. In the photo below, the sight picture is just the opposite of what it’s supposed to be (you want the front sight to be in sharp focus, and the rear sight to be a bit fuzzy, but I couldn’t get my iPhone camera to cooperate when I shot these photos).
I liked the feel of the CZ. I didn’t get to fire it, but I think I might have an opportunity at some point. The one you see here is chambered in 9mm. The Rami was also available in .40 S&W, which I think might be a bit much for a gun this small.
The Rami was discontinued in 202o with the introduction of newer CZ models. I haven’t seen the new handguns, but I can’t see how they can be any better than the CZ 2075. This pistol just feels right.
I’ve ridden motorcycles through Baja probably 30 times or more over the last 30 years, and it’s unquestionably the best place to ride a motorcycle I’ve ever experienced. Many people are afraid to venture into the peninsula for fear of a breakdown. Hey, it happens, but it’s not the end of the world and it doesn’t happen often. They don’t call it adventure riding because it’s like calling for an Uber.
Not all “breakdowns” result in your motorcycle being nonoperational. Some are just mere annoyances and you truck on. A few breakdowns result in the bike not running, but there are usually ways to get around that. When it happens, you improvise, adapt, and overcome. Here are a few of mine.
Heritage Indeed
The first time I had a motorcycle act up was on my beloved ’92 Harley Softail. It started clanging and banging and bucking and snorting somewhere around Ensenada. I was headed south with my good buddy Paul from New Jersey. It was obvious something wasn’t right and we turned around to head back to the US. The Harley got me home, but I could tell: Something major had happened. The bike was making quite a bit of noise. I had put about 300 miles on it by the time I rode it back from Mexico.
A roller lifter that converted to a solid lifter.
One of the Harley’s roller lifters stopped rolling, and that turned it into a solid lifter. And when that happened, the little wheel that was supposed to rotate along the cam profile started wearing a path through the cam. And when that happened, the metal filings migrated their way to the oil pump. And when that happened….well, you get the idea. My 80-cubic-inch V-Twin Evo motor decided to call it quits after roughly 53,000 miles. It happens I guess. Nothing lasts forever.
Potato, potato, potato.
Here’s where it started to get really interesting. My local Harley dealer wouldn’t touch the bike. See, this was around 2005 or so, and it seems my Harley was over 10 years old. Bet you didn’t know this: Many Harley dealers (maybe most of them) won’t work on a bike over 10 years old. The service manager at my dealer explained this to me and I was dumbfounded. “What about all the history and heritage and nostalgia baloney you guys peddle?” I asked. The answer was a weak smile. “I remember an ad with a baby in Harley T-shirt and the caption When did it start for you?” I said. Another weak smile.
An S&S engine in my ’92 Softail. It let me ride a slow bike fast.
I was getting nowhere fast. I tried calling a couple of other Harley dealers and it was the same story. Over 10 years old, dealers won’t touch it. I was flabbergasted. I tried as hard as I could, but there was no getting around it…the Harley dealer would not work on my engine. It was over 10 years old. That’s that; rules is rules. For a company that based their entire advertising program on longevity and heritage, I thought it was outrageous. A friend suggested I go to an independent shop. “It’s why they exist,” he said. So I did.
So, I went with Plan B. I took the Harley to a local independent shop, and they were more than happy to work on my bike. I could have the Harley engine completely rebuilt (which it needed, because those metal bits had migrated everywhere), or I could have it rebuilt with an S&S motor. I went with the S&S motor (the cost was the same as rebuilding the Harley engine), doubling the horsepower, halving the rear tire life, and cutting my fuel economy from 42 to 33 mpg.
Justin’s Countershaft Sprocket
On the very first CSC Baja trip, I was nervous as hell. The CSC bikes had received a lot of press and the word was out: CSC was importing the real deal, a genuine adventure touring motorcycle for about one sixth of what a GS 1200 BMW sold for in those days. The naysayers and keyboard commandos were out in force, badmouthing the Chinese RX3 in ways that demonstrated unbridled ignorance and no small amount of bias. And here we were, taking 14 or 15 guys (and one gal) who had bought new RX3 motorcycles that had literally arrived in the US just a few days before our departure. There was one thought in my mind as we headed south from Azusa that morning: What was I thinking? If the bikes started falling out on this first trip, it would probably kill the RX3 in America.
