It's all over except the wailing and gnashing of teeth.

In case you haven't heard - and I don't see how one couldn't have - Winchester has closed its doors permanently. The auction of the remainder of their manufacturing facility is September 27 & 28.

Another sad day in firearms history.

-=[ Grant ]=-

2008 is shaping up as the battle of the Republican anti-gunner versus the Democratic anti-gunner. If only I could afford my own island...!

-=[ Grant ]=-

The Carnival of Cordite is a regular collection of up-to-the-minute links to current gun topics and discussions. No matter what your shooting interest, you're likely to find something that you just have to read!

-=[ Grant ]=-

In the news this morning:

Pluto no longer a planet

Russian Cosmonaut to Whack Golf Ball From ISS

Am I the only one who sees the humor in this??

-=[ Grant ]=-

Here in Oregon, we once had a thriving retail enterprise known as Meier & Frank. M&F, as their logo appeared, was a department store in the grand old tradition - think of what a Nordstrom department store would look like, and you have Meier & Frank. The store expanded to several stores here in the northwest, but never got really "big"; many years ago the family sold out to a corporation, and the circus began.

Since then, the small but elegant little chain has had several owners (and bad management teams), culminating in their recent acquisition by Macy's.

We should have sensed that this behemoth from the east was up to no good, in the way that RiteAid (another large eastern corporation that purchased another homegrown chain, Payless Drugs) proved to be. Sure enough, Macy's announced that they would eliminate the venerable Meier & Frank name and paste their own (far less stylish) moniker on their buildings.

It is the end of a fond era.

But why "Friday Surprise"? Back in the good old pre-corporate-takeover days, Meier & Frank had a tradition of having some special sale or event every Friday. It was never advertised, but everyone knew about the Friday Surprise. So, to keep the memory of an Oregon institution alive, I'm inaugurating my own version of the Friday Surprise. This is where I hope to share all of the wilder (non-gun related) stories that I come across, pictures, events, personal stuff, and so on.

I hope you enjoy it!

-=[ Grant ]=-

Tamara K., over at her blog The View From The Porch, says this:

"For what it's worth, I don't carry a gun to protect me from muggers at the mall. I don't even carry a gun to protect me, period. I carry a gun every day despite living in an area where I'm more likely to be hit by an asteroid than attacked by a mugger as a symbol of my refusal to buy into this culture of teat-sucking victimhood for one day longer. I carry it because I can."

Recite this, word for word, next time some busybody asks (with the inevitable sneer) why you need to carry a gun.

-=[ Grant ]=-

Well, the guns are certainly real, in the sense that they were made by Colt. What's not real, though, is they way they came from the factory!

With the prices of collectible Colts going well north of a grand, some unscrupulous sellers have taken to faking the rarer, and more valuable, variations. The most commonly faked is certainly the 3" Python.

A number of years ago, Colt sold off their remaindered barrels to companies such as Numrich Gun Parts. Amongst the prizes were a number of 3" barrels - brand new, mind you - for the Python.

When prices started their ascent a few years ago, some enterprising people took more common 4" Pythons, stuck the 3" barrels on them, and sold them as the far rarer variant. It didn't take someone long to figure out that one way to overcome buyer resistance was to include a Colt box that had the 3" label on the end - of course, the label is a complete forgery, but enough to fool most people into parting with far more money than they should.

Well, the more astute buyers soon wised up to this scam, and started demanding factory letters to prove the provenance of the piece in question. In today's digital world, faking a Colt letter is as easy as faking the box label - so now there are 3" Colt Pythons running around with "original" boxes and "factory letters" to calm even the most jittery buyer!

It's gotten bad enough that I now recommend anyone contemplating the purchase of a 3" Python to call Colt and order their own factory letter. If the seller shows any reticence to letting you do this, you've probably just saved yourself a whole bunch of money!

(I have been approached by a number of people over the past few years to swap barrels on Pythons - replacing a stock barrel with a 3" tube to be supplied by the client. In each case, I've told the caller that I'd be happy to do so, but I would be stamping and indication under the grip panels that the gun was not original. Not too surprisingly, none have taken me up on my offer. I will not be a party - knowingly or otherwise - to fleecing Colt buyers!)

-=[ Grant ]=-

This is one of the few sites I check regularly. The Gun Law News website is an easy way to keep up on firearm news, legislation, and court proceedings.

