Stranded in Baja, Hearst Castle, and more…

Every once in a while we do a blog that covers a bunch of topics, and this is one of those times.

Good buddy Mike Huber and his friend Bobbie motorcycled Mexico (Baja, to be specific, almost another country all by itself), and he most recently published an excellent story about being stranded down there by the Covid 19 pandemic.  It’s not often that we recommend another blog, but hey, Mike’s writing is outstanding and it’s a great story.  Take a look; it’s very good.

My favorite motorcycle magazine (that would be Motorcycle Classics) sends out marketing emails on a regular basis, and in those emails they include links to past (and sometimes recent) articles.  I write for MC, and the most recent email that slipped into my inbox included a link to my Destinations piece on Hearst Castle.   You might want to read that story; I love Hearst Castle.  It’s closed for the pandemic, but the pandemic won’t last forever.  Hearst Castle will be there when it’s over.

We’re having a heat wave (both here in the Peoples Republik of Kalifornia and at Tinfiny Ranch).   That prompted us to start a piece on riding in extreme heat.   My first recommendation would be:  Don’t.   But things don’t always work out the way you want them to.  I once rode the length of Baja on a Mustang replicas with several friends, and due to a lack of research on my part we did the ride in Baja’s hottest month (and that’s September).  You can read about the 150cc Baja ride through Hell here.  Do you have any advice for riding in high temperatures?  Please share them with us (info@exhaustnotes.us) and we’ll include your recommendations here on the blog.

We have more motorcycle, gun and other stuff coming up, including info on Ruger’s new Custom Shop and their Super GP100 .357 Mag revolver, favored loads in the Henry .45 70 Single Shot, a piece on Turnbull’s iconic color case hardening and restoration services, a stunning (and tack-driving) Kimber with exhibition grade French walnut, the wrap-up of our ride through the Andes Mountains in Colombia, the Canton Fair, and for you fans of The Ten Commandments, making bricks without hay and mortar.  And a whole lot more.

Stay tuned, folks.

A Bullseye Birdseye Blackhawk

By Joe Berk

Good buddy Greg and I (along with about a gazillion other people) are  long term Ruger Blackhawk fans, and last week we were on the range with a new .357 Magnum Blackhawk Greg recently acquired.  It’s one of a limited run offered by Talo, a distributor specializing in custom guns from a variety of manufacturers.

Greg’s Blackhawk has a 5 1/2-inch barrel (standard New Model .357 Blackhawks have either a 4 5/8-inch or 6 1/2-inch barrel) and really cool birdseye maple grips (most Blackhawks these days have black plastic grips).   The birdseye maple grips contrast well with the Ruger’s deep bluing, and that 5 1/2-inch barrel just flat works on a single action revolver.  At 40 ounces (one ounce heavier than a 1911 Government Model .45 auto), the Ruger balances well and feels right.  Greg’s birdseye Blackhawk is beautiful, it groups well, and it has a superb trigger.  This particular offering from Talo includes an extra cylinder chambered in 9mm, so Greg can use .357 Magnum, .38 Special, or 9mm ammo (I guess he won’t be running out any time soon).

Greg loads the same .357 Magnum ammunition that I do (a 158-grain cast lead bullet with 7.0 grains of Unique), which is the “go to” accuracy recipe in .357 Magnum.  It sure shoots well.  A target load that is superbly accurate in a Blackhawk is the .38 Special with a 148-grain wadcutter bullet and 2.7 grains of Bullseye propellant (that’s been a preferred .38 Special accuracy load for decades).

Ruger makes a beautiful revolver, and this Talo birdseye Blackhawk’s limited production run almost guarantees these will be investment grade guns.  Most dealers are sold out, but if you poke around a bit on Gunbroker.com, you may still find one.


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Cast Bullets in a 7mm Magnum Ruger No. 1

A 200th Year Ruger No. 1S in 7mm Remington Magnum. With factory-level jacketed bullet loads, recoil is attention-getting.  With cast bullets, this magnum is a lot easier to shoot.  I shot cast bullets for the first time in this rifle this week.

When I was younger, I made my own bullets by casting them out of molten lead.  I cast bullets until I decided there wasn’t enough time to do everything I want to do.   Shooting can be a full time hobby, reloading can be a full time hobby, and casting can be a full time hobby.  There’s a little motorcycle riding and some writing thrown in there, too.  Something had to give, so a few years ago I sold all my bullet casting gear.

I still enjoy reloading and shooting cast bullets, though, for a lot of reasons.  Lighter recoil, cheaper bullets (usually), less barrel wear, and the big factor:  It’s fun and it’s challenging.  This fascination with cast bullets, for me, started when I ran with a bunch of gunsels in El Paso and one of the guys decided it would be fun if we had a cast bullet rifle bullseye competition.  Being mostly engineers, we reckoned that big bore rifles would be the way to go, as the larger bullet diameters and weights would tend to make bullet weight differences and imperfections negligible.  The first rifle I ever shot a cast bullet in was a .458 Win Mag.  I was hooked after the first shot, mostly because there was far less recoil than shooting jacketed factory ammo and the experience was much more enjoyable.  Then I fired four more shots and when I saw the 1-inch group at 100 yards (from a .458 Win Mag!) I was hooked.  We all shot big bores in those days:  .458s, .45 70s, .375 H&H Magnums, and such.  Cast bullets in these big calibers can be amazingly accurate.

Anyway, I fell in love with cast bullets and I’ve been shooting them ever since, but these days I buy my cast bullets.  I have a local source for cast bullets, and I have a few I like that I order online or pick up at my dealer (that’s Phillips Wholesale in Covina, California). I also poke around a bit on the Internet and a few weeks ago I found Gardner’s Cache, another commercial bullet casting operation.  What had my attention immediately is that Jim Gardner’s prices are relatively low, he’s a veteran, and he had something I had not been able to find elsewhere at a decent price:  7mm cast rifle bullets.  I wanted to try cast bullets in a couple of 7mm rifles (one being the Ruger No. 1 that you see at the top of this blog), so I ordered a box of 250.  Then USPS lost the shipment.  I filled out an online lost shipment report, the boys in blue located my bullets, and a few days later they arrived.   The Gardner bullets look great.

Beautiful cast Gardner 7mm bullets. Casting quality is high, and I was hoping accuracy would match. It did. I’m a happy camper.

I could see that the casting quality was high, so just for grins I measured 30 projectiles to get a feel for the variability.

In 30 bullets, the range of weights did not exceed 1.6 grains. The mean is the average weight, and the standard deviation is a measure of the variability around the average value.

It was good.   You ordinarily get a lot more variability with cast bullets then you do with jacketed bullets, but the Gardner bullets were more consistent than other cast bullets I’ve used.  As I reviewed the data, it suddenly hit me that these  were supposed to be 145-grain bullets.  I could see from the bullets’ configuration that they matched the RCBS No. 82150 bullet mold, but what the mold maker tells you the bullet is supposed to weigh and what they actually weigh seldom line up.  I had seen this before with other cast bullets.

The RCBS No. 82150 bullet mold.  It’s not uncommon for the specified bullet weight to be different than what the mold actually throws, and that was the case here.
I like these bullets so much I had to grab another photo of them. The copper cap at the bullet’s base is called a gas check. It protects the back of the bullet from hot propellant gases and reduces barrel leading. The blue stuff is bullet lubricant, which eases the bullet’s passage through the bore and also helps to reduce leading.

I loaded several configurations with my new Gardner cast bullets in virgin Remington brass I had on the shelf, and the cartridges looked good.

Loaded 7mm Remington Magnum ammo, waiting to be range tested. You can’t buy this kind of ammunition; you have to reload your own.

I went to the range the next day with the 7mm Remington Magnum Ruger No. 1 and my new cast bullet load, and after getting set up I fired the first load (with Unique propellant) at a single pistol target at 50 yards.  The rifle had been zeroed for a factory equivalent jacketed load, and the results were very predictable.  Whenever I’ve taken a centerfire rifle zeroed for factory ammo and shot cast bullets in it, the load is always about 10 inches low at 50 yards.

Two good groups (both around 1.5 inches) at 50 yards. The low group was fired with the scope still adjusted for jacketed ammo, and it was predictably 10 inches low. 80 clicks up on the Weaver and we’re in the money.

The required telescopic sight adjustment in going from jacketed to cast is something I know by heart:  80 clicks up.  You can see the first five-shot group at 6:00 in the 5-ring on the above target.  Windage looked about right, so I went 80 clicks up on the Ruger’s Weaver 3×9 scope.  Each click is 1/4-inch at a hundred yards so that means a click is 1/8-inch at 50 yards, and I had to go up 10 inches.  10 inches is 80 clicks.  I made that adjustment and oila, the second group was right where I wanted it.  It was exactly the same as the amount of elevation I had to crank into my .30 06 Browning B78 when going from jacketed to cast bullets.

Then I moved over to the other targets I had set up at 50 yards.  I’d like to tell you that all groups were tight, but hey, you do this to find out what works and what doesn’t.  My best group of the day was with 18.0 grains of Trail Boss propellant, but it wasn’t as consistent as the Unique load was.

Not bad, but not consistent. The next group with this same load was 3.140 inches. Was it me, was it the rifle, was it the bullet, or was it the load? We’ll find out on the next outing.  This might have been a 1.6-inch group at 100 yards, and that ain’t bad.

Here’s what I experienced with the first six loads I’ve tried with these bullets.   Yep, there’s a lot of variability on some, but I’m encouraged.

Accuracy results from the first six loads I tried with my 7mm Remington Magnum cast loads. I’ll focus primarily on Unique and Trail Boss, and seat the bullets out a little further for a longer overall cartridge length on the next set of loads.

I’ve already loaded more 7mm ammo with the Unique and Trail Boss loads, and I’m also going to try IMR 4227.  I don’t think that 4227 will do as well as the first two loads, though.  We’ll see.  After that, I’m moving the targets out to 100 yards.   That will be interesting, and when I do, you’ll see the results here on the ExNotes blog.