Hey, it worked. Adapt, overcome, improvise. The adventure doesn’t start until something goes wrong.
I need not have worried. None of the engines failed. We had a few headlights go out, but that’s not really a breakdown. And then, when we were about halfway down the Baja peninsula, I took a smaller group of riders to see the cave paintings at Sierra San Francisco. That trip involved a 140-mile round trip from Guerrero Negro into the boonies, with maybe 20 miles of that on a very gnarly dirt road. As we were returning, good buddy Justin’s RX3 lost its countershaft sprocket. We found it and Justin did a good enough MacGuyver job securing it to the transmission output shaft to get us back to Guerrero Negro, but finding a replacement was a challenge. We finally paid a machinist at the Mitsubishi salt mining company to make a custom nut, and that got us home.
On every Baja trip after that, I took a spare countershaft sprocket nut, but I never needed any of them after that one incident on Justin’s bike. Good buddy Duane had a similar failure, but that was on a local ride and it was easily rectified.
Jim’s Gearbox
Four or five Baja trips later, after we had ridden all the way down to Mulege and back up to the border, good buddy Jim’s transmission wouldn’t shift.
Good buddy Jim in the Mulege mission.
That’s the only breakdown I ever experienced anywhere on an RX3 that wouldn’t get us home, and that includes multiple multi-bike Baja trips, the multi-bike 5000-mile Western America adventure ride, the multi-bike 6000-mile ride across China, the 3000-mile circumnavigation around the Andes Mountains in Colombia, and quite a few CSC local company rides. One of the guys on that Baja ride lived in the San Diego area and he owned a pickup truck, so he took the bike back up to Azusa for us.
Biting the Bullet
A couple of years ago Joe Gresh and I did a Baja road test with Royal Enfield press bikes. One was the new 650 Interceptor twin (a bike I liked so much I bought one when I got home); the other was a 500 Bullet. The Bullet was a disaster, but it really wasn’t the bike’s fault. The dealer who maintained the press fleet for Royal Enfield (I won’t mention them by name, but they’re in Glendale and they’re known for their Italian bikes) did a half-assed job maintaining the bike. Actually, that’s not fair to people who do half-assed work (and Lord knows there a lot of them). No, the maintenance on this bike was about one-tenth-assed. It was very low on oil, it had almost no gas in it, the chain was loose and rusty, and on and on the writeup could go. The bike kept stalling and missing, and it finally gave up the ghost for good at the Pemex station just north of Guerrero Negro.
Joe Gresh, inflight missile mechanic extraordinaire, getting intimate with the Bullet in Baja. “The Bullet needs me,” he said.
Fortunately for me, Gresh had one of those portable battery thingamabobbers (you know, the deals that are good for about 10 battery jumps) and it allowed us to start the bike. We bought a new battery that didn’t quite fit the bike in Guerrero Negro (big hammers solve a lot of problems), but the entire episode left a bad taste in my mouth for the Bullet and for the Glendale Ducatimeister.
Big hammers fix all kinds of problems.
That bike had other problems as well. The kickstand run switch failed on the ride home, and Gresh did an inflight missile mechanic bypass on it. Then, just before we made it back to my house in So Cal, the rear sprocket stripped. Literally. All the teeth were gone. That was another one I had never experienced before. The Bullet was sort of a fun bike, but this particular one was a disaster. We joked about it. The Bullet needs me, Gresh said.
John’s Silver Wing Leak
Ah this is another motofailure that tried but didn’t stop the show. On one of my earlier Baja forays, Baja John had a Honda Silver Wing. That’s a bike that was also known as the baby Gold Wing (it had all the touring goodies the Gold Wing had). It was only a 500 or a 650 (I can’t remember which) and it had no problem keeping up with the Harleys (but then, it doesn’t take much to keep up with a Harley).
Baja John and the mighty Silver Wing, somewhere well south of the border.
The Silver Wing was a pretty slick motorcycle…it had a transversely-aligned v-twin like a Moto Guzzi and it had plenty of power. Unlike the Guzzi, the Silver Wing was water cooled and that’s where our problem occurred. John’s bike developed a coolant leak. I was a little nervous about that. We were more than halfway down the peninsula and headed further south when the bike started drooling, but John had the right attitude (which was not to worry and simply ignore the problem). The little Silver Wing was like a Timex…it took the licking and kept on ticking, and to my great surprise, it simply stopped leaking after another hundred miles or so. I guess it doesn’t really count as a breakdown.
