18 again!

Gresh left New Mexico headed for Los Angeles early this morning. What’s that white stuff?

Imagine you’re an old fart like Gresh and suddenly you could be again 18 years old again.  That’s kind of what happened to me just a short while ago.  Now, old Joe Gresh, he’s inbound from the Sacramento Mountains (don’t let the name fool you) in New Mexico, the Tinfiny Ranch, headed here.   The guy wanted to make the drive in one day in order to be staged for our run into Baja tomorrow.  Hey, that’s okay.  It’s going to be warmer where we’re going.

Anyway, back to that 18-years-old-thing again.   That’s what I want to be.  18 years old.  And while I’m dreaming, throw in a new 1966 650cc, made-in-England, Triumph Bonneville, but let’s add electric start, six speeds, disc brakes, and a flawless finish.  That’s my dream.

Only it’s not a dream. That’s where I am right now.

The bike is a new Royal Enfield Interceptor.  It’s a 650.  The styling is perfect, right down to the big tach and speedo that almost say “Smiths” (if I have to explain that, you wouldn’t understand).  It’s made in India instead of England (hey, the current Triumph Bonnevilles are made in Thailand).   My take?  This new motorcycle has out-Triumphed Triumph in being more faithful to the original layout, displacement, and feel of the ’66 Bonneville I’ve lusted after for years.   But with lots more refinement.

A brand new Royal Enfield 650 Interceptor in my driveway. It’s my ride for the next 10 days or so.
For my good buddy Orlando: See, it’s orange…the fastest color!
You can almost see where it says Smiths.  This, folks, is what motorcycle instruments should look like!

Want to read another strong statement?  On my 25-mile ride home from So Cal Moto in Brea, where I picked up the Royal Enfield, I decided I’m going to buy one.   Oh, I’ll find some nits to pick over the next 2000 BajaBound miles and I’ll share them with you here, but this bike answers the mail.   And the price?  Well, a new Triumph Bonneville cost $1320 in 1966.  I know, because my Dad bought one.  A new Royal Enfield is $5799, I think.  If you take that 1966 $1320 figure and adjust it for inflation to 2019, it comes out to $10,298.   Buy a new Enfield 650 and you’ve already saved $4500.  That’s the argument I’m going to use with She Who Must Be Obeyed.  I think it will work, too.

I’m going to break our rule and post more than one blog today.  We are living in exciting times, my friends, and I can’t wait to share the excitement with you.   The 500cc Bullet is about 45 minutes out (it’s being delivered from the RE dealer in Glendale) and I’ll post an update about that later today, too!

I can’t wait to get on the road tomorrow.

Stay tuned, and hey, sign up for our automatic email blog updates!

BajaBound on Royal Enfield!

The new Royal Enfield 650cc twin. We’ll be riding this and a 500cc Bullet single in Baja!

Ever wonder what Royal Enfield motorcycles are like?  I mean, really like?  You know, on a real adventure ride?

Joe and I are headed south tomorrow morning, and we’re riding (drum roll please) Royal Enfield motorcycles.   Not just any Royal Enfields, either, but factory bikes of a most interesting flavor…the exciting new 650 Interceptor twin (the actual bike you see above) and a 500cc Bullet single.  We’re picking up both bikes today, and wow, are we ever pumped!

This is going to be extremely interesting…it’s one of the very first long distance trips on the new 650, it’s the first time it will be in Baja, and we’re  excited about all of it.   You’ll get our unvarnished impressions of how the bikes perform, how they compare to each other, and how they compare to the other bikes we’ve ridden.

These are exciting times, folks.  The market is changing dramatically with real bikes at real prices  (not the bloated, heavy, monstrous, and expensive behemoths most of the manufacturers have been shoving at us for the last 20 or 30 years).    You know, I’ve been wanting a classic English vertical 650 twin for decades, and as a guy who rode singles all over China, Colombia, Mexico, and the US, I’m doubly excited about the Enfield 500cc single.   This is a dream come true and we’d like you to read about it and enjoy the experience, too.   Joe and I will see the whales, enjoy the fish tacos and other amazing Baja cuisine, and ride the best roads in the most exciting place in the world:  Baja!