I already used about half of the 250 Gardner bullets that came in the first box.  The results in my Ruger No. 1 made me a happy camper and I ordered another 1000 7mm rifle bullets a few days ago.  If you want good cast bullets at a great price, you might take a look at Jim’s website.


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Ruger’s .30 Carbine Blackhawk

I had a hard time selecting the title for this blog.  I ultimately went with the one you see above because I think it will show up better on the search engines.  But I almost went with Stupid is as Stupid Does (you know, from the Forrest Gump movie).   Read on.  You’ll see.

I am a big fan of the Ruger Blackhawk, and I wanted to try something different a few years ago, so I bought an older .30 Carbine Blackhawk on Gunbroker.  I was excited about getting it, but I have to tell you that revolver had issues, one of which led to its ultimate destruction.  One issue was that every case stuck in the cylinder after firing, and the other issue was that the cartridges dragged on the frame and the cylinder wouldn’t turn freely.

The first Ruger .30 Carbine I owned. It was the original design, informally referred to as the Old Model. It was a beautiful handgun, but it had problems.

I doped out the cylinder drag issue fairly quickly.  You have to trim the brass after nearly ever firing, and you have to make absolutely certain the primer is at or below flush after seating (something you should do for all cartridges).  The .30 Carbine is a cartridge that is unusually sensitive to all this in the Blackhawk.  .30 Carbine cases shrink in length when fired, and then they grow in length when you resize them.   The cartridge headspaces on the case mouth so case length is critical, and the .30 Carbine case seems to grow and shrink more than others.  Let it get too long, even by just a few thousandths, and the based of the cartridge will drag on the frame and the cylinder won’t turn freely.  I learned to check case length every time I reload this cartridge, and I usually have to trim about half of them.

I use a old Lyman case trimmer I’ve had since the 1970s. It’s a little manual lathe (I’ll let Gresh handle the big ones).  That’s a .30 Carbine case you see in there.

The next issue is primer seating.  Even though I clean the primer pockets each time I reload, I found that a handheld priming tool won’t always fully seat primers in a .30 Carbine case.  Hey, I’m not looking for an argument here and if you can do this with your hand priming tool, more power to you.  I’m telling what my experience has been.  I have another priming setup (also made by Lee), and it’s the Auto Prime tool that mounts on the press.  It positively seats the primer below flush on every cartridge.  It’s what I use now when priming .30 Carbine cases.

A Lee Auto Prime tool mounted on an RCBS Rockchucker reloading press. The shell holder mounts on top of the tool (upper arrow). A ram (lower arrow) pushes a machined rod that seats the primers.
A .30 Carbine brass case in the shell holder waiting for its primer.
A Winchester Small Rifle primer properly seated in a Federal .30 Carbine cartridge case.

All the above is a prelude.  I fixed the cylinder drag issue on my first .30 Carbine Blackhawk using the reloading process shown above, but I still had the extraction problem.  The cases just did not want to leave the cylinder. The extractor rod was bending and the cases still wouldn’t extract.  It was so bad that I usually had to take the cylinder out of the revolver to drive the cases out with a cleaning rod.  I tried everything to fix that problem.  I polished the chambers and I swabbed them with alcohol to remove any traces of oil (an oily chamber or cartridge case allows brass to flow into any machine marks in the chamber, locking it in place), but I still had the extraction problem.

Then I tried lighter loads.  A little bit lighter wasn’t doing it with the propellants I had been using, so I went to Trail Boss (a powder known for working well with lighter loads).  That’s how I got in trouble.  You have to understand that reloading manuals don’t include data on Trail Boss for many cartridges, and in particular, there was no data in any of the several reloading manuals I own on using this powder with the .30 Carbine.  The Trail Boss manufacturer’s guidance is to load to the base of the bullet for a max load, and not less than 70% of that amount as a minimum load.  I loaded at just under the max load.

I thought I was doing pretty good when I fired the first Trail Boss load and ejected the case.  It extracted easily.  This is progress, I remember thinking.  Things are looking good.  So I fired the remaining four rounds.  Then I walked downrange to check the target.

Hmmmm.  That’s odd.  Not a single shot was on the target.  My first thoughts were the load was either terribly inaccurate, or it was so light the bullets were hitting below the target.   Then, when I walked back  to the firing line, I saw it:  A sickening glint of copper peeking out of the Blackhawk’s barrel.  A stuck bullet.  Five of them, actually.  I got a bullet stuck in the bore and didn’t realize it.  Then I had fired another, and another, and…well, you know.  They liked that barrel, those bullets did, and that’s where they stayed.  I felt even worse when I ran my fingers along the length of the barrel.  I could feel the swells in its diameter from each bullet to the next.  Good Lord, they build Rugers tough (that’s why I’m here to tell this story).  Forrest Gump has nothing on me.  Like I said at the beginning of this blog, stupid is as stupid does.  The weird part to me was that I couldn’t feel anything different when firing the gun.

I was embarrassed and thoroughly disgusted.  It was the dumbest thing I’d ever done.  When I got home I put the gun in the back of my safe and I left it there for a year.   I didn’t want to think about it and I didn’t want to see it.  But I knew it was there, bearing silent witness to my stupidity.  I wanted to get it fixed, but I didn’t want to admit to anyone I had done something so dumb.  The barrel was toast, and the revolver’s frame looked a little distorted to me.  Best to just forget about it.  Maybe save it for a gun buyback program.

Then one day I figured I had waited long enough, and I called Ruger.  I told them my story and the nice lady on the other end told me I wasn’t the first one to call with stuck bullets in the barrel.  I felt a little better.  I asked if they could re-barrel my Blackhawk.  Sure, she  said, and off it went.  A few days later Ruger called me, and that same nice lady told me a new barrel would be $400.48, but they weren’t too sure about the gun’s structural integrity.  Or, they could sell me a brand new Blackhawk.  How much would that be, I asked.  $400.48, she said.  Ah, I get it.  What they were really telling me is to buy the new gun at the steeply-discounted price (MSRP on  a new .30 Carbine Blackhawk is $669).  I was in. Here’s my credit card number.  Send me the new gun.

So I received the Blackhawk, but like its predecessor it went in the safe.  I still didn’t want to be reminded of what I had done.  And, I had managed to convince myself that shooting a 40,000 psi M1 Carbine cartridge in a handgun maybe was just not meant to be.  What I was really afraid of was that the new Blackhawk would have case extraction issues like the first one.

Another three years went by, and then something clicked: I woke up and felt like shooting my .30 Carbine revolver.  I can’t say why it took three years.  It just did.  I had the urge and I loaded a box of .30 Carbine ammo in different flavors to test what worked best.  And a couple of days ago, we went to the range.

How did it go?  In a word, awesome.  Take a look:

Six different loads tested on two targets each. All groups are 5 shots, and all are at 15 yards.
The loads.  My .30 Carbine New Model Blackhawk seems to like everything.

This new .30 Carbine Ruger Blackhawk revolver liked every load I tested.  One was exceptional:

The secret sauce: 13.0 grains of 296 and the 110-grain Hornady jacketed soft point bullet. It’s consistent, too.

Shooting a .30 Carbine Blackhawk is fun.  You get massive muzzle blast, a huge muzzle flash, and major noise (hey, 40,000 psi is 40,000 psi), but little recoil.  And, as the above target and load data show, it is accurate.  This puppy can shoot.

You know what else?  The spent brass practically fell out of the cylinder when I emptied it.  The extraction problem is gone.  I’m wondering if something was wrong with the first .30 Carbine Blackhawk that caused the pressures to go excessively high and seize the brass cases in the cylinder (the chamber exit bores could have been too small, or maybe the barrel was undersized).  I’ll never know, but I don’t care.  This new Blackhawk is a honey.


A bit about the gear I use in my .30 Carbine reloading activities.  I use Lee dies, although just about .30 Carbine reloading dies will do the trick.  I normally stick with RCBS reloading gear, but I could get the Lee dies quicker so that’s what I bought.   I like them.  Most of my other reloading gear is RCBS, including the RCBS powder dispenser, the RCBS Rockchucker press, and the scale.  Again, any brand will work.  In looking at the prices for RCBS gear, I notice that it has become fairly expensive.  If you want to get into reloading for a lot less, you might take a look at this LEE PRECISION Anniversary Challenger Kit.  It contains most of what you need except for the dies.  Knowing what I know after having been a reloader for 50 years, it’s what I would buy if I was starting out all over again.


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Another 1917 S&W Record!

It had to happen, I guess.  We recently blogged about a Smith and Wesson 1917 .45 ACP revolver that sold for what, to me, was the incredibly high price of $2,525.  A couple of days ago, I saw another one that grabbed my attention.  It’s a Gunbroker.com auction for an N-frame Smith, but not just any N-frame:  This one is the original that Indiana Jones used in his first movie (Raiders of the Lost Ark).  I know, strictly speaking, it’s not a 1917.  But it’s built on the N-frame and chambered for a close-relative, the British .455 Webley.  This revolver played a key role in several Raiders scenes, including the Cairo swordsman and many others.

If you’re interested in bidding, the Indiana Jones revolver is on Gunbroker.com.  The good news is the minimum bid is the same as the Buy Now price.  The bad news?  That price is a cool $5,000,000.


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A .22 250 Ruger M77

Custom-crafted .22 250 ammo.  With the right loads, 4000 feet per second and sub-half-inch groups can be had from this cartridge.

One of the hottest .22 centerfires ever conceived, the .22 250’s wildcat ancestry goes all the way back to 1937, and to this day it is still one of the world’s hottest .22 centerfire cartridges.  The concept was simple enough:  Take the .250 Savage, neck it down to .224 caliber, stuff it full of the right powder, and oila, you get a .22 250.  Capable of exceeding 4,000 feet per second with lighter bullets, it’s a cartridge so fast that if you pick the wrong bullets, they’ll disintegrate in flight due to aerodynamic heating and spin-induced centrifugal forces.  That’s fast, folks.

