And a slightly better picture of the Webley

in all its new, black, oily glory.

Finishing up a blade,

and this one I decided to parkerize.

Which, if you're not familiar with it, is a phosphate coating chemically deposited on the metal surface to help prevent rust. A few years back I got a bottle of a concentrate for treating knives and I've still got the solution I mixed up; some are only good for one use, this stuff you can keep using. Nice and simple to use, just bring the solution up to 165-180F(and it's not real sensitive, you can be a bit lower and it'll still work) and hang the clean, degreased steel in. After about twenty minutes, take it out and let it dry completely, then oil.

Here's before:














This one was forged out of a harrow tooth, and the guard is hammered brass soldered into place on the tang. That's a 400-grit finish, which is as fine as I usually polish unless special request/need. So into the bath for 25 minutes, and here's after:

















You'll notice a difference in color between the edge and back. Remember the differential hardening I wrote of before? It causes that, the stuff grabs just fine but looks different on the different hardnesses.

It doesn't actually stick to the brass but it does discolor it. A little careful polishing with a dremel and a polishing wheel will take care of that. Then fit a grip and pommel.

When you look in your breaker box,

you do not want it to look anything like this

Bluing, before & after

Last fall I wrote of finally finding a MkVI Webley, a big, ugly .455-caliber revolver. It had none of the original finish left, so I decided to make it my second bluing project. Here's the before:















and here's after:












A very nice, even black over all surfaces. Like the 1911 I did before, no polishing was done. In this case while I wanted to reblue I didn't really want to change the surface itself. Disassemble, spray all needed parts with brake cleaner, then after dry wash with Dawn dish soap. As the solution was coming up to temperature I then dipped the parts in muriatic acid to strip any remaining finish, rinsed thoroughly, then hang on wires and into the bath.

Og mentioned the acid bath for stripping, and a Helpful Commenter sent me an e-mail with some good information which included that a 'pre-pickling' in an organic acid could help lead to a faster, deeper color. I damn sure doesn't seem to hurt.

Second try at bluing

Decided to try it on another couple of pieces the other day. Pretty simple, put the salts & solution in the pot, water in the rinse pot and start them heating while cleaning/degreasing the pieces. At proper temp hang the pieces in and boil for 25 minutes, maybe a couple more(lost exact track). This time everything had a bit of the red 'smut' on them when they came out, but brushing in the hot water cleaned it right off. Oil and let it sit overnight. Overnight's probably not necessary, but actually managed to leave it this time.

I'd heard that bluing salts 'creep', and they do. I'd stored the stuff in a plastic tub with a snap-on lid. When I poured the liquid into the pot I found the salts very thin in the center, very thick in the corner and they'd crept halfway up the sides. Soft, and easy to scrape out into the pot.

One of the pieces I did was another knife blade, I'll post pictures later on(busy evening, bad night, I'll get to it). So far this stuff works really well.

By the way, to the holders of the Human-Caused Global Warmering, 30% my ass. 30% was the chance of some scattered thunderstorms in this area last night. Which means it stormed and rained from about midnight to almost ten this morning. God knows how much rain, my gauge was on the ground so no measure; if I'm decipering the NWS listing they officially show about 1.75". I repeat, they can't predict this crap but they claim they can tell what the weather will be in 50-100 years?

And for a different timeline on earth's history,

take a look:

* 4003 B.C.: Earth still largely molten , Adam and Eve cover their shame with asbestos waders

* 3714 B.C.: The first biotechnologist, Cain, patents cyanobacteria.

* 3554 B.C.: Komatiitic lava floods Earth's earliest crust ; Noah's Ark incinerated.

* 3264 B.C.: Methuselah begins to notice passage of geological time.

* 3124 B.C.: Archaean copper deposits form , kick-starting Bronze Age.

* 3004 B.C.: Y1K crisis averted : Gilgamesh unable to count as high as 1000.

and so forth.

The 3/2 Stryker Cav

A couple of years ago Kim started the Walter & Adam fund to provide equipment for some guys in a sniper unit.

Now he and the Mrs. have set up to give assistance to men of the 3/2 Stryker Cav, info here and here.

Give if you can.

And Kim? My profound apologies for not getting this up sooner.

I have to agree with Tim,

these people are freakin' insane.
Home Office statistics suggest that there are 12 such murders each year. However, according to research, the true figure is much higher. At a conference in Southampton last week, police chiefs revealed that they are re-examining 2,000 deaths and murders between 1996 and 2006 to establish whether they involve honour killings. So far, 19 have now been found to be honour killings. A further 20 involved some element of “honour violence”.

