I saw a cool vid over at Bayou Renaissance Man., on this particular page. This: a transparent suppressor and a high-speed camera.
Interesting stuff.
Category Archives: Gun Fun
Rounds in the last month
In September I only loaded .40 S&W. It was 1875 rounds of Black Bullets for USPSA matches, 93 rounds of Acme Bullet Company’s 180 grain “Lipstick Bullets” (I’m probably going to replace The Blue Bullets with these for steel matches), and 95 rounds of Montana Gold bullets over 3.0 grains of Clays for some “powder puff” loads for new shooters. This is a total of 2063 rounds this month.
I had a revision of some numbers on 300 Win Mag ammo. A few years ago I made some ammo for a friend and didn’t count the rounds. I put them in zip lock bags and gave them to him. In my log I just entered estimates of 300 and 100 rounds for the two different reloading sessions.
Then… earlier this month I was visiting him and found out he still hadn’t shot them. I counted them and found I had reloaded a total of 299 rounds. Whoops. That changes things a little bit. I corrected my log file so that shows up in the numbers below.
The corrected and updated lifetime reloaded ammunition totals are:
223: 2,424 rounds.
30.06: 756 rounds.
300 WIN: 1591 rounds.
40 S&W: 76,772 rounds.
9 mm: 21,641 rounds.
Total: 103,184 rounds.
Year to date I have loaded 17,567 rounds. I’m still on course to reload about 20,000 rounds this year for a lifetime total of over 105,000 rounds.
Steel match results
Ry and I went to the Holmes Harbor Rod & Gun Club (Whidbey Island) steel match last Saturday. The weather was great and the ferry ride was pretty and pleasant:
As usual the stages were interesting:
Ry had problems with his open class pistol. The red-dot optic kept turning off when he was shooting. Hitting small targets rapidly with no sights is challenging. His score is not representative of his true ability. Rimfire rifle went better for him but he did have problems with one magazine on the first stage he shot.
I thought I generally did well. Things felt good with few misses and fairly consistent times. There were just three people in my divisions. I came in second in Centerfire Pistol Iron sights with a total time for five stages of 77.00 seconds. That is an average of 0.77 seconds per shot. With Rimfire Pistol Iron sights I got first with a total time for the five stages of 63.70 seconds. This is an average of 0.637 seconds per shot.
I did not shoot in the August match as I was helping Barb’s son, Max, move.
In July the same guy, Todd Epps, who won in September beat me in the Centerfire Iron Sights division. I had a total time of 76.83 seconds in this division. And, again, I won the Rimfire Iron sights division with a total time of 55.11 seconds.
In June I won the Centerfire Iron sight division with a total time of 79.03 seconds. I also won the Rimfire Iron sights division with a total time of 66.25 seconds.
Black Bullet anomalies
I’ve mentioned Black Bullet International before (and here, here, here, here, and here) and that I use them for outdoor USPSA matches. They give excellent accuracy, consistent velocity, and are a good price. I have reloaded 7563 rounds of ammunition using these bullets and have about another 875 on hand.
Earlier this month I ran into this:
One of these is not like the others. Instead of the 180 grain 0.40” diameter bullet it is a 124.9 grain 0.359” bullet. Of course, there is no danger of reloading it in a .40 S&W casing and causing a problem. But if it had been a 200 grain bullet while reloading for 180 or a 180 grain while reloading 165 grain bullets there would have been a serious concern.
I thought it was funny and set it aside.
This afternoon I opened a new box of Black Bullets which had been shipped many months after the last batch of bullets from them. I decided to weigh them to make sure they were essentially the same weight as the previous batch (important for making Power Factor for USPSA matches). I weighed 19 bullets and they were essentially the same as the previous batch:
- Mean: 180.7
- Standard Deviation: 0.612
- Max: 182.2
- Min: 179.7
- Extreme Spread: 2.5.
When I weighed the 20th bullet I was shocked. It was 177.5 grains. This is over three grains below the mean of the other 19. This is significant enough to endanger “making major” at a match. Hmm…
I weighed another 10 and found a 178.5. Hmm…
I measured their diameter and length compared to typical bullets. The diameter was the same but the length was 0.005 less:
All the typical bullets were within 0.001” in length of one another. Then there were the two out of thirty which were 0.005” shorter.