Until 1963, if you wanted a .22 250 you had to build your own rifle.  Browning offered a production rifle chambered for the .22 250 that year, but even then you couldn’t just walk into a store and buy ammo.  No, the .22 250 was still a wildcat.  You had to make your ammo:  Form the brass from another cartridge case, and roll your own.  Then in 1965 in a nod to the .22 250’s appeal, Remington changed all that.  They offered a .22 250 rifle and the factory ammo to go with it, and it was an instant success.

My Dad was a member of an east coast woodchuck hunter/killer pack back in the 1960s and he regarded the .22 250 as the Holy Grail.  Dad used a .243 Winchester Model 70 (another hotrod in its day), but he spoke of the .22 250 in hushed and reverential terms.  Dad never owned a .22 250 and that might have been his only character flaw, a family deficiency I’ve been making up for ever since.  I remember visiting Effinger’s with Dad before I shipped out to Korea (Effinger’s was an outstanding gunshop in central New Jersey that only recently closed their doors).  They had a Ruger No. 1 .22 250 in stock and Dad came close to buying it.  But he didn’t.  He let it get away and he lamented that loss for years.

Life went on, I spent a year in Korea compliments of Uncle Sam, and then I came back to Fort Bliss, Texas.  One night I was in a K-Mart in El Paso (when K-Mart sold guns), they had a bolt action Ruger Model 77 in .22 250, and you can guess the rest.   I think I paid $169 (the list price on a Ruger Model 77 was $215 back then).   It’s a beautiful rifle with classic American bolt action styling.   The bluing is deeper than deep (infinitely richer than what you see on new rifles today),  the hand-cut checkering is perfect (today’s rifles have mostly laser cut checkering that’s fuzzy as an old peach), and the profile is just right (thank you, Len and Bill).  The walnut is a joy to behold even though it’s straight-grained and doesn’t have much figure, and that red recoil pad is classy.  This rifle is nearly five decades old, but it still looks new.

My Ruger Model 77 in .22 250. It’s equipped with a Redfield 4×12 scope.
Classy, huh?  Based on my rifle’s serial number and info on the Ruger website, my rifle was manufactured 45 years ago.
The period-correct 4×12 Redfield. The optics on current-production scopes and the ability to dial out parallax make today’s telescopic sights much better, but this one was what was in vogue in the mid-70s and I like the look.
That’s not rust you see on the countersunk muzzle; it’s just muzzle-blast staining.

I tested the Ruger with Nosler 60-grain Varminter bullets at different H380 powder levels. H380 is the “go to” powder in .22 250, and I wanted to see what it would do with the Nosler bullets.

My .22 250 loads with 60-grain Nosler bullets and H380 powder.  Win some, lose some.

My buddy Greg recently acquired a .22 250, and that got me interested in shooting mine again.  I dug it out of the safe, loaded some ammo, and settled on on the 100-yard line.  I tried four different loads for a ladder test using H380 propellant and Nosler’s 60-grain ballistic tip bullet (the rounds you see in the photo above).

I’d like to brag about great groups with the above loads, but the results were disappointing.  Sometimes that happens.  You have to kiss a few frogs in the reloading game to find a prince (sometimes you have to kiss a lot of frogs), and let me tell you, every one of my loads during that range session was amphibious.  But that’s okay.   When you develop a load for a rifle, you find out what works and what doesn’t.  My Ruger .22 250 doesn’t like Nosler 60-grainers and H380.  Now I know.

I knew the rifle had potential, though.  Here’s earlier data with lighter bullets:

That one load at the bottom of the table showed real promise, so I loaded a few more with the same 52-grain Hornady bullets and tested them a few days later.  Here’s what I found:

The above results were promising, but there were inconsistencies in how the lighter bullets grouped.  What was driving that?  Was it me being a Shakey Jake, or was it something else?  I took a hard look at the bullets, and to my surprise, more than half of them had deformed tips.

Deformed tips on the 52-grain Hornady jacketed hollow point bullets.  There are a few other things detrimental to good accuracy revealed in this photo, like the faint circumferential witness mark left by the bullet seater, and the shaved copper at the case mouth.

I called Hornady to ask about the deformed tips, and their guy explained to me that what I was seeing was indeed a bullet defect.  He asked me for the lot number on the bullet box, and it turned out these bullets were manufactured in 2013 (which is weird, because I had only purchased them a year or two ago).  You’ll remember that 2013 was in the Obama era when component shortages were common and the factories were struggling to keep up with demand.  These bullets should have never left the factory, and the Hornady rep put a box of replacement bullets in the mail for me that same day.   Hornady is a good company that stands behind their products.

Not content to wait for the new bullets, I screened the ones I had and selected bullets with no visible tip deformation for the next reloading lot.   I also tried neck-sizing rather than full length resizing.  The theory on this is that the cartridge case is fire-formed to the exact chamber dimensions of the rifle, and it should more precisely locate the bullet in the chamber (when you neck size only, you only resize the case where it grabs the bullet).  With visually-screened bullets and neck-sized cases, the M77 returned about the same accuracy.   But I was seeing more groups below an inch, and I even had one below a half inch:

There’s still variability and that’s probably due to me.  There may still be issues I couldn’t see to screen in the bullets, but I think things are moving in the right direction.  So what’s next?  Varget is another powder reported to do well in the .22 250 (there’s a can of it on my bench), and the new box of Hornady bullets arrived last week.   And I’ve got a few more accuracy tricks I want to try.  We’ll see what happens.


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A cherry ’06…

About 40 years ago, I bought a Howa 30 06 barreled action and a Bishop semi-inletted stock.  It was to be the first rifle I had stocked and I wanted something different.  In perusing the Bishop catalog, I selected cherry instead of walnut (not cherry as in cool, but cherry as in the kind of tree George Washington cut down).  When I ordered it on the phone (this was way before the Internet came along), I asked the Bishop people if they could run the forearm out to the muzzle, because my concept was to make it like a Mannlicher rifle.  I thought that would be cool (and I was right).  As I recall, the semi-inletted stock was $57 plus postage (and postage wasn’t very much).  Ah, times change.

Semi-inletted stocks were advertised as 95% complete.  All you had to do, the ads said, was some minor finishing work to get a perfect fit (sanding and maybe a little filing in the stock’s inletted areas so the barreled action would drop in).  But it took a ton of labor to make that happen.  Maybe I just didn’t know what I was doing, but if what I put into the stock’s final inletting was 5%, Bishop must have spent a million hours doing the first 95%.  But all’s well that ends well and this project ended well.

I finished the stock with what would become my preferred finish on all future gun projects, and that’s TruOil.  After sanding with 320, then 400, and then 600 grit paper, and then buffing the wood with denim to get any remaining grain whiskers, the drill was to apply a coat of TruOil, wait a day for it to dry, beat it down with 0000 steel wool, and repeat the process the following day.  You’re looking at 10 days of that on this stock.  It deepened the color of the cherry nicely.  It’s different, and it always causes folks who see it at the range to strike up a conversation.

I floated the barrel (that means sanding the barrel channel so the barrel doesn’t touch the stock at all) and glass-bedded the action (that means pouring an epoxy and fiberglass mix into the stock and allowing it to cure around the receiver, creating a perfect bed for the action).  Glass bedding creates a stable platform.  Free floating the barrel eliminates asymmetric loads on the barrel due to temperature and humidity changes, and temperature changes in the barrel that occur when a rifle is fired. Those two steps improve accuracy tremendously.  It works.

I wanted something different for the forearm tip on this rifle, and I didn’t want to screw around with trying to fit a metal cap (what you typically see on a Mannlicher stock) because that would bring the barrel back into contact with the wood.  I thought it would be cool to give it an Alex Henry forearm treatment (like the Ruger No. 1 style), and I carved it freehand with a Dremel.  That turned out surprisingly well, too.

I didn’t checker the stock.  There are two reasons for that…I can’t checker worth a damn, and I actually prefer the look of a rifle without checkering.

Three handloads I developed for use in other 30 06 rifles work well.  The first is a near-max load of IMR 4320 with the Hornady 130-grain jacketed soft point bullet (that one shoots 1-inch groups all day long in a Ruger No. 1), the second is a couple of grains under max of IMR 4064 with either the Winchester or Hornady 150-grain jacketed soft point (both bullets work equally well, and this load is a tack driver in my Model 70), and the third is a max IMR 4064 load with the Remington 180-grain jacketed soft point (that’s the accuracy load in my Browning B-78).

Every rifle has a load it prefers, though, and this custom Howa is no exception.   Here’s the secret sauce:

The load shown in the photos above is not a hunting load (the Sierra Matchkings would sail right through an animal without much expansion), but it sure is accurate and it doesn’t take much to kill a paper target.  I like to think my marksmanship has improved with age; I probably ought to find some 760 powder and load a few more to see if I could better the groups you see above.

In the 1960s and 1970s (and on into the 1980s), there used to be several companies offering semi-inletted rifle stocks, but that business has largely gone away.  There’s still Richard’s Microfit in the Valley; I used them for a .375 Ruger project I did about 5 years ago (and I could go there and personally select the wood I wanted).

Some of the gunstock companies were mismanaged and took shortcuts that bankrupted them, but I think the real reasons they folded fall into two categories.  The first is that not many people want to expend the effort it takes to create a custom rifle like the one you see here, and most folks don’t have the skills to do so.  Shop courses disappeared in the US a long time ago, and most people today are more adept at things like at operating a cell phone and posting on Facebook.

Another reason is that very few people want a rifle with real wood.  Black plastic is all the rage. I was on the range last week, it was fairly busy, and I was literally the only guy shooting a rifle that didn’t have a Tupperware stock (everyone fancies themselves an operator; few have ever worn a uniform).  Not that there’s anything wrong with that if a modern military rifle is what floats your boat, and there are some fine custom builds (as outlined in Jake Lawson’s blog last week).

Hell, even if you wanted to build a custom rifle like the one you see here, it’s hard to find a barreled action.  In the 1970s it was not unusual for rifle companies to sell barreled actions; today, the only outfit I know of that does so is Howa and you don’t see them too often.  If you come across one, let me know.  I could go for another project.