I include in the 'insane' part both the islamic murderers and the British politicians and officials who've had a big hand in things getting this far. Do you really think they'd be having these problems, at least at these levels, if they'd started stomping on it when it first cropped up?

Hell, no.

But a bunch of politicians- which I guess would include the appointed and hired officials in, for instance, law enforcement- who'd rather be called a child molester than insensitive to islamists- kept making excuses for the swine, and threatening and abusing those who yelled about it, and now they're here:

A team of 20 prosecutors are to be based in London, the West Midlands, West Yorkshire and Lancashire. Each one will be trained by a number of different agencies including the police, the government’s forced marriage unit and the independent victims group, the Southall Black Sisters ...

Nazir Afzal, the CPS lead on honour-based violence, said that such crimes are often elaborate, pre-planned and can involve many suspects.

One in nine honour killings in the UK is carried out by hit men, he said. It is also common for the youngest member of the family to carry out the murder, with the others playing a lesser role.

And let us also note Tim's update, wherein the islamists once again become the victim of something done for someone else:

Iran Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini said the decision to praise the “apostate” showed Islamophobia among British officials ...

Mr Hosseini told a press conference: “Giving a medal to someone who is among the most detested figures in the Islamic community is ... a blatant example of the anti-Islamism of senior British officials.

Freakin' bozos have indeed taken the PC attitudes into account: paint yourself a victim, no matter what, and the idiots will make excuses for you.



















"Those people are nuts, boss"

Got some old cartridges

from Dad, stuff he'd picked up/found/been given over the years. Some I recognize, some I have no idea what they are. I'm going through the box and doing some cleaning, mostly headstamps so I can read them. Thought I'd post a few of them here.

First up, some rifle ammo:


















The first two I don't know. #1 has a paper-patched lead bullet of about .44 caliber, #2 a lead bullet of .427" at the case mouth.

Here's the headstamps:










#1, the central portion of the head surrouding the primer is raised, then the head narrows to the rim. It has a 'D' at the top, '11' on the left side and '87' on the right and '*' at the bottom.
#2 has 'A' at the top, a 'S' on the left and '5' on the right(looks like, and they're laying on their side; hard to read) with '78' at the bottom.
#3 is REM-UMC at the top and '30 USA' at the bottom, which I think makes it .30-40 Krag.
#4 is W.R.A. Co on top, .30 U.S.G. at the bottom, another .30-40 Krag.
#5 appears to be .303 British softpoint, 'R', then an Brit broad arrow, then 'L' at the top, going clockwise the date 1939, then 'G II'.
#6 is .30-06, 'Western' at the top and '1917' at the bottom.

There's also a bunch of pistol cartridges, here's a few of them:











and headstamps:









#1 is a .455 Webley, 'K42' at the top, 'VIZ' at the bottom.
#2 appears to be a .45acp blank, 'REM-UMC' at the top and '1906' on the bottom. Which, since I think the cartridge was developed by John Browning in 1905, makes it pretty early indeed.
#3 is .45acp, 'REM-UMC' at the top and '18' on the bottom.
#4 is a .45 Auto Rim, 'REM-UMC' on the top, '45 AR' on the bottom.
#5 is a .38 Colt, 'REM-UMC' on top, '38 COLT NP' on the bottom(NP for New Police?)
#6 is a 9mm blank, 'R-P' on top and '9mm LUGER' on the bottom.

The last two(for now) are interesting:























The first is(I believe) a 9mm rimfire shotshell. I've seen them in all-metal cases before, but not a metal/paper case. The second is a rimfire, and appears to be a heeled bullet like a .22 rimfire with external lube grooves. Which would, I think, make it produced in the 1800's. Bullet is .376" diamater, overall length is 1.39". Headstamps:















There's a WHOLE bunch of other stuff in this box, I'll be posting more pictures as I have time and get them cleaned up enough to see what they are.

Found a couple of good columns

from a guy named George Jonas up in Canada. Couple of good bits:
Guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens pose little danger to public safety. (Less danger, to be statistically precise, than unattended swimming pools.) In fact, from the point of view of public safety, the worst combination is armed criminals confronting unarmed citizens.

Yet this is all our current gun control laws can possibly achieve: Armed criminals confronting unarmed citizens. The 1993 Brady Bill was no exception. It could do nothing but add some annoyance and red tape to the life of a law-abiding person who wished to purchase a gun.(from here)

and

I visited the home of a police chief in the 1970s. He lived in a big house outside metropolitan Toronto, and had a gun in every room of his home. He also had four or five healthy Dobermans that roamed the grounds freely at night.