Hmm…
Then I compared the stats of the Black Bullets to what I find typical of Montana Gold bullets:
- Mean: 180.22
- Standard Deviation: 0.159
- Min: 179.9
- Max: 180.5
- Extreme spread: 0.6.
Remember when Barb and I toured the Montana Gold factory Norm told us they keep the weight of their bullets to about +/- 0.3 grains? Yup, that matches my measurements of their bullets.
Now, I did once find a partial jacket in one of the Montana Gold boxes, but I have reloaded nearly 40,000 of their bullets. That is over five times as many as the Black Bullets.
I have to conclude that the Black Bullets International company is not as quality conscious as the Montana Gold Bullets company with 180 grain .40 caliber bullets.
Another good classifier
Last Sunday I shot a USPSA match at Marysville Rifle Club (Marysville, Washington).
In the match I did good, but not great. I got a score of 64.97% of the Limited Class, Grandmaster winner.
I had kind of a rough time the day before and was sort of stiff and sore. I did well on the first few stages then faded in the afternoon. But with the classifier, the third stage of the day, I did pretty well coming in at third place in Limited out of 22 shooters behind one Grandmaster and one Master class shooter. My score of 67 on Lightning And Thunder gave me a solid B-class 74.4444 percentage (75% is A-class). I have the video but it’s three different, rather boring, strings of fire and I doubt anyone really is interested in watching it.
This brings my cumulative USPSA classification up to 63.7697%. I’m approaching my highest ever of 68.5272%
I’m a bit suspect of this particular classifier. It is a fixed time stage and I think it is probably too easy. I suspect that a large number of GMs and perhaps even some Master class shooters clean it with a perfect score of 90. This means that lower class shooters are not really compared to the very best GMs but, instead, are compared to something like the lowest level GM and highest Master class shooters.
Still, I played by the rules and legitimately got the points even if the system is probably warping the indicator of my actual ability.
Be sure of your target and who is in front of it
“All’s well that ends well” isn’t one of the rules of gun safety, at least so far as I know. Nor is, “If you can walk away from it, then it was good gun handling”. Maybe that does apply to rocketry though.
One round skipped off the ground just a few yards from the guy walking in front of the truck. I guess he had a memorable day.
It reminds me of a W.W II story in which an American unit was taking heavy artillery fire. Their commander, realizing that it was friendly fire, reassured his troops saying, “Don’t worry, Boys; those are our guns!” or something to that effect.
John Vlieger in the news
A media release from son-in-law John Vlieger’s sponsor Shell Shock:
Shell Shock Technologies, LLC., an early stage technology and manufacturing company focused on developing innovative case technologies for the ammunition industry, is pleased to announce its sponsored shooter John Vlieger has won High Overall in the Open Division at the 2017 USPSA Area 4 Championship, held at the United States Shooting Academy in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Sept. 8 – 10, 2017. Vlieger finished with 1390.928 match points and a time of 148.09. This was his second consecutive Area win.
“Being able to take home a second regional title in such a short time is another goal reached. The time spent traveling, training and competing can take it out of you, but I’m ready and raring to go to the next one. Having reloading components I can trust with my +P+ competition loads helps me focus on competing, and not on whether or not my gear can take the abuse. My Shell Shock Technologies’ NAS3 cases have taken everything I’ve thrown at them and keep on going. I plan on continuing to trust them as I finish out the 2017 competition season, and forward,” commented Vlieger.
The USPSA Area 4 Championship, otherwise known as the Walther Arms-MGM Targets Area 4 Championship, is a Level III (pending) match that runs 12 stages with a round count of 290. Watch Vlieger compete at the USPSA Area 4 Championship on the John Vlieger Shooting YouTube Channel.
Vlieger can be seen competing next at the Tennessee Atomic Blast USPSA State Championship Match, to be held at the Oak Ridge Sportsman’s Association in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, Sept. 16 – 17, 2017.
John placed second out of 227 competitors at the Tennessee Atomic Blast.
