Thursday, October 26, 2006

I have a question for those with greater knowledge

than I on the subject.

I've been looking at the drawings of the 'man-stopper bullet' from Mr. Webley. I know how you can cast hollow base or hollow nose bullets, but I'm thinking that a bullet with both would most likely have to be swaged; am I correct on this?

If I am, it makes it less likely I'll be able to get hold of some, because I have little interest in setting up to swage bullets. Among other things, I'm thinking having the dies made would be a bit on the expensive side.

Not exactly my definition of 'hot stuff'

but according to Sheik Hilali, hot women are like a dish of meat left out for the cat to find. Or something like that. You expect actual sense from a BPM?

This idiots method of preventing rape: If the woman is in her boudoir, in her house and if she’s wearing the veil and if she shows modesty, disasters don’t happen. Sure, honey, just stay in the house, wrapped in a tent, in your room, and all will be well. Unless you don't like being a friggin' prisoner, of course.

Take a look. While you're there, scroll on around, Tim Blair comes up with a lot worth looking at.

First one's what the enviroweenies plan for all of us

From the Telegraph, we find this:
4x4 drivers face £300 bill to park outside home

Millions of drivers of sports cars and 4x4s face hefty charges to park outside their own homes under a scheme being pioneered by a local council.

Town hall chiefs across the country were said last night to be closely watching a move by Liberal Democrats in Richmond upon Thames, south-west London, to target the owners of so-called "gas-guzzlers".

So for the 'privilege' of parking in front of your house, if you have a vehicle the weenies don't approve of, they council wants to charge you up to, I think it converts to about $450-500. And here's the "We HAVE to!" from the local council weenie:
Serge Lourie, the council leader, said: "Climate change is the single greatest challenge facing the world today. We can no longer bury our heads in the sand and pretend that it is not happening.

"For too long it has been seen as a problem that only central governments or international organisations could address. The truth is that we must all start acting now at local level."


By screwing the taxpayers again and more.


The other is just for the fun of it:Scots' plan for England as radioactive dustbin

SCOTLAND’S First Minister has said that one of the benefits of remaining part of the UK is that the country can continue to dump its nuclear waste in England.


Whee, English that glow in the dark so you can shoot them at night!

Wednesday, October 25, 2006

See? I did NOT forget the bumper

Not completely. Just took 'till today for me to have the truck, and the time to shoot it, AND to remember to haul my ass outside and shoot it.














This one is a heavy stamped-steel bumper with a rubber or plastic coating. Which both means no glare off chrome and no rust from scratches and dings. It's held up nicely so far. My previous truck's bumper was chromed but otherwise identical and was still good after fourteen years, so this one I'd expect to last as well.

Gun show report

And one of my remaining dream finds found

Now that I've mostly recovered(yeah, I'm a wimp) and have some time, the basic would be that the Wanenmacher show is a very, very nice show. They advertised about 3900 tables, and I believe it. Guns, parts, accessories, tools, knives, more tools & parts, books and surplus gear. Unlike last year I didn't stock up on ammo, though I picked up a few bits & pieces there. Mostly I was looking for parts for the M1 Carbine receiver, some replacement screwdriver bits and other things like that.

On the Carbine, every part you can think of was indeed available, but I've got to say this: the price of GI-production barrels is officially insane. I saw one Inland barrel (in very good shape externally but a bullet would slip into the muzzle all the way to the case) priced at $350. If the damn thing was new in the wrapper, maybe; no way in hell it was worth near that much in that condition. Some others were anywhere from $150-250, with much less muzzle wear. I'd hoped to find an Inland barrel to go with the receiver, but at those prices it ain't gonna happen.

Now to the find: I'm now the owner of a Webley Mk VI revolver














chambered for the, as Kim puts it, manly .455 Webley cartridge.Unfortunately, yes, the cylinder is cut, but that's the big reason I could afford it; those with uncut cylinders run about twice what I paid for this one. The bore is bright with very strong rifling, the barrel & frame lock up without any play or slop, and the cylinder locks up like a bank vault. I saw one other for a bit less, but the barrel/frame lockup wasn't as tight as this one.

Monday was partly devoted to detail-stripping this and cleaning and lubing. I've torn down/helped with several Enfield and Webley revolvers, and the thing they all had in common was being dry inside, no trace of any lube. Cleaned and oiled(greased where appropriate) they've all proven to have smooth actions and light, clean single-action triggers(in those pistols that had single-action capability). And it's a very simple design inside. In the case of the Mk VI, the 'V' mainspring delivers power to the hammer and rebounds the trigger; the only other springs are one in the cam that works the ejector and the one that tensions the single-action sear. A very robust design.

