A Garand Update: Speer and Hornady

The M1 Garand on the bench at the West End Gun Club.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about new bullets I had purchased for the Garand. They are Speer 168-grain Target Match bullets, and they’re designed to go head-to-head with the benchmark bullet in this arena, the Sierra 168-grain jacketed boat tail hollow point bullet. As you will recall, I talked to the Speer engineer and he recommended bumping the IMR 4064 propellant charge up from what I had tried previously and seating the bullets out a little further.

Speer 168-grain jacketed hollow point boat tail bullets.

I only had 20 Speer bullets left from the box of 100 I initially purchased and Phillips, my local dealer, didn’t have any more.   I also had a couple of boxes of 178-grain Hornady AMAX bullets in my stash and my Hornady reloading manual had a Garand-specific load for these, so I loaded some of them for testing in the Garand as well.   You can’t just use any .30 06 load for the Garand; the loads have to be specific for the Garand.  If you go outside of what’s recommended for these rifles, you can damage the rifle.

Reloaded .30 06 ammunition with Hornady’s 178 grain AMAX bullets. I was concerned about the plastic tips hitting the feed ramp, but I need not have been. These bullets performed well.

It was windy out at the West End Gun Club this past weekend, so I don’t know if my results were the result of the load, or the wind, my shooting abilities, or all of the above. Take my results as an indication of what might work, not the ultimate authoritative conclusion on either bullet’s inherent accuracy.  And as regards my propellant charges, work from your own manual.  You will want to develop your own loads, starting at the bottom of the range and working up.

My testing for this session was limited.  I had two loads for each bullet (both the Hornady and the Speer bullets), and all were with IMR 4064 propellant.  I did all of my testing from the bench at 100 yards.

For the 178-grain Hornady AMAX bullets, I used 45.0 and 46.4 grains of IMR 4064, and a cartridge overall length of 3.240 inches.   This load came right out of the Hornady reloading manual.  For the 168-grain Speer bullets bullets, I used 47.0 and 48.0 grains of IMR 4064, and a cartridge overall length of 3.295 inches (as recommended by Speer).   All loads were with Remington brass and CCI 200 primers. I trimmed the brass to 2.500 inches. This was the 6th firing of these cases in the Garand with these cases.

I reloaded and fired a total of 40 rounds for this test.  I reload for the Garand in multiples of eight cartridges (because that’s what the en bloc clip holds), and like I said above, I only had 20 of the Speer bullets left.  So bear with me (this is going to get a little complicated).   I had one clip of eight rounds with the 168-grain Speers at 47.0 grains of IMR 4064, and one clip of eight rounds with the 168-grain Speers at 48.0 grains of IMR 4064.   Then I did another clip of eight with the 178-grain Hornady bullets at 45.0 grains of IMR 4064, and a fourth clip of eight with the 178-grain Hornady bullets at 46.4 grains of IMR 4064.  That left four of the Speer 168-grain bullets, so I loaded those four with 47.0 grains of IMR 4064, and then I loaded another four rounds with the Hornady 178-grain bullets and 45.0 grains of IMR 4064.   Yep, you read that right.  That en bloc clip had two different loads in it.

I had a concern that the plastic tips on the Hornady 178-grain AMAX bullets might be damaged sliding up the Garand’s feed ramp, but that didn’t occur. At the seating depth Hornady recommended, the bullets are pointed into the chamber and the tips never touched the feed ramp.

None of the 40 cartridges exhibited any pressure signs. There were no flattened primers, no excessive muzzle blast, no case ruptures, no extraction issues, or anything of that nature. Everything fed and ejected normally.

I fired the mixed clip of Hornady and Speer bullets first, and surprisingly, it was my best group of the day (it was also the only group I fired where there was a lull in the wind that morning). The first four shots were with the Hornady bullets, and of these, only one was just outside the bullseye (it might have been the first round fired from the cold, oiled barrel). All the remaining seven rounds shot into a pretty tight group, with six of the seven in the 10 ring. The bottom line based on this one group to me was that either load (the 178-grain Hornady load at 45.0 grains of 4064, and the 168-grain Speer load at 47.0 grains of 4064) were awesome, and both shot to the same point of impact.

The next group up was the 168-grain Speers with 47.0 grains of IMR 4064. I couldn’t duplicate my prior results as shown in the above photo. Six shots were in the black, two were out, and of these two, one was down in the 6 ring. It could have been the wind, or it could have been me.  Most likely it was me (the wind wasn’t blowing down).

