I hope you like crap.
It’s received amazingly little attention. I guess all the other scandals are useful in that regard.
Update; Oh, it’s a parody site. There are parodies on Obama too. Does that mean he doesn’t exist? How about Fox News? But they tell nothing but lies, or maybe that’s a parody, so how about Forbes? OK, maybe they’re all lying. I haven’t been to Utah in a while. Do your own research.
The video posted here reminded me of something important.
This lept out at me like a cat with firecrackers exploding at its feet;
“The question is…how do we prevent people from committing crimes in the first place.”
No it isn’t. NO IT ISN’T!
The question IS; how do we protect liberty and dispense justice equally and reliably? The concept of crime prevention doesn’t even belong in the conversation, that is, if we’re talking about legislation, which we are.
How many people understand this? It’s there in that pledge, thingy; “…with liberty and justice for all.” Note the absence of any mention of crime prevention in the Pledge. You don’t find it in the declaration of Independence either, unless by “crime” we mean government overreach (in THAT case it’s in there, and I’m all ears if we’re having a conversation about preventing government overreach).
You can in theory have liberty and justice, OR you can have “crime prevention” legislation, but they cannot exist simultaneously. They’re mutually exclusive. The former defines a free state and the latter a police state.
The term “liberty and justice for all” takes crime as a given, a fact of life (if there’s no crime, there’s no need for a justice system). It’s an acknowledgement of the obvious – that people can do bad things. Because people can do bad things, we need our liberty protected and we demand justice. The term enshrines our right to self defense, free speech and all the rest, and promises a system of correct, organized, consistent and predictable retaliation (justice) for criminal acts.
I don’t think this is widely understood anymore. It certainly isn’t taught, and yet it is at the core of American Principle. Liberty and justice are two sides of the same coin. Crime prevention legislation is an entirely different coin, of a currency we want nothing to do with. I could say this a thousand different ways, but who gets it?
No, Little Grasshopper; crime prevention is the excuse of every police state. Having your rights respected and protected and having a proper justice system is the best condition of government you could ever ask. The prevention part is a combination of individual self defense and moral leadership, and neither of those are government business. That’s your job as a citizen. Crime prevention is your job. If it could be done with government force, (and all the worst places you can think of) would be crime free.
…and of mass killings, and most wars.
It has been the thesis on this blog that disarmament has lead to more death by violence than any other single factor. I submit that such an assertion misses a critical point.
This is hard to put into words. Criminals, evil, exists everywhere and in all times. What separates times of relative peace from times of chaos and mass death then? I submit that it is resolve. A state of mind.
Tam recently spoke of a seeming dichotomy between Europe’s tendency toward docility or complacency and Her capacity for mass killing on a grand scale. I say that they are the same thing.
The willingness to go along to get along, the fear of making waves, the unwillingness to stand up and draw a line in the sand, and more importantly the lack of understanding or embracing of basic principles…together, THAT is the cause of chaos and mass death. Disarmament, while critical to the end of mass killing, and being a virtual guarantee of it, is but a symptom of that cause. The criminal element need but wait for the time to strike, meanwhile preaching peace at the cost of freedom. That includes the criminal element that always lurks in the halls and offices of government.
How else do you explain a thousand Jews guarded by a pathetic few Germans, while no one organizes a rush against the guards to easily overpower them? It wasn’t merely the lack of arms, but the lack of hutzpah THAT RESULTED iN the lack of arms. This is currently the state of all of Europe, the UK, and it’s becoming the case in the U.S.
I recently heard a phrase that will stay with me for the rest of my life. “The most powerful weapon of the oppressor is the the mind of the oppressed.” — David Masters quoting Stephen Banta
Intimidation is in the mind of the intimidated, not in the mind or the hands of the bully. Guns are only a factor in the hands of those who aren’t easily intimidated. For the easily intimidated, guns are pretty well worthless. Discuss.
Later we can talk about who’s the more easily intimidated, the self sufficient individual or the desk jokey politician with a team of interns.