You can bet we’ll be riding with our BajaBound insurance, wearing our RHeroes workshirts and doing the things guys do on trips like this. And more likely than not you’ll be reading more about this ride in Motorcycle Classics, RoadRUNNER, ADVMoto, and Motorcycle.com magazines (Gresh and I have had stories in all these publications).   In the meantime, you’ll be able to follow the adventure in real time right here!

We’ll be posting from Baja every day, with great photos and great stories, so stay tuned!  And hey, while you’re here, why not sign up for our blog update notifications?   Just add your email address to the widget you see on this page, and you’ll be eligible for our quarterly adventure motorcycle book giveaway!

Daytona’s Flat Track Gets Stranger

The Bike Week flat track has another, even stranger configuration this year. Before I get onto that a brief history is in order. The Bike Week AMA points-paying races were held at Memorial Stadium on 11th Street for many, many years. It’s a good venue with lots of seating, parking and being a real stadium it’s perfect for flat track.

About 7 years ago (I’m too lazy to Google it) the races were moved behind Home Depot at the west end of the Daytona Speedway parking lot. It was a small track with funky stands and the first year was very slippery. Over the next few years the surface improved until it was an ok place to hold a race but the big V-twin bikes were useless on the tiny circuit.

Recently, the races have been held on a TT track that is located directly under the Supercross track on the front straight of the Speedway infield. The Super cross jumps are removed and an odd, tight cornered TT course emerges a day or two later. This track proved too point and shoot so the turns were widened a bit last year but it was still not flat track as we know it.

This year the track has been reconfigured yet again into a Superbikers type course using the paved section near the start-finish line combined with a dirt section. It goes like this: The start is on dirt and turn one is dirt, mid corner it transitions to pavement and the back stretch is paved, turn three transitions from pavement back to dirt.

It should make for some dramatic grip changes as turn two dirt spills out onto the paved section. Look for a few highsides as the rear tire hooks up onto the grippy pavement. Also chattering may be a problem as the riders dive into turn three. The track at Daytona has been an odd duck for a while now so I guess we should be used to it. The place is so strange results here will have little bearing on the rest of the season’s races held on real flat tracks.

All this weirdness may change if the promoters decide to slather some dirt on the back straight so we will have to wait and see.

The Three Flags Classic: Calgary!

So, good buddy Marty and I completed the 2005 Three Flags Classic motorcycle rally and we were in Calgary.  That didn’t mean the riding was over, though.  We would stay two days in Calgary, and then plot our own course home to California.   That part of the ride was great, too.   This blog focuses on our two days in Calgary.  Much as I like riding, after riding from Mexico to Canada, it was good to be off the bike for a couple of days!

Before diving into our time in Calgary, you might want to catch up on the ride.   Here are the first six installments of the 2005 Three Flags Classic…

The 2005 Three Flags Classic Rally:  the Intro!
The Three Flags Classic:  Day 1
The Three Flags Classic:  Day 2
The Three Flags Classic:  Day 3
The Three Flags Classic:  Day 4
The Three Flags Classic:  Day 5

And now, on to our Calgary visit!

We had arrived!

Calgary was fun.  It’s a large and modern city, and we had a good time walking around and taking pictures.  About the only riding we did in Calgary was finding a motorcycle shop and getting a new rear tire for the Triumph (you might remember that I patched it).   Only one shop had the tire I needed, they knew I needed it, and they soaked me pretty good.  It cost $300!

Some of the sculptures along Stephens Street in downtown Calgary, as seen through the Sigma 17-35 lens. I’d heard these were supposed to cut down on the wind noise between the buildings.
Interesting graffiti. Classier than the stuff you see around LA.
An interesting sculpture in downtown Calgary. It reminded me of one of the guys who rode with us on the rally.
I couldn’t resist this shot.
An underfed Canadian horse?
A chess set in a Calgary store window.
Looking up in Calgary.
A steam engine in downtown Calgary.  I had a new super wide angle 17-35 Sigma lens.  It was about a third the price of the comparable Nikon lens and it did a good job.