More Tales of the Gun stories!

A Good Crisis

Good buddy Jake Lawson sent us a marvelous guest blog on his new Israeli Weapon Industries Tavor X95 (the one you see in the photo below), and it sure is an interesting story.  Folks, this man can write!  Enjoy.  I sure did.


I wasn’t raised to respect Lego rifles.

There was no implication of egalitarianism in Dad’s gun culture: firearms were reserved for the martial few who took to the hills in Wranglers to provide for family, tribe, and the community of soft-handed city folk who’d never eaten brains for breakfast. We Lawsons, I was given to understand, descended from hunters and warriors and gamekeepers. We were special and worthy. We harbored innate skills.

Those blood-honed instincts were best served by very special rifles, furnished like Victorian houses and smelling, always, faintly of Hoppe’s No. 9 (we pronounced it “hoppies” and you should, too). I was occasionally loosed to wander wide-eyed through legendary temples like Kesselring’s while Dad traded country-boy bons mots with the staff. They’d nod at each other with the unspoken recognition of cowboys, bikers, and Seventh Day Adventists. Through the slanting half-light of well-secured buildings, racks of gleaming fire sticks whispered strong magic from the past, waiting like Excalibur to leap lively under the hand of a righteous knight.

Like classic hardware stores before canvas aprons gave way to the Playskool smocks of “home centers,” bygone gun stores offered only gradual apprenticeships into the mysteries. You started knee-high and – provided you paid respectful attention – you might one day grow into a man worth reckoning with. We had no internet to spawn new lingo by the day. You absorbed the patois the way artists learned line and color, with dawning awareness that most of the wisdom lay between the lines.

In those quieter times you could buy a rifle in most any variety store, but a man went to the altars of the elect to discuss blued, two-piece scope rings, buy a seasonal box of Winchester Silvertips, and run his fingers over the saddle straps of fine, leather scabbards. Those places, mostly killed off by Discount Gun Stores and their ilk, barely exist today. Where you find them, they’re secured by crabby, clannish insiders, guarding their diminishing cache of unique knowledge like tattered dragons squatting on a pile of dimes.

The full flower of our information age democratized knowledge on any number of subjects. This is largely a good thing. Who doesn’t want to download the part number for their dishwasher inlet valve alongside a quick, friendly video reminding you to wrap brass threads in nylon tape?

The internet also gave rise to tens of millions of Shake ‘n Bake™ experts who can quote the ballistics by range of 5.56mm 55-grain FMJ slugs but have never once shot a deer, bedded a walnut forend, or cleaned weapons to an armorer’s satisfaction.

Erupting angora-soft neck beards through scarlet fields of pimples, less good ol’ boys than fresh-faced kids, these are our experts now. Good-humored and alert, they staff brightly lit gun stores where you no longer ballpoint your way through BATF forms while leaning on the glass over surplus police revolvers, joking with someone’s crinkle-eyed uncle about your mental incapacities, but instead enter your digits into a dumb terminal, squatting humorlessly in the corner of a repurposed Blockbuster Video store that still reeks of Citrisolv. Lean hill hunters in woolen plaid are nowhere in sight, replaced by pasty Glock jocks sporting 5.11 Tactical trousers. The gun tech surely is better – so much better that you can build a reliable weapon on your kitchen table with no tooling more exotic than a wobbly drill press – but long glass cases littered with sci-fi props, zombie targets, and pimped-out banger bling make me miss my father’s Oldsmobile.

And there are AR-15s. So many AR-15s, in so many configurations, that kids today don’t say “my rifle” anymore. They call their gun “this build.”

Decades ago, I’d already had enough of M16s and their multifarious cousins: A1s, CAR-15s, A2s, SOPMODs, A4s, et al. Sure, they’re cool in those movies where Arnold gets 160 rounds out of every mag and never has a stoppage, but let’s get real: standing a pre-’64 Winnie up against a tac stack of AR-pattern rifles is like pushing Howie Long, wearing a Saville Row suit, into a police line-up of minor-in-possession suspects. Class or crass: pick one, and move along.

Having toted an M4 carbine across someone else’s desert at taxpayer expense, I conceived no special desire to spend a thousand bucks adopting one of my very own. I’d mistrusted those plasticky things since childhood. What kind of war weapon bitches like a parent when you don’t close the door? M1 Garands and M1911 Colts didn’t jam under fire! Mattel rifles?! I was sick of ‘em: sick of the Chevy 350 ubiquity of “modern sporting rifles,” sick of the little “oh s&!t” springs that zing away any time you don’t pay attention, and sick of dangling one from a single-point bungee sling, tied off to a 40-lb. shirt. I’d gone to work with my M4, slept with it, eaten with it, prayed with it, and I didn’t miss it for one lonely moment after our long-overdue divorce.

At some point, I realized that I’d gone my whole life without buying a rifle.

Now, this isn’t the hardship one might imagine. Most of us don’t need a rifle. I don’t need a rifle – and if I did, I could always peck open the safe and pull out the .30-30 I got as a Christmas present the year I joined up with Boy Scouts of America, or the pre-war .30-06 with its first series Leupold Gold Ring 3-9X scope that came down to me from Grandpa through Dad, or the .22 with the 4X Weaver that – strike that; I actually passed that one along to my mother-in-law to pop rattlers in her Arizona garden.

Or I could pull one of the rifles from the other side of the safe, where Pretty Wife’s inheritance encompasses more firepower than my own.

We’re not wealthy folks. Intrigued though I may be by long-range shooting, a Savage 110 with Accu-Trigger and a big honkin’ optic – let alone something fancy from Accuracy International – is not a hobby within my budget. It’s entirely too easy to shoot through two hundred bucks a day in ought-six or .308 ammunition, just getting the feel of things.

Also, that’s tougher on a rebuilt shoulder than I like to confess.

But still, I’d never bought a rifle. Never shopped for one “with intent,” never spec’ed one out just for me. Every long arm I’d shot was a loaner, a gift, an inheritance, or a duty weapon. That thought came to me from time to time and I pushed it down, and then it came tickling back. Some of those middle-aged tickles grow compelling. Plus I hearken to my sweetie’s frequent admonition to “have your midlife crises early, and often.”

Did I mention I’d never bought a rifle? According to family tradition, I still haven’t.

Oh, I had my aspirations. A bolt-action gun with a stainless, free-floated, heavy match barrel. A McMillen stock adjustable for comb height and length of pull, or maybe a thumbhole stock I carved myself from Circassian walnut, with a shoulder plate of polished ebony. Big scope, adjustable for ranges to infinity and beyond, with the kind of chambering that requires a dope card just to open the cartridge box: .338 Lapua, maybe.

Being more of a dream than a plan, that did not happen. For the record, I do not believe it will. In any event, I have the character more of a hip shooter than a sniper. I perform best when I think less. At least, that’s my excuse for all the busted plans in my life.

Hip shooters favor short rifles. They’re just easier to get through the door, whether that’s a HMMWV door or my bedroom door. Think more along the lines of Steve McQueen’s “mare’s leg” in Wanted Dead or Alive than the .45-110 Shiloh Sharps from Quigley Down Under.

Stubby rifles get a bad rap, though. As alleged “assault rifles,” they’re considered truculent by dint of terminology. The region where I live, always a “shall-issue” state due to our supreme court’s historic interpretations of Article I, Section 24 of the state constitution, swiftly retreats from our Wild West past.

There was an Ernst Home Center just down the road from the house where I lived through high school. It sold potted plants, plywood, drywall anchors, and guns. Nose-printed showcases lining the west wall displayed rows of Dan Wesson Pistol Packs boasting various selections of interchangeably-barreled revolvers, and I can remember wondering whether I’d need to be 18, or 21, to walk in and buy one of those O.G. “Lego guns,” right over the counter. Their big shrouds and barrel nuts made them a little funny-lookin’, but I didn’t mind too much.

There are waiting periods now, of course. Those have been legislatively hip for a while now, but recently my state went all-in on protecting us from the law-abiding. Now that semi-automatic rifles are considered a greater threat to society than pistols (a statistically unsupportable politifact), 18 year-old adults may no longer buy them here. Even those of us well past drinking age face the same ten-day waiting period for semi-auto rifles as for a handgun.

Year before last, possession of a Washington CCW meant that a citizen with such clearly documented legal standing could buy any legal weapon, from a long-mag Glock to a Barrett .50, without a waiting period or additional background check. That privilege recently vanished. Every single gun transfer, of every type, now requires a background check – including selling your old deer rifle to your cousin, or gifting it along to your daughter.

Strange times.

Now, in all honesty, none of that prevented an old cuss like me from buying an “assault rifle” any time I felt enough like it to muster the funds. However, two more laws now grind through our legislature: one to limit magazines to California’s ten-round max capacity, and the other an outright ban on “assault rifles.” Our Attorney General’s legislation request defines assault rifles as having a telescoping stock, pistol grip, detachable high-capacity magazine, forward grip, or a “combination flash suppressor and muzzle brake” (i.e. any M16-style bird cage) that “reduces muzzle climb and preserves shooter’s eyesight.”  Black rifles do not matter to Bob Ferguson. Neither, apparently, does a shooter’s eyesight.

Well, now. If there’s one way to make me want a thing, it’s to forbid it. All too human that way, I set about making my pitch to Pretty Wife. In these Trumpian times, a liberal activist like she just might respond perversely to me stocking in a practical little rifle.

Spoiler alert: it worked.

Again, I’ve never been much for customizing guns. That was gunsmith work when I was a tot, and my habits were formed then. No machine shop tools = no bore-sighted scope mounting (I don’t remember us calling them “optics” in the day).

Everything was some level of bespoke, back when. Even the humblest rifles were graced with pretty wooden stocks, inletted by the hands of people who cared. Bluing required preservation, and even when scrupulously cared for would slowly sacrifice itself over time, fading into colors soft and gentle as wisps of your grandmother’s hair.