(of 3D printed gun fame)
On theBlaze TV last night. You can watch the video at the link there.
Of course, if you were a Blaze TV subscriber you’d have seen it, and much more, Monday night.
“We’re right and our opposition is wrong. When lobbying for a cause, make sure your cause is right and just and is historically supportable. Having it already enshrined in the constitution is a big plus. Otherwise, even huge amounts of money and millions of warm bodies are going to have a difficult time getting support for your provably wrong (and unconstitutional) ideas. There is no substitute for being right.”
There are cases wherein you can never “figure out” (by tactics alone) how a person or movement achieved a particular aim. The American Revolution comes to mind. Those without principles may look at it every which way they know how and never understand it, because they’re looking in the wrong places. You can study it all your life and never be able to apply it to your own cause. It can (and does) drive people quite insane.
No, Young Grasshopper; you can not have a pet cause that you want to shove down Americans’ throats, and then “study to see how the NRA did it”.
It is not so much the “how” as the “why”.
There seems to be some surprise and indignation at the idea that the IRS would be used as a weapon against political opponents. I don’t understand.
First; what did you expect from a communist administration? Really. Can you say, “DUUUH!”? Second; the entire tax code is a weapon of political power. Always has been. It is designed to nudge you into behaviors you’d not be engaged in if you were left to your own devices, and to nudge you out of other behaviors. The very concept of a progressive tax is a political weapon, designed to substantially reduce wealth creation and accumulation. Raising revenue is far down the list, or it is only an ancillary function of the tax code and the IRS. I could on and on, but you should have gotten the point by the time you received your very first paycheck.
The specific targeting of individuals and groups is nothing new at all either. The Clintons were famous for it. Rush Limbaugh has been getting audited every year for many years. The list is longer than this whole blog since its beginning.
A “Gosh, we’re sorry” will change nothing. The only solution, assuming anyone wants one, is to abolish the tax code, abolish the IRS and go to a single digit flat tax. Otherwise quit your bitching– this is exactly what you’ve been asking for. Begging for, actually. Don’t bother pretending to be surprised– it makes you look even more stupid.
For some reason I put together another AR. I’ve had a pretty nice Colt’s Match HBAR for years, but I thought a light carbine would be good to have around for kids, new shooters and such. My daughter might want it at some stage.
This new one is cobbled together from nearly as disparate a set of parts as is possible. I think every parts group is made by a different company. The aluminum, railed gas block, for example, was knocked out on an old Bridgeport mill by Some Dude in Moscow, Idaho– I had to mount it on the lathe and trim it down a bit to make it clear the floating handguard, which is a used piece off of Some Other Dude’s AR. It’s all assembled as a mock-up right now. Mostly new parts, some of the metal being in the white. I wanted to proof test it before taking it all apart again, bead blasting it and giving it a finish of some kind.
Since none of the working parts had ever fired a cartrige before, I cranked off four rounds with the carbine held at arm’s length, one-handed, into a hillside (the thought had come to mind that the thing could blow up, and if it was going to do that I wanted it to happen far away from my face). Perfect function. All ejected cases ended up in a nice tight group off to my right, too.
After putting a few shots on paper at 25 yards, I took it out to 100 to get a good zero on the TX30 reflex sight. Here’s the 100 yard target. I fire two-shot groups for initial sight-in. One-shot “groups” would probably be OK for starters, but I like to get some sense of how I and the rifle are working together. The first 100 yard group is the one holer at the top of the paper, on the “1L” line. I’d thought that the TX30 had 1/3 MOA clicks like an ACOG telescope, so I over-compensated, putting the second group near the bottom of the paper. The TX30 has 1/2 MOA clicks, and the fact that the target was stapled to a log and was slanting back quite a bit accounts for the larger apparent error. Splitting the difference with a few “up” clicks, and a couple clicks left, the third group was pretty well dead on;
I have a padded steel rifle rest and some shooting bags, but I’m using them less and less. If you can’t use your vehicle, a stump, a tree branch, a rock, the ground or your knee, what kind of shooting are you practicing? In this case I was mono-podding, holding the 30 round magazine in my hand and resting the hand on the hood of the pickup. It works well enough. The truck bumper is OK too, or the tail gate, or a front tire steered over to one side. The tip of a longish snowshoe can make a decent place to rest your knee in a kneeling position… There are lots of options, so you can haul around less stuff.
