Guns – Page 24 – The ExhaustNotes Blog

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.

More gun stuff is right here!

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.

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!

Read more gun stuff on the ExhaustNotes Tales of the Gun page!

.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.

Like what you read above? More Tales of the Gun stories are here.

Another 1917 Revolver Record!

You may recall that I posted a blog last year about a handgun I bought that is over over a century old. It’s a pristine Model 1917 Colt, a U.S. Army handgun issued in World War I. Mine was a real find…it appears to be unfired, it has the original blue (not Parkerized) finish, and it is just awesome.

My Colt 1917, chambered in .45 ACP. Read our earlier blog; this is a great story.

As you know from reading that blog, the Army had two versions of the Model 1917, one manufactured by Colt and the other manufactured by Smith and Wesson. One of the Smith and Wessons (in comparable condition to my Colt 1917) closed on a Gunbroker.com auction yesterday for the astonishing price of $2,525.

The Smith and Wesson Model 1917 that closed on Gunbroker.com yesterday for $2,525. When the Army purchased these for World War I, they cost about 1/100 of that amount.

I spotted the Smith 1917 when it first appeared on Gunbroker and I thought it would be nice to own both an original Colt and a Smith, but the price shot up to over $1,000 very quickly (many days before the auction closed). I knew I wasn’t a player at those prices. And then it kept going up, and up, and up, all the way to $2,525. Wow! I’m feeling even better about my Colt, and I didn’t think that was possible.

The Henry Single Shot: A Tack-Driving Buffalo Gun!

It’s time to get out and do stuff. Yeah, this CV19 thing is a disaster, but it looks like what the wizards recommended is starting to produce results, and that gave me an excuse to get to the range again. Not that anyone ever needed an excuse to get to the range, but I felt like it was time, and that beautiful Henry Single Shot I’ve been writing about (but had not yet fired) was calling my name.

Exhibition-grade walnut, blue steel, polished brass, and a box of .45 70 ammo. Life is good!

I had my Nikon with me, too, so I was finally able to get some good D810 photos of this beauty from Henry’s Rice Lake, Wisconsin manufacturing operation.

I wanted a couple of photos showing the entire rifle, and then I wanted to get a couple more showing the highly-figured walnut stock. The folks at Henry sure did a great job.

Sweet, huh? The polished brass buttplate works, too. This is a stunning bit of American firearm artistry. Like Mr. Imperato says, made in America, or not made at all.

What’s nice is the stock is highly-figured on both sides. It’s hard to find wood like this on a production rifle these days. Always has been. I believe it’s getting tougher, too.

The .45 70 cartridge is a big one, and I’ve written about it in earlier blogs. There’s a list of links to our earlier blogs on the Henry single shot at the end of today’s post, along with a few other cool links. Take a stroll through them to get a feel for how I came to acquire this magnificent rifle (after you’re read this blog and shared it on all your social media platforms, of course).

If you have one of these and someone says “bring enough gun,” you’ll have all the bases covered with the Henry Single Shot.

It was fun shooting the Henry, both literally (more on that in a second), and figuratively (with the Nikon). The brass receiver on these guns photographs well, I think.

The rear sight is a standard folding leaf. You can flip it to the other side so that you don’t have the white diamond, and you can invert it to get a square notch instead of the U-notch. I’ve left mine as it was delivered from the factory.

On to the good stuff, and that’s an answer to the most basic question for any firearm: How does it shoot? In a word or two, superbly well. I had a big plan to test all kinds of different loads, but I don’t want to bore you with the details of what didn’t work well and get right to what did.

First, a word on my marksmanship. It had been about 9 weeks since I’d been to the range, and the ability required to shoot a rifle well is not something you just pull out of drawer and pick up where you left off. Nope, rifle marksmanship is an art, and I needed to put a few rounds downrange before the Henry started performing. Well, actually, that’s not quite accurate: I had to send a few rounds downrange before I started performing. There’s a skill set involved in shooting a rifle well. You can read our treatise on rifle marksmanship later (I’ll include a link for that at the end of this article, too).