Then I fired the clip of eight with the Speer 168-grain bullets and 48.0 grains of IMR 4064.  Five shots were in the black and three were outside, with one low at 7:00 in the 6 ring again.

It was on to the Hornady 178-grain bullets, first at 45.0 grains of IMR 4064.  Five shots were in the black, one was in the 8 ring at 9:00, one was in the 7 ring at 10:00, and again, I had one shot go low in the 6 ring at 7:00. The group was biased to the left. That was probably the wind.

And finally, I shot the Hornady 178-grain bullets at 46.4 grains of IMR 4064.  6 were in the black, 1 was in the 8 ring at 9:00, and yet again, 1 was in the 6 ring at 7:00.  These were a little more tightly clustered favoring the left side of the bullseye, consistent with the wind pushing the shots to one side (the wind at the West End Gun Club always blows northeast to southwest, pushing the shots to the left).

The bottom line is that any of loads could be good, but that first clip of mixed bullets was (for a guy at my low talent level) phenomenal. The wind no doubt distorted my results (along with my lack of consistency shooting the Garand). I have 180 of the Hornady bullets left, and I’m going to load them at 45.0 grains of IMR 4064. I’ll buy more of the 168 gr Speer bullets because they did well, too, and I’ll load them at 47.0 grains.  I’m just not that good to say with certainty which load is best; the variability in group size you see here is probably more me than anything else.

The Speer bullets are the least expensive of the three brands I’ve tried in the Garand at $25/100. Next up are the Hornady AMAX bullets at $32/100. The Sierra 168-grain MatchKing bullets (not tested yesterday, as I had used all of them previously) are the most expensive at $37/100. If there’s a difference in performance between the bullets, I’m not good enough to see it. I have 180 of the Hornady bullets left, and I’m going to load them at 45.0 grains of IMR 4064 later today. I’ll buy more of the 168-grain Speer bullets because they did well, too, and I’ll load them with 47.0 grains of IMR 4064.

So which bullet works best in the Garand?  Any of these are better than I am, and for a guy like me, evaluating accuracy at 100 yards with iron sights is subjective at best (my old eyes ain’t what they used to be).   But I’m having fun, and I love shooting my Garand.

Read more on the Garand (and many more) rifles and handguns here.

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Movie Review: The 24 Hour War

Gresh’s review of Ford versus Ferrari had my attention, and SWMBO wanted to see the movie, so off to the theatre we went.  My take on it was pretty much identical to Joe’s:  Grand entertainment, lots of grimaces and Hollywood liberties with the facts, but overall, an entertaining if not entirely accurate flick.

Later that evening, we were channel surfing and we flopped over to Netflix, and what do you know, a documentary titled The 24 Hour War popped up.  I know Amazon, Facebook, and others use all kinds of spyware to figure out what to pitch to us next, but wow, this was amazing.  That very day, and a pop up for another movie about the great Ford versus Ferrari war and Le Mans.  Hey, in for a penny, in for a pound, so we watched The 24 Hour War.

Unlike Ford v. Ferrari, The 24 Hour War took no liberties with the truth, the facts, the timelines, or the vehicles themselves.  It was a damn fine bit of actual, factual reporting, and I enjoyed it more than the movie we had seen earlier that day.  If you get Netflix, it’s free, and if you own a microwave and a refrigerator, you won’t have to pay $15 for popcorn and a couple of Cokes (like Gresh did).

A few more good things about The 24 Hour War:  It went into much more detail about Henry Ford and Enzo Ferrari (I found that interesting), and portions of the show were narrated by A.J. Baime.  Mr. Baime does a series on interesting cars people still drive in The Wall Street Journal and I love his writing.   I’m just finishing up a book by Baime about our industrial mobilization prior to and during World War II, and it, too, focuses heavily on the Ford family.   The guy is a great writer, and I’ll have a review here on Baime’s book, The Arsenal of Democracy, in the near future.

One more thing regarding the cars themselves:  To me, it’s not really a contest and I don’t much care who won Le Mans.   Given the choice between owning a Ford GT or a Ferrari, to me the answer is obvious:   It’s Ferrari all day long.

But I digress.  Back to the review.  The bottom line?  Ford versus Ferrari was an entertaining movie, but the The 24 Hour War is an absolutely outstanding documentary.  I think you’ll enjoy it.