We spent two nights in Calgary, and we went to the Three Flags Classic banquet in our hotel. About a thousand people attended. I won a $100 Aerostitch gift certificate.   It was great.  Then they announced how many people rode each different brand of motorcycle.  There were lots of Harley, BMW, and Honda riders.   There were a few Suzuki and Yamaha riders.  But there was only one Triumph rider, and that was me.

We had fun in Calgary.   Like I said above, it felt good to be off the bikes for a bit.   We spent time just sitting around in the hotel drinking coffee, we talked about many different things, and we solved most of the world’s problems.  Then it was back on the bikes for the run west across Canada, with a left turn to head back into the US as we neared the Pacific.   That’s coming up, folks, so stay tuned!

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Applying Taguchi to Load Development

By Joe Berk

People reload ammunition for different reasons.   It used to be you could save money by reloading, and I suppose for the more exotic cartridges (any Weatherby ammo, the big elephant rounds like .458 Win Mag, the .416 Rigby, etc.) that’s still the case.  It’s not the case for the more common rounds like 9mm, .45 ACP, and .223 Remington; bulk ammo for those is so inexpensive you’d be hard pressed to reload for as little as that ammo costs.  Sometimes people reload because factory ammo is no longer available or it’s very tough to find.  But most of us reload for accuracy.  We can experiment with different combinations of components and tailor a combo to a particular firearm to find the sweet spot…that combination of components that provides the tightest groups.  I’m in that category; it’s why I reload.

When I’m testing for accuracy and I get a tight group, I always wonder:  Is it because of the combination of components, or is it just a random event?  Usually, if the group size is repeatable, we conclude that it is the component combination, and not just a random good group that results from all the planets coming into alignment.  But is there a better way?   You know, one that shows with more certainty that it’s the component combination, and not just a fluke?

This article is a bit different.  It’s not just a story about a gun or about reloading ammunition.  It includes those things, but it’s more.  This story is about applying the Taguchi design of experiments technique to .45 ACP load development for ammo to be used in a Smith and Wesson Model 25 revolver (the one you see in the photo above).

I’m guessing you probably never heard of Taguchi.  That’s okay; most folks have not.  Taguchi testing is a statistical design of experiments approach that allows evaluating the impact of several variables simultaneously while minimizing sample size.  The technique is often used in engineering development activities, and I used it regularly when I was in the aerospace world.  The technique was pioneered by Genichi Taguchi in Japan after World War II, and made its way to the US in the mid-1980s.  I used the Taguchi technique when I ran engineering and manufacturing groups in Aerojet Ordnance (a munitions developer and manufacturer) and Sargent Fletcher Company (a fuel tank and aerial refueling company).

Taguchi testing is a powerful technique because it allows identifying which variables are significant and which are not.   Engineers are interested in both.  It lets you know which variables you need to control tightly during production (that is, which tolerances have to be tight), and it identifies the others that are not so critical.  Both are good things to know. If we know which variables are significant and where they need to be, we can change nominal values, tighten tolerances, and maybe do other things to achieve a desired output. If we know which variables are not significant, it means they require less control.   We can loosen tolerances on these variables, and most of the time, that means costs go down.

Like I said above, I used Taguchi testing in an engineering and manufacturing environment with great success.  The Taguchi approach did great things for us.  When I worked in the cluster bomb business, it allowed us to get the reliability of our munitions close to 100%.   When I worked in a company that designed and manufactured aerial refueling equipment (think the refueling scene in the movie, Top Gun), it helped us to identify and control factors influencing filament-wound F-18 drop tanks.  In that same company, it helped us fix a 20-year-old reliability problem on a guillotine system designed to cut and clamp aerial refueling hoses if failures elsewhere in the refueling system prevented rewinding the hose.  You don’t want to land in an airplane trailing a hose filled with JP4 jet fuel.  Good stuff, Taguchi testing is.

