The ExhaustNotes Blog

The Apache Main Rotor Blade Failures

By Joe Berk

Like that photo you see above? Yeah, me, too. I took it on the parade grounds at Fort Knox, Kentucky, a few years ago. I used to run the Composite Structures plant that made rotor blades for the Apache helicopter. It was one of the best jobs I ever had.

We recently reposted (under the Wayback Machine banner) our blog about the Gator mine system, and in it I promised to write about the Apache main rotor blade failures. This is another defense industry failure analysis war story that crosses company lines and supplier/customer boundaries, and I’m not entirely sure that there wasn’t some nefarious behavior going on at McDonnell Douglas. I’ll tell you what happened and you tell me.

The UH-1 Huey was a Vietnam War workhorse. It was extremely susceptible to small arms fire and you could hear it coming miles away.

During the Vietnam War, the Army (my alma mater) found that the Huey helicopter had a few shortcomings. I guess that’s to be expected; it was the first time the Army used helicopters in a major way in a real war. The Huey was susceptible to small arms fire (and big arms fire, too, for that matter) and it was noisy. On a clear night, you could hear a Huey coming in from a long way out with its characteristic “wop wop wop” signature as it beat the air into submission. That “wop wop wop” sound was actually the rotor tips breaking the sound barrier on the left side of the helicopter, so the Army knew it had to do something to get the blade tip speed below the speed 0f sound on its next-gen helicopter. Another big problem was small arms fire; a single .30-caliber AK-47 bullet through a Huey rotor blade would destroy the blade’s structural integrity (and there were a lot of AK-47 rounds in the air in those days). When that happened, the helicopter and its crew were lost. There could be no autorotation (you can’t autorotate without a blade) and you couldn’t bail out. The next-gen helicopter blades would have to be impervious to small arms fire.

Fixing the blade tip speed problem was simple. Instead of having two blades like the Huey, the Apache went to four blades. That cut the rotor speed and let the blade tips go subsonic. “Wop wop wop” no more. Easy peasy.

The structural integrity issue was the more significant challenge. The engineers at McDonnell Dougas (the Apache prime contractor) designed a blade that had four spars that ran longitudinally (with the length of the blade) contructed of AM455 stainless steel (a special blend used on the Apache and, at the time, nowhere else). The spars had overlapping epoxy-bonded joints that ran the length of the blade. The idea was that a hit anywhere on the blade (up to and including a 23mm high explosive Russian anti-aircraft round, roughly the explosive equivalent of a hand grenade) would damage that spar, but the remaining three spars would hold the blade together. It worked. An Apache blade actually took a blade hit from an Iraqi ZSU-23/4 and made it back to base.

A cross section of the McDonnell Douglas Apache blade showing the four spars.

So here’s the problem: The Army specified a blade life of 2200 hours (blades on a helicopter are like tires on a car…they wear out), but our blades were only lasting about 800 hours before the blades’ bondline epoxy joints holding the spars together starting unzipping. It wasn’t a catastrophic failure (the helicopter could still fly home), but the blades had to be repaired. The Army would send the blades back to McDonnell Douglas, and McDonnell Douglas sent them back to us at Composite Structures for refurbishment. If they couldn’t be repaired, we sold McDonnell Douglas a new blade (back in the 1990s, each blade cost just north of $53,000, and McDonnell Douglas put a hefty markup on that when they sold the blade to the Army). When they could be repaired, we still charged a hefty fee.

When I entered the picture as the plant manager, I learned that both Composite Structures (my company) and McDonnell Douglas (my customer) had made half-assed efforts to fix the blade problem, but neither company was financially motivated to eliminate it. We were making good money selling and repairing blades and so was McDonnell Douglas. The Army, however, was taking it in the shorts.

This was also a major problem for me as the manufacturing guy. I didn’t like having to make two blades to get one good one. We were rejecting one of every two blades we made for spar disbonds in the factory. You read that right: We had to make two blades to get one good one. Because of this, we were in a severe past due delivery condition, and my mission was to correct that situation. So we went to work on solving the problem. We found and fixed plenty of problems (blade cure profile issues, cleanroom assembly shortfalls, epoxy shelf life and pot life issues, nonconforming components issues, and contamination issues), but the blade disbonds continued. McDonnell Douglas continued to pound us for quality issues, all the while secretly smiling all the way to the bank as they continued to sell twice as many blades as they should have been selling.

We went through everything and finally concluded that there had to be a design issue with the blades; specifically, that the bondline width where the spars were glued together had too much variability. If that glue line was small enough, we reasoned, it wouldn’t hold up and the blade would disbond. We asked McDonnell Douglas about that (McDonnell Douglas was responsible for the design; we were building it to their engineering drawings), but they kept blowing us off. The bondline width wasn’t dimensioned on the McDonnell Dougas drawings. The other parts were, and McDonnell Douglas’ idea was that if the blade parts met their drawing requirements, the bondline width would be okay. That’s what they hoped for, anyway. But you know what they say about hope. You can poop in one hand and hope in the other, and see which one fills up first.

A macro shot of the bondline joint. The scribe lines (in the blue Dykem) show the bondline area.

I asked for a meeting with our company and McDonnell Douglas on the blade failures, and they wouldn’t meet with us. So I sent out another invitation, and this time I included the Army. McDonnell Douglas was livid when the Army quickly said yes; now, the McDonnell Douglas wizards had to meet with us on this issue. That meeting started about like I expected it to, with McDonnell Douglas tearing us a new one on the blade failures, telling us our quality was terrible, and basically letting me and the rest of the world know that, in their opinion, things had gone downhill since I had taken over as plant manager (no matter that this 50%-rejection-rate blade issue had existed for a dozen years prior to my arrival). I patiently explained the issues we had found and corrected, and then emphasized that the problem with blade separations had continued unabated. I then asked the McDonnell Douglas program manager about the bondline width and the fact that this apparently critical requirement was not on their engineering drawings. He denied it was the issue and went off about our poor quality again. When he ran out of steam, I asked the question about the bondline dimension yet again, and specifically, how narrow the bondline could be and still provide an adequate joint. There were more accusations about our lousy quality (the guy only knew one tune and he loved singing it), and I again waited for him to finish. When I asked the question a third time, before McDonnell Douglas lit up about our poor quality again the Army representative asked “yeah, how narrow does it have to be before the blade fails?”

The McDonnell Douglas guy stared at me like cobra looks at a mongoose (I’ve only seen this in YouTube videos, but I’m pretty sure the analogy is a good one). He sputtered and stammered and I think I saw a little spit fly from his mouth. “If you make it to the drawing it will be okay,” he said. I mean, under the circumstances it was the only thing he could say. I almost felt sorry for him, in the same way you feel sorry for a rat when a red-tailed hawk is swooping down with talons extended. You feel bad, but you look forward to seeing the hawk doing his thing.

The Army guy sensed this was something big. “How low?” he asked again. If there is such a thing as a perfect impersonation of a deer caught in the headlights, the McDonnell Douglas dude was nailing it. It was what we in the literary world call a pregnant pause, one of those “what did the President know, and when did he know it?” moments. As I type this, I can remember the scene like it happened 10 minutes ago, but it’s been close to 30 years.

“0.375 inches,” the McDonnell Douglas dude finally answered. He actually said the zero in a half-assed attempt to add engineering gravitas to his answer. “As long as they build it to the print, they’ll be okay,” he added, with a “so there” smirk. He was answering the Army man, but the smirk was all for me.