One hell of an ad…

A selfie of yours truly, as reflected in J’s visor, somewhere in the twisties below Lake Tahoe.

Good buddy J, with whom I’ve ridden a lot, is selling his old KLR. I had to laugh when I read his ad, and with his permission, I’m printing it here for you to enjoy as well (and if you ride a GS, my apologies in advance).   J and I have ridden big miles in Baja (those trips were on the CSC RX3 motorcycles), as well as northern Nevada and California in the Lake Tahoe area (we both rode our KLRs on that ride).  They were all awesome rides.

Okay, that’s enough of a stroll down memory lane.  Here’s the ad for J’s KLR:

2005 Kawasaki KLR 650 project for sale – $800 (DAYTON)

2005 KLR650 project for sale
$800
49,509 miles

Do you have big adventure-bike dreams but a very small adventure-bike budget? Have you got some basic mechanical skills, a strong desire to learn more, and a dry place to work over the winter? If so, this is perfect for you.

This is a Kawasaki KLR650. The OG adventure motorcycle.

Show up at any gathering of adventure riders on a well-traveled KLR and hold your head high. While a guy on a BMW GS has to put up with constant Starbucks jokes, when you ride a KLR you just climb on and go look for a good taco stand. In Baja.

I’ve done this. I rode this bike all the way to Cabo San Lucas and back. In winter. To a Horizons Unlimited meet in Mariposa. I rode it to Overland Expo in Flagstaff a couple of times and had a beer with Ted Simon. All of those were amazing trips. I want you to have trips like that.

The best thing about this bike is that you’ll know everything about it. Because you overhauled it yourself. Imagine sitting around the campfire, under a big desert sky, telling the story of how you brought this bike home, tore it down, put it back together, and rode it to somewhere awesome, far away. You need that experience in your life.

The bike has been sitting in my garage since June, 2016. I haven’t tried to start it since then. It ran well enough when I stopped riding it. I know the clutch was slipping under load. And the fork seals were leaking. I quit riding this because I got something newer that I liked better. I’m not aware of any major issues that aren’t easily fixed.

Somebody who really knows what they are doing could probably have this thing roadworthy in a few days. I don’t have the time nor the motivation to make that happen. So I’m offering it as a project, at a price much lower than I would ask if I didn’t just want it out of my way.

Clean title in hand.

First person who shows up with $800 in cash, and a truck or trailer to haul the bike and all the extra parts away, gets everything.

Farkles:
Progressive Suspension adjustable rear shock with remote adjuster
Doohickey done at Happy Trails headquarters in Idaho
Happy Trails soft panniers with waterproof liners
Happy Trails pannier racks
Happy Trails engine guard and highway pegs
Happy Trails engine guard bags
Happy Trails skid plate
Happy Trails rear master cylinder guard
Moose Racing handguards
Bike Master heated grips
Powerlet accessory power outlet on handlebars
RAM mount ball mount and double-socket mount
Sargent gel seat, needs to be recovered

Spare parts and extras:
New Shinko 705 front and rear tires, still in the shipping packaging
Slightly used Michelin T63 front and rear tires, lots of life left
New clutch kit, still sealed in the original packaging
New clutch cover gasket, still sealed in the original packaging
New clutch cable, in original packaging
New front and rear brake pads, still sealed in original packaging
Spare engine, needs to be rebuilt
Spare carburetor
Lowering links
Shortened sidestand
Clymer shop manual

You know, after reading that ad, I’m tempted to buy that KLR myself.  But I’m in the same boat as J:   I don’t have the time or the motivation to bring it back to life.  But wow, it’s one hell of a deal and the Kawasaki KLR was one hell of a motorcycle.   I had a lot of fun with my KLR, and I often wish I still had it.  But it went to a good home, and good buddy Daniel is putting it to good use.

The ride J and took with a bunch of other motojournalists in the northern Sierra Nevadas was grand.  The riding through that part of the world is about as good as it gets.

J on his KLR a few years ago.
Carla King’s photo of yours truly. My KLR went down the road a couple of years ago. Maybe I should have kept it.
Chasing J, Carla, and a a few others in the Sierra Nevada mountains.

Oh, hey, one more thing:  If you have an interest in J’s KLR, here’s the link to the ad.