"Gee, Chief," I said to him, "look at all these guns and dogs. Why don't you just run a direct line to your merry men?" "They can't fly," he replied, "as fast as a bullet."

I didn't blame the Chief for wanting to hang on to his life or to his silver, but it irked me that he didn't like the rest of us having similar ambitions.(from here)

Found through a link from the Relapsed Catholic

Sometimes 'Mythbusters' makes me want to scream

and yell at the screen. Other night had the chance to see an episode where they tried some firearms stories and a 'can hammers break each other' . Usually I wouldn't go into this, but there were a couple of things that I have to comment on(No, I'm not going to their website and posting on it; I'm sure the points have been brought up, except for maybe the last).

On firearms, they tried to shoot through a scope with another rifle from 100 yards, I think(missed the first minute or two) trying to duplicate that one scene in Saving Private Ryan. They repeatedly hit the scope, but no shot made it all the way through to hit the head of the 'shooter'. I didn't hear them say what caliber the rifle they were shooting was, or what kind of bullet used. The one case of this happening I've read of involved Carlos Hathcock firing at a VC sniper using a 91/30 Mosin Nagant with a PU scope. Hathcock was using a .30-06 firing a 172-grain match bullet; the PU scope has a fairly heavy steel tube. I'd like to see the test done with that setup.

The thing that irritated me here was when their sniper 'expert' said that WWII was the first time scoped rifles had been used in war. Which would be a real surprise to the German and British and other snipers who used them in WWI.

I'll throw in something on ballistics that made me groan in the SPR scene: the distance of the shot. The guy with the Springfield said the German sniper was about 400 yards away, which meant there's no damn way he could have shot lengthwise through the scope to hit the man. As we all know, a bullet travels in an arc from muzzle to target and that arc gets higher over distance: the arc of a .30-06 bullet over 400 yards would mean that- at best- the bullet could hit the eyepiece of the scope on the trip to his head.

On hammers, the question was could a hammer head fragment explosively if struck with another hammer? That testing was fine, but at the end they decided to try to make the hammers as likely to break as possible, so they decided to heat them 'as hot as you can get them without melting' and quench them in used motor oil- "...which is full of carbon..." because that would 'put more carbon in to the hammer head and make it more brittle' and kept referring to it as case-hardening.

I know, I'm being picky, but that's so damn stupid(especially coming from people with something of a science background) and it pissed me off enough that I had to write about it.

When you heat steel that hot, you enlarge the grain structure(bad) and when you quench it you do harden it, but how much depends on the carbon content and the alloy in the steel. A medium-carbon steel, especially with some alloys, will harden but not become brittle. Big thing here, though, is that no matter how much carbon is in the oil it doesn't 'go into' the steel. You actually lose carbon from the surface when you heat above about 1500F, but you cannot raise the carbon content by quenching in dirty oil. The steel cools below the point at which actual case-hardening is possible almost instantly and with in an open atmosphere the carbon has no chance to penetrate.
And I'm even more pissed on this because a: people will believe this crap because Jamie of Mythbusters said it and b: they had already talked to a blacksmith about hammers and he could have told them the facts. So could a lot of others(machinists for example).

The last was when the cast some minie balls for a test involving Civil War-era rifled muskets. They were pouring the lead into the mold and then dipping the mold in water! BAD! BAD Adam!

Aargh.

I think it's called 'karma',

at least in part, when stuff like this happens.
In the past 48 hours 19 Palestinians have been killed, tossed from rooftops, executed at point-blank range, and shot in hospital wards. That number seems certain to rise. More than 80 Palestinians have now been killed since mid May.

Among yesterday's dead was a 14-year-old boy and three women, all killed in a Hamas attack on a Fatah security officer's home.

"They're firing at us, firing RPGs, firing mortars. We're not Jews," the brother of Jamal Abu Jediyan, a Fatah commander, pleaded during a live telephone conversation with a Palestinian radio station.

Minutes later both men were dragged into the streets and riddled with bullets.

Don't you just love these people? "We're not Jews", which makes this terribly wrong. Whereas if the Hamassholes(thank you for the term, Emperor) were killing Jewish men and women and children, it would be just ducky.

Terje Roed-Larsen, the UN envoy to the Middle East, said: "The picture which emerges is very dark, and apparently getting darker. There are reasons for real concerns in the international community."