What the McDonnell Douglas guy didn’t know was that my guys could see the bondline width in an x-ray, and we x-rayed every blade returned for repair. And I guess he didn’t realize how easy it was to do a tolerance analysis to show what the drawings allowed the bondline width to be.

What happened next was one of those moments I’ll remember for the rest of my life. I looked my engineering guy and my QA guy. They knew what I wanted. They both left the room. Fifteen minutes later they were back. My engineering guy handed me the results of his tolerance analysis. The McDonnell Douglas engineering drawings tolerance stackups allowed the bondline width to go as low as 0.337 inch. The QA guy had even better information. All the blades that had been returned to us for spars unzipping (which was the only reason we ever saw a blade returned) had bondline widths less than 0.375 inches (McDonnell Douglas’ admission for the lower limit) but above .337 inches. In other words, our quality was fine. The failed blades met the McDonnell Douglas engineering drawings but were below the value I had finally prodded McDonnell Douglas into revealing.

I could have been more diplomatic, I guess, but that wasn’t me. I shared that information with the room. The Army rep smiled. “I think you guys might want to continue the meeting without me,” he said. And then he left.

The McDonnell Douglas guy exploded as soon as the door closed. He was apoplectic (I looked that word up; it means overcome with anger and extremely indignant, and that was him). McDonnell Douglas had been screwing the Army for years with a deficient design and now it was out in the open. They were potentially exposed to defective design claims from the Army (and from us) for hundreds of millions of dollars. Think about it: 12 years of Apache blade production, a 50% failure rate in production, a blade life of only 800 hours (against the Army’s spec requirement of 2200 hours), and the fact that we and McDonnell had factored all that waste into our pricing.

Fortunately for McDonnell Douglas, the Army wasn’t interested in suing them (all they wanted was good blades). My boss wasn’t interested in pursuing a claim against McDonnell Douglas, either, as they were our bread and butter and he wanted to keep the business. We fixed the problem by holding the blade components to tighter tolerances (tighter than McDonnell Douglas had on their drawings) so the bondline width would always be above the magical 0.375 inch, and we never had a blade unzip in production again. McDonnell Douglas did not correct their drawings, as it would have been an admission of guilt on their part that would absolutely guarantee a loss if the Army ever took them to court.

So there you have it: The Apache main rotor blade failures, all caused by sloppy engineering at McDonnell Douglas. It’s hard to believe that the blades had a 50% failure rate and didn’t meet the Army’s specified blade life for a dozen years before the problem was fixed, but that’s what happened. It’s also hard to believe that nobody at McDonnell Douglas went to jail for it.

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Bobbie’s Solo Baja Ride: Part 1

By Bobbie Surber

Discovering motorcycles came late in life for me. My first ride was in 2014 on the back of a KTM. From the first ride I knew I was hooked, and I knew being on the back was not for me. By January 2015, I purchased my first bike, a 2006 Yamaha 225 XT. I drove from Sedona, AZ, to Denver, CO, to pick her up. On the drive home, I kept looking at her in my rearview mirror and dreaming of my future adventures. That is, once I learned to ride!

A day later I was on a quiet street teaching myself how to clutch and ride. The clutching came easy, and I had no fear as a newbie. Soon I was competent enough to go down the block, then to the store and friends’ houses, and soon off-road. Boy, I fell a lot at first, but I was surrounded by a group of guys who encouraged and taught me the basics. Many remain mentors to this day. I still have that little 225 XT and would never sell her or give her away. She will be with me till the end.

I soon added a Honda 750 Shadow to my new addiction and split my time between dirt and road adventures. It seemed a perfect balance as I gained more skills off-road with the 225 XT and could now venture further without trailering as I rode the Shadow. This led me to my third bike, new to the USA: A BMW 310 (a single cylinder in hot demand in Europe and Asia). She was a red bike far faster than my little goat, the Yamaha.

With a bike that was great off-road while still able to handle the open roads, I set my sights on several bucket list trips, including the Pacific Coast Highway (Highway 1 up the California coast) and the Sierra Nevadas. These two trips in 2018 gave me the confidence to plan another solo ride. This time I would ride Baja, the peninsula in northwestern Mexico bounded to the north by the United States, to the east by the Sea of Cortez, and to the south and west by the Pacific Ocean. I set my plans for a Spring ride, but a trip to Hawaii and paddling the Colorado River got in the way in May, delaying my departure to June.

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Adding a new 40-liter Wolfman tail bag, I departed Sedona, AZ, heading for a small town south of Tijuana, Alisito, known to the gringos as La Fonda. This was my first time crossing the US border on a bike, challenging my skills while negotiating what seemed like 100 lanes with traffic darting between the lanes. It was soon my turn to cross at San Ysidro south of San Diego. I had done this several times in a car, but what a whole new ball game on a bike!

Turning hard to the right, I made my way to Mexico Highway 1, following the Pacific coast out of Tijuana. The air was crisp even on a June morning as I pulled into the left lane to pass a line of trucks and a group of protesters, soon finding my groove, indulging in music through my helmet speaker and enjoying the sights along the way. An hour later, I pulled into the parking lot at Dmytri’s Restaurant, well-known by locals and visiting gringos alike. It was a time to meet friends and show off my new girl (BMW, to clarify!). The margaritas and conversations flowed as I assured all of my friends that I was utterly competent to ride Baja solo in the growing heat of June.

Bravada got me thru till the morning of my departure, then a massive wall of apprehension flooded me. WTH, I was not competent enough to take on this challenge solo in Mexico! A repeated flaw as I once again found myself vacillating between the urge to push myself and my endless fear of failure and the unknown. I did what I do best, shoved the fear down, and got on my bike heading south on Highway 1 while enjoying the ocean breeze and the endless views of the Pacific Ocean. All the while, I negotiated traffic and the epic potholes that ranged from minor to “might swallow my bike” in one epic plunge.

With the efficiency of the toll road, I was soon in the traffic and mayhem of Ensenada, a port city that is a frequent stop for cruise ships. The smell of exhaust and burning trash contrasted against the street stalls grilling fresh fish and carne asada. I could not resist and soon found a place to pull over for a cold Tecate and a plate full of tacos. The local girls working the roadside restaurant were enthralled with my bike, asking for photos on it it with the sultry hotness that only a Latina could pull off while wearing an apron. I accommodated their requests for pictures and answered a soon-to-be-frequent question of “Solo?” with “Si, Solo,” followed by “No, no, where is your man?” Ha, I didn’t even have a man at home, let alone on this trip, but I had someone I was thinking about a lot on this trip (a story I will tell in another post).

With Ensenada’s noise and challenges behind me, I headed out of town to a campground with hot springs and soaking pools. The ride getting there was all dirt, rocky as hell, with several water crossings. These were my first water crossings on my own. I was both thrilled and nervous as I gave the throttle a firm twist and flew through creating a satisfying rooster tail. It was a short day full of first-time accomplishments that felt right and bolstered my confidence for the adventure ahead. I paid my entrance fee of 200 pesos, about $10, and proceeded to enjoy the hot tubs, complete with little cabanas and a hot shower.

The next day I found myself back on the road. My destination would be the tiny town of Cataviña, a community of fewer than 200 residents. Cataviña is known for cave paintings, colossal rocks mixed with desert vegetation, and epic sunsets. This place could be on Mars with its endless boulders stacked at impossible angles and the stark beauty of the high desert plateau.