Three consecutive two-shot groups of around 1 MOA and less. I be happy for now. Don’t ask me to repeat it. It was getting dark so I called it a day and let the dog out to romp around for a bit and get wet and smelly before the ride home. Ultimately I think I’ll want a solid 200 yard zero for this reflex-sighted carbine.
Dealing with “issues” while shooting is a good thing. In this case it was failing light, mosquitoes, my dog which hates gunfire (he ended up inside the pickup, and his moving around made the pickup, which I was using as a shooting rest, move just a little bit while aiming) and the fact that I’d ended up out there with no spotting optic so I had to trot the 100 yards back and forth to determine shot placement. That and there were people driving up and down the road, which was close enough I didn’t want to fire while people were so close and make them nervous. So I’m looking around, listening, swatting bugs, dealing with the dog, hurrying, and huffing and puffing a little. It’s an exercise in being very still while immersed in little stresses and distractions. That’s part of why I like rifle shooting so much. It’s wonderful. Sometimes it works out great and other times you chalk it up to learning. This time was like a dream, but I’ll have to figure out what happened to my 20×60 binocs.
This new light carbine is pounds lighter than my scoped HBAR rifle. I think it’s going to be one of my favorite shooters. I’d never “built” an AR before, and even though I’d had my Colt, and a Rock River, apart many times it was surprising to me how easy it was to cobble one together from parts. A fairly small child could do it, with a little bit of instruction.
…that gun homicides are down. Way down. Via theBlaze.
The majority of Americans apparently believe that “gun violence” is on the rise. This is because there are people in high places who want us to believe things that aren’t true.
But as Tam put it, and I paraphrase;
“Even if every other gun owner on the planet tried to murder someone last night, I didn’t. So leave me alone.”
The right to keep and bear arms is not conditional. It is based on sound, moral principles, which do not change with the weather or with any other circumstances as some would have us think.
Either way (that is to say; using their own false logic or using moral principle) the anti-rights forces lose the argument when people pay attention. The other takeaway here is that lies, even big, transparent lies, do seem to work somewhat, at least for a while.
In comments here;
“The bottom line is; we have authoritarians and anti-authoritarians living in the same society. Each is attempting to foster its separate, incompatible doctrine. Neither can afford to tolerate the other.”
It’s more like we’re living as separate societies in the same country, and that we have incompatible world views rather than “doctrines”. Neither world view can tolerate the other, because one example is often capable of poisoning, or infecting, a whole lot of people.
The authoritarian’s fantasy of a glorious regime can be highly threatened by one “upstart” who simply will not be intimidated or fall in line. The ideal of liberty in the minds of anti-authoritarians can be poisoned by the emergence of gangs as they infiltrate the political and media infrastructures.
So far in this post I’ve treated authoritarians and anti-authoritarians as separate but equal, but there is of course a major difference– The anti-authoritarian (libertarian) can best further his goals by being straight forward and honest, while the authoritarian must use deception, fear, anger and doubt.
One is honest and motivated by love while the other is a lying sack of shit motivated by hate trying to appear good and reasonable only as a means of getting its greedy way. One is honest with himself to the greatest extent possible while the other must avoid reality or be exposed and discredited. One builds and provides while the other is a deadly parasite, and yet one can be seen as mocking the other for its selfish goals.
Which are you? Most people are confused on the matter, believing themselves to be one when they are the other. Further; you can at times actually be doing the right things for the wrong reasons. Feints within feints within feints. What a tangled web we weave.
You can dress the conflict up in millions of words, appealing to various motivations and emotions, but it is still that simple, age-old conflict between love and hate, or liberty and tyranny.
