Due to a combination of tired and wanting out of the house, I said to hell with it and headed out. The evening beginning with meat.
Barbeque, that is. Slow-smoked animal parts. And fried potatoes and fried okra on the side. There's a place in northwest Oklahoma City called Oklahoma Station that has all you can eat ribs on Thursday evenings. Good stuff. Happily, on this occasion I stopped before they had to pull out a dolly to remove me from my seat and move me to the truck. Good stuff, Maynard.
And from there to the range. H&H is a nice place, and I took the Remington 33 I wrote about before, and that Star pistol I've been testing. I had stripped the Star down and took out the Dremel, polishing bobs and compound and attacked the feed ramp. Once I had shined the surface I found that the ramp was pretty rough, with some machining marks across the face. It only took a few minutes to remove most of them(Disclaimer: I'm not a trained gunsmith, so do not take this as expert advise. It's just what I did. If you've never done work like this or you're unsure about what/how, take it to someone who knows. If you try it yourself and screw something up, don't blame me). With a nice bright finish I worked some dummy rounds through, and oh, you could feel the difference. So tonight I shot some more of the Speer Gold Dots through it, all without fail or problem in any way. I also tried some Remington 117 grain hollow points; they also worked without fail.
I put a little over a box through the .22 at bullseyes at 25 yards. A few years ago I took some card stock and drew a grid of 1" squares all over it, with a corner at center. I left a bit of the upper left blank and typed in spaces for date, gun, ammo info. I kept that as a master and made a bunch of different targets by copying the grid and adding in whatever. So I've got hollow squares for sighting in scopes, different size black bullseyes, and whatever else strikes my fancy. Ok, ok, it's just a phrase, my fancy hasn't been struck in quite a while now. Anyway, the targets tonight were 2" black circles for the rifle. I used silhouettes for the pistol.
It still strikes me how nice the trigger is on that rifle. It was an inexpensive .22 for a kid, capable of hunting the elusive tin can and putting squirrel & rabbit on the table, nothing fancy about it. And yet it's got a trigger action you often have to either pay through the nose for in a high-dollar rifle, or pay a gunsmith to fix for you nowadays. Clean break at about 3 pounds I'd guess. Only thing it would need for serious use would be something to keep the trigger from moving back after the break, it does have a bit of motion there. For once I think I'll leave something the hell alone.
And just to make the evening complete, the folks in the next lane had two submachine guns, a Uzi and a Mac 10. Both with suppressors.
(Brief note. There are silencers and suppressors. A silencer makes the shot as quiet as possible, in the process slowing the bullet down some; used with sub-sonic ammo where the bullet is moving below the speed of sound, they can be amazingly quiet. Suppressors leave the bullet velocity alone, they just quiet the sound of the shot down quite a bit. This is my understanding of the difference)
I've fired a Mac 10 once before, without a barrel extension or suppressor, but I'd never fired an Uzi, so when the guy offered I grabbed- uh, happily accepted the offer and put a magazine through it. Firing that thing semi-auto there's virtually no recoil, the weight damps down a 9mm cartridge nicely. In short bursts, it was easy to control. No, I'll never get one unless I win a lottery or something, I can't afford to feed it.
So it worked out to be a nice evening. I'll clean the stuff tomorrow, I'm tired. Thank God for modern ammo where you can put it off.
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