My first thought is that things will rapidly get lighter as the terrorists kill each other off. And to quote somebody, it serves them right. The Palistinians knowingly elected a terrorist organization to power, and this is part of what comes after. "...reasons for real concerns in the international community", which means that the UN will have a commission to appoint people to a study to examine the situation and make recommendations as to what the following letters of "Why are you doing this?" should say exactly.

And for more on why they deserve this(at least a LOT of them do), check this out:
A 'music video' broadcast on a Palestinian Hamas TV station on Wednesday had a simple message for its viewers: Carrying out a suicide bomb attack is more important than raising one's children.

The video, broadcast on al-Aqsa TV, was made available by Palestinian Media Watch and can be viewed on YouTube.

I think it was Golda Mier who said there would be peace when the Arabs loved their children more than they hated Jews. Looks like they're not there yet. By a long damn way.

And in other news, Angelina Jolie really is a jerk. Not bad looking, but a jerk.

Reason #216 why Sen. Harry Reid

(Disgusting-NV) is a sorry, worthless, walking piece of crap.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid called Marine Gen. Peter Pace, the outgoing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, "incompetent" during an interview Tuesday with a group of liberal bloggers, a comment that was never reported.

Reid made similar disparaging remarks about Army Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, said several sources familiar with the interview.

Stinking, cowardly, corrupt, vile little excuse for a man. And do take notice of the picture; looks like he's copying the Castro & Co. 'socialism forever!' speechifying.

Among the reasons I like Oklahoma

is the way vets tend to be treated. In this case, the son of a friend, a Marine just back from his second tour in Iraq. Couple of days ago they went to a Pizza Hut for dinner, and a friend of the father who'd known the son growing up saw them, invited them over, and then announced to the place that this man was just back from the sandbox. The whole place gave him a round of applause.

Tonight he said a bit about it. He'd been in Ramadi and said that when his battalion arrived, for the first couple of months there'd been a bunch of firefights; for the last two months not a single American troop in his area had fired a shot. The Iraqi army and police had done all the fighting. From a trickle of information from the locals at the beginning they'd moved up almost to a 'flood' level, tips on bad guys(who and where), weapons and explosives caches and so on.

Also mentioned they'd had a bunch of bad guys who'd gotten sick of the fighting and killing and turned themselves in, often giving information leading to arrests of bad guys and lots of equipment.

He spoke of power restored to neighborhoods, schools and clinics opened and such. Finished with 'there's still bad problems, but they're moving ahead and taking responsibility; it's getting better'.

Oh yes, he got a round of thanks from us, too.

It's not quite 'Let Africa Sink',

but it's definitely 'Stop trying to save us!".

Couple of years ago Kim wrote Let Africa Sink, his thoughts on what might save that continent. This is an interview with a Kenyan economics expert basically saying that "all the aid is making things worse". Couple of key quotes:

SPIEGEL: Stop? The industrialized nations of the West want to eliminate hunger and poverty.

Shikwati: Such intentions have been damaging our continent for the past 40 years. If the industrial nations really want to help the Africans, they should finally terminate this awful aid. The countries that have collected the most development aid are also the ones that are in the worst shape. Despite the billions that have poured in to Africa, the continent remains poor.

and on the subject of AIDS:
Shikwati: If one were to believe all the horrorifying reports, then all Kenyans should actually be dead by now. But now, tests are being carried out everywhere, and it turns out that the figures were vastly exaggerated. It's not three million Kenyans that are infected. All of the sudden, it's only about one million. Malaria is just as much of a problem, but people rarely talk about that.

SPIEGEL: And why's that?

Shikwati: AIDS is big business, maybe Africa's biggest business. There's nothing else that can generate as much aid money as shocking figures on AIDS. AIDS is a political disease here, and we should be very skeptical.

Interesting reading.

So the only time Mexico gives a damn about border security

is when A: it's their southern border and people are sneaking in and B: it's their northern border and they're blaming us for their problems.

Like this one:
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said Friday that Washington is taking steps to address Mexican concerns the U.S. is not doing enough to stop illegal weapons from being smuggled across the border and into the hands of brutal drug gangs.

Oh yes, the drug gangs couldn't possibly be getting weapons anywhere except from the U.S. And it seems the Mexican government is getting talking points from the Brady Gun Ban Group:
Mexican officials have repeatedly complained that the U.S. must do more to stop the flow of potent weapons - including assault rifles and even .50-caliber machine guns - that drug gangs often purchase in the United States.
You know, those evil select-fire M16's and the M2 Brownings you find on the shelves at the local gun shop?

