New Workbench

Ever since we decided to move my daughter downstairs and allow me to reclaim my home office, I've been considering putting a workbench in. Although I have a workshop out back, it's not climate controlled. So, it's often uncomfortably warm in the summer, and frigid in the winter. I could really use a space in the house to tinker with stuff and fix things.

So, last week I ordered a Seville Classics UltraHD workbench from Home Depot. (It's also available from Amazon.) It arrived around 7:00 PM last night. I mostly put it together last night and finished up this morning.

It's very solid and went together pretty easily. The frame, pegboard backsplash, drawer, and shelf are all made from steel. The work surface is 1.5" butcher block, well-finished, and heavy. It came with a power strip that has two USB ports and an LED light that's mounted under the top shelf. It came with an assortment of hooks to mount on the pegboard.

The dimensions are 65.6" high x 24" deep x 48" wide. The top of the work surface sits 37" high. It's really the only thing I'd change. Being short I would prefer it to be a few inches lower.

It came with two tools for assembly: a stamped steel wrench and a long Phillips head screwdriver, which is magnetized. That came in handy although I mostly used my drill with suitable screw driver bits. It also came with a few spare screws.

My first project was to clean my 1948-vintage Remington 550-1 .22 autoloader. I put at least 100 rounds through it on our last camping trip, including a bunch of CCI .22 CB Shorts, so it was filthy inside.

Next up will be my Uberti 1866 Yellowboy. Since getting it earlier this year I haven't removed the sideplates. Unfortunately, Uberti has a bad habit of over-torqueing the action screws on their rifles, which combined with their cheese-like hardness means that there's a good chance some will be destroyed in removal. I therefore have hardened replacements on order from VTI Gunparts. After getting the gun apart I also intend to replace the loading gate cover (AKA "ladle") with a stronger, improved one. For now, I have penetrating oil soaking into the screws.

Got in some shooting and ham radio today

I was able to get to the range today. My rod and gun club remains open and IMNSHO, an outdoor range is the perfect place to engage in some socially distant outdoors activity.

First up was my Uberti Bisley in .44-40. Uberti has taken to putting extra tall front sights on their single actions which is nice, because it allows you to file it to zero because it will almost certainly shoot low, as mine did.

Before leaving the house I used Dillon's online Sight Correction Calculator. First you need to measure your sight radius, then plug in how far off the point of impact is at a particular range. It will then tell you how far you need to move the sights, or in the case of my gun, how much to remove off the front sight to raise the point of impact so it coincides with the point of aim.

Whenever you're zeroing a gun's sights with a file, take it slow. It's easy to remove metal but hard to put it back.

Anyway, I filed the front sight at home and when I got to the range, found that it shot a little high at 25 yards with my handloads with an AM 43-215C 219 grain bullet on top of 7.0 grains of Universal. However, it was dead on with a 200 grain bullet on top of 7.8 grains of Unique. I'm going to leave it as-is.

Now I just need to hit the top of the front sight with some cold blue, and then the back face of it with high-viz green paint.

After shooting the Bisley I moved to the 50 yard line and shot 50 rounds through my Uberti Yellowboy in .38-40. These were black powder handloads consisting of a 180 grain RNFP from cowboybullets.com, a dental wax lube cookie, and 1.9cc (~30 grains of Swiss 3Fg), and a CCI large pistol primer in Starline brass.

Unfortunately, it's not an accurate load. At all. Groups were about 6" at 50 yards from the bench, which is terrible. I shot the final 30 shots at the steel gongs at 50 yards, hitting more than I missed. I need to bench the 7.8 grains of Unique load I tried last weekend.

On the bright side, cleanup of the black powder load was quick and easy. The bullets I used don't carry a lot of lube but the dental wax cookie seemed to keep the fouling soft. It only took about 10 wet patches until the bore was clean.

After getting home, smoking a Bacarrat Rothschild cigar and drinking a Yuengling Black & Tan, I hoisted my Hawaii EARCHI 40 - 6M end-fed antenna on my 30' Jackite pole to try and join an Arfcom 40m emergency communications drill.

The net was difficult because of the noise floor. After awhile I decided to change over to 40M JS8Call. Per PSKReporter.info, I'm getting decent propagation into the East Coast and midwest, and have even been heard as far away as Arizona, Portugal, and France.

Yellowboy Range Report

I took some time off today and got the chance to shoot my new Yellowboy rifle this afternoon.

Function was 100% with cowboy action shooting loads from Black Hills and Ultramax. Accuracy with them was poor. I expected this based on my prior experience with factory CAS .44 WCF ammo in my Henry and 1873.

The Ultramax actually shot a little better than the Black Hills loads.

I'm not sure if the commercial manufacturers use bullets that are too hard for optimum accuracy, or if they dont' shoot all that well since they are downloaded. In the case of .44-40, Black Hills uses bullets that are too small to shoot well in modern Uberti barrels (.427 vs. .429). Anyway, I get groups with BH .44 WCF like the one shown above, but the same rifle with group into 2" with my handloads.

On the other hand, function was very rough using some black powder handloads I had put together using an original 19th Century Ideal tong tool, with bullets cast in that tool's integrated mold. I loaded these a couple years ago intending to shoot them in my Winchester 1892, but never got the chance to before that rifle was stolen.

Anyway, the cartridge OAL wasn't correct on all of them so several times the action bound up, requiring excessive force to function. If I don't pull the remainder of them I'll load them singly. However, accuracy flat out sucked with those rounds so they'll probably just get pulled, rather than wasting components.

I'm planning to break in the Accurate 40-180E mold this weekend. I expect the rifle to shoot well with bullets cast in it.

The other thing hurting accuracy today was the rifle's trigger pull. While crisp, it's far too heavy, probably around 10 lbs. I'm going to look into some careful work with some slip stones to see if I can't get that down to an acceptable level (4 to 5 lbs. would be ideal).

Finally, I wanted to post this picture of a fired case next to a complete .38-40 cartridge. As you can see, the fired case is very much blown out. This is typical with guns chambered in .38-40. For some reason the specs for unfired cases are much smaller than the chambers. This results in a situation much like that seen with Lee-Enfields in .303 British.

In the case of the Lee-Enfield it was designed to allow military rifles to function with dirty or corroded ammo on a battlefield, but nobody seems to know why it's the case with .38-40.