I started with four targets this morning at 50 yards and the results were not what I wanted, but I knew it was me and not the rifle. So I put another four targets out, and I started to settle down. It was a beautiful morning out at the West End Gun Club. Bright skies, mild temperatures, no wind, and I had the range to myself. It wasn’t too long before I was in the groove. The first target (the top left) was a bit shaky (good enough for deer or hog, and especially good enough for buffalo), but not what I knew I should be able to do with this rifle. The second target (top right) was a lot better, as I was kind of figuring out how to get the right sight picture. Shooting with iron sights is much more challenging than simply laying a scope’s crosshairs on the bullseye. Iron sights demand skill and practice. With 9 weeks away from the firing line, I was coming up short on both, but I was getting my groove back. I could feel it. The third target (bottom left) was another good deal, and then the fourth target sealed the deal. That one was a 0.740-inch group, with all the holes touching. With open sights on a lightweight .45 70 at 50 yards, I’ll take three-quarter-inch groups all day long.

50 yards, with a 6:00 hold on each target. Top left, top right, bottom left, and bottom right. Not bad, if I do say so myself.

Here’s another photo of my last target of the day, showing that beautiful 0.740-inch group. Bring on the buffalo. I’m ready. So is my Henry.

I think I’ll leave the Henry’s adjustable rear sight right where it is.

The secret sauce? It goes like this: A 300-grain Hornady jacketed hollow point bullet crimped in the cannelure, 16.2 grains of Trail Boss powder, a CCI 200 primer, and Federal brass. I don’t think the brass makes much of a difference when shooting .45 70, as long as the brass is trimmed to a uniform length. I used Federal brass because it’s what I had, and I’ve had it a long time. My .45 70 brass is over 40 years old. It’s been loaded a lot of times, but when you load at Springfield levels, brass lasts a long time.

So what’s it like to shoot the Henry .45 70 Single Shot? It’s fun. The Henry is more of carbine than a full-sized rifle, although the length of pull is the same as my other rifles and the barrel is a full 22 inches. It’s that single shot design that allows the overall package to be shorter. It’s a compact, hard-hitting package with recoil that is one thin red hair on the good side of tolerable. The rifle’s brass buttplate adds substantially to the rifle’s overall rich appearance, but let me tell you, you feel it when the hammer drops. I was glad the 300-grain bullets worked well; the 405-grain loads I had were just a hair over a tolerable recoil level for me. My shooting was all in shirt sleeves shooting off the bench, though. With a winter jacket or on a hunt, making friends with 405-grain bullets would be a lot easier.

It’s stunning just how elegant the Henry .45 70 Single Shot is, and what’s equally stunning is the amount of “cool” you get for the price. The MSRP on this rifle is $628, and Henry tells you on their website that you should expect a discount from that price. To me, the benchmark single shot rifle is Ruger’s No. 1, and that rifle is something like $1500 these days. I believe the Henry’s fit and finish are actually superior to what you get on a Ruger No. 1. The walnut on my Henry is exceptional. I think Henry is undercharging for these rifles. They’re that good.

So where am I on all of this? The Henry likes 300-grain bullets better than the heavier 405-grain stuff, and that’s where I’ll focus future load development. Several suppliers offer 300-grain .458 bullets, and there are other powders to try. One more thing I want to make sure you know: I love this rifle. Life is good. I’m having a lot of fun with my Henry.

Check out our earlier Henry Single Shot stories here:

Henry’s Home
Developing a Henry .45 70 Load: Part 2
Developing A Henry .45 70 Load: Part 1
The Henry Is In California
Henry Rifles: Made in America Or Not Made At All

Want more gun stuff? Hey, just click here!

Our rifle marksmanship blog is here!

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A 1911 Pellet Gun

Same dimensions, same heft, and it says Colt on the slide. How cool is that?