The day called for 380 kilometers, about a six-hour ride without stops. The morning started slow and easy as I retraced my ride back down the mountain and through the water crossings of the day before. After a quick stop at the OXXO convenience store for a burrito and coffee, I was on the road heading down Highway 1. The road went into the interior, passing through several tiny dusty towns and a few newfound favorites, including San Vicente and San Quintin. One of my favorite finds is Don Eddie’s Landing Hotel and Restaurant, an oasis with comfortable rooms, sports fishing, and even a few camping spots. I settled in at their patio, enjoying the views of the Pacific and Eddie’s legendary hospitality. This place is an ideal rest spot for enjoying a perfect plate of shrimp ceviche with just the right intensity of lime and chilis, complete with Don Eddie’s legendary hand-crafted margaritas, the likes of which I’ve never found in the USA.

Reluctantly leaving Eddie’s, I continued south on Highway 1, turning inland at El Rosario de Arriba, climbing up from sea level to 1841 feet. The elevation change did little to abate the day’s growing heat. I arrived intending to camp, but the reality of a 98-degree afternoon soon had me sapped. I pulled into the only commercial enterprise besides a little store across the street and a few tiny restaurants.

The Hotel Misíon Santa María – Cataviña looked like she was built in the colonial era; in reality, I learned she was built by the Mexican government as part of their tourism outreach. With a courtyard full of flowers and mature trees, I found a haven and counted my good fortunes to stay in such opulent digs (opulent compared to my humble tent). After securing my room for the night, I quickly dumped my gear, splashed some cold water on my face, and confirmed that I looked like I had ridden in the heat all day. I landed outside in the shade near the little bar enjoying my margarita. The bartender generously gave me endless glasses of water while we chatted about the heat, my bike, and his childhood in Arizona. Soon it was time to head to bed. I reached down to grab my bag and Delorme. A momentary shock as my Delorme was nowhere to be found. The little safety device would allow me to signal for help if needed and text my friends and family when off the beaten path and far out of cell coverage. The bartender and manager helped me search the grounds to no avail. I gave up and went to bed, cursing myself for my carelessness.

The following day bright and early I rode across the street to purchase the only available gas in this remote region from locals selling gas in plastic drums and liter-size soda bottles. Saying a prayer for the safety of my engine, I had them fill up my tank and MSR fuel bottle I always carry for the just-in-case moments.

Soon I was on the road headed to Guerrero Negro. The wind brushed over me gently with no hint of the high wind advisory posted for later that day. I left the unpleasantness of my Delorme loss behind and leaned into the joy of the ride. As it was a Sunday, I had the road to myself, with the added blessing of many commercial vehicles being home for the day. This was precisely what I had been dreaming of. As the starkness of the desert unfolded in front of my bike, I knew how lucky I was to be on this adventure! I was once again reminded to grab my dreams, ignore the naysayers, and embrace the adventure ahead.

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An Unfired NIB Liberty Model 77

By Joe Berk

The Ruger Model 77 rifle goes back to 1968. It gave Ruger a place in the centerfire hunting rifle class, and like the Remington Model 700 and Winchester Model 70 it would compete against, it outdid both by using the lucky number 7 twice in its name. The Model 77 is a good-looking bolt action rifle based on the Mauser design, with a classic walnut stock designed by famed custom rifle builder Lenard Brownell. I’ve owned several Model 77 Rugers, including this new-in-the-box .30 06 Liberty gun. I’d like to be able to tell you how accurate it is, but I can’t. I’ve never fired it. Nor has anyone else, other than the person who test fired it before it left the factory.

Every firearm Ruger manufactured in 1976 carried this inscription.

There’s no lawyer’s warning on the barrel about reading the instructions. We call these “pre-warning” guns. They were made in a time when people had more common sense.

The Liberty designation mentioned above refers to the “Made in the 200^th Year of American Liberty” roll marking on the barrel, which was a feature Ruger had on all its guns made in 1976. I bought the rifle in El Paso that year (I was in the Army stationed at Fort Bliss). This one has every thing that came with the rifle (the original serial numbered box, the scope rings and their blue cloth bag, the instructions, and the warranty card). It’s a brand new, unfired, almost-50-year-old rifle.

The tang safety Model 77 is considered more desireable.

The original box. The cardboard held up surprisingly well. This gun is new in the box (NIB) and this is the original box.

The box is serialized to the rifle. I obliterated the last number, which almost makes it look like the serial number matches the chambering.

You know, Rugers (and most guns, for that matter) were different 50 years ago. The bluing was deeper, the checkering was hand cut (and way better than the laser cut fuzzball checkering you see today), and the guns just felt better. This Ruger is like that. It’s immaculate, and there’s only safe ding on the stock. Other than than, there’s not a mark, dent, ding, gouge, scratch, or (Heaven forbid) spot of rust anywhere on the rifle. Even the anodized aluminum floorplate is pristine.

The Ruger Model 77 MSRP was $169.50 in 1976 and I believe I paid something like $139 for this one. I probably have the original receipt for it somewhere. A new Ruger Hawkeye in .30 06 (the rifle the Model 77 evolved into) lists for $1399 (yep, ten times what I paid in 1976), but a new one is not as cool as the one you see here.

Plain walnut, but elegant in its own way.

The unmarred anodized aluminum floorplate.

Early Ruger Model 77s wore this grip cap.

Check out this gorgeous hand cut checkering. You don’t see that too much today!

The rifle’s sole safe ding, done by yours truly. Nobody’s perfect. It will steam out. I’m leaving it like this.

God’s cartridge. The .30 06 is one of the all time greats.

This rifle may be going on the block soon. It’s time to start downsizing the armory and it’s time for someone else to enjoy owning it. You’re probably wondering how much I’m going to ask for it. So am I. As I look at this magnificent example of 1970s firearm manufacturing and post these photos, I’m having second thoughts. It is a .30 06, and that’s God’s cartridge. Maybe it needs to send a few rounds downrange, and maybe I’m the guy to do it. We’ll see.

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Dream Bikes: The Honda Dream

My Dad and I saw our first Honda ever in 1964 at a McDonald’s in East Brunswick, New Jersey. It was a 150cc Dream, the smaller version of the bigger CA 77 305cc Dream. I was 12 years old at the time. In those days, it was a fun family outing to drive the 20 miles to Route 18 in New Jersey and have dinner at McDonald’s (that was the closest one), where hamburgers were 15 cents and the sign out front said they had sold over 4 million of the things. And the Honda we saw that day…Dad and I were both smitten by the baby Dream, with its whitewall tires, bright red paint, and the young clean cut guy riding it. True to Honda’s tagline, he seemed to be one of the nicest people you could ever meet (although admittedly the bar wasn’t very high for nice people in New Jersey).

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Dad and I started looking into Hondas, and that included a trip to Cooper’s Cycle Ranch near Trenton. Back then, it really was a ranch, or at least a farm of some sort…the showroom was Sherm Cooper’s old barn. The little Hondas were cool, but the big ones (the 305s) were even cooler. A 305 was the biggest Honda available in the mid-1960s and Honda imported three 305cc motorcycles to America: The CA 77 Dream, the CB 77 Super Hawk, and the CL 77 Scrambler. The Dream was not designed to be an off road motorcycle (that was the CL 77 Scrambler’s domain) or a performance motorcycle (in the Honda world, that was the CB 77 Super Hawk).

Of the 305 twins, It’s probably appropriate to discuss the CA 77 Dream first. The Scrambler and the Super Hawk were intended to appeal to motorcycle enthusiasts; the Dream was a much less intimidating ticket in (into the motorcycle world, that is). The typical Dream buyer was either someone stepping up from a smaller Honda, or someone who had not previously owned a motorcycle.