Each sees itself as a liberator, too, and again it is because the mere existence of the other is a threat to its own existence. One is poison to the other and so it longs to be free of that poison.
How many ways can we say the same things? Millions and millions and millions. We fool ourselves into playing the same deadly game over and over.
I got an e-mail today off our web site, complaining that we’re too hard to contact. He went on and on about it. He wants to spend money. He was asking several questions that are answered on the web site. His message did not include his phone number or address, just the e-mail.
My e-mail reply was bounced back to me by his mail server.
This reminds me of the woman who always hooks up with scum-of-the-Earth men, who abuse her, and she then ends up hating men, the Progressive who advocates massive restrictions on commerce and then complains about businesses colluding with politicians, and the gun control advocate who points to Chicago’s crime rate as a reason why we need more gun restrictions.
Methinks thy complaints be self fulfilling.
We call it “static” electricity, but it can sure cause havoc when it moves. My office carpet charges me up when I walk across it, and if I am dumb enough to touch a USB port on my computer it causes problems from disabling every USB device to shutting down the computer. “Whack”. If I’m thinking, I touch the cabinet first, to discharge the static harmlessly. The USB port is a vulnerable point in the system.
I was awoke in the middle of the night years ago during a snow storm, by the noise. “POP!….snick…..POP!….Snick…” with perfect regularity, over and over. That’s something that’ll get your attention in a deep sleep in the middle of the night. I had a 40 meter “inverted vee” dipole antenna atop my trailer, but it was a crude experimental set-up with no grounding switch. For equipment protection I simply unscrewed the antenna connector when not in use. Static was building up on the wire outside, then jumping to a metal desk lamp nearby– “POP!” A second later it jumped onto a ground cable next to the lamp– “Snick”. I guess it took a second for the charge to migrate to the pointy piece of the lamp where it discharged. It was dark, so I could see the sparks. They were impressive. Stupidly, I grabbed hold of the cable to screw it into a grounded jack I had set up. Yow! That’ll wake ya right up. It’s amazing how much voltage can be pulled out of a snow storm in just a few seconds.
When we were kids, we had to wait at the Spokane airport for a long time one day. We found that the carpet there would build up an impressive charge on you, and when you touched a doorknob or something you’d get a pretty good jolt. So naturally we played a trick on our little sister. We told her to touch her finger to someone else’s finger. “Ouch!”
“Try it with someone else.”
“Ouch!”
“There must be something wrong with you. Here; try it on me.”
“Ouch!” After several rounds of this we had her convinced that it was all her– Something was wrong with her, and after facing the prospect of a lifetime of never being able to touch another person without causing pain, she started crying. Then of course we had to console her and explain the joke, feeling guilty about it.
One winter night while driving home at night in sub freezing weather I watched a lightning storm. It was a little, single, isolated thunderhead off in the distance. Normally a thunder storm is driven by warm, humid air condensing as it rises, releasing its heat energy thus causing more rising and more condensation, etc. Vapor to liquid– There’s a lot of energy involved in changes of state, but in this particular case it was quite cold outside. Compared to the more familiar springtime or summer thunderstorms, this one was very low energy. One strike only every several minutes. Could this thunder storm have been the result of a liquid to sold change-of-state system? Never heard of such a thing. I’ve seen winter lightening only twice in my life, and the other time it was just one strike.
“‘Love thy enemy’ does not mean kiss him and invite him into your country. It means stand up and fight, with grace.”