The Colt .177 1911 Pellet Pistol

That 1911 you see above is the same size and the same weight as a real deal .45 ACP 1911, but this one is a CO2 pistol that fires .177-caliber pellets. I saw it in a Big 5 sporting goods store a good 20 years ago, and for reasons I can’t easily explain, I bought it. It was an impulse buy. I thought it was a cool idea and I figured if I was ever stuck in the house and couldn’t go out, I could entertain myself by shooting my pellet pistol. Little did I know the CV19 debacle would turn that eventuality into reality (I mean, I’ve been under house arrest for over a month…I have everything but the ankle monitor). I paid $150 for my .177 1911, I put it on the shelf, and I forgot about it for the next two decades.

A cool case, too, and it also sports the Colt logo. How could I go wrong?

As you know from following our earlier pellet pistol blogs, I recently set up an indoor pellet pistol range in my garage in an effort to keep myself entertained (I don’t live on a big ranch in New Mexico and I don’t do concrete). I previously wrote about two Crosman pellet pistols that wouldn’t hold pressure and my old Daisy 717 pellet pistol that worked like a champ. A the end of the most-recent Daisy blog I mentioned that I had the 1911 pellet gun and I said I would break it out if I could find it.

Pellet Pistol Packaging Problems

Well, that’s what I did. I found the gun pretty easily…it was in the bright blue case you see above. But when I opened the case, things did not look good.

The road to Hell is paved with good intentions. In this case, those good intentions were a foam bed that attacked the gun chemically as the foam decomposed.

Hmmm, the foam padding inside the case that was supposed to protect the gun was doing just the opposite. Instead of protecting the gun, the foam was decomposing and appeared that it might be damaging the 1911. Ah, maybe not, I thought. Given a spritz of that powerful spray that cures all evil (that would be WD 40, not YooHoo, Fred), the foam that was sticking to the 1911 would probably fall right off. Or so I hoped. Before you feel compelled to weigh in on this, let me say at this point I realize this is all my fault. I was remiss in letting the gun sit in that case for 20 years without ever pulling it out, checking it, and keeping it wiped down. Maybe. It could be that if I wiped it down the oil I used would have accelerated the foam’s decomposition. Who knows?

Messy. Whoever specified this foam did a lousy job. It was rotting away and sticking to the gun.

The appropriate engineering response to this condition is: Yeccchh!

The boys at Colt were thoughtful enough to include a tin of pellets. The foam had cruddily bonded to it, too.

Finish Degradation

So I was hoping all this rotting, rotten foam would wipe right off and the gun underneath would be fine. Well, like the old saying goes, you can hope in one hand and poop in the other. You know which one is going to fill up first. A few shots of WD 40, a good scrub with an oily rag, and the verdict was in: Things were not looking good.

That’s not dust. It’s pitting in the finish where the foam had attacked it.

I even tried lightly scuffing the gun with steel wool (that works on light rust on blued steel), but nothing helped. The 1911 has what I’m guessing is a powder-coated finish, and that damned decomposing foam actually was eating into the finish. It was like rust, but it was a different chemical reaction. It actually etched its way into the powder coating.

Another shot of the surface finish damage. You live and you learn. Sometimes, anyway. Interestingly, the Colt pellet 1911 rear sight has an Allen screw that can be loosened to slide the sight left or right to adjust zero.

So I learned a lesson again I learned a long time ago: You can’t just put something away in a box and forget about it. I should have taken that gun out of its case every year and wiped it down. Eh, we live and we learn.

.177 1911 Operation

I cleaned up the 1911’s exterior as best I could, and then I had to figure out how to operate it. I had the owner’s manual, but what would be the fun of simply reading it? Nope, I had to play with my fuzzy friend and figure it out for myself. The 1911 had two little cylinders for holding the pellets and the owner’s manual (what little I read) said it could be fired either single or double action. Hmmm, that’s cool, I thought.