John Vlieger USPSA wins
Son-in-law John Vlieger, competing against 318 competitors, 79 of them in his USPSA Open division, decisively won the Walther Arms-MGM Targets Area 4 Championship match this year. Area 4 includes Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Arkansas. The next closest competitor came in with only 95.77% of his score:
He also won the EGW USPSA Area 8 Championship. Area 8 is on the east coast and includes Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia. His margin was only 0.7% but against 493 competitors, 105 in open division, a win by any margin is awesome:
Compare his shooting in the matches above which were in August and September against his shooting in March during Optic Nationals:
At nationals he came in at 11th place, just barely below Rod Leatham, even though he had an equipment failure (broken extractor) on one of the stages. It’s hard for me to say for sure, because the target distance is difficult to judge and I don’t have the exact times for the individual shots, but it seems he is now shooting perceptibly faster and he certainly has fewer misses on the steel targets.
I can see him winning national, and even world titles, soon.
Revolver re-build, Field Carry system, and deer hunt
Deer season is upon us (Joe; no Hunting category?) so I thought this a good time to post it.
Following is a very long, detailed account of customizing a reproduction Colt 1847 Walker percussion revolver and using it in a deer hunt in the 2016 muzzleloader season. It assumes the reader has some understanding of the Colt open top revolver design and its inherent problems, and contains lots of technical photos and jargon. I also introduce a paper cartridge “Field Carry” system which I’ve developed for percussion revolvers, making things simpler and easier for the shooter while in the field on the move. There are bloody butchering (necropsy) photos cataloging the terminal performance of the gun and ammunition. You have been warned– If you read on you may be extremely bored, fascinated, or shocked or disgusted, or all of the above.
Continue reading
USPSA Classifier “Tight Squeeze”
As I’ve mentioned before my USPSA classifiers have not been as good as I would like. Today, at the Lewiston (Idaho) Pistol Club, was a step up:
Draw: 1.27 S
Reload: 2.03 S
Total Time: 8.59 S
Hits: 11 A-Zones, 1 C-Zone
Points: 59
Hit Factor: 6.8685
Stage Win.
USPSA Limited Classifier: ~66.38%
Even though it was a classifier from 1999 (99-48 Tight Squeeze) with the issue of all the top shooters slowly ratcheting up the best scores over the last 18 years I did fairly well on it with an estimated 66.38%. This is better than I have done on a classifier in over seven years! This is solid B class shooting instead of all the C class results I have been turning in the last few years. It was the stage win for all divisions, including Open! I won Limited Division for the match and came in second overall. If I hadn’t overlooked one target on the first stage and racked up all those penalties I would have won the match.
The video shows my transitions between targets is almost painfully slow and I could do much better reloads. And with more practice I think I could do a faster draw as well.
Well, I know what I need to work on this week when I go to the range.
Gas cutting of bullets
It is often said, and it is often true, that you get the best accuracy by, among other things, seating the bullet out close to the forcing cone, or rifling.
Well, not always.
Continue reading
Dot Torture take 3
Today I shot the Dot Torture target at five yards again:
The first time I tried it I had two misses. Then one. And now none.
It’s not as clean as I would like. There are some hits that are less than a half bullet diameter into the dot. But it is 50 out of 50 points at 5 yards.
Primer removal failure
This is twice in about 500 rounds that I have seen this happen:
Instead of popping out whole, the primer fractured and only part of it came out of the primer pocket. I thought the first instance was just a very odd fluke. But this is twice in a very small set of used brass and I don’t recall this ever happening before in the over 100K times I have removed primers.
Update: I had this happen with three more cases out of about 150. All with R-P headstamps. I bought this brass used. It would be interesting to know the history of these cases.
Rounds in the last month
In August I loaded 148 rounds of 30.06 for daughter Kim and 2644 rounds of .40 S&W. This used up all my 30.06 brass and before I do any more 30.06 she is going to have to do some shooting. The .40 S&W was 722 rounds of Black Bullets for USPSA matches and 1922 rounds of Montana Gold bullets yielding Major Power Factor for practice at indoor ranges.
This brings my lifetime reloaded ammunition totals to:
223: 2,424 rounds.
30.06: 756 rounds.
300 WIN: 1692 rounds.
40 S&W: 74,709 rounds.
9 mm.log: 21,641 rounds.
Total: 101,222 rounds.
Year to date I have loaded 15,504 rounds. I’m on course to reload about 20,000 rounds this year for a lifetime total of over 105,000 rounds.
F.A.S.T.
Today, in addition to the Dot Torture Target, I shot the F.A.S.T. (Fundamentals, Accuracy, & Speed Test) target:
The individual shot times, in seconds, are:
- 1.93
- 0.78
- 2.81
- 0.48
- 0.43
- 0.40
Total: 6.83 seconds.