Bought, issued, or given, the thing came to you as a piece of kinetic, mechanical art; wrought from the disparate elements of tree flesh, steel, bluing, oil, chrome, and smokeless powder. For me, rifles were objects of reverence in the manner of excellent tools: taught to sons as a secret language, and handed forward across generations.

Today’s guns are not that; surely especially not the jangle-parts “black rifles” that have ruthlessly displaced .30-30 Marlins as basic, go-to units for American rifle(wo)men. MSRs seem closer akin to the power tools at your home center: you may notice brand quality differences between Milwaukee (Colt) and Ridgid (KelTec), but you must delve much deeper into specialty retail to find heirloom-quality marques like Mafell (Blaser).

On the plus side, plastic-stocked rifles are utterly modular and have more accessories available than the H.O. train sets of my youth. In the future we now occupy, gun parts rain from the internet sky, fully engaging the tinkering mind.

As mentioned, I’m not sitting on a big go-to-Hell budget. When I shake a few nickels out of the sofa, they normally go toward tools &/or supplies for home improvement.

Yes, we’re still working on our house. We’ll likely be working on it on the day I die. Hopefully, between then and now, I’ll set aside a few hours to knock together a pine box for my carcass.

However, everything is situational. Rahm Emmanuel once exhorted, “Never let a serious crisis go to waste.” So it was when mean bubbas got meaner about Jews at around the same time our state government decided to restrict “assault rifles” that I pled my case for picking up a Hebrew Hammer… y’know, just in case we might need it. Better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it, right?

As mentioned, AR-pattern guns remain the most modular, not to say popular, sporting rifles on the planet. With upgrades and spares available for everything from the flash hider to the buffer spring, they’re the small-block Chevy of rifles. Problem is, I’m “that guy” – the sentimental boob who buys a flathead Ford, just to be different.

Or because he’d already spent so much time behind the wheel of a Chevy that the Corvettes started to feel like Caprice Classics. I’ve shot a few friends’ AR-15s, and (obviously) put in trigger time on Colt’s (and GM Hydramatic Division’s) M16A1 and A2. I’m good enough on a rifle-mounted M203 to bloop a 40mm grenade through a small window a couple hundred yards out; have put in range time (one-way and two-way) on the slightly odd M249 SAW; and I deployed with an ACOG-equipped M4.

So, lots of black rifle exposure.

Enough is enough and I’m sick to death of picking carbon out of the bolt faces and forcing cones of direct-impingement rifles. Filthy buggers, and still – after half a century of development! – stupidly prone to jamming. Jack’s rule for outdoor fun: if you have to keep snapping shut a modesty panel to keep your rifle’s bikini line shaved, someone made a questionable design choice.

I did want to shoot 5.56 NATO, though. It is to me what .30-06 M2 Ball was to WWII vets: familiar and readily available. It’s light to carry. It shoots pretty flat. It’s a ton cheaper than 7.62 NATO if you don’t reload (which I don’t), has low recoil and high velocity, and I know the ballistics by instinct.

After a couple hun’nerd hours of pleasant research, I dropped a notable sum for a chunky bullpup from the Promised Land of Zion, the Israeli Weapon Industries Tavor X95, and it is one cute rig. Despite our possible impending mag ban, I didn’t buy a bunch of bananas. For some reason, I seem to have a dozen or two of them already lying around.

The plastic-chassis X95 ships in IDF black, “Flat Dark Earth” (light brown), or O.D. Green. Mine is the green, since it was available and I wanted not-black. Sue me. I’ve shot enough black rifles for two lifetimes.

I was stoked! When it came in, I trotted straight up to Precise Shooter L.L.C. and keyboarded my way through the computerized interrogation. Forking over the not-inconsiderable cash, I smuggled it home to play with it. First discovery: it comes apart easy as an AK. Punching a single pin flips open the overstuffed, La-Z-Boy butt cap (required to keep it legally lengthy), and you can slide out the gas piston works. Two pins more, and the trigger pack drops into your palm.

With 500 rounds and a clutch of extremely well-traveled “high capacity magazines” sleeping in an old .50-cal. can, I was all set to go terrorize some paper.

Yet there it sleeps, in our big, speckle-coated Cabela’s box, still waiting for me to go shoot it because I blew my entire budget on the carbine. My X95 bristles with virtues – it’s short and handy; conveniently modular; battle-proven; and reliable as a blacksmith vise – but an economical buy-in price does not number among its pleasures.

And I wanted an optic.

I was still saving up for one on the day we found ourselves smack amidst the next available serious crisis: coronavirus! Plus Australia on fire, locusts straight out of the Book of Revelation swarming over Africa, police riots from sea to shining sea, murder hornets illegally immigrating four towns to the north.

“Basically,” as the good Dr. Venkman said, “the worst parts of the Bible.”

I would fix it with retail!

Pretty Wife was probably told about the pre-battlesight-zeroed, snappy little iron sights that defilade themselves flat into the carbine’s topside Picatinny rail, but I somehow don’t think that information took hold. If it did, she forgot about it somewhere between Initiative 1639 and now.

Once again, we had “the talk.”

This is a different talk than the one your dad had with you before high school. More like a negotiation, really. A sensitive one, at that. Once again, it turned out I’m more charming than I knew.

What? Is it my fault she loves me?

Following even more enjoyable research hours, I settled on a MEPRO Pro V2 from redoubtable IDF supplier Meprolight. It retailed for 600 bones, but Optics Planet had it for $550, with another fifty bucks off for St. Patrick’s Day. It’s well-reviewed on their site, and elsewhere.

One funky thing about a Tavor is that the comb is groundsnake-level to the top rail, forcing the use of a high (read “expen$ive”) mount for AR-optimized optics. And one funky thing about yours truly is that I tend to break stuff.

The Mepro has me covered on both fronts: the Israelis GI-proofed it for use by conscripts slogging through an eternal war zone, and they sized it specifically to mount on their front-line service rifle. That’s what the Tavor is (my version is the U.S. model, so no giggle switch but at least it isn’t black). Which is to say that both gun and gunsight were apocalypse-proofed by apocalypse experts.

“Expensive but hard to break” is how I grew to ride BMW motorcycles and to stock my shop with General International and Milwaukee and Record Power trade tools, and when I can pull it off I rarely regret that economic model.

My red-dotter hit the porch a couple of weeks ago. After side-eyeing its package for four days to see if any militant viruses leapt off, I pulled it out and cammed it onto the rail. Just to be sure it was tough enough (okay, actually because my spine’s last will & testament bequeathed me a permanent case of butterfingers), I dropped it onto my bench.

Twice.

Then once onto a concrete floor, just to be sure. Din’t seem to faze ‘er none.

I like the circled, 1.8-mil red dot more than others I’ve sampled, which are EOTech and the M68 (MIL-SPEC version of Aimpoint). It shows up well on every setting (except IR, obviously), and I figure I’ll be able to shoot it pretty well with both eyes open. That’s becoming important with the growth spurt of my bouncing baby cataracts. I also like that its dust- and water-sealed power compartment requires nothing more exotic than a lone, double-A battery.

In another life, I ran range strings with an EOTech mounted on an M4. This optic inspires the same effortless targeting (hi, neighbors!), though hopefully without the fragility and short battery life of those earlier “picture window” sights. Reportedly, it runs for a dog’s age on that regular ol’ double-A, has auto-off and motion-restart, and is waterproof to a few meters’ depth. It’s also supposed to be mud- and sand-resistant, which is important given that the rifle it’s mounted on definitely is – there are torture test videos on YouTube showing military Tavors yanked out of sloppy mud holes and saltwater baths, then immediately loaded and fired full-auto without a pause for cleaning.

We’ll see. Again: I am known for breaking stuff.

I tried positioning the MEPRO in a couple different spots along the ridge rail, before I latched its nose into a photo finish with the charging handle’s rest position. Bonus of sticking to factory racing parts: with the backup iron sights erected, the peep and blade line right up spot-on with the orange bullseye. Still no gunsmithing. All I did was to press the mount forward against the rail teeth as I folded in the cam levers (the direction recoil will push it), and peer through it.

Zeroing should be a lolly. Once my submontane range reopens, I plan to adjust fire to an average two and a half inches low at 25 yards, then walk out the strings to 100m and see how my groups hold up. May change POI later, depending on ammo selection (it’s a Boolean for me: XM193 or XM855, with a mild preference for the latter), and on how it prints at 100 meters.

With its 16.5” barrel, my bullpup’s overall ballistics shouldn’t vary much from an AR15, but the ballistic arc will likely be “bloopier” due to a sighting axis about an inch higher over the bore. The V2’s half-mil clicks won’t make a precision rig out of it, but this is a battle rifle. I’ll be content if it shoots into 3 MOA at 100, and can tag a championship Frisbee at 300. If I can squeeze ‘er under 2 MOA with its suspiciously Kalashnikovian guts and my trifocaled eyes, I’ll be ecstatic.

So the sight is all mounted up and there’s ammo on the shelf, but I still can’t shoot it. In our gone-viral age, it seems rifle ranges aren’t yet considered “essential business.” Not that I disagree with that. I just like to fuss.

So I went back to shopping. There are but few American anxieties fully resistant to retail therapy.

One of the spiffy, gunsmith-obviating features of the X95 is that its forend panels literally slide off at the touch of a button. You’ll discover one Picatinny rail under the bottom and another to either side of the front stock, each with its own quick-detach cover. Cool kids these days are all into KEYMOD or Magpul’s M-LOK system, but rails are solid and battle-tested. Grandpa would approve.

I decided I might want a “broomstick,” and would definitely want to mount a flashlight. For home defense, a short rifle beats the ever-lovin’ snot out of a long shotgun (that’s my opinion, worth what you paid). That augured in favor of a forward grip and weapon light.

Here’s the rub, though: the little sumbitch is like Yoda, short and stumpy with the gravitational pull of a black hole. While noticeably smaller than a stubby M4 with its federally controlled 14.5” barrel, the Tavor weighs as much empty (7.9 lbs.) as an M16A1 weighs with 30 rounds in the hopper. Not only do I disdain larding up guns with excess ballast, I also hate hanging snaggy accessories off the nose of a rifle (I’m talkin’ to you, AN/PEQ-2!). When it comes to clearing rooms, the slicker, the better.

