On the Passing of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Well, as if 2020 wasn't interesting enough, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died from pancreatic cancer yesterday, only 45 days before what is likely to be a hotly contested presidential election.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell issued a statement last night that whomever President Trump nominates to replace Ginsburg will get a confirmation vote on the Senate floor.

This is good, and I hope it happens before the election.

Unlike Obama when he nominated Merrick Garland for SCOTUS, Trump is not a lame duck president working with a Senate controlled by the opposing party. The Republicans were given control over both the presidency and the Senate by the people because the people preferred their vision. They should do their jobs to the best of their ability. That includes filling vacancies on the Federal bench, all the way up to the Supreme Court.

As for not politicizing her replacement, consider a few things:

RBG could easily have stepped down while Obama was president and allowed him to pick her successor. However, she was so confident that Hillary Clinton would win in 2016 that she stayed on the bench in the hopes that her seat would be filled by an HRC appointment. And in the wake of Trump's victory in 2016, RBG held on as long as she could in the hope that he would lose reelection, and a Democrat president would fill the seat. By her actions, RBG politicized her seat and the replacement process.

It's being reported that her last dying wish was that her replacement would not take place until after a new president is "installed." First off, "installing" leaders is some real banana republic shit right there. We elect leaders in this country. Second, what if Trump wins reelection? Do we wait another four years? That's ridiculous.

Let's not forget the Democrats' appalling conduct since Trump became the Republican nominee in 2016. A four year long tantrum of one faked, debunked scandal after another, all in an effort to stymie the peaceful transition of power that is a hallmark of American government.

Let's also not forget the Democrats' unforgivable conduct during Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation hearings, when they brought forth a slew of witnesses with no credibility to smear Trump's nominee as a rapist. This was merely the latest of a line of Democrat smear jobs against Republican Supreme Court nominees, e.g., Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas.

Finally, even before RBG's death, Democrats were already signalling that they do not intend to accept the results of the election if Biden loses, and are already assembling an army of lawyers to challenge a Trump victory in the courts. This, after a summer of civil unrest that was and continues to be enabled by Democratic politicians in several cities. We'll need a fully staffed Supreme Court if this comes to pass.

It would be insane for Trump to not nominate a replacement for RBG and for the Senate to confirm that person.

Loaded Some More Black Powder 12 Gauge Ammo

Last weekend I primed 25 Magtech brass 12 gauge shotgun shells and on my lunch break today I finished loading them. The details:

• Magtech 2.5" all brass hull
• CCI Large Pistol Primer
• 80 grains of 2Fg Goex black powder
• 11 gauge nitro card (over powder card)
• 11 gauge fiber cushion wad
• Lubricated felt wad
• 1 1/8 oz. of mixed No.7.5 shot
• 10 gauge overshot card
• Sealed with Duco cement

Magtech hulls require the use of oversized components because the case walls are thinner than 12 gauge plastic or paper hulls.

The felt wads were punched out of 1/8" thick wool felt with a .75" punch, then soaked in a mixture of 50/50 beeswax/mutton tallow. This is to help keep powder fouling soft.

The shot is a mix of plated that I bought from Rotometals, along with some unplated shot scavenged from miscellaneous promo loads. No. 7.5 shot is primarily for clay busting but it will work on doves, as well. Otherwise I'd load No. 5s for small game hunting.

I'll let the Duco cement cure overnight before boxing them up.

These will be good for informal clay target shooting. They shoot well in my Russian-made Baikal MP-310 over/under. Cleanup in a chrome-lined smoothbore isn't bad.

Keeping my Nissan Xterra on the Road

 Last Saturday when I got up to our campsite in Tioga County my two friends who I met onsite smelled antifreeze from my 2007 Nissan Xterra after I pulled into camp. My sense of smell sucks, to put it mildly, and I didn't smell anything. We popped the hood and after the engine cooled down, checked the antifreeze level. Sure enough it was low. One of my friends had a gallon of premix so we topped it off. (Given the age of the vehicle I should have been carrying some.)

We also noticed that a hose going from air cleaner to the engine was cracked. I'm now carrying some Rescue Tape (self-fusing silicone tape) in my truck toolkit in case any other hoses crack.