That’s just barely in the “Advanced” ranking and a long way from “Expert”.
I shot about four or five practice targets before I got one where everything was working reasonably well. The slide lock reload is really painful. In action shooting I try to always plan my reloads so I never go into slide lock and frequently reload with half full magazines in the gun when I’m on the move between shooting positions just to make sure I avoid the slide lock. The reload time shows my lack of practice. I always hesitated as I started to engage the target again before I racked the slide. I think I can do better on the first shot too. I can see shaving 0.50 off my time without too much effort, but getting to “Expert” may be beyond what I can accomplish.
Dot Torture take 2
Today I shot the Dot Torture target at five yards again:
Last time I missed two. This time I missed one. It’s better, but I know I can shoot it clean if I don’t rush it quite so much.
Dot Torture
Last week Say Uncle linked to the Dot Torture target. Paul Koning sent me an email about it too, so I printed out a few and tried it today at five yards:
It’s tough. Those are 2” circles. I can usually do a 1.5” six shot group at 10 yards. But that is a group size, not putting them inside a 1.5” circle. And that is six shots, not 50 shots. Just going from six shots to 50, with the same base accuracy, bumps my group size from 1.5” to 2.57” (Modern Ballistics will tell you this if you speak to it nicely). Then you have to make sure you are centered exactly in the circle.
I adjusted my sights after shooting the #1 dot which helped. I still dropped two.
I think I can clean it at five yards. I’ll try again when I’m not intent on working on shooting faster.
Amazon carries Interflon Fin Super again
I’ve written about Interflon Fin Super before and use it on all my guns. It is available from Amazon again.
Montana Gold Bullet factory tour
Kalispell, Montana was on the way home from Glacier National Park so Barb and I decided to see if we could get a tour of the Montana Gold Bullet factory. I have reloaded nearly 39,000 (38,684) of their bullets and have another 4,500+ in stock and ready for the Dillon 550.
I called the number on their website and set up a time for yesterday that worked for Norm and us.
We arrived a few minutes early at the unmarked warehouse like building. I took a picture of Barb out front and Norm greeted us a minute or so later.
I asked if we could take pictures and Norm told us, “No pictures allowed.” As we went inside and started the tour Norm told us production goes down during the summer and there wasn’t as much going on as there sometimes is. I asked if the election had also affected sales. He said it had made a big difference not just for Montana Gold Bullets but across the entire industry. He had looked at demand over the years and it has gone through several cycles. The first peak occurred after Bill Clinton’s election and the last peak being just before the defeat of Hillary Clinton.
Before we moved on I asked why they used brass jackets rather than copper like almost all other bullet manufactures. Was there a technical reason or was it the just the appeal of the gold color and the neat name made possible by that color?
Norm explained their company wasn’t the first to use brass. Remington, with their Golden Saber bullets, was the first and marketed them extensively. There are other companies who also use brass in some of their bullets. There are some technical reason why brass is better in certain circumstances but that isn’t the reason why his company uses brass. And it wasn’t the appeal of color and the cool name of “Montana Gold”. Also, he didn’t come up with the name “Montana Gold”!
He said he probably shouldn’t tell the story, then proceeded to tell us how the name came about. I’ll refrain from telling the story here but I’ll drop the hint that it was a San Francisco pathologist who came up with the name “Montana Gold” for the bullets produced by Norm’s company. Norm thought it was a cool name and adopted it.
The reason they use brass is because it was forced upon them, indirectly, by the U.S. government. Many years ago the U.S. Mint began producing small dollar coins that were a copper sandwich. The demands of the U.S. Mint for the particular grade of copper the bullet company was using made it impossible for Norm’s company to get the jacket material they needed. It was either go out of business, shutdown until they could get supplies, or change jacket material. They changed jacket material.
Another story he told was of a commercial reloader who bid on a contract for law enforcement ammo specifying, and supplying samples using, Montana Gold bullets. When he won the contract and started delivering the finished product the end customer noticed the bullets were actually plated bullets which are much cheaper to make and generally considered of lower quality. They complained to Norm, who reported he hadn’t supplied those bullets. Norm now refuses to do business with that reloader and, furthermore, does not allow reloaders to mention “Montana Gold” even if they are using “the real deal” in their product.