Honda first used the name “Dream” on its 1949 Model D (a single cylinder, 98cc two-stroke). No one knows for sure where the Dream moniker came from, but legend has it that someone, upon first seeing the Model D, proclaimed it to look like a dream. The C-series Dreams first emerged in Japan in 1957. Pops Yoshimura built Honda engines with modified production parts that ran over 10,000 rpm for 18-hour endurance races, proving the basic design was robust. Some say Honda based the engine design on an earlier NSU engine, but Honda unquestionably carried the engineering across the finish line. Whatever. When’s the last time you saw an NSU? Another big plus was that Honda used horizontally split cases and that (along with vastly superior quality) essentially eliminated oil leaks. The other guys (and in those days, that meant Harley and the Britbikes) had vertically split cases and they all leaked. Honda motorcycles did not, and that was a big deal for a motorcycle in the 1960s.

There were several differences between the Dream and the other two Honda 305cc motorcycles. The Super Hawk and the Scrambler had tubular steel frames and forks; the Dream used pressed steel for both its frame and fork. The Dream was a single-carb motorcycle; the Super Hawk and the Scrambler had twin carbs. The Dream had large steel valanced fenders, the other Hondas had more sporting abbreviated fenders. The Dream was the only 305 that came from the Honda factory with whitewall tires. The Dream had leading link front suspension; the Scrambler and the Super Hawk had telescopic forks. The Dream used the Type II crankshaft (so did the Scrambler) with a 360-degree firing order (both pistons went up and down together, but the cylinders fired alternately). The higher performance Super Hawk had the Type I, 180-degree crankshaft. Like the Super Hawk, the Dream had electric starting (the Scrambler was kick start only). The Dream came with a kickstarter, too, but why bother? I mean, you weren’t going to be mistaken for Marlon Brando when you rode a Honda Dream.

The Dream’s 305cc engine had a single 23mm Keihin carb and it produced 23 horsepower at 7500 rpm (not that the rpm was of any interest; the Dream had no tachometer). With its four-speed transmission and according to magazine test results, the Dream was good for between 80 and 100 mph (depending on motojournalist weight, I guess). The Dream averaged around 50 mpg, although in those blissful days of $0.28/gallon gasoline, nobody really cared. Honda Dreams came in white, black, red, or blue. With 20/20 hindsight, I wish I had bought one in each color and parked them in the garage. My favorites were black or white; those colors just seemed to work with the Dream’s whitewall tires.

Honda built the Dream until 1969. The Dream retailed for $595 back in those days, but a shrewd negotiator could do better.

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The Wayback Machine: Later, Gator…

By Joe Berk

I had a tough time choosing a title for this blog. I went with what you see above because it reminds me of one of my favorite Dad jokes…you know, the one about how you tell the difference between a crocodile and an alligator. If you don’t see it for a while, it’s a crocodile. If you see it later, well, then it’s a gator. The other choice might have been the old United Negro College Fund pitch: A Mine is a Terrible Thing to Waste. But if I went with that one I might be called a racist, which seems to be the default response these days anytime anyone disagrees with anyone else about anything.

Gresh likes hearing my war stories. Not combat stories, but stories about the defense industry. I never thought they were all that interesting, but Gresh is easily entertained and he’s a good traveling buddy, so I indulge him on occasion. Real war stories…you know how you can tell them from fairy tales? A fairy tale starts out with “once upon a time.” A war story starts out with “this is no shit, you guys…”

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So, this is a “no shit” story. It sounds incredible, but it’s all true. I was an engineer at Aerojet Ordnance, and I made my bones analyzing cluster bomb failures. They tell me I’m pretty good at it (I wrote a book about failure analysis, I still teach industry and gubmint guys how to analyze complex systems failures, and I sometimes work as an expert witness in this area). It pays the rent and then some.

So this deal was on the Gator mine system, which was a real camel (you know, a horse designed by a committee). The Gator mine system was a Tri-Service program (three services…the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force). It was officially known as the CBU-89/B cluster munition (CBU stands for Cluster Bomb Unit). The way it worked is instead of having to go out and place the mines manually, an airplane could fly in and drop a couple of these things, the bombs would open on the way down and dispense their mines (each cluster bomb contained 94 mines), the mines would arm, and voila, you had a minefield. Just like that.

It sounds cool, but the Gator was a 20-year-old turkey that couldn’t pass the first article test (you had to build two complete systems and the Air Force would drop them…if the mines worked at a satisfactory level, you could start production). The UNCF slogan notwithstanding, the folks who had tried to take this Tri-Service camel and build it to the government’s design wasted a lot of mines. In 20 years, several defense contractors had taken Gator production contracts, and every one of them failed the first article flight test. When my boss’s boss decided we would bid it at Aerojet, I knew two things: We, too, would fail the first article flight test, and it would end up in my lap. I was right on both counts. We built the flight test units per the government design and just like every one else, we failed with a disappointing 50% mine function rate. And I got the call to investigate why.

So, let’s back up a couple of centuries. You know, we in the US get a lot of credit for pioneering mass production. Rightly so, I think, but most folks are ignorant about what made it possible. Nope, it wasn’t Henry Ford and his Model T assembly line. It was something far more subtle, and that’s the concept of parts interchangeability. Until parts interchangeability came along (which happened about a hundred years before old Henry did his thing), you couldn’t mass produce anything. And to make parts interchangeable, you had to have two numbers for every part dimension: The nominal dimension, and a tolerance around that dimension. When we say we have a 19-inch wheel, for example, that’s the nominal dimension. There’s also a ± tolerance (that’s read plus or minus) associated with that 19-inch dimension. If the wheel diameter tolerance was ±0.005 inches, the wheel might be anywhere from 18.995 to 19.005 inches. Some tolerances are a simple ± number, others are a + something and a – something if the tolerance band is not uniform (like you see in the drawing below). But everything has a tolerance because you can’t always make parts exactly to the nominal dimension.

Where companies get sloppy is they do a lousy job assigning tolerances to nominal dimensions, and they do an even worse job analyzing the effects of the tolerances when parts are built at the tolerance extremes. Analyzing these effects is called tolerance analysis. Surprisingly, most engineering schools don’t teach it, and perhaps not so surprisingly, most companies don’t do it. All this has been a very good thing for me, because I get to make a lot of money analyzing the failures this kind of engineering negligence causes. In fact, the cover photo on my failure analysis book is an x-ray of an aircraft emergency egress system that failed because of negligent tolerancing (which killed two Navy pilots when their aircraft caught fire).

I don’t think people consciously think about this and decide they don’t need to do tolerance analysis. I think they don’t do it because it is expensive and in many cases their engineers do not have the necessary skills. At least, they don’t do it initially. In production, when they have failures some companies are smart enough to return to the tolerancing issue. That’s when they do the tolerance analysis they should have done during the design phase, and they find they have tolerance accumulations that can cause a problem.

Anyway, back to the Gator mine system. The Gator system had a dispenser (a canister) designed by the Air Force, the mines were designed by the Army, and the system had an interface kit designed by the Navy. Why they did it this way, I have no idea. It was about as dumb an approach for a development program as I have ever seen. Your tax dollars at work, I guess.

The Navy’s Gator interface kit positioned the mines within the dispenser and sent an electronic pulse from the dispenser to the mines when it was time to start the mine arming sequence. This signal went from coils in the interface kit to matching coils in each mine (there was no direct connection; the electric pulse passed from the interface kit coils to the mine coils). You can see these coils in the photo below (they are the copper things).

In our first article flight test at Eglin Air Force Base, only about 50% of the mines worked. That was weird, because when we tested the mines one at a time, they always worked. I had a pretty good feeling that the mines weren’t getting the arming signal. The Army liked that concept a lot (they had design responsibility for the mines), but the Air Force and the Navy were eyeing me the way a chicken might view Colonel Sanders.