While poking around the merch sites and cheerful chat rooms of the gunweb, I found a FAB Defense forward grip on closeout, again from Optics Planet (full disclosure: I also suckered for their doorbuster-priced knife, a meaty and smooth-opening Chinese folder for under eight bucks). The FAB grip is rigged to mount a one-inch, rear-switch flashlight à la Streamlight or Surefire. It has a grip trigger to turn on the lights and (yes, really) a cross-bolt safety to prevent accidental illuminations.

It’s a pretty slick gizmo, plastic but solidly cast. FAB sustains a good rep, and I like the idea of NOT having the flashlight lashed to the side rail like a Fury Road War Boy hanging off an overclocked rat rod. The green is probably not perfectly matched to my rifle’s plastic, but I’m partially RG-colorblind and it looks just fine to me.

Will I come off like a pimply, overcompensating mall ninja with no real-world experience when I yank out this Ghostbuster wand at the range? Most certainly. I just don’t give a large rodent’s sphincter.

Speaking of pulling it out, I also settled on a case from which to pull it. IWI pushes a stout bag, knotted over with MOLLE gingerbread, for about 150 bucks. For reasons obvious to adults, I wanted something less “gunny” looking, so I ordered up SAVIOR Equipment’s “American Classic Tactical Double Short Rifle Gun Case Firearm Bag” in 28″ length.

That’s a lot of words to describe a bag that costs less than fifty bucks!

And yes, you read that right: in 28″ length. The overall length of my bullpup is 26.4 inches. The overall length of the “spec ops cool guy” M4 that I toted in Iraq was 29.75 inches with the stock fully collapsed – and it had a 1.8-inch shorter barrel (same 1:7 rifling twist rate, though).

The bag is superb – not “pretty good for a third of the price,” but actually superb. Based on a lot of squinting at marketing pictures, it seems likely that it was stitched up in the same Chinese factory as IWI’s case, with the only noticeable difference being omission of the tacti-kewl MOLLE straps. My case is not green, black, or “flat dark earth,” but a business-like light grey, suitable for office tower or racquet club.

I don’t want to be a mall ninja everywhere.

Inside, it’s festooned with handy pockets, including not one but TWO rifle compartments. There’s additional space for a couple of handguns, cleaning kit, tools, spares, accessories, and fitted pockets for 18 USGI magazines loaded with 5.56 NATO (that’s 540 rounds, or more pork than adding TWO additional carbines to my double-rifle range bag). All this in a case that measures two feet, four inches long.

On the outside, it’s snugly padded with sturdy zippers, tie-down straps over each pocket, and handle straps circumstraddling the belly of the bag. There are metal D-rings for the padded shoulder strap. All told, this bag is ready to carry far more than I’m prepared to stuff it with.

Did I mention it’s 28 inches long? It’s TWENTY-EIGHT INCHES LONG! Looks like a dang tennis bag.

Not long after the bag hit our porch, it was followed by a Surefire G2X Tactical LED flashlight that snugs perfectly into the FAB grip, which itself turns out to have a quick-detach function: punch a button on the left side, and it slides off, with flashlight aboard, to transform into a “light pistol” separate from the weapon. Handy, I suppose, for those times when you want to check what’s happening across the backyard without actually aiming a rifle at your daughter’s fleeing boyfriend.

Or your granddaughter’s.

The weapon light, mounted, projects beyond the flash hider of my Tavor. Happily, the whole rig still fits into that cheap, sturdy bag that cost me less than an accessory port cover.

While Tavors may never achieve the teeming fettler’s aftermarket of the AR15, Manticore Arms has invested big design time into engineering tasty treats for it. I whiled a few pleasant hours dreaming my way through their catalog, as well.

One criticism of the X95 relates to modular reversibility. To make it easily switchable from right- to left-handed firers, it’s built with ejection ports on either side. Because it’s a bullpup, the unused ejection port lurks around the corner of your mouth. The factory’s plastic port cover allegedly does a poor job of controlling renegade gas discharge around its edges, resulting in the grey-black cheek bloom known as “Tavor face.” Apparently, that gets worse under suppressed fire.

Although I don’t plan to run a suppressor, Manticore’s gasketed port cover is just ded sexy: two meticulously machined, black anodized panels sandwich a rubber gasket that bulges from the edges to seal the port hermetically. As a tidy bonus, Manticore’s port bling adds an extra QD mount for sling attachment, because why not?

Added to the factory-installed tackle, that gives me four (4) QD points on the cheek side (one of which is reversible to the other side), and two on the off side.

Speaking of slings, I went for a quick-adjust, padded Vickers Combat Applications sling from Blue Force Gear (back in the days before our world melted, “blue force” meant the good guys and “red team” was the opposition force, and that’s already more political than gun writing should ever get).

Because IWI thoughtfully included two stout QD swivels in the rifle box, I ordered my sling naked and saved $25.00. With a sale price at Optics Planet, that reduced expenditures for this well-regarded slippy-strap to solidly 30 bucks less than IWI wants for their convertible one- or two-point Savvy Sniper sling (I’m unlikely ever again to have use for a single-point sling).

My sling showed up in dirt-ignoring Coyote Brown. Tropical Camouflage seemed a bit over the top for our Pacific NW rain forests. Also, see under “I’ve had enough of black.”

What to say about a sling I haven’t taken anywhere yet? It’s comfortable; it’s slick to adjust, and I felt pretty silly after about a minute of standing in my office, running the adjustment tab up and down to practice shouldering my bangstick. Zing! Zing! Beware, dust bunnies!

Somewhen during this card-melting retail frenzy, I bought myself a ShootingSight “TAV-TOOL” from Bullpup Armory for about forty clams. This is a jacknife-style gizmo I really wanted to like, particularly since it includes the occasionally important barrel wrench (fifteen bucks OEM, all by itself). Although regrettably floppy and cheaply finished, the TAV-TOOL found a place in my range bag. Between that and a Leatherman Wave, I can cover most any fiddling that I’d take on away from home. Like a bicycle multitool, it may not be much good but its yellow-lettered bulk keeps me from losing whichever slim, black fiddle probe I need. Right. NOW.

More research on the aforementioned port cover revealed that the plastic chassis of my X95 might release gas, not only from the unused ejection port (now sealed up like Grant’s Tomb) but also from under the hind end of the top Picatinny rail. Encasing gas blooms in a plastic chassis results in a farty little beast. It’s probably the single most prevalent criticism of the gun. As a guy still annoyed by all the CLP eyewash I collected while trying to keep old Stoner platforms running I wasn’t overly concerned, but I had time on my hands.

Other owners have published various solutions, including smearing RV sealant all around the stock/rail junction. That sounded… nasty. Obviously, I don’t mind messing with my rifle. In early spring, that was what I set out to do.

I’m just not ready to mess up my rifle. Did I mention I’d never bought a new rifle before? Shoot, pard, it ain’t even been to the range yet!

No schmear here.

Turns out, IWI posted a little video on their site to address this exact issue. They suggest mounting a rail cover right at the back of the rail and shoving an IWI-logo, rubber zipper pull (full disclosure: I have one on my shop vest) under the back edge. Simple, eh? Though it does beg the question: if gas leakage is so easy to fix, why is it still an issue left for owners to solve? Reminds me of the ignition coils on cam belt Ducatis, but I digress…

Shopping for rail covers was a novel experience. Seems most of ‘em are purpose-built to make me walk tall and talk loud, banged out of aluminum and customized with silk-screened patriotism ranging from Punisher skulls to Bible verses – and they’re about 25 bucks a pop, too!

Enter Wal-Mart, carrying a bagful of rail covers from Acid Tactical (a woman-owned company, they proudly announce). Looking like tiny, rubber, desert tortoise shells in Flat Dark Earth, they cost $8.99 a dozen.

Shipping was free.

Since so many of them tumbled out of the cellophane sack, I went ahead and snapped ‘em on anywhere rail teeth might bite: behind the flashlight-enabled ghetto grip, and everywhere along the top rail not already covered by Meprolight’s finest.

Back, ye gases! Avaunt!

All dressed up and no place to go, I was really getting the itch to go shooting, but it still isn’t a thing here. Three more weeks, and my chosen range just might open… meantime, what else could I play with?

SBRs (“short-barreled rifles”) are any kind of rifle that’s cut-down for maneuverability. These are considered double-secret probation-level subversions of federal intent, here in the Land of the Free. They’re the assaultiest of assault rifles. You can order an upper receiver for an AR-15 with a 14-inch, 11.5-inch, 10.5-inch or even 7.5-inch barrel. This will make your black rifle shorter, MUCH louder, faster wearing, less reliable – and instantly felonious without a $200, recorded tax stamp from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, AKA “the fun police.”

As mentioned early on in this model builder’s manifesto, an X95 doesn’t need its pipe sawn short to be handy in a pinch. Even with its 16.5” barrel, the Tavor is just 26.4” long. Any shorter would require that same SBR signoff from BATF, because there’s a statutory minimum overall length to go with the statutory minimum barrel length.

Of course, people generally rob banks with pistols and a note. Even the shortest SBR is a whole lot harder to conceal than a garden variety SIG, and not a whole lot scarier. A muzzle in your face is a muzzle in your face, right?

Strike that. The Tavor is actually closer to twenty-EIGHT inches with its flash hider screwed in place. Now, like most modern rifles, my carbine has never had its flash hider removed. The thing is gummed on with thread sealant and horsed into place with a wrench, and here’s one of many places where our laws get weird.

To make Tavors ATF-compliant, IWI fits them with a U.S.-only, double-stuffed butt pad that adds an inch-plus to length of pull (i.e. distance from trigger to butt). There are few rifle rounds that recoil more softly than 5.56 NATO fired from a gas piston gun weighing damn near nine pounds, but this callipygous rump is their solution to legality.