As you know from reading our other Tales of the Gun stories, the idea in reloading is to find the secret sauce…the perfect recipe of bullet weight, propellant, brass case manufacturer, and more, to find the best accuracy for a given firearm.   Hey, I thought…I could apply the Taguchi technique to this challenge.

When you do a Taguchi experiment, you need to define a quantifiable output variable, and you need to identify the factors that might influence it.  The output variable here is obvious:  It’s group size on the target.  The input variables are obvious, too.  They would include propellant type, propellant charge, primer type, bullet weight, brass type, bullet seating depth, and bullet crimp.  We’re trying to find which of these factors provides the best accuracy.  I wanted to turn my Model 25 Smith and Wesson into a hand-held tack driver.

The Model 25 is an N-frame Smith and Wesson revolver chambered for the .45 ACP pistol cartridge. It is a superbly accurate handgun, as attested to by the target above.

When Taguchi developed his testing approach, he made it simple for his followers.   One of the things he did was define a simple test matrix, which he called an L8 orthogonal array.  It sounds complicated, but it’s not.  It just means you can evaluate up to seven different input variables with each at two different levels.  That’s a bit complicated, but understanding it is a little easier if you see an example.   Here’s what the standard Taguchi L8 orthogonal array  (along with the results) looked like for my Model 25 load development testing:

As the above table shows, three sets of data were collected.  I tested each load configuration three times (Groups A, B, and C), and I measured the group size of each 3-shot group.  Those group sizes became the output variables.

The next step involved taking the above data and doing a standard Taguchi ANOVA (that’s an acronym for analysis of variance).  ANOVA is the statistical method used for evaluating the output data (in our case, the group sizes) to assess which of the above input variables most influenced accuracy.  That’s a complex set of calcs greatly simplified by using Excel.   The idea here is to find the factor with the largest ANOVA result.   You see, any time you measure a set of results, there’s going to be variation in the results.  Where it gets complicated is the variation can be due to randomness (the variation in the results that would occur if you left all of the inputs the same).  Or, the variation can be due to something we changed.  We want to know if the differences are due to something we did (like changing or adjusting a component) or if they are due to randomness alone.   I cranked through the ANOVA calcs with Excel, and here’s what I obtained…

The above results suggest that crimping (squeezing the bullet by slightly deforming the case mouth inward) has the greatest effect on accuracy (it had the largest ANOVA calculated result).  The results suggest that cartridges with no crimp are more accurate than rounds with the bullet crimped.  But it’s a suggestion only; it doesn’t mean it’s true.   The next step is to evaluate if the differences are statistically significant, and doing that requires the next step in the ANOVA process.  This gets really complicated (hey, I’m an engineer), but the bottom line is that we’re going to calculate a number called the f-ratio, and then compare our calculated f-ratio to a reference f-ratio.  If the calculated f-ratio (the one based on the test results above) exceeds the reference f-ratio, it means that crimping versus no crimping makes a statistically significant difference in accuracy.  If it not not exceed the reference f-ratio, it means the difference is due to randomness.   Using Excel’s data analysis feature (the f-test for two samples, for you engineers out there) on the crimp-vs-no-crimp results shows the following:

Since the calculated f-ratio (3.817) does not exceed the critical f-ratio (5.391), I could not conclude that the findings are statistically significant.  What that means is that the difference in accuracy for the crimped versus uncrimped rounds is due to randomness alone.

Whew!  So what does all the above mean?

All right, here we go.  This particular revolver shot all of the loads extremely well. Many of the groups (all fired at a range of 50 feet) were well under an inch.  Operator error (i.e., inaccuracies resulting from my unsteadiness) overpowered any of the factors evaluated in this experiment.  In other words, my unsteadiness was making a far bigger difference than any change in the reloading recipe.