The joys of owning an older vehicle. 😐

Yesterday, I brought the truck to a local mechanic who confirmed that it has a leak, so I had him replace the radiator. It must have been a very small leak since the truck didn't overheat either way on the trip (about 240 miles each way).

I've actually been thinking of getting this done to prevent the Xterra Strawberry Milkshake of Death from happening, anyway. The Xterras were designed with an automatic transmission fluid cooler integrated with the radiator. Unfortunately, sometimes there's a failure which allow cross-contamination between antifreeze and ATF fluid, causing the SMOD, which kills the transmission. It's both a clever and dumb design.

Although my truck is 13 years old it only has 110,000 miles on it, so I'd like to keep it for several more years, therefore replacing the radiator is worth it to me.

Video: Ken Hackathorn on M1 Carbine Reliability

 Lately I've recently been paying more attention to my M1 Carbines and so watched this nice video on the Forgotten Weapons YouTube channel with Ken Hackathorn discussing the M1 Carbine:

I have NOWHERE near as much as experience as Mr. Hackathorn, but I’ve owned several M1 Carbines since the 1980s and my experience matches his when it comes to ensuring reliability.

My first Carbine was a commercial copy by Iver Johnson, purchased new. It had a problem with an improperly hardened bolt. The locking lugs peened and it had to go back to the factory for repair. I got rid of it a little while after I got it back from IJ.

Since then, I've owned a few USGI Carbines: 1943 Underwood, a 1944 Underwood, and a 1944 Rock Ola. I still have the '43 Underwood and the Rock Ola. On all of them I replaced the recoil springs with new springs from Wolff.

In my experience, the USGI Carbines have been very reliable as long as they were kept clean, lubed, and fed good ammo. The only time I had significant reliability issues was when shooting steel cased Wolf (Tula). The steel cases don't obturate as well as brass and the chamber got filthy. After shooting a box of that stuff I changed over to some RA 52 Ball and got extraction problems. Cleaning the chamber fixed that.

Good .30 Carbine ammo that I've shot includes RA 52 Ball (Remington from 1952), Winchester FMJ, Remington FMJ and JSP, Prvi Partizan FMJ, and Federal FMJ and JSP. I recently got a 1080 round can of mid-1980s vintage Korean milsurp ball made by PMC, and I'm sure that will be perfectly fine.

Finally, if you're interested in keeping an M1 Carbine around for more than just casual use, get ahold of Jerry Kuhnhausen's The U.S. 30 Caliber Gas Operated Carbines: A Shop Manual. It's the definitive work on gunsmithing M1 Carbines.

On Kenosha

 Kyle Rittenhouse did more than simply defend a used car lot. He stood up to defend civilized society against marauding barbarians determined to destroy our way of life and replace it with a communist "utopia."

As Edmund Burke said, "All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing."

I am relieved that he is getting top notch legal assistance. I donated to Lin Wood's Fight Back foundation, which is working with his family, and secured him a good criminal defense lawyer. It is well past time that supporters of liberty engage in lawfare against the left.

20 Gauge Black Powder Patched Round Ball Shells

 Today I loaded up 25 rounds of 20 gauge shells for potential use as short range deer hunting loads. They consist of:

• Magtech brass cases
• Federal large pistol primers
• 80 grains of Goex 2Fg black powder
• Ballistic Products nitro card
• Ballistic Products fiber cushion wad
• 2 x 0.010” patches prelubed with Wonder Lube
• .575 round ball
• Ballistic Products over shot card sealed with Duco cement

Before I settled on the patch/ball combination I check it for fit in my H&R Topper’s modified choke. With only one patch I could push it through with hand pressure. With two patches I needed to tap it through using a mallet, but it required less pressure than a typical tight fitting PRB in a muzzle loading rifle.

Waiting for the Duco cement to dry:

Office Visit

Today I went into the office for only the second time since March 12th.

As with the first post-lockdown visit, my reason for going in was to download large virtual machine templates (OVFs), and then upload them to a different system. I couldn't vMotion them between clusters, because they are on different network security zones and running different version of VMware ESXi.

The other task I had was to setup a new PC that a coworker and I will use for this sort of thing going forward. It's configured to allow Windows Remote Desktop connections and hardwired to the company LAN.