— Roy Masters, “Advice Line” April 29, 2013
He was speaking of what he refers to as the Dalai Lama’s cowardice in dealing with the Chinese, but the quote rang out to me as with regard to radical Islam. Years ago in Idaho, we had a Neo Nazi group calling themselves the Church of Jesus Christ, Christian Aryan Nations. They were racist socialist revolutionaries who managed to use a bomb or two, causing some property damage. They were rooted out of Idaho for the most part, and good riddance. I didn’t like some of the methods used, but good riddance. They weren’t from around here, and they figured that since most people in Idaho were white, their white power, anti-Semite nonsense would be tolerated. They figured wrong. I bring them up only as a comparison to the even more virulent and dangerous radical Islamists, who’ve been allowed into this country, often welcomed with open arms. If we had the same recognition of bigotry, promotion of violence and power-lust regarding the Islamists that we had with the Aryan Nations we’d be raiding certain Mosques and other organizations in the U.S., but violent bigotry that hides behind Christianity is a vastly more convenient target than the exact same violent bigotry that hides behind Islam. The difference is of course a result of political subterfuge and we can’t fight it because we’re short on grace.
It’s like our societal immune system is degraded, leaving us open to all forms of infection.
Double action, pre Civil War design percussion revolver. It has a fully enclosed cylinder, i.e. a top strap. What I don’t get at the moment is why there are twice as many cylinder notches as there are chambers.
This is the sort of thing I’d like to own, and yet I can give no practical reason for it whatsoever.
ETA; I think I figured out the cylinder notch thing. It must be a safety system. Colt’s, Remington and others had similar features, pins or notches in the back of the cylinder to engage the hammer, that more or less locked the cylinder half way between chambers, so the hammer could rest safely between chambers, allowing the carrier to have all chambers loaded rather than resting the hammer on an empty chamber. This revolver is simply using the existing bolt (cylinder lock) for that purpose, methinks, hence the “in between” cylinder notches.
Today’s sarcastic jokes are often tomorrow’s real life. And here we are once again. No doubt, many gun owners said after the event at the Boston Marathon, or thought to themselves sarcastically; “I guess we’ll have to ban pressure cookers then. That’ll stop future bombings.” Well, it turns out that a company halted sales of pressure cookers after the Boston bombing.
Sure; it’s not an actual ban imposed by out-of-control law makers. They halted sales of pressure cookers voluntarily for a while “out of respect”. You may think; “What’s the big deal, Lyle? Jeeze.” and to that I say that this is quite insane, and that this sort of insanity is rampant. It is promoted.
It’s a cooking implement, for Pete’s sake! Put out some flowers if you want to show respect, or, you know, actually reach out and offer help to the victims and their families? Ever thought of that? Hmm?
What if someone used a pair of crutches to commit a crime? You going to halt the sale of crutches “out of respect”? Idiots. Hmm…you know it would be entirely possible to make a bomb using a fire extinguisher as the containment vessel. Let’s ban those then. Same goes for guns – we restrict the tools of self protection in response to crime. What a bunch of blithering idiots we’re becoming.
This is yet another in a very long line of cases of punishing the innocent for the actions of the guilty. They punished the whole city of Boston too, with that lock-down. I’m disgusted that there wasn’t a city-wide defiance of that order. Such cowards as we are, such zombies, maybe we deserve to be slaves.
Heard on my way to work today – Network news break;
“Boston bombers blah blah blah Religious Right blah blah bombers blah blah Chechnya blah blah blah Far Right.”
As always, Progressives refer to all icons of evil as “The Far Right” or the “Religious Right”. That was the sole purpose of the “report”.
Back in junior high school in the 1970s I was taught the same thing, only then it was (and usually still is) that the Nazis were “Far Right”. Never mind that they referred to themselves as national socialists, and were inspired by the American Progressives and the Eugenics movement. Oh, and they were pretty tight with the Middle Eastern Muslims.
Yeah, so we’re to believe that the more you advocate freedom, the more you support the American founding principles of liberty, the more you support the concept of minimum government and maximum individual responsibility, the closer you get to Nazis and Islamofascists. Stupid as that is, there are those who believe it. And so they keep beating that drum.
As expected, the report did not contain the word “Islam” or the word “Islamist” or “jihad” or anything similar. They were so upset that, yet again, the perpetrator was not a teapartier, they went ahead and made the connection anyway. As usual also; they did it with innuendo. Just plant the little seed and watch it grow.