To understand just how silly that is, realize that the butt pad swings open when you drive out one pin, and falls right off if you then back a single screw out of a cross pin. You can change it with a pocketknife much more easily than you can denude the threaded muzzle, but there you have it: the stock is officially permanent, and the birdcage fungible, unless and until I drill a hole through the flash hider, into the barrel, and seize the whole works tight by brazing in a steel pin. I won’t do it. I’m averse to vandalizing new products for superficial security concerns and besides, having more options remains superior to having fewer options.

Manticore Arms produces a curved butt pad that somewhat restores the designed LOP and retains legal length, thanks to its hooked-top profile. It runs close to 70 bucks.

Here’s what I found out, though. One of the parts available for the X95 is the IDF’s flat butt plate. It’s legal in Canada and, presumably, in the U.S.A. if you have an 18.5”-barrel Tavor. Thin plates are made from rubberized plastic and run $14.99 each from IWI (for people hawking enormously expensive bullpups, they’re surprisingly reasonable about spares). My plan is to chop a chunk of aluminum or even rock maple into a length-extending top hook, inset a couple of screw inserts, then run small bolts through the butt plate into my cheater block. I’ll cover the whole thing with black heat shrink to keep a clean look.

If I get around to it, this little project should accomplish three goals. One, it will shrink my rifle for all practical purposes, while technically maintaining legal length. Two, it will give me one more thing to dink around with during this interminable viral lockdown.

Three, and most importantly, it will make me giggle.

Out of deeply felt personal incorrigibility, I might or might not already have installed the feloniously flat plate for a few minutes, just to experience what federal crime feels like. Probably not, though, and don’t tell anyone.

What else might I fiddle with? Well, the $350 Super Sabra trigger pack from Geissele seems as redundant as it is expensive – the X95 Tavor carries a vastly upgraded mechanism, relative to the crushing pull required for its predecessor, the Tavor SAR. I tried that trigger in a gun shop, and it was like trying to prize open a snapping turtle’s beak. Although still more a combat bang switch than a target trigger, X95s measure at around half the weight of a SAR.

Still may pop for Geissele’s “Lightning Bow” trigger, though, just to dial out most of the novella-length takeup.

IWI offers the option of switching out their swashbuckling “cutlass grip” for the pistol grip preferred by Israeli special operators, as well as grip panels that are slotted instead of pebbled to offer security when your palms are sweaty (for instance, if you happened to find yourself operating in a desert near the Mediterranean coastline). I’m not in any great hurry to do this for the same reason I haven’t ordered MagPul’s MBUS flip-up sights: I need to shoot it as-built before I fix what is likely not broken. If I needed it to feel and run just like an AR-15, I could have saved close to four figures by buying an AR in the first place.

Our buddies at Manticore Arms make a charging handle that alertly parks itself out of the way every time the bolt slams home. I’m attracted to it for the same reason people peel the plastic chrome off new cars – it just looks cleaner.

Manticore also makes a nice ambidextrous safety which, like gas sealing, frankly should have come stock from the factory.

The initial excuse for my carbine was quickly freighted with the additional burden of entertaining my adolescent world-building fantasies (and I should really get back to making furniture, which I’m frankly better at than fettling guns). Believe it or not, I aim to keep the overall package reasonably sleek, respecting the Wiley Clapp ethic of “everything you need, and nothing that you don’t.”

But then “need” can sure become a subjective and temporary judgment. Perfection ever flees at her lover’s course approach.

So on it goes, just like with Legos and dirt bikes and shop tools and jeeps. There’s always one more thing to tinker at and if there isn’t, we’ll find one. Ask any man who never outgrew tuning hot rods, creating worlds around Lionel trains, or organizing a warehouse wall lined with color-matched rollaways in a cellar shop two floors beneath the Lego Museum. The male monkey remains an inveterate fiddler. Against all practical sense, men will not be stopped from racing chain saws, stocking bug-out rigs, and re-programming our smart watches to open the garage door.

We control our recreational world – the part of life that matters, where imagination capers carelessly over responsibility’s grindstoned snout – by commissioning, refining, tearing apart, and rebuilding systems in the evanescent image of our dreams.

G-d help me if I ever buy a boat.


A great story, Jake, and thanks very much for sharing it with us.  When you get to the range with your new Tavor, we want to hear how it shoots!


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.357 Ruger Blackhawk Accuracy Loads

A favorite load that seems to work well in any .357 Magnum revolver, including my stainless steel Ruger Blackhawk, is 15.7 grains of Winchester’s 296 propellant and the Hornady 158-grain jacketed hollow point bullet. I use standard rather than magnum primers. This was a 25-yard target.

The .357 Ruger Blackhawk

Ruger’s Blackhawk is an iconic firearm, one that’s been in production since the 1950s in one form or another. I bought my first one in a department store in Texas for under a hundred bucks back in the mid-1970s, and I’ve bought and sold several since.  I wish I had not sold any of the Blackhawks.

I’ve owned a few .357 Magnums over the years…Rugers, a couple of Model 27 Smiths, a Model 28 Smith (remember that one?), a Model 19 Smith, and a Model 65 Smith.  I’ve owned a couple of Colt Pythons, too.   The Pythons were nice, but not nice enough to command the premium prices they pulled in the 1970s, and certainly not nice enough to pull the exorbitant amounts they sell for today.  The Smiths were accurate, but they didn’t hold up under constant use with magnum loads.  I had a new Model 27 that I wore out in a couple of seasons in the metallic silhouette game; it suffered from extreme gas cutting under the top strap and a cylinder that sashayed around like an exotic dancer in a room full of big tippers.  The Ruger Blackhawks seem to last forever.

Every Ruger firearm manufactured in 1976 carries the 200th year bicentennial stamp, just like the one on my 200th year Blackhawk.   On my gun, the liberty scrollmark is on top of the barrel.

I’m down to one .357 Magnum now and it’s a 200th year stainless steel Blackhawk with a 6 1/2-inch barrel.  It’s one of my favorite revolvers and it’s not for sale (it never will be; I learned my lesson about letting good guns get away).  I have a few favorite .357 Magnum loads I’ve used over the last 50 years.  I thought it might be a good idea to document how they did in the Blackhawk, try a few more to see how they do, and share it all with you here on the ExNotes blog.  I guess this is the appropriate place for the disclaimer:  These are loads that work well in my Blackhawk.   You should never just take these loads (or any others from the Internet) and simply run with them.  Always consult a reputable reloading manual (I like the Hornady and Lyman manuals best).  Always start with lower charges and work your way up, looking for any signs of excess pressure, and go no higher if you see signs of excess pressure.  Okay, so that’s out of the way.  Let’s get to the good stuff.

Last week’s .357 Magnum testing at the West End Gun Club.

.357 Magnum Accuracy Loads

I’ve played with a lot of different .357 Magnum loads over the years.   I have a few favorite .357 Mag loads that have been superbly accurate in any of the .357 sixguns I’ve owned.  That’s a bit unusual because frequently a load that is accurate in one gun won’t be accurate in another, but that rule doesn’t seem to apply here.  The loads I like have worked well for me in any .357 I’ve ever shot.  I verified these loads in my Blackhawk with this latest round of testing, and like I said above, I explored a few more loads.

A few of the loads tested for this blog. From left to right, the first five are .357 Magnum cartridges and the last three are .38 Special cartridges (you can fire .38 Special rounds in a .357 Magnum handgun). The bullets (from left to right) are the 110-grain Hornady jacketed hollow point, the 158-grain Hornady jacketed hollow point, the 158-grain Hornady jacketed flat point, the Xtreme 158-grain plated flatpoint, a cast 158-grain flatpoint, a cast 158-grain flatpoint in a .38 Special case, a powder-coated 158-grain semi-wadcutter in a .38 Special case, and the Missouri 148-grain double-ended wadcutter in a .38 Special case.

So, with the above as background info, let’s get into the loads.  I’ll start with one of the standard “go to” .357 Magnum loads.  That’s the 158-grain cast semi-wadcutter bullet (the Keith-style) over 7.0 grains of Unique.  This is not the hottest .357 load (it’s a mild-recoiling .357 Magnum load), but it’s hot enough, it’s very accurate, and it’s relatively flat shooting.  I have a guy who casts 158-grain flatpoint bullets for me and I like those with 7.0 grains of Unique even better than the semi-wadcutter bullets.  The load is very consistent, and with the same zero and six o’clock hold I use at 50 feet (seen in the target below), I pretty much hit right on target at 25 yards, 50 yards, and yep, even at 100 yards.  I was hitting a steel gonger last week at 100 yards consistently with this load.  My shooting buddies were impressed, and after all, that’s what a lot of this is all about.   This is a good load.

A 50-ft target with the .357 Blackhawk using 158-grain cast flatpoints with 7.0 grains of Unique. Like they say, this is close enough for government work.

For hotter .357 Magnum loads, any of the Hornady 158-grain jacketed bullets (hollow points, flat points, and full metal jacket flat points) work superbly well with 15.7 grains of Winchester’s 296 propellant.  These loads have a distinctive bark, high velocities, snappy recoil, and they are superbly accurate.

15.7 grains of WW 296 and the 158-grain Hornady jacketed flat point resulted in the best group fired in this test series. Two shots went through the hole in the lower right.

Another long time favorite load is a bit unusual but it’s accurate as hell.  That’s the 110-grain Hornady jacketed hollow point and a max Unique load (10.0  grains of Unique, as listed in a Hornady reloading manual from the 1970s).  I first tried this one 40 years ago when I had a Colt Python and I was impressed with its accuracy.  I tried it again in this test series and the results were similarly impressive.  It’s probably the fastest load I tested because of the max load and the light bullets.  My old Hornady manual indicates the 110 grain Hornady bullet with 10.0 grains of Unique exits the muzzle at 1450 feet per second.  That’s fast.

If light bullets and high velocity float your boat, try this one (but work your way up to it): 10.0 grains of Unique with Hornady’s 110-grain jacketed hollow point.