Our local IT guy did a great job of quickly turning around my request for the PC. It's a new Dell OptiPlex with an Intel Core i7-800 at 3.2 GHz, with 16 GB of RAM and a 500 GB disk. I was surprised to see that it came with a DVD drive. The OS is Windows 10 Enterprise. It seems like a decent little corporate desktop machine and is on a network security zone that will allow me to access anything I need to.

I have an old Netgear 8 port Gig-E Ethernet switch on my desk that allowed me to connect both my MacBook Pro and the Dell to my network drop. After setting up the PC I just used Remote Desktop from the Mac all day to do work on the PC. After I got home tonight I confirmed that it's working over our VPN connection.

Going into the office was a nice change of pace but I'm happy working primarily from home. I expect that to continue into next year.

Black Powder Shotgun Go Boom

A few years ago I loaded up some black powder 12 gauge shotshells in Magtech all-brass hulls, that I bought from Ballistic Products. This exercise was inspired by a video on the Survival Russia YouTube channel, which has since been taken down in accordance with their rule prohibiting videos that show how to load ammunition.

(The picture is a frame grab from an iPhone video.)

I did a few variants:

1-1/4 oz. of #7.5 shot on top of a compressed column of sawdust (in lieu of a cushion wad)
1-1/4 oz. of #5 shot on top of sawdust.

Also, some of the same payloads on top of lubricated wool felt wads. (I have a supply of such homemade wads for use in my Euroarms Magnum Cape Gun percussion 12 bore.)

And a patched .690 round ball on top a couple lubricated felt wads. All were loaded on top of 80 grains of 3Fg.

I tested one each of the #7.5 and #5s, and 3 of the PRB loads.

From 10 yards the #7.5 penetrated one wall of an empty soup can. The #5s went through both sides. Patterning seemed OK for a cylinder bore gun.

Accuracy with the PRB would be good enough to take a deer out to 40 - 50 yards or so.

Because these shells were loaded with black powder, I ran a couple patches wet with a Ballistol/water emulsion through the bore when we finished shooting. I repeated this at home and left the bore with a good coat of Ballistol.

The empty shells got put into a soapy water bath overnight. I found that a 12 gauge tornado brush was perfect for brushing out the inside of the cases to remove residue left from the glue I used to hold the over-shot cards in place.

Tomorrow I'll punch the primers out of the spent shells and clean the primer pockets. I'll also use some acetone to remove the load info I'd written on the side of the shells with a Sharpie marker.

Shooting these BP shells was a lot of fun and the cases should be reusable more or less indefinitely.

One thing I like about the Magtech brass shells is that they use large pistol primers rather than 209 shotshell primers. I use LPPs for .38 WCF and .44 WCF, so that's one less component I need to stock. Also, in normal times, pistol primers are less expensive than 209 primers. (All bets are off in this election/pandemic/civil unrest year, however.)

RT Systems Programming Software for the Icom 7200

With my getting back into ham radio I wanted to update the memory settings on my Icom 7200. You can do so via the front panel, and it's good to know how, but it's tedious.

The popular open source program CHIRP will talk to the IC7200. However, functionality is pretty minimal with this radio. For example, it works with the rig in live mode with changes you make in the application immediately written to the radio. It also misconfigured some fields in the memories, as I discovered later.

Years ago, shortly after buying the rig, I'd purchased  RT Systems' WCS-7200 programming software on CD from the New Castle, DE Ham Radio Outlet store. That CD disappeared, along with the product registration info. So, I decided to drop $25 for a new digital download of the program. (What the heck, it's good to support small businesses anyway.)

Unlike CHIRP, it runs only on Windows, but it can use the same USB A-B cable used for digital mode operations.

The WCS-7200 software is more mature and full-featured than CHIRP. For example, I entered in a bunch of frequencies into the spreadsheet-like UI, and it then allowed me to select a group of them and move them up or down for organization. It also has a Comment field, which I used to identify which frequency is for, for example "20M PSK31" or "WWV."

Unlike CHIRP, it doesn't operate in live mode, so I could tinker with memory organization, save the file locally, and then upload it to the rig.

Before closing the app I exported the memory to a .csv file in the Ham Radio folder I keep on Dropbox, opened it in Numbers on my Mac, and printed out a copy for reference.