I started asking questions about the tolerancing in the Navy’s part of the design, because I thought if the coils were not centered directly adjacent to the matching coils in each mine, the arming signal wouldn’t make it to the mine. The Navy, you see, had the responsibility for the stuffing that held the mines in place and for the coils that brought the arming signal to the mines.

At a big meeting with the engineering high rollers from all three services, I floated this idea of coil misalignment due to tolerance accumulation. The Navy guy basically went berserk and told me it could never happen. His reaction was so extreme I knew I had to be on to something (in a Shakespearian methinks the lady doth protest too much sort of way). At this point, both the Army and Air Force guys were smiling. The Navy guy was staring daggers at me. You could almost see smoke coming out his ears. He was a worm, I was the hook, and we were going fishing. And we both knew it.

I asked the Navy engineer directly how much misalignment would prevent signal transmission, he kept telling me it couldn’t happen, and I kept pressing for a number: How much coil misalignment would it take? Finally, the Navy dude told me there would have to be at least a quarter of an inch misalignment between the Navy coils and those in the mine. I don’t think he really knew, but he was throwing out a number to make it look like he did. At that point, I was pretty sure I had him. I looked at my engineering design manager and he left the room. Why? To do a tolerance analysis, of course. Ten minutes later he was back with the numbers that showed the Navy’s interface kit tolerances could allow way more than a quarter inch of misalignment.

When I shared that with the guys in our Tri-Service camel committee, the Navy guy visibly deflated. His 20-year secret was out. The Army and the Air Force loved it (they both hated the Navy, and they really hated the Navy engineer).

We tightened the tolerances in our production and built two more cluster bombs. I was at the load plant to oversee the load, assemble, and pack operation, and when we flight tested my two cluster bombs with live drops from an F-16 we had a 100% mine function rate (which had never been achieved before). That allowed us to go into production and we made a ton of money on the Gator program. I’m guessing that Navy weasel still hates me.

It’s hard to believe this kind of stuff goes on, but it does. I’ve got lots of stories with similar tolerance-induced recurring failures, and maybe I’ll share another one or two here at some point. Ask me about the Apache main rotor blade failures sometime…that’s another good one and I’ll post a blog about it in the next week or so.

Stay tuned, my friends.

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ExNotes Stock Car Racing Review: Vado Park Speedway, New Mexico

Sometimes the story you set out to write doesn’t want to be written. Something is wrong, there’s no ju-ju, there’s no vibe, or in this particular case, there are no decent photos. I have an expensive Canon 5D that takes beautiful racing photos and I have a pretty good 300mm zoom lens with selectable, 2-axis stabilization. It’s not a professional lens by any means but it can do a fairly good job if you’re steady enough and don’t shoot at nighttime. The problem with the 5D and 300mm lens combo is that it weighs a ton and I don’t like carrying the thing around.

Anyway, it’s foolish pride on my part to try and capture the moment because as soon as I stop to think about a camera it’s not a moment any more. It becomes staged. It seems phony and something like grasping for the shot that will make the story. I don’t want to be a photojournalist and I never was. I learned the basic operation of a camera only because photos were a necessary evil in order to sell a story to magazines.

Oh, how I envy Cameron and Egan. Man, those guys have it made. They write their columns propped up on six pillows in an overstuffed bed between 1000-count Egyptian cotton sheets while green-skinned slave girls serve wine and grapes as they type each 600-word, 10,000-dollar column. And they do it without photos. Sometimes the magazine’s art director will tack on a few squiggly line drawings for the folks that need a picture. When I read their stuff I don’t miss the photos one bit.

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Since I’ve pretty much given up on cranking out content for paper magazines, I find myself wanting to enjoy the story in real time. I want to live the story, absorb all the sounds, sights and smells, and then write about it later. Events may not be recorded exactly as they happened but they record what happened to me. At least I imagine it happened to me. Memories are funny things; each of us views the world looking out from different eyes.

Still, websites are a visual medium and photos do make the page look better. They also attract readers. For the Vado races I brought along the little Canon S100, a higher-end point and shoot camera not much bigger than a cell phone. I thought I could get a few photos good enough to use for this story but the shutter lag was hard to plan for. I’d press the release and a second later the camera would take the photo. In racing things move a long way in a second. Annoyingly, the auto focus kept locking on the barrier fence instead of the cars behind the fence. I have a bunch of really sharp shots of the fence

My first attempts were a mess. The S100 needed the shutter sped up and to do that it needed a higher ISO setting. And then the auto focus had to be disabled in the menu. All these settings required scrolling through the various menu pages or pushing buttons and turning dials, which I had forgotten how to do. Switching the S100 from regular stabilization to panning stabilization took twenty-three keystrokes to accomplish. For the same task on the Canon 5D you just flip a switch.

A man’s got to know his camera and the seductive lure of the cell phone has caused my camera skills to atrophy. While I was staring down into the S100’s tiny screen life was happening all around me. I turned off the camera, put it in my pocket and decided to watch the races.

The whole reason we were at the races in the first place was because of the Sylings. The Sylings are friends of ours who live in Alamogordo. They are forever going on fun outings then putting cheerful, Team Syling posts on Facebook. CT and I decided it would be a good thing to be more like Team Syling so we are making an effort to do fun things around New Mexico. The trip to Vado Speedway was CT’s birthday present/Team Syling adventure. I don’t want you to get the idea I’m not romantic; I also bought her a 12-gauge Mossberg pump shotgun.

Vado Speedway is a fairly new track about 15 miles south of Las Cruces, New Mexico. You can see it from Interstate 10. The track looks small but they claim it’s 3/8th of a mile. Maybe the outside is 3/8 mile. It’s a dirt track, like God intended us to race on, and the corners are banked. The straights are short but the track is wide enough to allow plenty of passing. There are two lines at Vado: the high line and the low line. Both have their advantages but late in the evening the low line became very bumpy at the apex of the corner. Cars were bouncing up on two wheels in the rough. Most of the fast guys stayed up high where it was smooth, only dropping down to block a rival. As the evening wore on cars started to use the outside wall as a contact point like a slot car dragging the rails.

Stock car racing has changed a lot since the seemingly unlimited supply of Chevelles dried up. The night we went all the classes looked like Super Modified. There were no stock bodied cars. The lowest class cars are beat up sheet metal concoctions that look like something a child of three would draw when asked to draw a car. They resemble station wagons with large panels of metal aft to act as air dams. Think of the last outlaw sprint car race you went to with those giant billboard wings on top. It’s the same idea. The front wheels ran exposed on some of the cars. I don’t remember what they were named but in my day this class would be called the Sportsman class except for the homemade bodies.

The next step up from the flapping, crashing station wagon class was more station wagons. For all I could tell it was the same class, maybe “A” to the previous “B.” This class would have been called Late Models when I was going to stock car races back in the days when the planet Mars could still support life. These cars looked like the ratty-class cars but were built much better. The sheet metal was straighter and it didn’t flap around or fall off. The paint jobs and lettering were nicer and they crashed less. Besides being uglier than old style stock cars the Late Models’ engines sounded crisper and revved faster than the other, looser station wagons.

The top-tier division, known to me as Super Modifieds, were really nice cars. You could tell the owners had a ton of money in them, probably as much or more than a NASCAR stock car. They were fast and didn’t crash very often. The Super Modified cars didn’t look like station wagons but they still had acres of sheet metal on the side to assist with corners. All the wheels were covered by bodywork. NASCAR driver Kyle Larson was racing in the Super Modifieds with a Hendricks car and he did fairly well. He got a Main Event second place finish against drivers that spend their entire career in this specialized form of competition.