Yes, they have an RSS feed!

-=[ Grant ]=-

Russian photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii made quite a number of photographs prior to the communist revolution of 1918. What makes them unusual is that they are in vibrant color!



Prokudin-Gorskii invented the technique to do this. What he did was to shoot 3 nearly identical black-and-white negatives in rapid succession - through narrow-band red, green and blue filters - then show them on a screen through those same red, green, and blue filters to produce color images. With today's digital techniques, it is possible to assemble these images and view them easily.

During my photographic career, I experimented with his technique with marginal success, but of course modern color films and papers made this cumbersome process superfluous. At the time I was playing with this, I did not know that Prokudin-Gorskii had invented it. It was, after all, the tail end of the Cold War, and very little was publicized about Russian technology. It wouldn't be until the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the disintegration of the Iron Curtain, that such things became known.

Today, the Library of Congress has one of the largest, and the only digitally reproduced, portfolio of Prokudin-Gorskii's groundbreaking work. Absolutely fascinating to view, and a "must see" for history and technology buffs!

-=[ Grant ]=-

Thanks to the precision machining abilities of the Swiss, we now have the world's first revolver that presents a greater hazard from choking than from firing!

I'm not sure whether I'm more amazed with the workmanship, or that police organizations in this country are so imbecilic as to believe that this thing actually constitutes a hazard. As one blogger put it, someone armed with a Sharpie marker is more dangerous!

So, in salute to the vacuous hand-wringers in our media (and their sycophants everywhere), I hereby resurrect the feel-good mantra "won't SOMEBODY PLEASE think of the children?!?!?"

(You heard it here first, folks!)

-=[ Grant ]=-

Many people ask me where to get finger grooved grips for various guns (often for the Colt Python, but the Ruger GP-100 seems to be a common request as well.) Personally, I usually try to talk them out of that style grip, and I'd like to share my reasoning.

First, the grooves rarely fit any given person perfectly; for my hands, for instance, every grooved grip I've ever tried required me to spread my fingers to an uncomfortable degree. If I didn't, my fingers would wind up on top of the separating ridges, making shooting far less comfortable and secure! Women, who often have hands that are significantly smaller than their male counterparts, are particularly sensitive to this problem.

Second, anytime you add spacing between your fingers the combined strength of your grip is reduced. You simply grip harder with your fingers together than apart. There's a reason that hammers don't have finger grooves!

Third, having grooves on your grips slows down your acquisition and draw. No less a personage than Jerry Miculek, in a television interview, eschewed finger groove grips. As he put it, "no one gets a perfect grip out of the holster every time." A smooth, non-grooved grip allows you to get a workable grip immediately, where a grooved model requires that you get perfect finger placement from the outset. That is not what you want on a self-defense firearm!

I could point out that another revolver shooter who was "pretty good" was Bill Jordan, and you'll note that the grips he designed and used don't have finger grooves.

It's possible that if one is accustomed to holding a revolver in a light target-shooters grip, finger grooves may help in control. (I don't, I don't know anyone who does, and it's not what most trainers teach today.) Outside of that, I think they are an abomination and suggest that you not use them!

-=[ Grant ]=-

This last weekend was the large wedding of one of my close relatives. Since we're known as the "Second Amendment Family", the day would not be complete without some sort of ballistic celebration. What we came up with fit the occasion perfectly.

One of my cousins handloaded some special 12ga shotgun shells with birdseed. (That's right, SEED, not SHOT!) He used a 100% cotton wadding for biodegradability, and a very small amount of powder. (We had originally thought that primers alone would be sufficient to propel the lightweight charge out of the barrel, but that proved to not be the case.) The resulting rounds sent their payload out of a vertical barrel some 25 to 30 feet, and the sound level was approximately that of a .22 Short - just enough to attract attention but not so much that anyone's hearing would be in jeopardy.

After thoroughly checking the shotguns for non-approved ammo, and making sure that no one had any such ammunition on their person, our little Matrimony Militia (a grand total of 4 people) met the happy couple at the entrance of the reception area. We announced them, and (with the best military precision that a bunch of civilians could muster) fired our rounds straight into the air - muzzles held high, well above anyone's head, of course.

The effect was perfect - the birdseed rained down and thoroughly covered the bride and groom, who were surprised and greatly amused at their "shotgun wedding." Their photographer even stifled her laughter enough to thoroughly document the prank, and I'm quite certain that this was a first for her too!

