Thanks to this thread I’ve learned that some departments require carrying rifles in “cruiser ready”:
‘Cruiser Ready’ – no round in chamber, hammer forward, magazine inserted.
Learn something every day.
Archive for the 'Hobbies' Category
New term: cruiser ready
12 July 2009ALS owners: stop using your uppers
7 July 2009There have been two incidents with ALS uppers in the last year; they are both referenced in this thread. Both resulted in serious injuries; needless to say, an out-of-battery event in a 50 BMG rifle is a very serious safety hazard.
I was at the FCSA World Match this past weekend at the NRA Whittington Center in Raton, New Mexico. On Friday, 3 July 2009 an ALS rifle fired out of battery (the bolt was not fully locked). The shooter was seriously injured.
As soon as the incident occurred, the line was called cold for an emergency cease fire. After the shooter was rendered first aid and evacuated, the FCSA and NRA Whittington Center issued a stand-down on all ALS rifles at the match. No ALS rifles were allowed to continue in the competition.
Pending further investigation, ALS rifles will not be allowed to compete in FCSA competitions or be fired at the NRA Whittington Center.
As an ALS owner, I have decided not to fire my ALS rifle until the cause of this incident is known.
FCSA representatives and the manufacturer are working to determine the cause of the incident.
-David
Edgewood, NM
from the first incident:
Alleged incident!
Bull Shit.
I’m just trying to survive. I was trying to be a good guy and not cause trouble for Darrin, he told me he didn’t have insurance and I didn’t want to put him out of business. When I called him and told him what I thought the defect was with his upper he hung up on me and never checked back to see how I was doing.
I’ve got $150k in medical bills. I also lost an eye and permanently fucked up my right hand. I still have 25 pieces of shrapnel in my hand. and because my right pectoral muscle was cut through I have limited strength on my right side. I suffered nightmares every night for months, and still have them occasionally.
I wish I hadn’t of been a good guy. If I had been an asshole another person wouldn’t have been hurt.
I’m sorry for the language, this idiotic statement just pissed me off.
Firearms asshatery – or fakery; can’t tell
3 July 2009If you watched any of these individually, you might think they are real; in fact, when I saw the first one, I was pretty sure it was.
Ricochet takes off guy’s hat
However, watching this other video, you begin to wonder if they might be very [un]lucky:
Shot in arm with 270 caliber
The third video, though, is just… well, it could be true, it could not be.
Guy loses bet, stands in front of 30-06
Different metrics
30 June 2009When you buy barrels for most guns, you care primarily about brand (as a proxy for quality), length, and twist. Perhaps some other features are important, like chamber tightness, metal, or finish. Quality of the threads is usually down the list, if on the list at all. Most muzzle breaks are designed to be open enough to not impede the development of sound (I’m only aware of two that aren’t); many precision rifles have no muzzle device at all.
Talk to people about barrels, and the same makers float to the top; however, among people that shoot suppressed rifles, different names populate the list.
LMT wasted some of my money with a fucked up barrel, so I’d trust ADCO too. I would have thought from reading all of Wes Grant’s posts that they were gold plated miracle sticks, but my barrel thread is so far out I’m afraid to shoot cans on it now. On a .275 bore it apears to lean far enough to nearly be parallel with one of the sides.
It comes down to how perfect your threads are, or how much meat you have left to re-thread. If you’re building an AR15 to suppress, the best bet is to buy a non-threaded barrel and have either a well-known company (ADCO) or your suppressor maker (Gem-Tech) thread it. They know how important it is that the threads are aligned with the bore, not the exterior of the barrel.
Another metric that is supremely important for suppressor owners is ammo quality in terms of run-out; you need to inspect each round you send down the pipe. Period. If you don’t, you could end up with an endcap strike on your brand new suppressor:
If you ignore the light strike, you might end up with this:
That’s a pile of $100 bills thrown on a fire; the ATFE no longer allows you to repair a suppressor tax-free if it involves modifications to the “can” portion.
