D.E. Watters

Look what I found

Yes, people will bitch endlessly about how .280 British should have been adopted, without considering how miraculous it was that any round got adopted at all.

I seem to remember Pierangelo Tendas claiming that the Ruger Mini-30 was developed for the US Navy SEALs.  So, he does need to be taken with a large grain of salt.
 

I just watched The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, and learned two things:

1. Terry Gilliam has had a source on weapons-grade LSD since at least 1988.

2. Uma Thurman was absolutely smokin hot in the 1980s.

Whoever inherits my collection may have some questions...
 

I really should take pics of my "lothar Walter" .22 barrel I grabbed from a Ruger scrap drum, took for a ride in a 1942 Monarch lathe, and then stuck a '70'es era Bushnell Phantom on, for my '50's era AR7..
 
 
Yes. I have an original Armalite AR-7, and it has a Lothar Walther Hammer  forged 24" tube.. And with my tiny cache of Soviet match ammo, it makes wee groups.. And it makes me smile in it's sheer absurdity.

New Minesweeper looking good
 

I burned a few bridges when working at Ruger, by  answering "OH , would you like a MkII for your bonus or a check for $1000."  I asked for the check. They insisted I take the pistol, I said "I have many .22 pistols" (at the time, I had six). They pressed... "Look, I have a Colt Match Target, a woodsman and a huntsman. I have a Walther TPH in my truck glovebox. . I really do not need another .22 pistol.
 
Shit went pear shaped from there. At least I scored a few hammer forged barrels from scrap before I quit.

Have horrible edits of experimental HK firearms!

http://imgur.com/a/J9w6F
 
http://imgur.com/a/Xm4zg
 
http://imgur.com/a/eBiLE
 
http://imgur.com/a/ARWCf

I just confirmed that Studler was the Assistance Officer-in-Charge of the .276 ammunition program at Frankford Arsenal in its last years.

Get rekt .280 fanboys!

Really, the only clean-sheet lever-action designed after 1895 that remains in production is the Browning BLR.  However, it sort of looks retro/vintage.  Stuff like the Savage Model 99, Winchester Model 88, Marlin Levermatic, and Ruger Model 96 have all died.

OK, so I had an idea for an ongoing project for TFB that I wanted to use this forum as a test audience for run by the forum. The idea is to shamelessly rip off adapt Chris Baker's "Wheelgun Wednesday" concept of only shooting revolvers for a year, but instead do something similar with the M1 Garand. We all kinda know that the M1 isn't a competitive military rifle today, but what would using one in a modern environment be like, anyway?

So while I wouldn't be as dedicated as Chris and wouldn't shoot the M1 exclusively, I would take it to the range a lot more and try to develop some skills for using it in practical shooting scenarios, and also try out different kinds of gear and equipment to maybe make it better. I probably wouldn't be taking it to any courses, like Chris did with revolvers, but if I could find some kind of matches around here I might do that. Alternately, I can just set up timed scenarios for myself.

At the end of the project, I would lay out what I've learned, and try to create an assessment of whether I thought the M1 was a more or less effective rifle than I thought when I begin, and also discuss what I thought made it better, or worse.

While this has a "practical" bent to it, it really would just be for fun, and also to try to learn more about the M1 as a system and maybe appreciate it more. Do you guys think you'd enjoy reading something like that, or not?

Just a little bit of today's haul:
 
St. Louis-made M2 AP; got four boxes of this stuff for testing.

 
A stripper clip of Japanese-made 6.5 Arisaka on the left, and a stripper clip of 6.5x55 Swedish surplus. I got my hands on quite a lot of the 6.5x55, so I should have some good fun shooting my m/96 coming up. These Swedish clips are amazing, BTW, probably the best stripper clips I've ever used:


 
A partial box of 4.6x36 CETME/HK, made for the HK36 experimental rifle


 
Some miscellaneous rounds: Egyptian-made 12.7x108mm API, 8x63mm Bofors ball, 8x63mm Bofors AP, 8x63mm Bofors tracer, Chinese 7.62x54mmR API, 7.62x54mmR Heavy D Ball in three different cases, Egyptian 7.62x54mmR blank, East German 7.62x54mmR training round, Chinese 7.62x54mmR blank, 7.62x51mm SLAP-T, .357 Magnum metal piercing bullet, 5.7x28mm black tip SS190 AP, 5.7x28mm L191 AP-T, 7.65 Longue in both bare steel and lacquered/bimetal.

I have to concur with the fellow in the comments who wanted to see what the locking block and its engagement surfaces in the frame and slide look like now.

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I have to concur with the fellow in the comments who wanted to see what the locking block and its engagement surfaces in the frame and slide look like now.

More dope shit for sale:
 

 

 

 

 

 

A couple of days ago, I finally broke down and bought some more doubloons in order to buy four more port slots.  Alas, WG just announced a sale for 10 port slots for barely more than what I paid for the doubloons .  Poor timing on my part, as I can't justify paying for 10 more slots.  There simply aren't enough ships that I like to fill them.  I was really hoping that they'd gift a low tier premium ship for WG's anniversary, preferably one from the Russian tech tree.

The Russian cruiser line is kind of disappointing up through Tier 4.  They are way too fragile.  You really have to upgrade the modules as fast as you can in order to make them playable.  I suspect your best bet is to use the Novik to train your captains into Level 4 skills before ever assigning them to the Bogatyr and the Svietlana.  They really need the range boost for their 130mm guns in order to keep them out of reach of enemy ships.  The Svietlana can be chased down by just about any ship at Tier 4 or 5.  So you need to start damaging them as quickly and as far away as you can.

I'm having a weird losing streak lately.  While I have racked up multiple Kraken Unleashed awards, my teams have melted around me.  I guess that is the curse of low tier matches.

 

Collecting cartridges in a humid environment is a little bit of a challenge, because brass tarnishes easily and steadily. So you buy some lovely looking (and sometimes irreplaceable) cartridges, and they begin to tarnish and eventually they look like you fished them out of a river.

What do you do? Well, I looked online, but didn't find a solution that seemed to be exactly what I want (most dealt with corrosion, which is another problem that needs more drastic solutions). In this case, especially, I was trying to clean up a round of plain-tip FN 5.7x28mm SS190, the only one of its kind that I own, and it has a blue neck sealant that I obviously wanted to preserve.

Most of the remedies I found involved acid of some kind, so I got some tarnished 7.62x39mm (which also has neck sealant) to test out some methods. I found that alcohol removes the neck sealant, so don't use that! The one that ended up working was a hunch on my part, that being lemon juice from my home bar. And it worked great! Very little effort with a worn out toothbrush soaked in lemon juice removed all the tarnish and didn't harm the neck sealant at all! Huzzah!

Here you can see two 9mm rounds, both from the same box of ammunition, both had been sitting around for a while. The tarnish had started to get ugly on both of them, and they also exhibited unsightly fingerprints from oil. The one on the right I cleaned with lemon juice:

My latest acquisitions:


 
Winchester Long Neck .30-06 Duplex, .30 Blake, Colt .30 Salvo Squeezebore, Winchester .308 Magnum Exp, XM645 flechette with compressed fiber sabot, 6x35mm KAC/TSWG, .30-18 Browning
 
 
 

 
.404 Jeffery, .333 Jeffery Rimless, .280 Ross with an early tipped bullet, 4.2 Line Berdan, 11.15x58R Werndl, .32 Winchester Special, .25-36 Marlin, 8mm Nambu