I still like CHIRP for programming my Baofengs and it seems to work fine with my Yaesu FT-7800R, but in this case, it was worth $25 for the commercial software.

Incidentally, a good source of frequencies to input into your radio for making contacts or just monitoring is Bandplans.com. Also check out Repeaterbook.com and RadioReference.com.

Radiowavz 40M Dipole Antenna

Today's vacation day activity was to put up a Radiowavz 40M dipole. I got it in trade several years ago for an AR15 lower receiver. :)

Hams know that antennas offer better performance when erected in crappy weather, ideally a New England winter day. Not having one of those handy, hopefully a hot-as-balls SE Pennsylvania day will suffice.

It's currently supported on both end but not the middle, which as you can see, sags a bit. The end supports are 5 foot lengths of schedule 40 PVC pipe with an eye bolt on the end. Braided dacron cord is strung through each eye bolt and then secured to the end insulators of the antenna with a bowline knot. The halyards are then attached to a large plastic landscaping stake in the ground.

The feedline is a 25 foot piece of RG-8X coaxial cable running to an MFJ-4602 window pass-through panel.

After it was up and connected I texted a couple friends and we tried it on 80M phone using NVIS propagation. I was able to hear them but they could not hear me, which wasn't surprising.

I'd like to get the middle up higher so I'm going to look into a military surplus fiberglass mast. If I get the center elevated the resulting antenna will be an inverted-V, which will give me better performance.

I haven't made any QSOs on this antenna yet, but this screenshot from pskreporter.info shows the results of calling CQ with 50W on JS8.

And this one from WSPRnet.org shows the results of transmitting 50W on WSPR.

Removing Stubborn Screws from an Uberti 1866 Sporting Rifle

AKA, "When I said get out, I wasn't asking."

Earlier this year I bought an Uberti 1866 Sporting Rifle chambered for .38-40 WCF. Uberti build beautiful guns but unfortunately, many of them seem to be assembled by a gorilla who applies 87,000 pound-feet of torque to screws that are slightly harder than cheese.

This rifle is one of them.

I wanted to remove the sideplates from the action to inspect the inside and lubricate it with Ballistol. I also wanted to replace the loading gate cover (AKA ladle) with a stronger, aftermarket piece.

After weeks of soaking in Kroil, I was able to remove the lever screw. However, I still couldn't budge the sideplate screw. Even though I used a properly fitting gunsmith screwdriver bit, all I managed to do was booger the screw head.

A few weeks ago I ordered a set of replacement screws that are properly hardened from VTI Gun Parts. (Part # 220-H.)

So, today I braved the hot, humid Southeastern Pennsylvania weather and went out to my backyard shop so I could use my Grizzly G8689 mini-mill as a drill press.

First, I drilled into the sideplate screw on the end where it screws into the right sideplate. This relieves some pressure on the threads.

Note the use of a center drill for starting the holes. This is important because they are more rigid than twist drill bits and you don't want the bit walking off to the side and damaging the receiver.

Then I flipped over the rifle and drilled into the screw head, and then used a screw extractor held in a tap handle to back it out.

While I had the rifle open I also replaced the lever spring screws. A trick to reduce tension on these so you can move them is to slide the lever springs to the side. This worked for the right hand screw but not the left one. So, back to the mill.

This time I put the screw extractor in the drill chuck and manually rotated it (my mill cannot rotate to the left).

After reassembling the rifle I adjusted the tension on the lever so that it's a little easier to work than before but still holds the lever up.

I won't be disassembling the rifle regularly. Even when fired with black powder cartridges, the .38-40's thin brass seals the chamber very well. Virtually no fouling makes it into the action. (The same goes for .44-40, which I shoot in an 1860 Henry and 1873 Sporting Rifle.) However, I can now easily get into the action should it be needed for repair.

Podcast Episode 1 - Tips for Working From Home

It's hosted on YouTube but is audio-only. Hopefully you find this interesting.

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.

Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) Resources

I ran across this first link yesterday and thought it's worth sharing with the current State of the Union.

Bellingcat's Online Investigation Toolkit - Links to a variety of OSINT tools. If you have a Google account, you can go to File > Make a Copy and save it to your own Google Drive.

And this video is interesting:

Using Skiptracer to Gather License Plate OSINT Data.

(That channel, Null Byte, has a number of interesting videos.)