Except that ANY select-fire or automatic weapon can only be bought legally after a bunch of federal paperwork and background checks and taxes and fees, and only if it's one that was owned by someone before it was decided(back in the 80's) that no new firearms of the type could be sold to citizens. Which means, besides the cost, there's only so many of them and the authorities are pretty picky about inspections to make sure people still have them. Which means, (wonder of wonders), that the bad guys- IF they're buying them here- are(GASP!) buying them illegally.

And I have to wonder about that, because there's a very few companies that build these, and they have to account for every one built. Not just the completed guns, but the receivers. And even if you assume a company is willing to risk the entire business for the chance of making a few extra dollars sneaking out some pieces to sell, just how many could they manage to make and sneak out?

"The firepower we are seeing here has to do with a lack of control on the (U.S.) side of the border," Patricio Patino, Mexico's top anti-drug intelligence official, said last month. "What we have asked the American government ... is that they put clear controls on the shipments of weapons."

I call bullshit. I don't doubt that there are smugglers taking some weapons south across the border, and if somebody's sneaking them in to the U.S. first and then south, but the numbers they're talking about? And this 'shipments of weapons' crap makes it sound- again- like someone can buy this stuff in stores here and then sneak it south across the border.

And, with all the coastline to land things on and mordida being the way of business down there in so many things, just why would someone smuggle the stuff into the U.S. and then across a second border into Mexico? As much as anything, sounds like another way of blaming the evil, nasty, bigoted U.S. for the problem.

Mexican Attorney General Eduardo Medina Mora argued that combatting violence was a cross-border issue, saying: "We recognize that we can't confront this problem alone."

Gonzales agreed, and said he and President Bush were "committed to collaborating in the development of a regional security and law enforcement strategy."

"Regional security and law enforcement strategy", right. When it's about something THEY want stopped and only in a way that(you can be sure) won't inconvenience the people crossing our border illegally.

Hey, I've got an idea! Let's build a damn fence along the border and stop ALL the smuggling going BOTH ways! And when the Mexican government bitches and whines about the northbound smuggling being stopped(people in particular) wave this article at them and tell them to shut the hell up.


Added: be it noted that Mexico has real problems with gangs of various types; I'm just damn sick of the U.S. being in some way called responsible for all of them.

The son has been heard from,

Yesterday while packing up to head out in the field again. They've been training hard(as they should) and spending a lot of time out in the field.

Pretty much everybody's been qualifying with everything, and he made expert with the M240B











.30 caliber machinegun. Also fired the M2 Browning, (only with the plastic bullet practice ammo, alas) and everything else that might come to hand in time of trouble.

He's supposed to have some leave and come back for a visit in the near future, which'll be nice. So far, so good.

If you've got someone joining or in who doesn't have one, may I make a suggestion? A really good folding knife. Gave him one for his birthday a couple of weeks before he shipped out, one of the big CRKT folders, and it's been a very handy tool.

Dealing with police

in a traffic stop is the subject of this post over at Kim's. Read it, and then read the comments. All 122 of them that got in before he closed them.

Something I'd read confirmed about .303 ammo

I'd read years ago that to increase lethality, the Brits had started putting an aluminum insert into the nose of the jacket to move the center of balance further back: the bullet remained very stable in flight and accurate, but on hitting a 'soft' target tended to go unstable much more quickly. This was the Mark VII ball.

Just looked at the Box o' Truth for the first time in a while and found this post testing just such ammo, including a couple of pictures. I'd never tried cutting a bullet in half to check the inside, here's the aluminum insert design:


















And, to make it even more interesting, here's a WWII round with a WOOD insert:


















Better than my describing it, go check out his results with this ammo on water jugs. Impressive, to say the least. A few years ago I wound up with several boxes of WWII Brit .303 ammo, I may have to move it up to my 'grab in case of trouble' box.

Ok, so I lied on one point

and was wrong on the other.

I looked at the parts of the pistol, sitting there all oily and disassembled, and I just couldn't wait. So I put it all together(minus the grips) and here it is in it's new, still very oily glory

















In my case, I can't blame the camera. Mine's pretty good, but I don't have the lighting or the skill to really show how well this came out. It's just as black and even as the knife blade. And if I'd spent an hour or two with a file and some 240/320/400 grit wet/dry paper polishing the slide and frame, it'd be just as smooth and glorious a finish.

This is so damn pretty I will eventually take it back down, polish and re-black it.