I looked at the gun and it had a lot of the same features as a regular 1911 (i.e., a .45 ACP 1911). You know, the grip safety, the mag release, and the slide release. I tried the grip safety (unlike the rest of this 1911, it’s plastic). It was hinged at the top just like a real 1911. Cool, I gotta check this out, I thought, so I pulled the hammer back, pointed the gun in a safe direction without depressing the grip safety, and pulled the trigger. The hammer fell anyway. Okay, so the grip safety is purely cosmetic. The 1911 also has a thumb-actuated safety, but unlike the grip safety, it actually works (it prevented the hammer from falling when I pulled the trigger). The pellet 1911 has a mag release just like a real .45 auto, and what that does is press against the right grip to flex it away from the frame. That allows you to get a fingernail under the grip, and you can pop it off (more on that in a second). And finally, there’s a slide release just like a real 1911. I pressed it down and what do you know, the slide slid! Forward, that is…about three quarters of an inch (more on that in a moment, too).

The thumb safety really works, just like it would on a real 1911. The plastic grip safety is hinged like it would be on a real 1911, but it is cosmetic only.

Like I said, when you press the mag release, it pushes the right grip away from the gun’s frame. You can then pull it off and that exposes where the CO2 cylinder sits. There’s a lever under the grip. You can rotate that down and it releases upward pressure under the CO2 cylinder. Then you rotate a knurled brass wheel to lower it and a brass cup underneath the cylinder, and then the spent cylinder can be removed. To install a new cylinder (which you need to do a lot, as I’ll explain shortly), you just insert the new cylinder, rotate the brass wheel to take out all the clearance between it and the cylinder, and then rotate the 1911’s grip lever (underneath the grip) upward. That pushes the CO2 into the probe that penetrates the cylinder cap and seals the cap against the probe. It’s all very clever.

A CO2 cartridge in the 1911’s grip cavity. That little brass wheel beneath it snugs up against the bottom of the CO2 cartridge.

Snap the right grip back on the gun, rotate the lever beneath the grip (shown here in the lowered position), and the gun is charged.

I did all the above, locked a new CO2 cartridge in place, and the gun was charged. And unlike the two Crosman handguns I tried a couple of weeks ago, it held pressure. Next up was loading one of the little revolving cylinders with .177 pellets.

Colt provided two pellet cylinders with the .177 1911. They are like the cylinders in a revolver. Those little protuberances on the face of the cylinder are supposed be engaged by a push from the gun’s internals to rotate the cylinder when it is fired double action or when the hammer is cocked.

Here’s another shot of the pellet cylinder with a few pellets inserted. It holds eight pellets, matching the magazine capacity of a real 1911.

After you’ve loaded the cylinder with pellets, the idea is that you drop it into the 1911 between the rear of the slide and the frame, and then pull the slide to the rear to close it. I did all that, and at that point, I was ready to start sending lead downrange.

A loaded cylinder, in place. Rack the slide rearward, and it should be ready to go.

Double Action It Ain’t

Downrange, in this case, was 20 feet away into my house-arrest, Rube Goldberg, cardboard-box-contrived bullet trap. Like my pistol, I was pumped because it felt good to have a hefty 1911 in my hand again. This 1911 pellet gun feels like a real one. It weighs exactly the same, it’s got relatively decent sights, and lining it up on the target felt like the real deal. Alvin York, step aside, ’cause this 1911 has the added advantage of double action.

Or so I thought. With the safety off and the gun pointed at the target, I tried firing double action. I felt the take up on the trigger and I felt it come all the way to the rear, but nothing happened. I tried again, looking at the hammer, but the hammer just sat there. Hmmm. Well, so much for double action.

I manually cocked the hammer, lined up the sights, held my breath, focused on the front sight, and then I heard a satisfying PFFFT! That delightful report was followed a nano-second later by the mighty .177 lead hourglass sharply smacking into my target. I could see the hole it made, and it was in the black! Yeah, baby!

Cool, I thought. Okay, double action was a bust, but that’s no big deal…I’ll just cock the hammer for each shot. So I pulled the hammer back, repeated the steps above, and it was PFFFT again, but this time without the thwack of the pellet hitting the target. I looked downrange and that prior hole on the target was looking mighty lonely. Hmmm again. Shooting blanks with a pellet gun. Whoever heard of such a thing?