The racing was very close and heats were frequent. All the classes had several heat races to determine which cars made the main event and the grids were well populated. Driver/teams from Kansas, Wyoming, Illinois, California and other states attended. The stands were another story. When CT bought our tickets she was told they were sold out of general admission so she bought reserved seats. After everyone was seated the grandstands looked about 60% full. Maybe the cold, night air kept spectators away.

When the racing was over the announcers thanked the track owner for keeping stock car racing alive. Whenever you hear that sort of talk it’s not a good sign. South-Central New Mexico used to have a stock car track in Tularosa, another a few miles away near Alamogordo, one on Highway 9 west of Sunland Park near the border with Mexico, and I think Deming might still have a track and maybe El Paso.

Stock car tracks used to be everywhere. Where I grew up there was a track in Medly and one just across the Miami River in Hialeah. Those tracks are gone now. I wonder if dirt oval tracks are disappearing all over America. I believe part of the reason for grass roots oval racing’s decline is that none of the cars racing are related in any way to the cars found in the parking lot. That is if you can find a car in the parking lot. Today everyone drives bloated SUVs or pickup trucks.

Then there’s the high bar of entry into the sport. Even those ratty station wagons require a lot of work to build. Maybe the demise of cheap, rear-wheel drive sedans is part of the problem. The class structure never adapted to new realities in the marketplace. Look how NASCAR’s rigid rules have created a situation where you can buy a box stock Dodge, Chevy or Ford off the showroom floor with more horsepower than a NASCAR contender. I know the old time stock cars shared few common parts with the cars they resembled but at least they resembled them and had engines you could check off on the dealer’s option page.

Finally, the “Car of Tomorrow” eliminated the last tentacles connecting the cars on the track and the car you drove to the track. Now all the bodywork is the same and only paint creates the illusion of several brands. The situation is probably not as bad as I’m making it sound. I’ve gotten grumpy as I got old. I liked it when stock car racing was the most exciting thing happening on a Saturday night.

I’ll be back to Vado Park Speedway. Later in the year they are hosting USRA Modifieds, which look a lot like old style stock cars. Then there are the winged and un-winged Sprint cars along with Super Trucks. We all need to do our part to keep this uniquely American form of racing alive. Hopefully a new generation will get interested in stock cars and start racing cheap, two liter, front-wheel drive sedans around those well groomed dirt ovals. I know a couple unused tracks nearb. Just add drivers.

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The Wayback Machine: Marking Time

By Joe Berk

I’ve always been a watch guy. It probably started when my parents surprised me with a Timex when I was a kid. The thought of having my own wristwatch was heady stuff for a boy back on the east coast (or anywhere else, I imagine). To make a long story short, I’ve been a watch collector ever since. I don’t specialize, and many times I won’t keep a watch forever. If I like the way a watch looks and it’s not crazy expensive, I’ll wear it for a while, with the duration of “a while” usually determined by the time it takes for the next interesting thing to catch my eye.

The real deal: Apollo 15 Astronaut Dave Scott’s Bulova, which sold for a cool $1.625 million at auction.

I make no excuses: I like watches, and I always wonder about guys who don’t wear them. Not wearing a watch is a common thing with young guys today. When I taught in Cal Poly’s College of Engineering, one of my topics focused on how to do well in an interview. My guidance was simple. Dress sharply, be early, look the interviewer right in the eye, speak up, don’t use the word “like” incessantly when you speak, and wear a watch. A lot of kids today don’t wear watches. If they have any interest in knowing what time it is, they look at their iPhone. That’s a no go, I’d tell my students. If you don’t wear a watch, the person interviewing you will conclude you have no sense of time-based urgency. It’s what I always concluded when someone showed up not wearing a watch.

Anyway, to get to the subject of this blog, I want to tell you about the Bulova Lunar Pilot. It’s a cool piece with an interesting story that goes like this: With the advent of the Apollo lunar exploration program (the NASA endeavor to put men on the moon), the US government decided we needed an official space watch. Omega won the competition with their Speedmaster watch, and for the next 14 missions, that’s what astronauts wore.

Here’s where it gets complicated and where the story gets Internet-fuzzy. Depending on which source you believe, Astronaut Dave Scott wore a Bulova watch on the Apollo 15 mission for one of the following reasons:

He wore the Bulova watch because his Omega broke.
He wore the Bulova watch because he felt like it.
He wore the Bulova watch because Bulova was trying to replace Omega as the official NASA watch.
He wore the watch because the US government, Bulova, or other parties wanted the official watch to be something made in America.

Whatever the reason (and you can find stories supporting each of the above floating around in that most authoritative of all sources, the Internet), Dave Scott wore the Bulova on the Apollo 15 mission, and Omega went from being “the only watch worn on the moon” to “the first watch worn on the moon.” It could not have gone over well at the Omega factory.

Dave Scott’s original Bulova, the one he wore on the moon, sold at auction a few years ago. The predicted auction price was $50,000. As predictions go, it wasn’t a very good one. When the gavel came down and the dust cleared, Scott’s Bulova sold for a cool $1.3 million. Throw in the auction commission and other fees, and you’re talking about a $1.625-million wristwatch. Wowee!

Bulova, today no longer an American watch company (they were bought by Citizen a few years ago) recognized a marketing opportunity when it fell into their laps, and they re-issued an internally updated version of Scott’s watch as the Bulova Lunar Pilot, complete with a 262 kHz Accutron movement. I have no idea what a 262 kHz movement is, except that the Bulova marketing hype tells me it means it’s super accurate.

The not-so-real deal, but a hell of a deal nonetheless: The Bulova Lunar Pilot, purchased for just under $300. Yep, as I type this, I’m wearing my Bulova.

The increased accuracy really didn’t matter to me when I saw the watch (I’m retired now and I seldom need 262 kHz accuracy when I decide I feel like going somewhere), so that’s not what prompted me to pull the trigger. I just like the way it looks, I like the swirl of stories around the original Bulova moon watch, and my Dad wore a Bulova when I was a kid.

Oh, one other thing helped…a trick that has prompted me to pull the trigger on other discretionary purposes. You know how the Internet spies on us, right? I mean, folks complain all the time about looking at something on Amazon or whatever and then it starts showing up in their Facebook feed. That’s not always a bad thing. When I first looked at the Bulova Lunar Pilot it was a $600 bauble. I wasn’t going to pay that kind of money, and I guess the spymasters/Internet marketeers figured that one out. They and I knew it was a waiting game to see who would blink first. Because I had looked for the watch on Amazon, I started getting emails from different retailers to buy the watch for less, and I let those roll in. Delete, delete, delete, and then one day, an offer floated into my inbox for $299. Hmmm. Delete. And sure enough, a day or two later and that $299 offer came with a coupon for $20 off and free shipping on my first order. Ka ching!

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Lee’s Classic Turret Press and the S&W Shield: Range Results

By Joe Berk

Check out that photo above. It’s a flat dark earth Smith and Wesson M&P 9 Shield, with ammo reloaded using the Lee Classic Turret Press Kit. Yep, this is a “two-fer” blog: A first look at the Shield, and an evaluation of the first loads prepped with the Lee Classic Turret Press Kit.

I initially tried two loads in the Shield:

- - 124-grain plated roundnose Rainier bullets and 5.2 grains of Accurate No. 5 powder.
  - 124-grain plated roundnose Rainier bullets and 5.6 grains of Accurate No. 5 powder.