Scanner stuff:

Radio Reference - Site with information on frequencies, licenses, and discussion.

Broadcastify - Site to stream scanner feeds on your computer or mobile device.

Police Scanner and Radio on Apple App Store.

Police Scanner and Radio on Google Play.

Freescan - Free software to program and control many police scanners. Can also be used to record. I use this with my Uniden Trunktracker IV.

ProScan - Another piece of scanner software.

Chirp - Free software for programming primarily ham radios, but you can use it to easily add other common frequencies like FRS, GMRS, MURS, and NOAA weather to hand held radios like the ever-popular Baofengs.

Microsoft Office 365 for Mac Hung Updates

Last week I started having a problem with Microsoft Office 365 for Mac crashing when I tried to open one of its apps. I kept getting a message indicating that Outlook (or whatever) would open when an update completed. The app never did.

What was happening was that the Microsoft Office AutoUpdate app kept hanging. Here's what I had to do to fix it:

1. Close any Office app that happened to be still open.
2. Kill Microsoft AutoUpdate. You can do this with Activity Monitor or like I did, via the terminal.
1. Open Terminal.app
2. Do ps ax | grep Auto to find the PID
3. Do sudo kill -9 <PID>
3. Download the latest Microsoft AutoUpdate from here and ran it.

HP Laptop First Impressions

I've been getting back into ham radio lately and have a trip upstate planned for Memorial Day weekend. The two friends I am going with are also hams, so one of the activities we like to do in the evening is off-grid communication practice.

My specific interest is in digital mode communications, which requires either a mobile device or a computer to connect to the radio and run various applications. For field ops in the past I've used an iPad and an MSI Wind netbook. I traded in the iPad a year or two ago and the netbook is ancient at this point (plus has a small 10" screen) so I wanted something better.

My normal computer is an Apple MacBook Pro. However, I am not enthused about bringing a $3,000 laptop into the field, plus it seems like a lot of ham apps are better supported on Windows or Linux.

So, Friday after work I went down to Microcenter and picked up an HP 15-ef1072nr 15.6" laptop running Windows 10 Home for $400. The specs are decent for the price, IMO:

• Dual-core AMD Ryzen 2.6 GHz CPU
• 8 GB RAM
• 256 GB SSD
• AMD Radeon 3 graphics

As expected, the hardware feels a lot cheaper than my MacBook Pro. The Mac's case is machined from billets of aluminum. The HP's case is plastic. The keyboard is mushy but usable. The screen is nowhere near that of the MacBook Pro. Overall, the HP is much lighter than the MBP, which is nice.

Battery life seems good. It was partially charged when I brought it home. I plugged it in while setting everything up but then rant it down to around 10% over the course of several hours with web browsing, YouTube, and email. I repeated that on Saturday and probably got a good 7 hours before it went into battery saver mode.

The huge trackpad on the current MacBook Pros really spoils you and it is missed on the HP.

The HP's space bar is annoying. Pressing it towards the right end doesn't do anything. I tend to press the space bar with my right hand so this is a PITA and hinders typing.

Of course, one of the things I had to do was get Windows updated. Compared with Apple's macOS updates, Windows Updates remains a major PITA with multiple reboots required. Overall, it takes a lot more time.

It has been quite awhile since I used a Windows PC for desktop computing although I ocassionally have to login to a Windows server at work so the UI isn't totally unfamiliar.

Anyway, after cleaning up some of the factory-installed bloatware I loaded a number of utilites to make life easier:

• Notepad++ (In which I wrote most of this. On Mac, I use BBEdit.)
• Piriform CCleaner
• Piriform Speccy
• Replaced the pre-loaded Office 365 with Office 2019 Pro Plus
• Visio 2019
• Google Chrome
• iCloud for Windows so I can sync bookmarks with my Mac and iPhone
• nmap
• Wireshark
• Windows Subsystem for Linux with Kali Linux installed
• Signal
• ZOC terminal

And these ham radio apps:

• Fldigi
• JS8Call
• WSJT-X
• Chirp (For programming my Icom 7200, Yaesu FT-817ND, and Baofeng HTs)

The two Apple applications I'll miss most when using the HP are Messages and Facetime, neither of which are supported on Windows.

