There are many Carbines,

but this one's mine, so keep your sweaty hands off.Having been able to hie myself off to the range for a while today, and firing this beast for the first time in a while, thought I'd write a bit about it.

I've mentioned it before: it's an Inland, made(near as I can tell) December '42 or January '43. It had the usual upgrades over time(adjustable rear sight, bayonet-mount barrel band, 'turn' safety and magazine latch for the 30-round mags), but seems to have held onto the original stock. The barrel is either the original, or a replacement from the same time the receiver was made. It made its way around the world, from the markings having served with the South Korean Army before finally coming back to the States, finally winding up with me.

This was the first of these I'd ever fired. First I'd ever really handled, for that matter. Kim has waxed poetic about them before, but I was still surprised by the 'handy' factor; it's the Model 94 of semi-auto war rifles: light, short, and reliable. And I was quite pleased with the accuracy it's capable of, better than I'd hoped for. There were two things I did to it: First, the thing shot high at 100 yards, as in about 6" high. Since the top of the sight blade, where it'd been filed down, was nice and flat I made a piece to match the blade angles and width and soldered it on; that way I was able to file it down to put the shots on at 100 with the rear sight on 100. The other thing I did to it was recut and polish the crown; whoever had cleaned it over the years had been careful, but there were a couple of tiny dings. Maybe fifteen minutes work to polish them out.

Once upon a time I wrote about modifying a handguard I picked up to allow forward-mounting a pistol scope on it. That actually worked out quite well, but there was always the chance of the handguard shifting a bit, so I finally decided to get a more solid setup. I looked around and settled on the Ultimak mount, which you see on it in the picture. Machined aluminum, doesn't weigh much and mounts solidly to the barrel, replacing the handguard. And has a Picatinny rail the full length. Took about twenty minutes to put it on, that long because I was using a level and rechecking to make sure it was aligned properly.

The sight you see above is a Millett Redot SP1. After the lousy experience with a Pentax red dot(PENTAX RED DOTS SUCK!!!), I went to Midway and browsed. An Aimpoint or Eotech was out of reach, so I started browsing with the following in mind:
Brand I'd heard of,
$100 or less,
At least four stars on customer ratings.
And this was the only one that met all the above. So I decided to give it a try(Midway stands behind their stuff, which helps). And it's been great. Mounted solidly, proper click adjustments, and once zeroed I haven't had to touch it. Eleven brightness settings, which lets you adjust for ambient light conditions. And it's very fast and accurate; I've been very pleased with it.

Put the magazine pouch on the stock just so there'd always be two handy, and there's a hex key for the sight bolts in it(just in case).

Nicle little rifles, they are.