I wanted to start low and work up, partly because that’s good reloading practice and partly because the Shield was new to me and I didn’t know how it would work and what it would like. The first reduced load (5.2 grains of Accurate No. 5 and a 124-grain plated bullet) wouldn’t cycle the Shield’s action. I fired 50 rounds this way, one at a time. I’d have to pull the slide back and release it after each shot. For the Shield portion of the evaluation, I knew I needed to bump up the load. For the ammo portion of the evaluation, every load fed and fired flawlessly. The Lee turret press had done its job.

Bumping up to the 5.6 grains of Accurate No. 5 (still with the 124-grain plated bullet), the Shield’s action cycled but a couple of times the slide closed after the last round in the magazine fired. I fired 50 rounds in this test, loading 5 rounds in the Shield’s magazine each time. The Shield was pushing the slide back far enough to strip off a new round, but on two magazine loadings the slide did not go far enough back to engage the slide stop after the last round. I needed to bump the charge a scosh more. For the ammo eval, every load fed, fired, and ejected flawlessly. Again, the Lee turret press had done its job.

The Lee Classic Turret Press, a phenomenal value and a great reloading setup.

At this point, I knew I needed to go a little higher on the powder charge with the 124-grain plated bullet, and I knew the Lee Classic Turret Press was making good ammo. Everything fed and there were no jams.

The first rounds loaded to an overall cartridge length of 1.610 inches. I later moved that back to 1.140 inches.

I loaded the above 9mm ammo to an overall length of 1.160 inches, which is longer than I usually load 9mm. The Lee manual has the cartridge overall length with a plated 124-grain Rainier bullet at 1.169 inches. The cartridges would go in the Shield’s magazine and they fed fine when shooting, but when loading them in the magazine, the first cartridge tended to go horizontal instead of being angled up as others were loaded on top of it. That hung up the magazine while cartridges were being loaded into it. In the past, I had normally loaded 9mm at around 1.120 to 1.130 inches overall length. I decided that for my next load I would go up to 5.8 grains of Accurate No. 5, and I would seat the bullets for an overall cartridge length of 1.140 inches. I went home and in 20 minutes I had loaded another 50 rounds. That Lee Classic Turret is fast.

50 rounds of custom-crafted 9mm ammo created on the Lee Classic Turret Press.

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When I returned to the West End Gun Club, I set up a target at 50 feet, took out the Shield, and loaded the first magazine. Loading to a cartridge overall length of 1.140 made it easier to load the magazine. So far, so good.

Next, I fired 20 rounds to assess the ammo’s functionality. Everything worked perfectly. Every round fed, every round ejected, and life was good. The Shield’s bright fixed sights were printing a bit to the left, so I held to the right on a fresh target and rattled off 30 rounds.

Thirty rounds at 50 feet from the Shield. Not too shabby for a belly gun.

The Shield’s recoil was not at all uncomfortable; it was way better than a .38 snubnose revolver. The Shield is a very light pistol (19.0 ounces). That’s lighter than the S&W Model 60 (23.2 ounces) or a Compact 1911 (33.4 ounces). Those weights for the 1911 and the Model 60 may not sound like a lot, but (trust me on this) it’s enough to weigh on you at the end of the day. I guess the Shield’s light weight is the big advantage of a Tupperware gun. I like it, and I like the fact that the gun is pleasant to shoot.

A few days later, I was on an indoor range and I set up the Alco target that has four mini-silhouettes on a single sheet. I ran it out to 21 feet and put 50 rounds on target (dividing them roughly between the four targets), all shot offhand while standing. The load was the same as the one mentioned above. That’s 5.8 grains of Accurate No. 5 and a 124-grain plated Rainier roundnose bullet at an overall cartridge length of 1.140 inches, and for these, I used mixed brass.

The quad mini-silhouette from Alco Target in Monrovia, California, and 50 rounds fired standing at 7 yards.

I also tried two different powder-coated bullets with Accurate No. 5. One was the 147-grain Boudreau flat nosed bullet with 4.8 grains of Accurate No. 5. This is an accurate load in the Shield (even more so than the plated bullet load mentioned above), but it leaded the bore. The other was the Boudreau 124-grain round nose bullet with 5.4 grains of Accurate No. 5; it, too, leaded the bore. The plated bullets did not lead the bore at all so I think they are a better load. I loaded more 147-grain powder coated bullets with a lighter charge to see if that would eliminate the bore leading, but they did not and I had cycling issues. 4.8 grains of Accurate No. 5 is what this 147-grain powder coated bullet wants.

The Shield with 124-grain powder coated roundnose bullets. These leaded the bore.

147-grain powder coated bullets. These, too, leaded the bore. They are accurate, though.

Another Alco quad mini-silhouette with 5-shot groups fired standing at 7 yards, this time with the 147-grain powder coated Boudreau bullet and 4.8 grains of Accurate No. 5.

Let’s talk about the Shield a bit. My Shield is the first iteration (not the Shield 2.0, as that model is not sold in California). The Shield has a 3 1/8-inch barrel.

The Shield’s 8-round magazine. The left arrow points to the spacer. It can slide up, as indicated by the right arrow.

The Shield’s magazine could be better. It has a plastic spacer at the bottom, and that spacer rides up when loading the magazine. Conceivably, it could interfere with seating the magazine in the gun. In my opinion it is a poor design. The collar slides down as easy as it slides up, so that’s good. You get two mags with the Shield. The one you see above holds 8 rounds and it has a grip extender that feels just right to me. There’s another one that doesn’t have the grip extender and it holds 7 rounds. I haven’t done anything with that one, other than checking to make sure it was in the box when I bought the gun.

The Shield’s sights are the best I’ve ever used. They are bright and easy to see. The sights let in light from the sides, and that design just flat works. It’s the first gun I have ever shot with these sights. They are better than my SIG P226s’s Tritium sights, and those sights are good. The photo below isn’t enhanced; it’s what the Smith’s sights actually look like.

The Shield’s sights. They are the best I’ve ever used.

The Shield’s trigger, in a word, is terrible. There are other triggers available for the Shield, but I will leave this one alone. The trigger got a little better with use and a couple of cleanings (I’ve put about 600 rounds through the Shield so far). The Shield is a striker-fired gun and the trigger is not what I would consider good, but it’s better than it was initially. Compared to a good 1911 like the Springfield, it’s awful. But, it’s good enough to get rounds on target (as you can see above).

The Shield’s slide release, out of the box, was super stiff and essentially unusable. I could release the slide with two thumbs, but not with one. I found it best to pull the slide back and let it go to release the slide. This aspect of the design (or its execution) is poor, and requiring two hands to release the slide is not good for a defensive weapon. A close examination of the slide stop showed that it was rough where it interfaced with the slide, so I judiciously worked it over with 600-grit sandpaper, and it releases more easily now. I can release it with one thumb with no magazine in the gun, but it still takes two thumbs and a lot of effort with the mag inserted and that’s bad. It’s surprising that Smith and Wesson would let this happen.

A SIG P226, the Smith and Wesson Shield, and a Springfield Armory 1911, all chambered in 9mm. Flat dark earth is the new black.

I had the SIG and my 1911 with me when I shot the Shield. The Shield doesn’t look that much smaller in a group photo, but it is flatter and it will carry concealed better. In subsequent blogs, I’ll explore different loads prepared on the Lee Classic Turret press fired in all three of the guns above. I fired a few rounds through the Springfield, and they worked just fine; the same is true for the SIG P226. Interestingly, the lighter loads that wouldn’t work in the Shield did work in the Springfield. It’s counterintuitive, but compact handguns are tougher to make work well than are full size handguns. That’s because the recoil spring in a compact handgun has to be much stiffer than one in a full size gun.