Seattle’s Museum of Flight

Susie and I were up in Seattle earlier in the year for a wedding and while we were there, we visited the Museum of Flight.  It’s one of the world’s great museums, and the $25 admission fee was money well spent.  We were lucky on our visit: It was the 50th anniversary of the Apollo moon landing, and the museum had a special exhibit focused on that.  It was awesome.

Neil Armstrong’s actual Apollo 11 capsule. The actual capsule. It was like touching history.
One of the Saturn rocket engines used on the Apollo mission.
My photo of a photo: Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon. I came close to meeting him once at Nieuport 17, a restaurant in Tustin, California, but he wasn’t there the night we were.
An Omega Speedmaster watch worn on the moon.  One of these original moon watches sold for $1.6 million just a few years ago.  There’s an interesting story on this Omega watch (and on a competitor watch, the Bulova). My apologies for the flaky photo; this was the best I could in the dim lighting.

The Apollo special exhibit was only a fraction of what the Museum of Flight displayed.  The main hall had all kinds of aircraft.

A view of the Museum of Flight’s main hall. That’s an SR-71 at the center of the photo. It’s a spy aircraft developed in the 1960s that flew entire missions over Russia and China, all at supersonic speeds.
An early commercial passenger aircraft.
An F4 Phantom. I was an engineer on the F-16, the air combat fighter that replaced the F4.  When I was in the Army, we provided air defense for an airbase in Korea with an F4 wing, and watching these aircraft take off with their afterburners on was fun.
A World War II airplane on display in the Museum of Flight’s Personal Courage Wing. The Personal Courage Wing, a separate part of the Museum, has 28 aircraft from World War I and World War II.

We spent nearly a full day at the Museum of Flight, and we could have spent more time there.   We visited the Apollo display, the Main Hall, the Personal Courage Wing, and the Red Barn (the original Boeing airplane factory).   As were left the airport, we saw an enclosed pedestrian walkway over the road, and it led to an area with several aircraft parked on the other side of the road.   We could have spent another day there.  We’ll save that for our next visit to Seattle.

Seattle’s Museum of Flight is a 20-minute ride out of downtown Seattle, and it’s a great way to spend a day.

The Three Rivers Petroglyphs

It’s mid-November here in southern New Mexico, nights are cold but our mid-day temperatures are still in the 70’s. That will change soon. I needed a break from concrete so I texted Mike and asked him if he wanted to take a little ride before it got cold. Mike always wants to ride.

Mike lives in Carrizozo about 50 miles north from Tinfiny Ranch. 50 miles is not a lot of distance but the weather is much wilder up at his place. Located at the crossroads of Highways 380 and 54 right between a dip in the Sacramento Mountains the landform, there funnels a steady stream of wind across the strange little town. Even though it sits at a lower elevation than Tinfiny, Carrizozo is colder in winter. Hollywood has found the old buildings of Carrizozo picturesque and it seems like there’s always a crew shooting a funky scene whenever I go through.

“Can we get a couple coffees?” The lady working at the Three Rivers trinket shop says she will have to make some. Mike tells her that’s okay, we’ll wait. The coffee making process is interrupted by two black dogs coming in the front door. The dogs seem really glad to see us. They fall to the ground and beg to be petted. The smaller dog wants to kiss, needs to kiss, will die if he doesn’t get a kiss. That coffee pot is taking forever so I grab a cold drink. Mike is eating a bag of chips. When the coffee is finally ready and the dogs are thoroughly petted, we’ve killed an hour.

The road to the petroglyphs heads east towards the mountains, if you keep going it turns into dirt and ends at the beautiful Three Rivers campground. From that point Ruidoso is only a 20-mile hike: uphill all the way. You should go camp there.

The rocks here have some kind of iron oxide-like coating and the petroglyphs are kind of pecked into the rock. Dimpled could be used to describe it. The dimple knocks off a small chunk of the oxide revealing the stone beneath. There are thousands of them along a three-mile round trip path at Petroglyphs State Park. The images are still very clear with lots of contrast. You can mostly tell what the artist was representing with maybe 25% of the artwork being symbolic of something that made sense thousands of years ago.

These pictures from the past aren’t fragile cave paintings or fading lines scraped into soft sandstone. These suckers are exposed to the elements and some look like they were made last week. We don’t know a lot about the Mogollon People who made the petroglyphs but I can tell you they built their artwork to last. These stone images will go another 10 thousand years no problem.