John’s KLR 650 OPEC Bike
Baja John had another bike, a KLR 650, that developed a fuel petcock leak on another one of our Baja trips. As I recall, it started leaking on the return run somewhere around El Rosario. I get nervous around fuel leaks for the obvious reasons, but John stuck to his policy: Don’t worry, be happy.
Baja John: The man, the legend.
We stayed in a hotel in Ensenada that night. The hotel had an attached enclosed parking structure, which immediately started to smell like the inside of a gas tank. Not that I’ve ever been inside a gas tank, but that parking garage pretty much had the aroma I imagine exists in such places.
John’s luck continued to hold, and we made it home without John becoming a human torch.
The Bottom Line
The bottom line is you basically need four things when headed into Baja:
A tool kit.
A good attitude that includes a sense of adventure.
A well maintained motorcycle.
Maybe some spare parts.
So there you have it. If you’d like to know more about riding in Baja, please visit our Baja page and maybe pickup a copy of Moto Baja.
If you’re headed into Baja, don’t leave home without BajaBound Insurance. They are the best there is. If you are nice, they might even fix you up with a cool BajaBound coffee mug!
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I own a bunch of watches. They’re not rich man watches; they are the indulgence of a guy with practical tastes and a flair for useful and inexpensive tools. My all-time favorite watch, hands down, is the Casio G-Shock GD400 series, with a personal preference for the olive green one. I’ll get to that in a second (hahahaha…a time pun).
I first bought a similar Casio in turquoise and orange, almost as an impulse buy. I had purchased a set of shoes from Nike or Adidas or somebody in turquoise and orange, and then (probably because I had searched for them online) I started seeing pop up ads for the Casio.
I know it’s weird. I mean, what kind of a motorcycle guy buys a watch to match his shoes? (You don’t need to answer that.) The watch arrived a few days later and I liked it. I was in and out of CSC a lot when I bought the watch and the shoes (we were getting ready for a CSC Baja ride), and I caught a bit of flack for being a fashion plate. That’s how it goes sometimes when you’re a famous and well-dressed blogger.
I liked the watch, and I loved its phenomenal accuracy. I went to www.Time.gov (that’s the official US government time), and the Casio was running exactly even with the government website over the span of a month. That’s really good.
The Casio has a bunch of features I never really use and some I use a lot. It’s got a stopwatch, a timer, and an alarm. It’s got a calendar and it shows the day of the week. You can have it show regular time or military time. You can set it so that if you flick your wrist, the backlight comes on. And you can press the G button and the thing lights up. I use the Casio as a flashlight three or four times every night…you older guys will know what that’s all about. And by pressing the buttons mounted on the case side you can find the time in just about any time zone in the world. That comes in handy on many of my overseas secret missions.
I wore the watch for several years, and then on another CSC Baja trip the battery went south on me. The battery had the good manners to do this in Guerrero Negro, where there are a few stores. I asked the guy who took us to see the whales on that trip which store would have a battery and he pointed one out on our way to the docks. After seeing the whales and having a couple of fish tacos at Tony’s, I rode my RX3 to the place the guide had mentioned. Nope, they didn’t sell watch batteries, but the farmacia two doors down did. Okay, so I went to the farmacia two doors down. Nope, they didn’t have watch batteries, but another farmacia two doors on the other side of the first store did.
Then things got interesting. They had the battery, but the lady behind the counter told me I had to open the watch and change the battery myself. The watch has these tiny little screws and I was wearing my contact lenses, which gives me great far field vision but lousy near field vision. She gave me a little box of tiny screwdrivers, but I couldn’t see the screws very well and I tried to explain my predicament to the very nice lady, but she didn’t speak English. So, I took my right contact out (they’re one-day disposables, so it wasn’t a big deal) and I basically did a roadside repair.
The watch lit up as soon as the battery went in, but the rear cover is orientation sensitive and I got it wrong. The watch crystal fogged within an hour, and by the end of the day, the watch called time out (hahahaha …another time pun). The time out, unfortunately, was permanent. When I returned to So Cal, I took it to the guy who normally sells (and installs) watch batteries for me, but it was too late. The watch was toast.