I pressed the slide release, the slide slid forward, and I peeked in. The cylinder holding the pellets had not advanced. It was still sitting on the empty chamber I had fired previously. I pulled the hammer back to see if the hand that is supposed to advance the cylinder was moving up to do so, but it wasn’t. Rats. It looks to me like the parts that form the mechanism to rotate the cylinder are plastic. They may be broken, or age-degraded, or maybe stuck in place by agglomerated lube. Who knows? I need to take the thing apart to do a proper proctological exam, but that’s a project for another time. A quick Google search showed that others complained of similar problems with these guns, and one of the comments noted that there are YouTube videos showing how to work on the thing. Hey, Gresh has his Z1 and concrete, and I have my broken-down pellet guns! Life is good.

Sending Lead Downrange

For right now, I have a single shot 1911 pellet gun. I just have to open the breech, take the cylinder out, load a pellet, put the cylinder back in, close the slide, cock the hammer, and take a shot. Which I did several times, and here are the results.

Eh, not bad. Not as good as the Daisy 717, but not bad, either.

I had a good group going, but this time two went high.

Running out of steam. After 25 or 30 shots, the CO2 cartridge was circling the drain. The pellets didn’t have enough poop to pop through the paper.

Cost per Shot (Pellets vs .45 ACP Ammo)

This is a good news/bad news story. You’ve already read the bad news. A little bit more bad news: I only get about 30 shots (maybe less) out of a single C02 cartridge. That surprised me. So much so, that I looked it up on Google, and it seems like 30 shots is about what any CO2 pellet pistol gets. I think I’ll probably get comments from our readers on that and I’m looking forward to reading your inputs. Hey, if your mileage varies, leave a comment and tell me about it.

Just for giggles, and because I have the time while we’re all under house arrest, I thought it would be fun to compare the cost of shooting the pellet 1911 to the real thing.

I checked online (because it’s been a long time since I’ve bought C02 cartridges), and they seem to be going for around $8 for a box of 5. That works out to $1.60 per cartridge, and at 30 shots per cartridge, that’s a little more than 5 cents per shot for the CO2. The pellets seem to run around $7 for a tin of 150, and that’s a little less than 5 cents per pellet. So, every time I pull the trigger on my 1911 pellet gun, I’m sending a dime downrange.

For my .45 ACP reloads, there are costs in the bullets, the powder, and the primer. I don’t count the .45 brass, because I get mine for free and it seems to last forever. My favorite Missouri 230-grain cast roundnose bullets are $50 for a box of 500, so that’s a dime per shot in lead. Unique powder is about $30 a pound, there are 7,000 grains in pound, each cartridge takes 5.6 grains of Unique, and if you do the math, that works out to $0.024 per cartridge for propellant. CCI 300 large pistol primers are $30 per thousand, s0 that’s $0.03 per round for primers. The bottom line here is each time I pull the trigger on a real 1911, it costs me 15 cents.

What the above means is that I’m saving about a nickle per shot with the 1911 pellet gun. I guess need to shoot a whole bunch more…you know, so I can make up for the hit my 401K is taking as a result of the corona virus.

Wrapping It Up

So where am I on all this? The good news is I like my 1911 pellet gun. It’s impressive how much it feels like a real 1911 (without the sound and fury of a real 1911’s bark, of course). The pellet gun 1911’s accuracy isn’t stellar, but it isn’t terrible, either. It doesn’t index when I cock the thing and it doesn’t work double action, but that’s almost an advantage given our current house arrest situation (fixing those problems is just another project to put in the hopper). The bottom line? I like my .177 Colt pellet gun and it’s one I’ll be using more.

See our other Tales of the Gun stories here!

It’s a Daisy!

A pellet gun that shoots as well today as it did nearly 40 years ago…the Daisy 717!

The pellet pistol you see in the above photo is a Daisy 717, one I’ve owned for nearly 40 years. After learning that my Crosman C02 pellet pistols wouldn’t hold pressure a few days ago, I thought I’d try the Daisy, and whaddaya know, it worked like a champ (just like it did when I bought in the early 1980s). The Daisy is a single-stroke pneumatic air pistol. You pump it once with this long lever that swings out to the left, open the bolt (just like on a bolt-action rifle), put a single pellet in it, close the bolt, and then shoot. No CO2 cartridges required.