Although the test shows that accuracy results were not significantly different, this is good information to know. What it means is that all of the test loads (the different reloading recipes) are reasonably accurate.  If I had used a machine rest, I might have seen a statistically significant difference.  Stated differently, the test told me that I needed to use a machine rest with this gun to see which load parameters were really playing a role in accuracy.  Without it, my flaky shooting skills (or as the statisticians like to say, my randomness) overpowered any accuracy gains to be realized by playing with component  factors.

That said, though, I like that 4.2 grains of Bullseye load with the 200 grain semi-wadcutter bullet, and it’s what I load for my Model 25.  But I now know…the gun shoots any of these loads well, and crimping versus no crimping doesn’t really make a difference.

Check out our other Tales of the Gun stories here.

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The Warning

Check out these two men and what they did almost a century ago…folks, you couldn’t make a movie this exciting!

The monument above (The Warning, sculpted by Eric Richards) was erected in 2003 in Santa Paula, California, to mark a heroic evening in 1928. Motor Officers Thornton Edwards (on the Indian) and Stanley Baker (on the Harley) were on duty the evening of March 12, 1928, when California experienced the second worst disaster in the state’s history. The recently completed St. Francis Dam, 36 miles upstream in Santa Clarita, collapsed shortly after midnight.

The collapse released 52 billion gallons of water, and that water was headed directly toward Santa Paula. The Santa Paula Police Department learned of the impending danger shortly after the dam broke. Thornton and Baker spent the next 3 hours riding their motorcycles throughout Santa Paula, notifying residents and evacuating the town. Thornton worked for the State Highway Department, which later became the California Highway Patrol. Baker was a Santa Paula Police Department Officer. Although the records from this era are sketchy, legend holds that Thornton’s bike had to be repaired during his midnight ride when it ingested water. As a result of these two officers’ actions, the residents of Santa Paula were successfully evacuated, and few Santa Paula residents died that night.

The water released by the dam (the reservoir had just filled, and the poorly-designed dam was not strong enough to contain it) mixed with mud and debris to form a wall of slurry that advanced 54 miles to the ocean at about 12 miles per hour. The disaster killed an estimated 470 people, and to this day, it is the second worst disaster in California history. Only the San Francisco earthquake resulted in more death.

The Warning contains no mention of either motor officer’s name; rather, it is intended to honor all acts of heroism, and to honor those killed during the St. Francis Dam collapse. If you head through downtown Santa Paula, The Warning is hard to miss.  It’s worth a trip to Santa Paula just to see it.

Special thanks for the above research to Peggy Kelly, a reporter for the Santa Paula Times, whom I interviewed for the above information.

More police motorcycle posts are here!

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Auto Email Updates Are Back!

BajaBound, Arjiu and Dajiu are. Stay tuned!  This photo is from a 2008 trip with good buddy Joseph Lee, looking out over Bahia Concepcion.  I bought the ’06 Triumph Tiger you see above from Douglas Motorcycles, and it was a grand machine for touring Baja.

It’s been a challenging time, but the WordPress automatic email blog notifications are back on line.  I’d like to be able to tell you why the “improvement” caused things to stop working, but I can’t.  The people who create the software for this feature (they call it a widget, which is probably and insult to widgets worldwide) advised deleting the update and rolling back to the original version, but that didn’t work initially, either.  So we waited a few days (especially after seeing the help board explode with other bloggers complaining about the failure), tried the rollback to the unimproved version again, and voilà, it worked.

Our apologies for the screwup.  Eh, these things happen.  If you want to sign up for blog update notifications (and we think you should), the widget is in the upper right corner of this page if you’re viewing the ExNotes blog on a laptop, and it’s at the end of this blog on a mobile phone.  You might want sign up for two reasons…one, the blog is great, and two, we’re giving away another moto adventure book at the end of this month to one of the folks who get our automatic updates.

Stay tuned, mi amigos, because there’s more good stuff coming your way real soon.  Uncle Joe and I are headed into Mexico next week, and you sure don’t want to miss any of the Baja updates!