I missed having that watch on my wrist, and I tried to buy it again. But it turns out that Casio changes the colors frequently on this particular model. Not only had the turquoise and orange version been discontinued, but now it was collectible. I had paid $72 for mine, but by this time used ones were going for close to $400 on Ebay.
A week or two later, another secret mission, and I found myself killing time (wow, a third time pun!) in a mall in New Jersey, and I saw the OD green version of the GD400 Casio. The sales guy and I went back and forth a little, and $92 later (tax included), the watch you see in the big photo at the top of this blog left with me. Like I said, it’s just about the perfect watch and I wear it nearly all the time.
More good news? I liked that turquoise and orange G-Shock watch, too, so I called Casio’s US importer and asked them if they could repair it. I had to spend another $60, but that’s okay. There’s only one thing that’s better than one Casio GD-400 G-Shock, and that’s two of them. The GD400 model comes in a variety of other colors, too, and they typically go for around $100 on the Internet. Trust me on this…if you want a good watch for every day bouncing around, you can’t go wrong with a G-Shock Casio.
I love my S&W Model 60 and I shoot it a lot. It’s particularly cool after I had TJ (of TJ’s Custom Gunworks) do an action job on it. Not content to leave well enough alone, I convinced myself that (after tracing the occasional double action misfire to not-fully-seated primers) that what I really needed was a lighter hammer spring (in addition to the lighter trigger spring I had already installed). Wolff Springs sells a lighter hammer spring kit, and I went for the lightest hammer spring I could get.
The Wolff Springs hammer spring kit. I went with the lightest spring.
The lighter trigger spring affects single action trigger pull after you have already cocked the gun and it has nothing to do with the occasional double action misfiring I had experienced in the past. Double action trigger pull is affected by both the trigger spring and the hammer spring, but the hammer spring is a much beefier spring and it drives most of the resistance when firing double action. The hammer spring, if too light, can induce misfires.
The Wolff hammer spring kit includes a standard strength spring (an 8 1/2-pound spring), a heavier spring (a 9-pound spring), and a lighter spring (an 8-pound spring). I wanted a lighter double action pull, so I used the 8-pound spring. The tradeoff is this puts less force on the hammer, which means it has lower velocity when it hits home, and that ups the likelihood of a misfire.
The hammer spring is easy to change, and if necessary, I can go for either of the two heavier springs at the range. All it takes is a small screwdriver to remove the grips, and the same exotic custom tool used for disassembling the Rock Island Compact 1911 (a bent paper clip). The photos below show how this is done.
The Model 60’s hammer spring, with the hammer in the uncocked position.The Model 60’s hammer spring, with the hammer cocked. Note that the hammer yoke (the rod running through the center of the hammer spring) has been pushed back, exposing a hole in the rod.A high tech, German tool steel special assembly/disassembly aid? Nah, it’s a bent paper clip and it works gang busters.To remove the hammer spring yoke and the hammer spring, insert the paper clip into the yoke and gently release the hammer by pulling the trigger and lowering the hammer.With the hammer dropped, the spring is captured in a compressed mode and the hammer spring and the yoke can be removed from the gun. Once this subassembly is removed, you can manually push the spring cap to further compress the spring, remove the paper clip, remove the spring cap and spring, and install the lighter hammer spring. Assembly is the reverse of disassembly.
While installing the new hammer spring, I noticed that my normal gun cleaning routine just wasn’t cutting it on the Model 60. There was still a bit of lead in the barrel, and the powder residue was building up around the yoke. I selected a bronze bristled toothbrush and went to work on the cylinder, the yoke, and the frame, and a bronze bore bush for the bore. When the remnants of gunfights past were gone (you know, my encounters with zombies, as previously described), I spritzed the gun with the universal cleaner (WD40) and then I wiped it down before applying gun oil.