If you are moved to try this, remember SAFETY FIRST. We made sure that everyone involved behaved in a safe manner, from the loading of the rounds to the storage of arms afterwards. The rounds were completely biodegradable (save for the hulls, naturally) and we made sure that all of the standard safety rules were obeyed. Of course, this was well before the bar was opened and absolutely no alcohol was permitted until after the arms were stored in locked trunks. (The fact that this event was held outdoors on private property made the whole thing possible. DO NOT try this at a church or indoors!)

-=[ Grant ]=-

I realize that I've been a bit off-topic the last couple of weeks, posting more general interest topics than revolver-centric items. It's not that I've been lazy, just busy and suffering from a bit of writers block.

When I started this blog, I made a promise to myself to update it at least three times a week; a blog that doesn't have new material on a regular basis is pretty boring, and I don't like to read boring things. So, I've been posting things that simply caught my eye, rather than taking the time to sit down and bang out an original article.

I'll try harder, I promise!

-=[ Grant ]=-

There is a huge amount of misinformation regarding revolver accuracy. Folks, assuming that you have a gun in proper repair - timing, lockup, chamber-to-bore alignment - the most important factor in accuracy is the chamber throat dimension.

What is the chamber throat? It is the slightly constricted opening in the chamber, just in front of the cartridge mouth, that the bullet passes through on its way into the forcing cone. The throat gives the bullet its first stabilizing guidance, and many people better than I have demonstrated that it is critical to good accuracy - perhaps more than the bore itself!

The best accuracy is obtained when the bullet diameter and the throat diameter are exactly the same; in the case of lead bullets, it can be up to .001" smaller than the bullet diameter with good results. If the throat is larger than the bullet, then the bullet sort of wallows through the throat and never does get that initial guidance. Accuracy will suffer.

It is therefore important to serious shooters to know what their throat diameters actually measure. Now, I took heat from some internet experts recently when I stated that one cannot get proper measurements of throat diameters using calipers - dial, vernier, or digital. One fellow wrote me that he'd been doing it for years with nothing more than a cheap dial caliper, and the readings were always "nuts on!" While I don't wish to argue with anyone, let me relate a little test I did.

I took a cylinder that happened to be on my workbench - a S&W Model 60 "J" frame cylinder - and measured its throats with calipers, then with a set of certified pin gages. There were three different calipers - a vernier, a dial, and a digital electronic - all of Swiss origin. The Swiss make the finest calipers on the face of the earth, and substantially better than the Chinese tools most stores sell. In addition, I've been measuring very precise watch and clock parts since I was a teenager, and have more experience using quality measuring devices than the vast majority of people you are likely to meet. In other words, I know what I'm doing and I've got the best tools to use!

I started by checking the throats from several angles, to eliminate the possibility that they were oval instead of cylindrical. Since this is a brand-new cylinder, the readings were identical, showing that the throats were indeed machined correctly.

What did I find? The vernier caliper indicated the throat diameter was .355+", the dial caliper showed .3560", and the digital read .3555". Now for the moment of truth: the certified pin gages, which are the most accurate method of determining a bore size, proved that the bore was in fact .3585" ! That is between .0025" and .003" discrepancy!

Precision machinists will quickly tell you that a caliper - even the best, like I have - are only good to a "couple of thousandths" (.002"), and not reliable at all for inside measurements under a couple of inches. (Frankly, I was surprised that I got as close as I did!) The verdict? One simply cannot measure throats precisely with a caliper, even using the best that money can buy - they aren't sufficiently accurate.

(It should not come as a surprise that I'm not a big fan of calipers; I don't use them for anything remotely critical. I consider them to be "ballpark" instruments at best, and rely on best-quality Swiss micrometers for about 90% of my work. What does your gunsmith use??)

-=[ Grant ]=-

NASA maintains a great website called "Astronomy Picture of the Day". As the name implies, they put up a new picture each day, along with a plain-language explanation by an astronomer.

Be sure to check out their archives - there are some terrific pictures in their collection. Sure to pique anyone's curiosity about what is beyond our little world!

Here's one of my favorites: The Eskimo Nebula.



Sometimes my wildest imaginings pale in comparison to reality. This is one of those times.

-=[ Grant ]=-