Morgans and Mr. H…

A 1953 Morgan. This is a dream car for me.

I read the Wall Street Journal pretty much every day. The reporting is far more objective than what passes for journalism in the other papers I take (the LA Times and the NY Times), the stories tend to be better, and there’s A.J. Baime. Mr. Baime is an award-winning historian and a fantastic writer. He does a regular column in the WSJ about interesting people who own interesting automobiles, and the most recent one was about a fellow who fell in love with, and later bought, a Morgan.

A Morgan. Wow, that brought back memories.

Pete Herrington in 1963, when I was in the 7th grade.  I was surprised at how easy it was to find this photograph on the Internet.

When I was 12 years old and in the 7th grade, our science teacher (Peter Herrington) owned a Morgan. It was 1953 Morgan, to be specific, and it was unrestored and magnificently original. I was just getting interested in cars and motorcycles back then, and that Morgan was riveting.   It was one of the most interesting things I’d ever seen.  I couldn’t quite figure it out, but I knew I liked it.  In an age when everything was trying to look like a fighter jet, Mr. Herrington’s Morgan was a combination of an old car, a sports car, and attitude.  It had sweeping fenders (like an old Model A Ford), it was low slung and a two-seater (like a Corvette), and it had huge louvers and a big leather belt to hold the hood down.  Its appearance said I don’t care what I look like, I’m tough, and I’m built to perform.  It was cool. To a 12-year-old kid like me, it was beyond cool.

To dive a bit deeper into this story, I was a bit of a problem, you see, when I was 12 years old.  Actually, I was a pain in the ass, and I got detention a lot. You might say I was a confirmed detention recidivist, and as such, I spent more time in detention than any other class I had in those days.

Normally, detention would be a bad thing, but our principal rotated detention duty and one day Mr. Herrington drew the short straw.  I guess it was inevitable that Peter Herrington would be the detention duty warden one day when I had detention, and this day was that day.  The upshot of all this was that I lived about a mile and a half from school, and after cleaning blackboards and doing the other kinds of things kids in 7th grade had to do in detention, I started to walk home when my detention ended.  Mr. Herrington was in the parking lot, he fired up the Morgan, and he offered me a ride home. In his Morgan. The one I described above.  A ride.  In the Morgan.  This was punishment?

Now, I won’t tell you that I tried to time my recidivism to coincide with Mr. Herrington’s detention duty, but I will tell you that was not the last time I ever got a ride home after detention in the ’53 Morgan.  That car was just so cool. It was a convertible, the door waistline was incredibly low, and it looked and felt like you sat above the pavement at a distance more appropriate for a valve gap than an automobile’s ground clearance. The effect was intoxicating.

Many years later (50 years later, to be specific), I received an email from good buddy Chief Mike (who lives in New Jersey, where I sort of grew up) with an interesting message. Whaddaya know?  Mike had bumped into Mr. Herrington at a local mall. It seems our former 7th grade science teacher (still a gearhead and now long retired) had shoehorned an LS-2 Chevy Corvette engine into his Mazda RX-7.  He had some questions about the care and maintenance of Corvette motors, and everyone in New Jersey knows Mike is the guy to see if you have a Corvette question.

As Mike was telling this story, a lot of memories flooded back. All of us have had great teachers, and Mr. Herrington was mine. Like I said above, I was a first-class pain-in-the-you-know-what in junior high school (and in high school, too, for that matter), but my 7th grade science class held my interest. Science was cool and so was my teacher. It’s probably why I became an engineer.

To make a long story a little less long, I Googled Mr. Herrington’s name.   Yep, there he was.   There’s his address.  A quick 411 call and a few minutes later I had Mr. Herrington on the phone. How about that? Fifty years since I’ve seen this guy, and now I’ve got him on the phone.

You know, a voice is a funny thing. Mr. Herrington, then well into his 80s, sounded exactly as I remembered him. Strong, firm, and focused on gearhead stuff. He told me that the RX-7 was a good car, but the original rotary piston engines were only good for about 75,000 miles (he’d been through several of them, he said). Dropping a Corvette engine into an RX-7 was the way to go, and that’s what he had done. He spoke about it like it was changing tires (a classic Peter Herrington trait).