That’s when I noticed that the barrel-to-cylinder gap was nonexistent. Zip. Nada. Zero. The front of the cylinder was touching the rear of the barrel. Uh oh. That’s no good. There’s supposed to be a gap there (like you see in the photo below), because if there’s no gap the cylinder will drag on the barrel. That will degrade the double action trigger pull and, in a worst-case scenario, it can drive the revolver out of time (the chamber won’t be aligned with the barrel). The technical term for the fore-and-aft cylinder movement that assures a minimum clearance when the cylinder is fully forward is called end shake. There needs to be some, and there needs to be a gap. Ideally, that should be 0.004 to 0.008 inches. Any less, and powder and lead residue will bind the cylinder, any more and too much gas escapes (and velocity suffers).
The barrel-to-cylinder gap. This is about .004-inch with the cylinder pushed forward, and that’s the gap I want. This was after I installed the TriggerShims.com cylinder shim.
You measure the barrel-to-cylinder gap with a feeler gage, just like you would when setting the valves on a motorcycle. I’ve done that (as you know from reading this blog and any of the CSC shop manuals), and I already had the feeler gages I needed.
My feeler gage. I’ve probably owned this tool for 40 years. It still works. I use it for adjusting valves on my Royal Enfield, too.
After a bit of internet research, I learned that the way to address inadequate gap is by shimming the cylinder and its fit on the yoke. That’s when I first learned there’s a business that specializes in making shims for this exact purpose. In short order I was communicating with Lance Shively, who heads TriggerShims.com.
The cylinder shims from TriggerShims.com. They were well packaged and sent in a standard business envelope.The cylinder shims out of the pack. I ordered the four-piece set because I had not worked with these before, I didn’t know what I would need, and they were inexpensive. They are color coded by size.
Lance and his wife, Tammy, run a real Mom and Pop operation that manufactures gun specific shims for a living. Lance has an extensive background in small engine repair and tool and die making, and he and Tammy parlayed that into TriggerShims, which has been doing well for more than 14 years now. Lance told me his primary concern is customer satisfaction, and I can tell you my perception in working with TriggerShims is they have mastered it. I had the Model 60 custom end shake shims in three days, there was no postage charge, and the price was more than reasonable for custom gun parts. Lance runs a Christian business, he believes in God and country, and he’s not bashful about letting people know that. He and Tammy also sell select items from other vendors when he finds a company he likes and believes in, but that is a very select group. The two biggest ones are Wolff and Volquartsen.
I received the shims I ordered from Lance in just a few days, and installation was trivially easy. I had to remove the yoke, disassemble the ejector rod from the extractor, install the shim I wanted to use (I went with a single .003-inch shim to give the clearance I wanted), and then reassemble everything. It only took a few minutes, and the only tricky part was remembering that the ejector rod had a left-hand thread.
This screw has to be removed to allow removal of the yoke and cylinder from the revolver. You don’t need to remove the revolver’s side plate.With the yoke removed, you unscrew the ejector rod (the knurled piece you push on to eject empty brass from the cylinder) and everything comes apart. Hold on to the ejector rod as you unscrew it so parts won’t fly away, and remember that it is a left-hand thread.The cylinder shim(s) fit beneath the extractor spring. They are pushed into the cylinder by the extractor spring as the cylinder and yoke subassembly are reassembled. The shim(s) position the cylinder further to the rear, increasing the barrel-to-cylinder gap.
TriggerShims.com manufactures over 100 firearm-specific shims with thicknesses from .002-inch to .007-inch, with some specialty items as thick as .010-inch and as thin as .0015-inch. Lance sends shims worldwide, with Australia and Canada being the biggest international customers (he also ships to more than 100 other countries).
Lance and I had a good conversation, during which he told me he enjoyed exploring the ExhaustNotes site and our blog. One thing led to another, and TriggerShims.com is our newest advertiser. You’ll see the TriggerShims.com logo on the ExNotes blog and all ExNotes pages, and Lance asked if he could post links to some of our Tales of the Gun stories on the TriggerShims.com site. Hey, you bet, Lance, and welcome aboard.
I had the Model 60 on the range yesterday morning, and it is a much smoother running revolver. I confirmed another issue I’ve experienced on this revolver before, and that’s a slightly out-of-time situation when firing double action (probably induced by the cylinder drag described above). That’s going to take a new hand to correct (“hand” is the nomenclature used for the part that advances the cylinder). The replacement hand is on order, and there will be another Model 60 blog coming up in a couple of weeks on it. As always, stay tuned.
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?
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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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.
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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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.
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.