Sights are a front post that's locked into the base with a screw(I've seen sight blades marked for the range they were sized for) and a wide 'V' rear that's actually part of the barrel latch. It should be noted that they did make target versions of this pistol which had adjustable rear sights.

Last couple of days I've done more research on this cartridge, which included finding this page of British revolver cartridge data if you want the entire rundown. Short version, this cartridge originally fired a 265-grain bullet of 12 parts lead and 1 part tin loaded to 700 fps. That, I would say, would leave a mark. There were several modifications over time, and at the time this pistol was made the standard was a flat-nose hollow-base bullet at about 650fps. One thing I'd like to note is that in 1898 this cartridge was produced with 'Thomas Webley's patented man-stopping bullet'





cast in 12 parts lead to 1 part tin. Now THAT would leave a mark. The record notes:Patented by Thomas Webley in 1897. It had a conical cavity in the nose which was to aid expansion, and the outer radius (of the nose) was slightly chamfered to aid initial penetration. This design was meant to increase stopping power when non-vital parts of the body was hit. It appears to have worked too, as the Mk III round was withdrawn from service because of it´s "over-effectiveness". I would tend to wonder, how can a combat bullet be 'over-effective'? In any case, that hollow base would also let the bullet swage out to fit the bore, which would help explain the reputation for accuracy of this pistol/cartridge.

I mentioned the cylinder was cut. At the start of WWII, when the Brits were desperate for any firearm that would go bang a lot of these were dug out of the armories for use. However, there was a shortage of the ammo for them, and no way to take manufacturing capacity from other cartridges to make them. So, since they could get lots of .45acp ammo from us, the cylinders/extractors had a little milled off the back; this made enough room for .45acp in spring-steel clips to be used. Accuracy suffered as the bullet of our .45 was of a bit smaller diameter, but it worked. So now it's not easy to find either a pistol with or an uncut cylinder alone, and the prices are high.

Fast forward, and a lot of these revolvers are on the market. You can shoot them with .45acp and clips, but if you don't want to do that there was a problem: .455 Webley ammo or brass was hard to get and expensive. Answer to this was to create the .45 Auto Rim, basically the acp case with a very thick rim















Auto Rim case on the left here. The rim engages the extractor properly, and the thickness fills in the space for the clip.

So you can set up to shoot it, but there's still a problem, the different bullet diameters. Which means not only is a standard .45acp bullet too small but the case is a bit smaller in diameter, too. I wanted to give this one a try before I wrote this so I did the same thing as I did for the .380 Enfield revolver: cast the bullet and don't size it, just lube with Lee Liquid Alox. I cast some 230-grain ball and 200-grain flat-nose, and this method gave me bullets of .455 in the ball and .453 in the flat-nose. I dug up some load information and put these in the Auto Rim cases with a suitable charge of Unique and this morning took it to the range.

Note: I've read everything from "It's perfectly safe to shoot with standard .45acp ball" to "You're a fool if you shoot it with .45acp". I've got a bunch of full-moon clips, and I'll use them with handloads kept to about the same pressure-velocity levels as the original cartridge, but mostly I plan to use the Auto Rim cases to load this.

Overall a very smooth action with, as I said, a clean and light single-action pull. I couldn't set up the chronograph so I'll have to check the velocity of the loads later. I boiled down to this: first target was fired single-action at about fifteen yards with the 200-grain loads:






(the hole an inch south & a bit east should be ignored; yes, there is a reason)








The second target was fired double-action at seven yards with the 230-grain loads, all fired in about five seconds:
















Overall, I'm very happy with this thing. These groups in a dimly lit range with sights designed for fast acquisition, not precise marksmanship, ain't bad at all from my eyes. And recoil was negligible with both loads; the combination of size, weight, barrel length and grip size/shape made it very comfortable to shoot. A very nice pistol that I'm going to enjoy being the caretaker of for a while.

Other stuff about the show

One dealer was selling Duracoat in all the various colors. I got a kit of matt black(bottle of resin and bottle of hardener, with instructions) to try out. I've got an air brush I can hook up to the compressor, so we'll see how this works out. If I get good results there are a number of things I can use it on.

I found a very nice powder measure that I'm going to get when I've got some money again. Weighing every charge on a stick powder like IMR4895 or 3031 or whatever can be a pain, but every measure I've tried doesn't work well with them; you have to throw a charge that's a bit light and then put it on the scale and and add powder to bring it up to weight. This measure was dropping very consistent charges with a large, coarse stick powder( I can't remember which one offhand) with no cut grains.