We had a great conversation. He told me he remembered me, which I kind of doubted until he asked me a question about my father. “Your Dad was the guy who designed and built his own swimming pool, including the filtration system, right? He made the filter tank out of an old wine vat?” That was so long ago I had forgotten about it, but not Mr. Herrington. Wow!

I told Mr. Herrington I felt bad about being such a bad kid and such a royal pain in the ass back in the 7th grade, and he said, “Ah, don’t worry about it. That’s what you’re supposed to do when you’re that age…”  Just like that, years of guilt evaporated.  It was a good feeling.

I sent Mr. Herrington a signed copy of 5000 Miles at 8000 RPM and we had a couple of great conversations after that touching on cars, motorcycles, careers, health, life, and other topics. And then one day his wife wrote to tell me he had passed away.  That was a tough email to read, but I felt incredibly fortunate to have reconnected with Mr. Herrington, and I think he enjoyed it, too.  A.J. Baime’s article in the Wall Street Journal made me think about him again.   Thank you, A.J. Baime, and thank you, Peter Herrington.

A Savagely-inexpensive rifle…

My new-to-me Savage 340 in .222. It’s got a scope and the whole shebang set me back $180. Such a deal!

I’m a rifle enthusiast, I can’t pass on an interesting experience, and I’m cheap. So when I was in a local gunshop a year or so ago, I was surprised and intrigued to see a consignment rifle go on the rack at a ridiculously low price. It was a 50-year-old Savage 340 bolt action rifle in .222 Remington (complete with a period-correct 3×9 telescopic sight) for only $180.

A Bushnell 3×9 scope was included with the deal!
Rollmarks on the Savage.

This is a rifle that probably sold new for around $35 or $40, but like I said, that was 50 years ago. These days, any kind of a shooter for $180 is a steal. I was immediately attracted to the Savage by the price and the thought that it might make for a nice gunstock refinishing project. What really got my attention, though, was the cartridge for which it was chambered: The .222 Remington.

I’ve never owned a gun chambered in .222 Remington.  The Triple Deuce is a cartridge that has a cult following because it is one of those special numbers known to be inherently accurate.  It’s very similar to the .223 Remington (the 5.56 NATO round), but the .222 is a little bit shorter with a longer case neck.  It’s proportions are said to be ideal for phenomenal accuracy. Like I said, I’ve never had a .222, but for $180, I could afford to find out if the stories were true.

Okay, on to Step 2 of this saga, and that’s the reloading aspect. Accuracy can be greatly enhanced by reloading. You know, that’s the deal where you save the fired brass, resize it in a reloading press, punch out the old primer, insert a new primer, load a precisely-controlled amount of new gunpowder, and seat a new bullet. Oilà…you have a reloaded round ready for firing.  The deal with reloading is that you can experiment with different powders, different powder weights, different primers, different brass manufacturers, different bullet makers, different bullet weights, different bullet seating depths, and more. The concept is that you can tune the ammunition to precisely match a rifle’s preferences and achieve improved accuracy. I’ve been reloading ammo for close to 50 years and I’m here to tell you it works.

Now, back to that Savage rifle. I waited my obligatory 10 days (the Peoples Republik of Kalifornia’s “kooling off” period) and in Governor Gavin’s eyes I guess had cooled off sufficiently. I picked up my new-to-me, 50-year-old Savage and loaded several different combos to see how the old 340 would work. In a word, it was awesome…

Impressive results for the first time out with a 50-year-old rifle. These groups were fired at 50 yards; the next steps will involve experimenting around the best load and testing for accuracy at 100 yards.  The recipe for the tiniest loads was a 55-grain Hornady full metal jacket boat tail bullet, a cartridge overall length of 2.176 inches, and 22.6 grains of IMR 4064 propellant.

