I installed an Aimpoint sight on a 500 S&W pistol for a guy today.  He lives in North Idaho and has been hunting here and elsewhere for 30 years.  He’d been in and out of our shop, trying to figure out how to make the little Micro sight stay put on his 500 bore, G-force production factory, so we’ve gotten acquainted.

Today he brought in one of his many hunting photo albums.  He keeps records of each harvest; date, details of the animal, distance, and so on. 

One of his kills was of a circa 2,000 lb Bison bull he got in South Dakota using a traditional muzzleloading rifle.  He used a 200 grain XTP 45 caliber handgun bullet in a 50 caliber sabot.  Muzzle velocity; ~2000 fps. (he could state his velocity extreme spread off the top of his head).  He knows his rifles and his trajectories from years of practical use.  That bull was shot from 150 yards.  I ran the numbers in Modern Ballistics, and the impact velocity would have been around 1280.  The jacketed hollowpoint bullet struck inside the front shoulder (so as to avoid the heavy shoulder joint, he said) in a quartering-toward shot, penetrated the heavy hide, busted a heavy rib, penetrated both lungs, the diaphram, and stopped in the spleen.  The bull walked a few yards, laid down and never got up, shot with what amounted to (energy-wise) a 45 magnum handgun.

Some (most)(no; virtually all) would say that his choice of round was drastically too fragile and drastically under-powered, taking a shot at the “practical” range limit of the firearm, but he’d worked with this system for years and knew it’s capabilities and limitations from experience.  Do not try this at home.

Anyway; it’s fun to talk with people who actually do things.

By the way; Installing the Micro sight on a 500 Smith requires the “permanent” red (as opposed to the “high strength” red) thread locker.  I had to special order it as no one in town knew it existed.  According to the tech I spoke with at Aimpoint, you also need to crank the cross-bolt down far beyond the 180-after-contact spec in the instructions, if’n you’re mounting it on the 500 hand cannon.  This time we used a ratchet wrench.  He’ll try it out tomorrow after the required 24 hour cure time and we’ll see if it worked.  I wish they’d go with a square cross bolt for high recoil applications, but in nearly all other applications it matters not a bit, one way or the other.

…or…

Words Mean Things

Hundreds of years ago, when most long guns were stocked to the muzzle, there was usually a metal part known as the muzzle cap at the end of the stock to protect the thin wood and end grain there.  The half stock rifle, with which we are all familiar, often has a cap at the forward end of the stock also, but since it’s not at the muzzle, we call it a nose cap or a forend cap.  The forward end, or forward portion of the stock, for hundreds of years, has been called the forend or forestock.  For some reason hardly anyone, it seems, uses these terms anymore.

When I tell someone they need a nose cap on their AK before they can use a standard forend, they’re at a loss to understand.  For one thing, it is no longer a forend but a handguard, and there is apparently no longer any such thing as a nose cap.  In these modern times, when we’re still using the exact same features, we need the new term “handguard retainer”.  If I try to add clarity by calling it a forend cap, it still doesn’t work.  I have to use some version of “That metal thingy what holds the handguard on at the front of the handguard” but that’s a lot more syllables than the centuries old “nose cap”.

“Stock forend” or “forestock” no longer works.  I hear “forearm” more often, but most common is “lower handguard” (but some AKs only have the one, so using “lower” only adds confusion.  If a rifle doesn’t have an arm or arms, then it cannot have a “forearm” (the forward portion of an arm).  Since a rifle is an “arm” (in a different sense of the word) then a “forearm” would be the muzzle, wouldn’t it, or the front sight or something out there?

What really throws me for a loop is the term “foregrip” which I always take to mean “forward pistol grip”.  We sell forward pistol grips, so when you ask me for a “foregrip” I can only conclude that you mean forward pistol grip, which is after all a “foregrip”  We sell forends too, but you need a nose cap for a standard forend.  “You know; that foregrip you sell” applies, potentially, to a wide spectrum of products.  When I ask, “Which one?” I almost always get a “what?” or a “the one you have on your web site”.  We have a lot of them on our web site, which you would know if you’d looked at it, which I assume you did or you wouldn’t be talking about it.  You might as well say, “You know– the one I’m thinking about.  I can see it right here in my mind– why can’t you see it in my mind?”

Do you know where your rifle stock’s heel, toe, comb, wrist, forend, nose and nose cap are located?  Or is each feature “That thingy, there, next to or at the end of that other doo-hicky, what holds the thing you hold on to…there…by the bracket”?  I swear; I have several conversations per day that go along those lines.

Recently I had a guy completely reiterate everything I said, “just to be clear” in his words.  He knew all the parts, he knew how to use the language, he knew what part he had called to talk about, and he got everything exactly right.  I had to take a break, take a deep breath, and tell everyone about it.

Anyway; I take the common misuse of terms, or unfamiliarity with the jargon, to mean that there are a lot of new gun owners out there, so I try to be as patient as I can.  The other day I told a guy he needed to be sure he got Picatinny rings for our M8 rail.  Problem was, he didn’t know what “Picatinny”, “rail”, or “rings” meant, nor “Leupold” nor “Burris”.  I had to explain the meaning and derivation of each term and how it applied to his situation.  “Leupold is a manufacturer of optics including rifle scopes…”  At one point in the conversation he said he’d have to call those folks at the Picatinny Arsenal and order some of those rings.  He ended up spending a couple hundred dollars with us, so I must not have sounded too exasperated with him.

While I’m at it; a sight is not a site.  This is the first time I have cited the use of “site” when “sight” would have been right.