It’s late afternoon by the time we get back to the trinket shop for more coffee. “There’s only enough for one cup and it’s gotten cold, I’ll have to make another pot.” The dogs can’t be bothered to lift their heads and acknowledge our existence. We are old news. The coffee brews its slow drip. A BMW rider sees our bikes out front and stops in to chat.

Conversation is easy.  The trinket lady joins in with strong opinions on which Medicare plan is best (Plan F). I snack on a bag of dry-aged peanuts and some hard candy. The BMW guy is staying at the Three Rivers campground. He trailers his motorcycle around the country stopping in different areas to ride. His wife got all the money and the 80-acre farm back in Wisconsin. We pay the trinket lady; she made 9 dollars from us today and it only took her 2 hours to do it.

It’s starting to cool down now. In a few weeks we will be getting started with winter here in Southern New Mexico. I don’t like riding at night so I say goodbye to the boys. We start our bikes and three motorcyclists go their separate ways: Mike to the north, me to the south and BMW guy to the east.

Joe’s .44 Magnum

I’m not the Joe in this story, nor is Joe Gresh.  Nope, this is something altogether different…a guest blog by our good buddy Art, and it touches on a topic near and dear to my heart, the .44 Magnum Smith and Wesson Model 29.  Let’s get right to it, and that would be Art’s blog on his friend, Joe, and their experiences with the mighty Model 29.

Joe Abbott was one of South London’s finest characters. Probably in his mid-fifties, this tough looking, gruff-talking individual of which at least one in three words was an expletive, was also a man of many diverse talents. He’d been in the fruit & vegetables and meat trade, blue movies, and had settled in the more lucrative scrap metal trade.

But what made Joe such so endearing was that he always came to the shooting club with a 6.5” barrel, lusciously-blued, S&W Model 29 tucked away in a suitable shoulder rig. This unloaded piece was also kept in fine company by a bullet belt with about 8 rounds.

Joe always graciously allowed people to handle his .44 Magnum. This experience was always accompanied by lurid stories about just how many engine blocks it could destroy and the unsavory whack the shooter would receive.

It was 1975, and I had not yet seen “Dirty Harry,” but the repeated references were made and after coming out of the cinema, I realized that I really needed one.

Getting a Firearms Certificate (FAC) in the UK is a drawn-out procedure and you must join a reputable shooting club. Once done, I obtained a ‘slot’ on my FAC for a 6”, Model 29-2 which I bought through “The Saddlery & Gunroom” in Biggin Hill, Kent – and which still exists today.

And so it came to be that on one fine October evening in 1981 I found myself on the “Stone Lodge” shooting range in Dartford, southeast of London – now long defunct due to the UK’s continuing anti-gun stance.

The dozen or so, pistol booths, divided by plywood walls had battered wooden counters which bore a few scattered marks of various NDs over the years.

With some trepidation, I partially loaded op the cylinder with 240-grain Federal JHPs, took my stance and gently bought the gun up one-handed as I had been taught for slow-fire. Joe Abbot’s biblical warnings returned to me when the next thing was a thunderous muzzle blast, a blinding flash that seemed to light up the skies and a mule’s kick to my right hand, which was still clutching my 44 in a near-vertical position.

“You OK, mate?” came a voice from the booth next to me. It seemed that the flimsy plywood had not been sufficient in dampening the 44’s roar.

When my fellow shooter peered into my booth, he found me gazing open mouthed at my new piece which I had placed on the counter, wondering what the hell I had just bought. That evening I only put five more rounds through it, the standard Goncalo Alves grips with its sharp checkering not giving any quarter.

The .44’s reputation preceded me, so every time I took it to any range, there was always a healthy line of people wanting to shoot it, and who offered their pieces in return to fire, which allowed for a good experience with a wide range of guns. One of the club’s members downloaded my brass into .44 Special loads, easing up the load on my gun and my wrist.

In 1997, the whole thing came to an end when the British government banned all handguns in private possession. Along with 40,000 law abiding sports men and women all over the UK, I was commanded to go to a local police station of their choice and hand in my 44 and Walther GSP .22 target pistol, never to be seen again.

As rumors persisted that the higher end guns would be stored for some years and then sold to lesser restrictive countries, I had written my full name and address inside the grips of both guns.