We saw the 70 pound lead-antimony ingots they use for bullet core material. As there are no more primary lead smelters in the U.S.they get their lead from Canada. They used to get their lead from mines in Idaho not too many miles away. At one time they even considered moving to Idaho to be close to their lead source as well as some economic incentives.
Barb was particularly impressed with the extruding equipment that squeezes the lead through an orifice like so much toothpaste making a lead wire of the appropriate diameter.
I was surprised by learning that because the metals alloyed with lead (to get the desired hardness) are of a different density the ingots may not be of sufficient uniformity to meet their final bullet weight tolerances. Depending upon how quickly the liquid lead alloy is cooled to a solid after being stirred they may cut off a section of the lead wire as scrap because can cause the bullet to be too light.
The thickness of the jacket material and the consistency of hollow point formation also have an effect upon the final bullet weight. Tolerances stack up. They keep the weight of their bullets to about +/- 0.3 grains and sell bullets that are out of tolerance as “seconds” to people who take delivery at the factory who Norm is confident will be using them directly rather than reselling them.
After being shown a bin of with tens of thousands (or maybe 100’s of thousands) of jackets I told Norm about finding one in a box of completed bullets. This seemed to bother him some. He told us there were at least three different places in the process it should have been been found.
They have several machines which are dedicated to certain bullet caliber and style and a few they reconfigure as needed. We saw large multistage presses which put the lead core into the brass cup then form the cup around the lead and size it to make a completed bullet. I was surprised that the machine only produced about one finished bullet per second. That one machine takes about 40 minutes to produce one case of bullets the postman delivers to my door (actually–the sidewalk near the street, then he rings the doorbell).
I told Norm I had used their .401 diameter, 180 grain, complete metal jacket bullet until fellow shooter Don W. reported he got better accuracy with the jacketed hollow point bullets. As the price was only a fraction of penny more I tried those bullets and found Don was correct. I too got slightly better accuracy compared to the CMJs.
Norm said the decreased accuracy with the CMJs probably was because my crimping die was just a little to tight. If crimped too much it will end up as an undersized bullet. Because of the construction of the base on a FMJ, and even a JHP, as a slightly undersized bullet is fired it will expand back out and be just fine. But the base of a CMJ with the brass (or copper) disk doesn’t expand like the FMJ and JHP and “rattles” as it traverses the barrel resulting in a decrease in accuracy. By backing off the crimping die a little bit you should get the same accuracy.
Near the end of the tour Norm pointed at two work stations with women flicking bullets, one by one, off a conveyor belt. “That”, he said, “Is the most difficult job here. It takes a special kind of person to do that and when we find someone who can do it we take special care of them.” These women do the visual inspection of every bullet. They don’t work full days and yet Norm told us you can see from their faces they are drained and tired at the end of their shifts. They considered going to some sort of sensors and computer sorting but the visual computer in the human brain can’t be beat yet.
Barb and I spent nearly an hour with Norm and the stories and discussion continued until both Barb and I were in pain from standing. We had hiked over 33 miles in the previous four days and felt we could hike some more but not stand. My knees were “talking to me” in an angry tone so we thanked Norm and left with new appreciation and attachment to Montana Gold bullets.
Clean your bore
I was at the range the other day with a .22 LR pistol. Things were going well for a while then, fairly rapidly, deteriorated. I checked the sights and the screws that hold the barrel in place and every other mechanical thing I could think of. Everything looked good.
I put up a fresh target at 10 yards and using two different types of ammo put some carefully aimed rounds downrange. The two targets on the right in the picture below are the result.
The result was very discouraging. I then put some rounds downrange with my .40 at the target on the top left above. Okay, so it’s not just me.
I checked the target carefully and could see some of the bullets were impacting the target sideways. But this is the same ammo that I have shot thousands of rounds with excellent accuracy and even greater range!
I took the gun home and cleaned it. I frequently just clean the slide and other moving parts and don’t clean the bore of the barrel. How many rounds had it been since I clean the bore? I just don’t know. Probably at least a couple thousand.
I went back to the range and tried the same two types of ammo.
This is the first set:
That’s better. But still not what it should be.
So I tried the second type:
Better.
And back to the first set:
That’s what I expected.
The bore needed to be cleaned, then it needed a little bit of fouling.
Good to know.