I ordered a few of the E-Lander 30 round AR mags (they say they’re made for the Tavor). It took several weeks but here they are. They look really nice. They’re made with the same fold and spot-weld technique we see on most Aluminum mags, but these are steel. They have a protective coating that supposedly exceeds the salt spray requirements in U.S. military specs. The followers are true anti-tilt, meaning you can press down at the very front or the back, and they go down fine, without up-ending like the standard green mil spec followers. The bendy tabs that hold the floor plate are reinforced. Nice touch.
All very nice, but I won’t be keeping them in my main line-up, at least not with a full 30 rounds in them.
This seems pretty bizarre to me– you can not lock the mag into an AR with a full 30 round load when the bolt is forward, i.e. no tactical reloads. I’ve noticed this with some of my other mags too.
I suppose one could tweak the follower/floorplate interface to allow another millimeter or so of follower travel and solve this problem pretty easily. The mag bodies appear to be identical in length to my standard aluminum mags. On the other hand, the box of Brownell’s mags I just got all have that extra millimeter of follower travel and snap right in with a full 30 round load. They aren’t quite as pretty though.
I’ve been on a kick for the last couple of weeks, pointing out, it seems to me, at least once per day how this or that must have been designed or built by people who don’t actually use the product. I suppose I should pay more attention to my own designs, but as a user of products, it comes naturally to be a critic.
Last night I found myself in a town conspicuously like my home town – the place I spent the first 18 years of my childhood. I was up against a sniper. She was a Chinese woman; determined (“Hell-Bent”, even). She was wearing the classic Cultural Revolution style, plain O.D. jacket and plain O.D. hat, and she had a rifle. I think that’s her on the right, but she’s younger in this photo;
It started out with her trying to snipe me from some distance (I hate it when that happens) but it ended up as a running, ducking, hiding, urban-style shootout from about 150 yards. I took a couple of rounds but were superficial hits. I thought I had nailed her good in the end. Through my low magnification, illuminated scope I saw her go down just as she was trying for cover.
The next day however, she was back to her usual self, dressed like a perfectly ordinary American woman in the small, eclectic community of immigrants in which I grew up, tending to her ordinary American life with her perfectly ordinary, American-born children, interacting in her perfectly normal, friendly manner with friends and neighbors.
I spoke about the encounter with some of my friends, showing them my bullet wounds, which had healed to the point of being mere scars, and explaining what had happened, pointing out to them my now perfectly innocent-looking enemy. Funny what the light of day can do to a person that was trying to kill you just a few hours ago in the cover of darkness. I saw the woman a few times that day, and both she and I were pretending nothing had happened the night before. Neither of us wanted entanglements with law enforcement or other authorities, knowing that such would be the undoing of us both. This had become a chess game. We were going to have to settle our differences later…
I don’t remember many of my dreams lately, and would certainly not have remembered this one except for something my daughter said to me this morning at around 06:00 that triggered the memory.
When I was a boy, out working the fields alone on my grandparents’ farm, I heard voices wafting in from the distance. Two men were standing next to a tractor, its engine running, and so they were shouting at each other to be heard over the engine noise. Two to three hundred yards away, I could hear nearly every word they were saying.
“Ah Hah! Unlike addition and multiplication, communication over a noise source can be asymetrical, or one way.” YOU may be able to hear ME just fine, but it may be utterly impossible for me you hear you, or vice versa. I knew that there was no possible way I could ever shout loud enough for those two men near the tractor to hear me, though I could hear them pretty well.
I’ve used this as an example on several occasions, trying to explain this as the reason why the frustrated fool on the other end of the conversation cannot get through to me. My wife, for example, has never understood this, and she will get angry when I tell her I can’t understand her as I’m washing my hands at the sink. SHE thinks I’M the dumb one, see.
Same goes for radio communication, when someone hears you booming in on a 100 watt repeater, but can’t understand why he isn’t being heard from his 3 watt handy-talkie (then he shouts into the microphone, which makes it worse, because his over modulation [FM} spreads out his three watts over more bandwidth, out toward the edges of the receive passband).