Plated Bullets:  Are They Any Good?

Surprisingly, the 158-grain plated flatpoint bullets I tested didn’t do well with any charge of Unique, and in the past, they have performed very poorly with 296 (the bullets frequently shed their plating in the bore).  These plated bullets are offered by Berry and Xtreme.  These are not jacketed bullets; the copper plating is chemically applied and the coating is very thin.  I did get one decent showing with a lower-end charge of IMR 4227 propellant, but given the choice, I’d go for a plain cast bullet rather than plated bullets.   You may feel differently.  Please leave a comment here on the blog if your experience is different than mine.

Powder Coating and Paint Fumes

I tried powder-coated bullets last week, too, to see how they would perform.  Powder coating is a concept that’s been around for a few years as an alternative to lubing cast bullets.   I found that accuracy was more or less on par with lubed bullets, but not really any better.  The powder-coated bullets look cool (the cartridges kind of look like lipstick).  When I fired several powder-coated bullets fairly quickly, I could smell the paint.   Some folks swear by these bullets and love them for IDPA and similar competitive pistol events.  For me, performance was the same as conventional cast bullets.  Your mileage may vary.  Leave us a comment if you feel differently.

Powder-coated 158-grain semi-wadcutter bullets. I found their accuracy to be comparable to conventional cast and lubed bullets.

A Metallic Silhouette Load

When I shot metallic silhouette competition I used a 200-grain cast roundnose bullet in my .357 Magnum Model 27 Smith and Wesson.  That bullet worked extremely well, and because of its heavy-for-caliber nature and high length/diameter ratio, it carried a lot of energy downrange.  It was superbly accurate with 12.4 grains of 296.  But finding those bullets is next-to-impossible today.  It used to be a standard .38 Special bullet for police duty, but very few (if any) departments carry .38s today, and nobody seems to stock the 200-grain bullets.  Maybe I need to get back into casting.  I sure loved that 200-grain bullet in the .357 Magnum.  They actually made the .357 Magnum work better on the 200-meter rams than a 240-grain .44 Magnum.  The .44 Magnum wouldn’t consistently take down the rams; the 200-grain .357 Magnum did so every time.

.38 Special Loads

One of the great things about a .357 Magnum handgun is you can also shoot .38 Special loads in it.  I guess that’s a good thing, as the .38 Special cartridges have lighter recoil.  I tried three .38 Special loads with three different bullets.  The accuracy load in .38 Special is a 148-grain wadcutter bullet seated flush with the cartridge mouth over 2.7 grains of Bullseye propellant.  That load is super accurate in my Model 52 Smith and Wesson target pistol, and it did okay in the Ruger, too.  I’ve always believed that a .38 Special cartridge would never be quite as accurate in a .357 Magnum handgun because the bullet has to make a longer jump to reach the rifling, and my testing last week did nothing to change my mind on that count.   The .38 Special does okay in a .357 Magnum handgun, but I believe the best accuracy resides in a .357 case.

.357 and .38 Accuracy Testing Results

Here’s a chart summarizing my accuracy results:

Ruger Blackhawk accuracy testing results. All testing was with a two-hand hold at 50 feet. All groups are five shots.  All loads (except the plated bullet loads) were crimped.  All cast bullets were sized to 0.358.  Note 1:  Two shots went off paper.  Notes 2 and 3:  One shot went off paper.

There you have it.  If you have a load that works well, please leave a comment.  We’d love to hear from you.


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Reloading .45 ACP for 1917-style revolvers

The Model 625 with a box of my reloaded ammunition. The ammo in this photo had Xtreme 230-grain roundnose bullets. I found the Missouri cast roundnose bullets to be more accurate in my revolver.

Good buddy Rick C., one of the world’s great philosophers, once told me that every time he reloads he learns something new. I think he was right.  This story focuses on reloading .45 ACP ammo for the Model 625 Smith and Wesson revolver, and what I learned during a recent reloading session.

The Model 625 is a beautiful revolver.  It’s a direct descendant of the Model 1917 that Smith made for the US Army in World War I.  The only thing I sometimes find annoying about the 625 is that sometimes reloaded 45 ACP that chambers easily in a 1911 auto won’t chamber in the revolver.  This blog focuses on that issue.

The 625 and a box of ammo. This is a sweet-shooting and accurate handgun.
A typical 6-shot, 50-ft Model 625 group with my favorite load. That ain’t bad from a 4-inch revolver.

There are two kinds of ammo for these revolvers.  The first is standard .45 ACP, firing the same cartridge as the 1911.  The other is .45 AutoRim.  Firing .45 ACP ammo in a revolver like the Smith and Wesson 625 requires the use of either star or moon clips (the star clips hold six rounds; each moon clip holds three rounds).  Individual cartridges clip into these.  The clips provide proper headspace by holding the cartridges in place in the cylinder, and they allow the extractor to push the rounds out of the cylinder.   They also work as speed clips because you can insert six rounds into the cylinder simultaneously.   Theoretically, you could fire .45 ACP ammo in a Smith and Wesson revolver without the clips, but then you would need a probe to knock each case out of the cylinder.  The .45 AutoRim cartridge is very similar to the .45 ACP round, but it has a rim.  That eliminates the need for the clips.

.45 ACP ammo in 6-round star clips. The clips allow chambering .45 ACP ammunition in 1917-type revolvers. They are necessary because the .45 ACP cartridges don’t have a protruding rim to allow extraction.

Over the years, I’ve found that .45 AutoRim always chambers easily in a .45 ACP revolver.   With .45 ACP reloads, however, that’s not always the case.  That’s not good, as it sometimes prevents closing the cylinder.  Even if you can close the cylinder with difficult-to-chamber .45 ACP reloads, the loaded cylinder will often drag on the frame, making cocking or double action fire difficult.

I recently loaded a batch of .45 ACP ammo that I intended to fire in my Model 625, and as is my normal practice when loading for the 1911, I put just enough of a flare on the empty cases to allow the bullet base to start into the case.  After priming the cases, charging with propellant, and seating the bullets, I adjusted the seating die such that the brass just kissed the crimping ring in the seating die.   At this point, I thought it would be a good idea to check the first 10 rounds in the 625 to see if they chambered fully, and you can probably guess where this story is going.  A couple of rounds only went about two-thirds of the way into the chamber. I put a little more crimp on the cartridge; of the two that would not chamber, now one would and the other wouldn’t.

In examining the loaded rounds, I could see where the case had expanded circumferentially slightly after the bullet had been seated (it had a slight bulge at the base of the bullet.  I wondered if perhaps the Missouri 230-grain roundnose bullets I was loading were just too big, so I measured them. The box told me the bullets had been sized to 0.452 inches, and that’s exactly where they were. Then I measured the case outside diameter for the loaded rounds just below the case mouth. They measured 0.475 to 0.476 inch.  Then I went online to see what that dimension should be.  Here’s what I found:

The drawing above is misleadingly dimensioned. The dimension we’re interested in is the 0.473 case outside diameter at the case mouth (it looks like an inside diameter on the drawing, but it’s the outside diameter.   My reloaded ammo was 0.002 to 0.003 inch above this. I played around with the crimp a bit, but I couldn’t get that number to come down via crimping with my RCBS bullet seating die.

Then I had an idea. I removed the decapping pin and threaded shaft from the resizing die, and adjusted it to just kiss the loaded round a little to square up the bullet in the case and decrease the diameter at the case mouth a bit. I adjusted the depth of the seating die in the press such that I obtained a 0.473 outside case diameter result at the case mouth.  The first case chambered.   I then repeated the partial resize on 10 cartridges; all but one sucked right into the chamber with no circumferential play. I still had that one, though, so I played with the resizing die adjustment again until the dimension was right at 0.472, and that did the trick.  It removed the flare completely, and every subsequent cartridge I loaded using this technique chambered perfectly. Basically, I was using the resizing die as a crimping tool.

It bothered me that I had to go .001 below the 0.473 inch spec to get the ammo to chamber 100% of the time in my revolver, and I was a little worried about what this might be doing to the bullet diameter. I wondered what factory ammo measures, and then I realized I had some. So I pulled it out of the ammo locker and measured it. The factory ammo measured 0.470 inch at that dimension (0.003 under the 0.473 specification), which explains why factory .45 ACP ammo always chambers so easily in this revolver.  I also checked the drawing for the .45 AutoRim cartridge. It shows the case outside diameter at the business end to be 0.472, which is coincidentally exactly what I found to work perfectly for my reloaded .45 ACP ammo in the revolver.

I was a little bit worried that in running the cartridges part way into the resizing die I might be swaging the bullets to something below .451 inch (the minimum bullet diameter for this cartridge).  To check on this, I measured the case wall thickness. On my Winchester .45 ACP brass (which has a wall thickness perceptibly greater than other brass I sometimes use) the wall thickness is exactly 0.010. Since my ammo measured 0.472 at the mouth after my post-load resizing/crimping operation, that should leave the bullet at exactly 0.452 inch (or 0.472 – 2*0.010).  That’s exactly where it should be.  The cases hold that wall thickness for some distance into the case, too. I think what the operation is doing is aligning and straightening the bullet in the case.

I’m not using any lube for my secondary resizing operation. I have carbide dies, and they do not require it.

The proof on all of this was how the rounds grouped, and folks, they grouped well.  It was a little windy when I fired these groups at the West End Gun Club, but the gun and the ammo did what they are supposed to do.

Four groups of 6 shots each with the Model 625. 5.6 grains of Unique with a 230 cast roundnose bullet has always performed well for me in both revolvers and 1911 semi-automatics.

I like this modified approach (resize/decap, clean, prime, bellmouth, charge, seat, remove the FLRS decapper, and then crimp the ammo to 0.472 with the resizing die).  It works well, it produces an accurate load, and every round chambers easily in the Model 625.

My shooting buddies Rick and Robby tell me that the Lee factory crimp die does the same thing as what I’ve described above.  I ordered one for the .45 ACP and I’ll reload ammo using it, but that’s a topic for a subsequent blog.


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