Incidentally, Microcenter limited the number of people in the store at a time, you had to wear a mask, and before going inside you had your hands sprayed with sanitized by an employee. Also, they are not taking cash, only credit or debit cards.

Testing WSPR and a New Laptop

I picked up a cheap HP laptop at Microcenter on Friday to run ham radio apps on in the field. I'd rather not take my $3,000 MacBook Pro camping, plus it's a fact that a lot of ham radio apps are better supported in Windows. Should something bad happen, it'll be a lot easier to swallow with a $400 laptop.

Anyway, today I was configuring the HP to work with my Icom 7200 using Fldigi, JS8Call, and WSJT-X, and tried out transmitting using the latter in WSPR mode. The antenna was my Hawaii EARCH 40-6M end-fed, strung approximately horizontally out to my back fence. This is far from optimal.

I transmitted on WSPR at 50W a few times and checked propagation using WSPR Watch on my iPhone. Not bad.

Along with a couple friends I'm heaing up to Tioga Country next weekend. We're all hams and off-grid operations are on the list of activities. One thing I want to try is a random-length loop antenna using welding wire, connected to my antenna tuner using an LDG 4:1 balun. My friend did this a couple years ago and it worked great, allowing him to check in on a north PA/south NY 160M net.

ATF Day 050320

Today I went to the range with the primary goal of zeroing the iron (plastic) sights on my Keltec CMR30 .22 WMR autoloader.

The CMR30 is a neat little rifle that weighs 3.8 lbs. unloaded. It fires .22 Magnum ammunition fed from a 30 round magazine located in the pistol grip. The receiver is an aluminum extrusion with Picatinny rails on top and bottom, in front of the trigger guard. The top rail is fitted by the factory with Magpul MBUS sights.

When Keltec announced it several years ago it immediately piqued my interest as a potential PDW that would be very compact, light, and reasonably effective for recoil-sensitive shooters. I finally picked one up last year in trade.

I've had the CMR30 out to a friend's place a couple times. It was in need of zeroing, which I finally did today at my rod and gun club.

I first put it on paper at 25 yards offhand and the fine tuned the zero at 50 from the bench. It's shooting about an inch high at 50 with either CCI 40 grain Maxi Mag FMJs or Federal 50 grain Game Shock JHPs.

I didn't take any pictures of the groups because, frankly they sucked. I attribute this to my not being able to easily focus on the front sight. When shouldered, the front sight is right at the distance where my almost 52 y/o eyes start to lose their ability to focus.

I did bring a Bushnell Trophy red dot with me and intended to mount it after zeroing the irons. Unfortunately, the Bushnell rings are intended for Weaver mounts and weren't compatible with the M1913 Picatinny rail of the CMR30.

After shooting the rifle the last time I field stripped, cleaned, and lubricated it with FP10. In spite of that, I had some reliability issues.

Specifically, on many magazines the second round down had a bolt-over-base failure to feed. Racking the action fed the round into the chamber and the rest of the cartridges fed OK. Keltec recommends using 40 grain or heavier ammo but I don't think the malfunctions were ammo induced. This didn't start happening until after about 50 rounds were down the pipe so I think it was a fouling or lubrication issue.

Another thing I noticed today (and which I experienced before) is that it spits unburned powder grains out of the ejection port. Right handed shooters may not notice this but as a lefty it's a bit annoying. If you're going to shoot one of these portside, glasses are absolutely required.

Both the reliability issues and spitting from the ejection port mean that until they are remedied, I wouldn't rely on the gun for defense.

I'm going to try and come up with some sort of brass and gas deflector.

All told, I put 150 rounds through the CMR30 today.

Aside from the Keltec I also brought along my Ruger 50th Anniversary Blackhawk .357 Magnum. I put a few cylinders full through it at a 25 yard paper target, and some at 50 yard steel. Once I got the elevation figured out I was able to regularly bang a ~12" gong shooting two hands, offhand at 50 yards.

The ammo I shot in the Blackhawk were some of my .38 Special +P handloads, with a 178 grain Keith SWC on top of 5.2 grains of Unique.

After getting home I relaxed out back with a Yuengling Black and Tan beer and a San Cristobal Quintessen cigar.

Paul Harrell: Top Ten Tips for Pandemic Firearms Buyers Part 2

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.