In the old days, you built suppressors in certain ways (with wipes) because they worked and were cheap. Once the ATFE changed what a wipe was and what was allowed (wipes verboten), the market evolved from loose tolerances and wipes to modern wipeless cans with tight tolerances. If you had a strike, you re-serialized a new can and no additional tax was paid. The ATFE changed those rules; now the trend is toward cans that may be disassembled and repaired without welding. Furthermore, they’ve relaxed the rules on wipes a little. The market continues to react to what the ATFE says is legal today; you should pay attention to the type of can you buy and adjust your metrics for quality appropriately. Threads that work for a flash hider will destroy your suppressor, and ammo that’s fine for blasting (XM anything) will do the same.
Boomershoot Proposal
6 April 2009It would cost a couple hundred bucks, but this was my idea for “asshole” targets this year:
The red is paracord, the blue is boomerite, and the yellow is helium balloons.
Feedback?
Rails
3 April 2009Rolling stock on Bushmaster siding:
Leaving Leupold tunnel:
(click for full-sized versions)
While I agree with the goal,
31 March 2009the facts aren’t there. While it is true that many types of firearms can’t be readily converted to reliable full auto, two of the more common – the AR15 platform and the AK47 platform – can be converted with this highly regulated tool:
Right, a $100 drill press. I’ll allow that finding the exact location and size of the single hole you need to drill in each to facilitate the conversion will take a few seconds of googling. I’m also obscuring that you must have a vise and the proper size drill bit. Oh, but you say, you have to have the parts to install and know how to install them; the parts for an ar15 were about $150 pre-Obama (I haven’t priced an LPK, sear, and bolt carrier recently). The parts for an AK47 were free for about a decade; every AK47 parts kit ordered from any reputable vendor came with everything, including the full auto fire control parts. The first step for the homebuilder of an AK-pattern weapon was to toss that jailbait in the trash.
Robb is leading the charge; Tam picked it up today. While it’s true that the conversion isn’t interesting (Robb covers why), in these two cases, it isn’t hard. It doesn’t require a machine shop. To do it legally requires the paying of a lot of fees (FFL, SOT, ITAR); to do it on a small scale, illegally, does not. The conversions are neither difficult nor requiring ultra-precise machine work.
This also sets aside that both platforms have a well-known, no-machining work-around. The AR15 supports the lightning link, the exact dimensions of which are easy to find; the AK47 supports that U-shaped thing without a real name, AFAIK. Neither of these options require modification of the host firearm.
Again, I agree the drumbeat of “OMG FULL AUTO” in the media is idiotic. I also agree that, by definition, any firearm a non-stamp-buying member of the general public may purchase is not readily convertible; the ATFE has decreed it to be so, therefore it is.
Experiments
29 March 2009Forced time off gives one the opportunity to engage in introspection; it also gives you the opportunity to engage a bottle of cheap tequila. One does not preclude the other, of course; it just seems that whatever one learns at the bottom of a bottle of tequila doesn’t really translate into anything more than a headache.
I decided, last week about 1600 or so, to take a week off from two of my favorite pursuits – reflexively refreshing arfcom and chatting on irc. The goals were treble; to see if I could, to see if I felt the need to go back after a week, and to see if I did anything constructive with the time.
Should I hold out another three hours or so, I will have made the week; chances are good, as I’m not feeling the need. This satisfies my curiosity about the second part.
The third part I cannot yet address; I was able to close a ticket for DCTI, get cvs working for DCTI (only to find the parts I needed to change are not in cvs), write more here (if that counts as productive, I’m doomed), get more familiar with my camera (which I think is a good thing), and engage in another project which I’ve been thinking about (read: ignoring) for a couple months.
Once that project is ready to show off, I will do so. I will say that I’d made exactly zero progress towards it since last April, when I thought of it; I started thinking of how to actually do it in November or so; and I started actually doing it on a very rudimentary level on 27-MAR about 02:30. I spent today, when I should have been walking, working on a less rudimentary version; this is getting me back into C# for the first time since 2004/2005 at WSU. A lot has changed in C# since 2005; much for the better.
I did try to substitute Beth’s Café for the first couple of days; I found I was thinking about how I should be working on this project instead of refreshing google reader.
Regardless, I think, should I make it another few hours, I’ll try to spend another week off and see if I spend more time with C# or with Patrón.