The Shield’s sear deactivation lever. You have to push it down to remove the slide and barrel.

To takedown the Shield, you do not simply unlock the slide takedown lever. There’s a sear deactivation release in the magazine well (identified with a red arrow in the photo above), and you have to push that down before you can turn the slide takedown lever for disassembly. You can’t do it with your finger; you need a small screwdriver or a thin pen. With the SIG, you just turn the slide takedown lever with the slide back.

Cleaning the Shield is a breeze. You make sure the gun is unloaded, release the mag, lower the sear deactivation lever, rotate the slide takedown lever, and the gun comes apart. The slide comes off the frame, and the spring subassembly and barrel come out. That’s it. Five parts (the magazine, the receiver, the barrel, the spring subassembly, and the slide.

The plated ammo I loaded on the Lee turret press didn’t lead at all. Zero. Zip. Nada. The powder coated bullets did, which surprised me. All were accurate.

The bottom line? Let me put it this way: I like the Shield; I love the Lee Classic Turret Press kit. The Shield will get better with more shooting and I want to try more loads in it, but that 5.8-grains of Accurate No.5 and 124-grain plated Rainier roundnose load is a winner. The Lee Classic Turret press and all its accessories were good to go right from the beginning. Its design and quality are excellent.

The Lee Classic Turret Press…what can I say? It’s awesome. It’s fast, easy to use, inexpensive, and it makes great ammo. I say it’s the best bang for the buck in the reloading world. As an engineer I’m impressed; as a consumer and reloader I am delighted. I have already fired several hundred rounds loaded on the Lee Classic Turret Press in my Shield, the Springfield, and the SIG and once I settled on a load, every one of them fed, fired, extracted, and ejected perfectly in three different handguns. I had a box of 1000 124-grain plated 9mm bullets a few days ago; I like the Lee turret press so much they’re all gone now (they were either sent downrange or they’ve been loaded and labeled and they’re waiting their turn to go downrange). I love reloading and shooting; I love it even more now that I’m loading with my Lee turret press.

A word of caution here…these loads performed acceptably in my guns. Your firearms may vary and you need to develop your own loads. Always start low and work up in any load development program.

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More Tales of the Gun!

More information on Lee reloading gear.

Our earlier blogs on Lee equipment:

Lee Safety Prime
Lee Auto-Drum Powder Measure
Lee Classic Turret Press Kit
Lee Bench Plate
Lee’s Modern Reloading Manual
Lee Safety Powder Scale
Lee Classic Turret Kit Unpacking
Lee .44 Magnum Dies 1
Lee .44 Magnum Dies 2
Lee .44 Magnum Dies 3
Lee .357 Magnum Dies

The World’s Greatest Furniture Salesman

By Joe Berk

I’ve always loved Triumphs and I always thought they were not only the coolest bikes around but also the best bang for the buck. I rode Triumphs in the ’60s and ’70s when they were air-cooled and I rode them when they were made by Hinckley. I always thought the ’65 Bonneville was the best looking motorcycle there could ever be until the Speed Triple came along and took that title. But the one that stole my heart was my ’06 Triumph Tiger in Caspian blue. I loved everything about that motorcycle. Seeing Bobbie Surber’s Tiger has me thinking about my Tiger again.

My Tiger in Baja. We both spent a lot of time patrolling the peninsula.

I wasn’t planning to buy a new motorcycle when I walked into Doug Douglas Motorcycles in 2006 and saw the one that would become mine. But none other than old Doug Douglas himself noticed how I reacted to it. Doug knew his business, and he told me he’d sell it to me for whatever the number was, which seemed like a reasonable deal. Reasonable, however, was not the adjective that was governing my thought process when I saw that motorcycle, and Doug recognized that. I gave Doug the only response I could think of at the time, which was: I’ll take it.

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Sue hit the roof when I came home and told her she needed to give me a ride back to Doug’s to pick up a new motorcycle. She stayed upset longer than usual when I told her how much it cost and that I would be taking the money out of the checking account. “What happened to the money you got from selling your Suzuki?” she demanded. It was more of an accusation then a question.

I had to think for a minute, and then I remembered. “That mother-of-pearl and onyx bracelet I bought for you…I used the money I got for the TL to buy it” I said, and Susie mellowed. Visibly. It was like de-arming an IED. “Oh,” was all she said, and then she was her usual cheery self.

When we arrived at Douglas Motorcycles, the tempest was over. I introduced Susie to Doug and she said, “You must be the world’s greatest motorcycle salesman…my husband told me he took your first offer, and he never does that…”

Doug smiled. “Oh, I’ve sold a few motorcycles,” he said, “but that’s not my real strength. My real strength is furniture. I am the world’s greatest furniture salesman.”

Stopping to let the fog blow over along Baja’s Transpeninsular Highway enroute to Bahia de Los Angeles.

Sue was perplexed, as was I. Had I missed something? Did Doug Douglas Motorcycles have another wing that sold furniture?

“Yeah,” Doug continued, “there are a lot of couples who bought new bedroom furniture and new dining room sets when the husband came home and told the wife he bought a new motorcycle from me…”

Riding Baja? Insure with the best. We always do.

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The Wayback Machine: Ossa Pioneer

By Joe Gresh

I must have been around 15 years old the first time I saw an Ossa Pioneer. It was at Haines City motocross track. Mike Mills’ mom was divorced and her boyfriend gave us a ride way out to Chrome Avenue in his boat tail Buick Riviera . What a car! The Riviera smelled great inside not only because it was new, but because the boyfriend wore cologne. This was the first time I had been around a grown man that used cologne. All the other adult men I had known up to that point smelled like dirty socks. I smell like dirty socks right now.

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“Burn the tires, c’mon!” we pleaded. It was a strange experience sitting in the plush, perfumed Riviera as the big V-8 engine effortlessly spun the tires into clouds of cotton candy. “Want to stop at the hobby store to pick up some sniffing glue, boys?” Damn we laughed and had fun with that guy. He treated us like equals, like he cared what we had to say. I wish I could remember his name. It was like going to the motocross races with Hugh Heffner.

He drove 90 miles per hour every chance he got and it wasn’t long before he was dropping us at the motocross track. He spun the Buick around and said, “I’ll be back at five.” And then lit the tires up again on Chrome Avenue. He was exactly what we wanted to be when we grew up.

Mostly Bultacos and Maicos were racing in Haines City back then but one guy had an Ossa Pioneer with the lights removed. The rider was good. He would get crossed up over the jumps and finished in the top 5 against real race bikes. I loved how the rear fender blended into the bike. That fiberglass rear section had a small storage area inside. One of the bike magazines of the era tossed a loose spark plug in the storage and went scrambling. The plug beat a hole in the rear fender and they had the nerve to bitch about it. Hell, I knew at 10 that you have to wrap stuff in rags on a motorcycle.

It rains most everyday in Florida and it started pouring. The races kept going for a while but finally had to be called because it was a deluge. You could hardly see to walk. There was no cover so we huddled in the leeward side of the ticket stand out by the entrance. It rained harder, the wind was howling. Wearing only shorts and T-shirts we were getting colder and colder. My lips were turning blue, man.

It was like Niagara Falls, a solid sheet of water that the Riviera emerged from. Man, I was so glad to see that car. “How were the races, boys?” Soaking wet and shivering we piled into the Riviera’s soft leather seats. I thought he’d get mad but boyfriend just laughed. You got the feeling he could go buy another Riviera if he wanted to.

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