You can see that different loads do indeed result in different accuracy levels. This is encouraging stuff, and what makes it even more promising is it shows the results of just one reloading session. The load that printed a 0.538-inch group is clearly pointing toward what the Savage likes, and my next set of loads will refine that combination. Good stuff and great fun, and all with a rifle that only cost $180!

Check out our other Tales of the Gun stories here!

Tractor Supply

It seems like I’m always working a pick and a shovel at Tinfiny Ranch. Situated at 6000 feet in the foothills of the Sacramento Mountains the place is steep with many elevation changes. An arroyo runs past the house so that when it rains (and it rains a lot in New Mexico) my driveway becomes a short-lived trout stream.

Water, being the universal solvent, plays havoc with Tinfiny Ranch and most of my time is spent trying to bend it to my will. Armed with hand tools and 50-pound bags of concrete I’ve managed to carve out a dry spot to sleep. The landforms here are fleeting, changing and slowly make their way 1500 feet down to the Tularosa Valley where huge dust storms blow the accumulated material back up onto the mountain sides. You don’t own real estate here: you trap it.

When Hunter called me to tell me he had found a Kubota tractor for me my first thoughts were about water. Like a slightly soft football a front loader tractor would give me a leg up on erosion. I was on my way to Stillwater a few days later.

Hunter is my riding buddy. We both like crappy old two-strokes and we’ve run them clear across country following the Trans-America Trail. We’ve passed some impassable routes and had bikes lay down on us in the middle of the desert. I know him as Vinnie The Snake from the dirt and only the dirt but it turns out there’s more to Hunter than a beat up old DT400 Yamaha.

We had a day to kill before I picked up the tractor so we went to Hunter’s Skybox at OSU and watched the OSU women’s basketball team dismantle a team from Kansas. The governor of Oklahoma has a suite two doors down and there was unlimited free food along with all the ice cream you could eat. The suite had a commanding view of both the football field and the indoor arena.

When we walked in the coach shook Hunter’s hand and then he shook my hand like I might also be somebody important. Then the TV and radio guys chatted up Hunter including me in the conversation. It was weird: nobody ever cares about what I have to say but my proximity to Hunter earned a listen. Everyone knew and loved Hunter and they loved me too. Nobody called him The Snake. It’s like there are two Hunters, one that lives in a world unlike any I’ve seen. I’ll remember that other, respectable Hunter when he’s tipped over in a mud hole cussing his two stroke.

The Tractor was a beauty with tires so new they still had rubber bar codes visible. Kubota’s have earned a good name in the heavy equipment arena and this L2850 sported a diesel engine that fired right up.

Underneath the driven front end you’ll find a portal-type axle to give the tractor plenty of ground clearance. Everything is leaking a bit but oil is cheap and Tinfiny can use a little dust control. The steering felt tight and Woody, the guy I bought the tractor from takes good care of his stuff.

When I worked construction in Miami it was rare to see a dashboard unbroken. Vandalism was a constant problem. Lights, tires and hoses were routinely damaged by bored kids. The L580 dash was clean and everything works except the tach needle fell off.

At the rear of the Kubota has a two-speed PTO drive that I will be using as soon as CT buys me a backhoe attachment. Amazon has some cool 3-point hoes costing around $3600. You don’t want to do a lot of side digging with a 3-point hoe because the hitch wasn’t meant for big side loads but as long as you are crabbing in a straight line they will work well.

The transmission has high and low range with low range, first gear being super slow. Top end of the tractor in high range-high gear is around 12 miles per hour. With zero suspension 12 MPH is plenty over Tinfiny’s rough grounds.

This lever engages the front wheels. This is pretty important because the front end loader combined with nothing attached to the hitch means the big rear wheels have little traction.

The Kubota’s grille was bent a bit but Woody had a new grille that he hadn’t gotten around to installing. The rest of the tractor is pretty straight. The side lights need new lenses and the back lights could use some love but all in all I’m thrilled with the tractor. How could I not be? Every boy loves a tractor.