Then there are those who, when wearing ear muffs or headphones and you’re not, and you’re standing right next to them, will shout at you.
And we won’t even get in to the subject of those “low talkers” – those who will talk under their breath apparently as a means of irritating you or for some bizzare reason they want to use it as a means of feeling superior to you, because you’re struggling to hear them while they can hear you perfectly well, and so what’s wrong with you, Chump?
Down the rabbit hole into the esoteric. Before the current ammo shortage I decided to start casting bullets, just because I liked the idea of an extra level of independence. The 30-30 cast bullets worked OK but there’s more to do there. This time though its the 10 mm Auto.
I’ve been loading the Hornady 180 XTPs with good results, but I wanted a 200 grain cast bullet too. The RCBS 200 SWC has gotten good reviews so I got that two cavity mold a while back. The mold handles I use for the Lyman molds didn’t fit the new RCBS mold, and people were starting to run low on things. Buffalo Arms in Idaho sells a hand-fabricated-looking handle set that works like a pair of Vice-Grips. Pretty expensive and heavy, but they had them in stock. They’re great. You get VERY consistent closing pressure for each pour. I weighed 20 already lubed bullets tonight and the extreme spread was 1.5 grains, 201 gr +/- .75.
Of course, to “save money” casting bullets from one dollar per pound lead, I had to buy a lube sizer. Seating the lead bullets, I was shaving lead on the case mouths, so I bought a 10 mm M die. It expands deeper into the case than a regular expander die, plus it makes a wider spot at the mouth. I’d been seating crimping in one swipe with the jacketed bullets, but since that’s not really an option for cast, I had to readjust my otherwise permanently adjusted seating die. Now I figure I’ll buy another seat die in this “money saving” venture.
To prevent the case mouth shaving lead from the bullet upon seating, I had to put LOTS more flair on the cases. I tried chamfering the mouths a little and that didn’t help much, so now I’m working the brass a lot more, which means it will work harden sooner. The bullets aren’t getting shaved now, but the cases are so wide at the mouth that the seating die can’t be lowered nearly as much as normal or the crimp taper starts to erase that wide belling, shaving lead anyway. And that means that the seating stem is just a bit too short, so with the locking collar removed from the seating stem and the stem screwed in as far as it will go, I still have to screw the die body down to where it is narrowing the flair just a bit. That means there is no support on the case at all except at the very mouth. I noticed that if I nicely align the bullets on the case mouth by hand before seating, they now don’t get shaved. When the bullets shave, the lead that’s stuck in front of the case mouth interferes with head spacing. It’s not serious, but it is annoying.
Loading dies, at least for straight wall auto cases, are not made with cast bullets in mind. These are RCBS dies, but I doubt there’d be much difference. The whole paradigm is wrong. Since you apparently need much more flair at the mouth, and you’re shoving the case up into the die mouth-first, your die has to be too large to support any part of the case except for the very mouth, or else it will erase your mouth flair. Instead of going mouth-first into the seating die, the cases should be going head-first into a support die, and then up to a seating stem, with the bullet pre aligned before it touches the case. That way, much of the case, and all of the bullet’s drive bands, could be aligned prior to seating. It couldn’t be done “right”, in my opinion, any other way.
But we make it work, somehow, with what we have. There’s still more testing to do, but initially I got two groups of just under 5 inches at 20 yards standing unsupported. Lots more recoil than the 180 XTP loads, but my chrono got lost along a 20 mile stretch of highway in a snowstorm so no vel data. A third group was MUCH larger, so I quit. There was leading in the Lone Wolf barrel. That was before I eliminated the lead shaving at seating. We’ll see later whether the shaving verses not shaving makes any difference.
The load is 9.4 grains Blue Dot, CCI 300, OAL 1.255, #2 alloy, Super Molly lube that came with the Lyman sizer. Still don’t know if it’s a keeper, but I do know I can get off at least 10 decent shots. Whoopie, eh?