There were a lot of old double-rifles out there, in calibers from .450 on up. Some absolutely beautiful examples of the gunmakers art, marred only by the fact I'd have had to sell my house to afford any of them.

Overall a very good show. I will make a suggestion if you're going to it: if you plan on buying much of anything and spending the day/s, take some kind of cart. I borrowed a suitcase cart(the kind that folds up) and used a bungee cord to hold a small storage bin on it and it was VERY nice to have. Among other things it lets you carry a couple of bottles of water and some munchies along.

Tuesday, October 24, 2006

Two things tonight

And I promise that tomorrow I'll write about the gun show. In this case that should be Gun Show.

First, from across the Atlantic, maybe this will finally get them to understand why we treated the Kings taxmen so nastily:
Council tax inspectors will be given the right to enter homes and fine householders who refuse to cooperate under a new property revaluation scheme, the Conservatives claimed last night.

They accused ministers of "covertly" pushing through new laws that would give the inspectors power to levy fines of up to £1,000 to back up a revaluation that could see council tax bills soar.

The new powers are due to be rubber-stamped today by a little-noticed committee of MPs dealing with delegated legislation reforming the domestic rating system in Northern Ireland.


And from the sorry excuses for journalists we have running around we get this about the CNN snuff video:
Hunter's fury over the video underscores the tightrope often walked by news media in the war. Critics of the war say Americans see very little of the daily violence in Iraq because of television's reluctance to show gory footage. Dangerous conditions also keep journalists from reporting independent of military units that provide them protection.

Don't you just love it? These are the little bastards who don't want to write about it when our troops stomp bad guys or treat sick & injured locals, they don't EVER want to write about the truly heroic actions of many troops, but the put out this crap and then excuse it with "But we're walking a tightrope, here! People need to SEE the carnage!" Worthless little shits don't worry about showing the 'carnage' of our people busting ambushes or whacking terrorists who say that murdering teachers and children is doing their gods' work, but by their god we HAVE to see this garbage.

We need a hunting season on CNN.

Why I dislike Tony Blair

Here's one of the ways
Tony Blair called yesterday for the national DNA database to be expanded to include every citizen.
...
The Criminal Justice and Police Act 2001 permitted police to retain DNA samples from everyone who was charged. Previously they had to destroy samples and fingerprints from anyone who was found not guilty or had their charge dropped.

The Criminal Justice Act 2003 gave police the power to take and keep a DNA sample.

...The DNA database could be a vital tool in the fight against crime but the terms of its use must be properly laid down and approved by Parliament.

"There is no provision to deal with people who have a DNA sample taken, are innocent of any crime but still remain on the database," said Mr Green.


And Blair says Mr Blair said he did not believe there was "any problem" with the public providing samples because if they had committed a serious offence they "should be convicted". The database sent a "strong signal" to the criminal community that they could be identified and caught from even the smallest trace at a crime scene.

Ok, first: apparently Blair has been watching CSI: Wherever after saying that 'smallest trace' crap. Second, it's a logical next step for Blair & Co.; they think the government should control all parts of your life. Third, don't you just love the logic? "You might someday do something wrong, so we're going to keep samples of you around. And if it turns out you were arrested in error, we'll keep all samples; never know when someone like you will do something".

Last excerpt: Downing Street said later that no thought had been given at this stage to requiring everyone to give a DNA sample, although they will have to give scans of their eye and fingerprints for a passport and eventually a national identity card. I call bullshit on this; no thought had been given my ass. They've been planning for and pushing this for years. The fact that they'll lie about it even now says all you need to know about their intentions.

Sunday, October 22, 2006

Remember I wrote about the attacks on police in France?

I noted the article spoke of 'intensifying attacks'. I just took a quick look at Gates of Vienna and found this post, When Will the First IED Explode in Paris?. Here's a key quote:

The figures are stark. An average of 112 cars a day have been torched across France so far this year and there have been 15 attacks a day on police and emergency services. Nearly 3,000 police officers have been injured in clashes this year. Officers have been badly injured in four ambushes in the Paris outskirts since September. Some police talk of open war with youths who are bent on more than vandalism.

112 cars a DAY? EVERY DAY this year? Almost three thousand injured cops, including outright ambushes?

This isn't 'going bad', this is flat out of control.

I'm back

Tired and hungry and thirsty and my legs are killing me; boots or no, spending that much time walking around on concrete is not good.

I can't honesty say I was there the entire time. I left not quite an hour early Saturday to avoid the rush, and about a half-hour early today; otherwise, two days of the biggest gun show you'll ever see. Approximately 3900 tables according to what I read.

I'll put more up about it later, right now I need to put things away and get a drink.