Going to school
27 March 2009I enjoy making videos, but I don’t enjoy the end product; I have never been happy with where all the work leads. To attempt to understand what roadblocks I’m facing, I picked up two books: Making Documentary Films and Videos: A Practical Guide to Planning, Filming, and Editing Documentaries by Hampe and The Shut Up and Shoot Documentary Guide: A Down & Dirty DV Production by Artis. I picked these up not because I’m planning on shooting documentaries, but because I figured the process of producing in that style was closest to what I want to do. First, Hampe: this is truly a ground-up course on filmmaking, with an emphasis on documentaries. I quickly saw why I was unhappy with my products: all of the planning that Hampe covers in great detail was missing. Hampe states the first 80% of the work he does is planning and pre-production; I had thought for something like the Boomershoot the truth would, as Hampe says, leap into the camera, and I just had to blast it back out into the viewer’s mind. Hampe lays out plenty of obvious faults with this approach, and how to get around it; basically, everything has a story, so tell the story.
I would be remiss if I didn’t discuss Hampe’s emphasis on truth, reality, and ethics. Many pages are spent discussing what is and isn’t a documentary and what Hampe posits are and are not ethical situations; he uses An American Family many times to highlight issues of truth and ethics. I found a lot of this obvious, but much not tedious; Hampe illustrates his points with decisions he has made. Hampe claims to be a libertarian, and his objectivist leanings are clear throughout the text; as a fellow traveler, I’m OK with it. If you aren’t, though, I think there is enough here on the process of film-making to make the purchase worth your while.
Artis takes a completely different approach to the same material; what’s interesting to me is how close in content and how far apart in presentation the books are. Artis dispenses with the direct ethics and truth discussion, but he provides more information on how to shoot video of drug dealers and gang members in the natural environment. How does one do this? By treating them ethically. Artis says to act as if you’re shooting in someone’s home when you shoot on the street, because you are; Hampe makes the same point about being polite and deferential to your talent. One of the large departures in Artis’ book is the direct discussion of technology selections; Hampe says that he won’t cover technology because it changes too quickly and dates the material. In the beginning, I was in agreement with Hampe; Artis argues, however, that one should embrace specific media like podcasting and technologies like the list of cameras he gives. The value in Artis’ approach is that he gives you a starting point; along the lines of “if these are the types of forums you want to play to, these cameras and formats are the minimum.”
Both Artis and Hampe have many points in common; some of these are:
- Get the shot; don’t let technology get in your way of shooting footage when an event is happening. It might not happen again.
- Preproduction is everything. If you don’t know what you’re going to shoot, you’re not going to shoot much.
- Travel with the appropriate amount of gear and spend your money on stuff that shows up on screen. Expensive, unused rental equipment dragged around for a week will cost you weeks in the edit bay.
- Both think “b roll” is lame.
- Craft services make or break a production – feed your crew well.
- You may be good at only one of the multitude of things that need to happen to produce a video. Delegate.
This last point was a key lesson for me; what I viewed as the reality hose that I needed to point at the eyeball isn’t. My previous take was shoot footage, splice it together, and roll. Both Hampe and Artis hammer on the skill it takes to use a camera well, capture sound correctly, light a scene, and so on. The chance that you’re an excellent (or even worthy) director, director of photography, camerman, soundman, editor, voice talent, music editor, tape cataloger or critic is slim to none. Delegate the tasks you either aren’t good at or don’t enjoy.
While I have no doubt grabbing Shut Up would get you to shooting more quickly, the framing and history provided by Hampe is more interesting to me. I already know the basics of camera function, lighting, and the like; Hampe doesn’t cover much of this at all. If you just have an idea and a burning desire to get it on video, get Artis and know there is more out there to consider. If you want a framework to understand filmmaking as a developmental process, get Hampe and know you need to do more study before you hit the road.
The bigots among us
10 March 2009With regard to the Boomershoot:
I’ve always thought there are some events that shouldn’t get National TV coverage.
When we’d like the public to think of competitive shooting to be like other mainstream sports.
Not much more to say than our worst enemies come from within. Thanks, Kevin, for asking.