In 2015, I became a proud ‘Documented-American-In-Waiting’, my AZ residence allowing me to enjoy an unprecedented freedom that no other world country could dream of offering. I would continue to dream of owning another part of identical S&W history, despite the steep prices to which they had climbed over the years.

In the ever-increasing universe of polymer self-loaders, the appreciation of the traditional steel has begun a steady upwards trend. Revolvers with their near-clockwork mechanism are becoming increasingly in demand, especially from the younger shooters. Ex-police guns, predominantly the stainless autos, have found their way into the civilian market and are hungrily bought by discerning citizens who are swayed by historical interest and the very affordable prices.

One fine day, and at half the price of the blued ‘Dirty Harry’ model, a 6” stainless .44 Magnum Hunter Classic with unfluted cylinder followed me home from one of the Phoenix shows. The continued underlug, ventilated barrel rib, resembling the beautiful Colt Python, and Pachmayr grips sounded the bells of seduction. I was well and truly on the rocks.

Those 38 years must have dulled my initial reactions to Joe Abbott’s apocalyptic performance figures since I pointed my Model 29-2 downrange for the very first time. Perhaps it was the increased weight of my new piece that seemed to have tamed the ferocious recoil, or having fired a great many handguns of various calibers. Whatever, happy days are here again and I’m privileged to enjoy the 228-year-old rights and privileges that all Americans are born with. Long may it continue.

Art, I could not have said it better myself.  Well done, and thanks for your guest blog.  I enjoyed reading it and I’m sure our readers will, too.  We’re glad you’re here in America with us, and it’s always good to hear from a fellow .44 aficionado (how’s that for alliteration?).  Please shoot us a copy of your snail mail address, Art, and we’ll send to you a signed copy of 5000 Miles At 8000 RPM as a small thank you for helping us make the blog a success.

And to the rest of our readers:  Do you have an idea for a guest blog?   It can be any topic:  Motorcycles, watches, guns, bicycles, travel, photography, and more.   We’d love to hear from you.   Write to us at info@exhaustnotes.us!

A CSC Supermoto TT250

I stopped by to visit with the boys at CSC Motorcycles yesterday morning and the TT250 Supermoto setup you see above stopped me in my tracks.  This, my friends, is one seriously good looking motorcycle.  Seriously good looking, seriously well equipped, and seriously inexpensive.  Think new hubs and aluminum wheels, custom tires, new disks, a matching red anodized sprocket, anodized red footpegs, and red grips.  Don’t like red?  CSC has a bunch of colors you can order the Supermoto package in to suit your tastes.  But that red and black is going to be hard to beat.

I own a TT250 (one from the very first shipment) and I like it a lot.  I played a minor role in helping to configure and bring that motorcycle to the US, and I’ve toured Baja on it.   It’s a grand bike and it sells for just $2,195.  And to close out the last of the 2019s, CSC is knocking $200 off that.  You’ll make up that amount and a bit more configuring it with the Supermoto option shown above, but you’d still have a brand new motorcycle for something around $3,000 (roughly the price of a set of BMW saddlebags).

A CSC motorcycle is one of the best values in the motorcycle world.  I’ve maintained that from Day One, and I’ve got the miles under my belt in Asia, America, South America, and Baja to back it up.

Take a look at some of the details on this bike:

Here’s the tab on all of the above:

Red and black always work for me.  Those are my school colors (go Scarlet Knights!), they just look good, and the bike kind of matches my Gear’d Hardware ZX2 wristwatch.

Red and black works on a lot of things, one of them being this Gear’d Hardware ZX2 watch!

Hey, I spoke with good buddy Baja John yesterday.  I’m still thinking about a quick run down to his place in Baja next month.  I need to get my knees in the Baja breeze.  John is like me…he rides a TT250 and an RX3, too.  Maybe I can talk Gresh into a ride…that would be fun!

Want to read about the TT250 and other bikes in Baja?   Give a click here!

The Model 659 Smith and Wesson

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

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

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

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

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

Please click on the popup ads!  It’s what keeps the lights on.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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ExNotes Review: Ford vs Ferrari

Caution: Spoilers ahead!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gear’d Hardware ZX2 Features

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

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

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

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

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

Pressing the upper left button illuminates the digital display.

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

The Gear’d’s stopwatch mode. The time starts and stops with the upper right button, and resets with the lower right button.
The alarm mode. You can set the watch to start beeping at a time you select.

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

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

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

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