Daisy first introduced these guns in 1981, and at the time, they sold for something well below $60. I want to say I paid around $40 for mine at a department store called Gemco. In those halcyon days, I thought I’d give competitive air pistol shooting a shake and I didn’t want to spend a thousand bucks or so on a serious handgun. The range was short (I think it was 10 meters, or 33 feet), and wow, were those targets ever tiny. I only tried that game once…the club where the matches were held was a long drive for me, the competitors had uber-expensive guns, and I just wasn’t that into it. But I didn’t embarrass myself, and I did better than some of the folks out there with their big bucks pellet pistols. Then I put the Daisy away and more or less forgot about it for the last 40 years.

Well, sort of. A friend in the bomb factory (where I was working at the time) told me about another use for air guns, and on occasion, I would put the Daisy to work when the need arose. That story goes like this: No matter how militant a feminist your better half might be, when there’s a spider on the ceiling or in the bathtub she’s going to get all sguiggly and require manly intervention. That’s where yours truly and the mighty Daisy answer the call to arms.

Truth be told, there’s no way I went to get up close and personal with a big old hairy, funky spider. I was always just as scared as Sue was, but I couldn’t let her see that. I know, I used to be an Army officer, I’ve jumped out of airplanes, I’m pretty good with a 1911, and I rode a motorcycle across China. But I’ll admit it, and only to you: Spiders scare the hell out of me. But we’re men, you see. Real men. And when it’s time to step up, that’s what we gotta do.

This guy might be a little much for the Daisy. I photographed him on Glendora Ridge Road in 2003. Maybe a .458 Win Mag would be more appropriate.

The good news? The Daisy 717 makes it easy. All you need to do when you hear that dreaded directive (There’s a spider in the bathroom…get it!) is dig out the Daisy. Cock it without putting a pellet in the gun (that part is real important…make sure you don’t put a pellet in). Stalk your prey carefully and slowly approach the offending arachnid. Place the muzzle (the end the pellet comes out of) approximately two inches from the spider, taking care not to alarm it. Take a deep breath, let it halfway out, and then slowly squeeze the trigger (without jerking it) while maintaining proper sight alignment. When the pistol discharges, a high speed jet of compressed air will strike the spider, breaking it up into its major body parts, legs, and assorted arachnid appendages, which will then fall gently and harmlessly to the floor. It’s likely said appendages will continue to twitch for several minutes after your demonstration of manly marksmanship. More good news: At this point, your job is done (you’ve done what your significant other requested). You were asked to “get it” and you did. If you are of a mind to, you can tell her to clean it up, but I wouldn’t advise doing so (don’t ask how I know this).

All that aside, after nearly four decades of faithful spider stalking and, most recently, trying to amuse myself during our self-imposed shelter-in-place house arrest, I thought I would try my Daisy in my cobbled-up indoor, garage-based pistol range. I made a target stand out of a cardboard box and a phone book, and hey, the Daisy and I can still drive tacks!

Five shots at 20 feet with the Daisy. The 717 does nice work.

Pfffftttt!

Hmmmm….an indoor range with pellet guns during the shelter-in-place. What say you?

Sitting in my home office surfing the net, I’m sheltered in place which basically means staying home. It’s like detention in high school, or maybe house arrest, except if you sneak out you could die. I don’t know what it’s been now. Two weeks? Maybe more? Anyway, I was thinking about how much I missed getting to the range. I’m dry firing my SIG Scorpion a lot and assessing my performance by how stable the sight alignment is when the hammer drops, but it’s not the same thing as seeing the results on target. Then I saw two handguns I hadn’t fired in maybe 30 years. They’re the two you see above…Crosman CO2-powered replicas of a Smith and Wesson Combat Magnum (the Model 19) and the Colt Python. Hmmmm.

So I grabbed the Python and headed out to the garage. You load a CO2 cartridge in these things by popping the left handgrip off, inserting a fresh CO2 cartridge, and then tightening the screw at the bottom of the grip to tap the keg and form a seal. Except it didn’t. Form a seal, that is. Pfffttttt! That’s the sound of a CO2 cartridge emptying. That sound, and a bit of frost on the backstrap due to the rapidly expanding CO2 escaping around what used to be an effective seal.

No problem, I’ll just try the Combat Magnum. It’s good to have spares, you know? Except the results were the same. Pfffffttttt again!

Eternally optimistic, I went back to the Python and took it apart. Cheaply made guts, to be sure, but to my great surprise the internals are more complex than a real Python. Hmmmm. Man, there are a lot of seals inside that thing! I took it all apart and sprayed the hell out of everything with WD40, thinking the seals would be refreshed and, you know, seal. It took a lot longer putting it back together, and then it was another CO2 cartridge. And another frosty Pfffffttttt! Times that by two, and you’ll have a good idea of how I spent Saturday afternoon. Except after the last attempt, I guess I forgot how it all went together again and I reverted to a YouTube video on this specific subject. You can find everything on YouTube. God forbid I ever have a brain tumor, but if I did, I’m pretty sure somebody’s done a YouTube on how to surgically extract it yourself at home using readily-available kitchen utensils.

Sunday morning started with me watching the video again. With the help of a good Mariachi sound track (watch the video) and an artfully-edited YouTube video, I finally got the Crosman back together with no parts left over.

My Crosman .357 had two problems. The first was its Pfffftttt! problem; the other was the “elastomeric spring” that holds the barrel latch up. That part was sort of a rubber chingadera that had degraded and hardened. The spring aspect of its existence didn’t really work because the part no longer had any spring to it. Holding and examining it in my fingers, it fell apart like a cheap politician’s promise (sorry for the redundancy). I thought maybe I could order a new elastomeric spring (which really is an exotic term for a little piece of rubber), but when I went online I saw right away I would have problem. I found parts lists for my pellet pistol, but most of the parts were out of stock, and the few parts that were still in stock were way expensive. I only paid something like $37 when I bought the pellet gun maybe 35 years ago. There’s no way I’m going to pay half that for a little piece of rubber.

Like most exploded drawings, though, it was visually arresting. I was already in mental handcuffs studying it when I noticed the elastomeric spring circled in red. Whoever loaded that drawing evidently needed the same part.

The way the Crosman 357 loads is you depress a button in the top of the frame and it acts against the elastomeric spring you see in the drawing above. That lowers a lever to unlock a tab (the lever is the part immediately above the elastomeric spring in the drawing). That allows you to unlock and rotate the barrel down and the gun opens like an old British Webley. Then you can remove the cylinder and put the pellets in it.

I couldn’t fix the seal problem, but I felt like I wanted to fix something. So I cut up a wide rubber band, superglued the pieces together, and made my own elastomeric spring. It works well. But that’s not the main problem. That honor goes to the seals being (pardon the pun) shot. They are suffering (like me) from age-induced degradation. To make a long story longer, I went through six CO2 cartridges trying to find a fix. You can buy new seals, but they cost nearly as much as what I paid for the whole gun originally. And that’s before you put the larcenous shipping and handling charges on top of it all. Truth be told, I just don’t want to mess with the Crosman anymore. Even if I got those new seals, there’s no guarantee the thing is going to work.

The good news? I know a hell of a lot more about how a Crosman pellet revolver is supposed to work. More good news? The story I’m telling here was an interesting way to spend eight hours of my shelter in place time. The bad news? My two Crosman pellet guns are now nothing more than display pieces. I could probably find a way to make new seals, but I’m just not that committed to it.

I’ve got another CO2 pellet gun (a 1911) laying around somewhere that I’ve had about 10 years and never fired. I might dig it out later and screw around with it. I’ve also got an old Daisy pneumatic pellet pistol, and I think I’ll try to find it to see if it still works. As always, stay tuned.