EssOne

Using a Dreml tool on a gun is like turning a herd of elephants in a cul de sac - you gotta do it verrrrry carefully and a little at a time. 

I was in the Gun Rack in Kingsport two days ago and they had an excellent to mint Yugo M24/47 with matching bolt for $350 (under $400 anyway) on their used rifle rack. The Yugo Mausers are first rate Mausers, but have the "intermediate" length action, which means it is about 1/8" shorter than the K 98 action. This is only important if you intend to rechamber for a round longer than the 8x57mm. The M24/47 has the milled steel butt plate instead of the stamped out sheet metal "cup" butt plates of the later war German Mausers (Kar 98), it has the milled trigger guard/magazine assembly and the straight bolt handle, plus it has a rear sling swivel instead of the milled sling cut in the stock. I've had a couple of them and loved them. NOW, I didn't look at the bolt face or the bore, so if you're interested in the gun I'll be glad to go over and give it a close inspection for you. Here is what one looks like: P.S. - this is one of the few European service rifles that does NOT have those blasted finger grooves in the stock.

An old police instructor trainer I trained under used to say:  "If you guys want knockdown power you'll have to get a Number Fourteen Louisville Slugger cause you sure as hell ain't gonna get it with a pistol."

I've used one of these for the last six or seven years. If you can live with three speeds it's a good deal.   http://www.ebay.com/itm/like/360754794598?ul_noapp=true&chn=ps&lpid=82

I have never accepted the premise that someone has to be crazy to commit a horrible crime - all he has to be is mean. Acting on that belief, I haven't seen any part of the shooter's conduct so far that can be deemed insanity any more than it can be considered the acts of a perfectly sane but hate-filled, devious, cold blooded, mean, vicious, murderous S.O.B. And none of that meets the legal definition of insanity to the best of my knowledge.

What? Y'mean the M38 jeep has been retired?

Post withdrawn by EssOne

I hear they're gonna write a new law for some of the counties around here returning the dimmer switch from the turn signal stalk to the floor - too many people getting their legs tangled up in the steering wheel and crashing.

There are more guys trolling for a sucker on GunBroker than in all the used car lots in California.

 Albert Einstein once said - "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has limits." Leave it up to Hollywood to prove him right.

Boy I'm sorry that happened to you Ramjo. I have had experience with a friend who insisted on triggering his pistol with his middle finger, and his results were poor at best. The biggest issue was proper control of the pistol, which is very difficult once you shift it in your hand to accommodate middle finger triggering - after all, the pistol was designed to be fired with four fingers and a thumb with the forefinger on the trigger. Once you have to shift the gun in your hand to accommodate middle finger triggering, the weight, balance, height of the bore line above the hand, and ergonomics of the gun become critical and very touchy, making accuracy difficult.   OK, now for the good news. This guy wasn't an enthusiastic shooter and you are. So I think if you'll let the hand heal, build up its strength, then go looking for the most well balanced, ergonomic, hand fitting, and possibly lightweight pistol you can find and then practice with it like the shooting enthusiast you are, I think you might just pull it off. There are some other things you'll have to worry about and overcome - one is getting your shooting hand chewed up by the slide, you'll have to be careful there, and the other is letting the gun get away from you, which I believe practice will overcome, especially with a good two hand hold, and with hand exercises to get the hand good and strong. Even so, like I said, I'd recommend that you avoid single hand shooting as much as possible, and rapid drawing is something you want to approach with some real caution for sure.   You'll have to experiment around with this, but you should expect to find that the trigger system of the gun and the curvature and distance of the trigger from the frame inside the trigger guard will be very important to you. For instance some versions of the CZ 75 have had a long reach trigger, which probably wouldn't lend itself to helping with your problem, and I suspect that a double action gun might be hard for you too. You would want a gun with the bore line as low as possible for best balance, as a gun with a high bore line above hand would (I believe, anyway) be harder for you to control. You'll also find that operating a safety or decocker will be difficult without compromising control of the gun. Finally, a single stack gun might be easier for you to control than a double stack pistol, so you might want to experiment with that before giving up entirely. The bottom line is you're going to have to be much more selective about which gun you adopt than in the past and you really need to experiment quite a bit before settling in on one particular design..   So I'd encourage you to carefully give it a try as long as you can do it safely. I hope this isn't too discouraging.

  That about says it all. I couldn't agree more.

Harry Truman once said that a recession is when your neighbor loses his job, and a Depression is when you lose yours. I think ol' Harry would wink at the term SHTF. :pleased:

Yeah, when I lived in California the common saying was "Life is a game and he who dies with the most toys wins." I never played the game, pouring our money into getting the house paid for before retirement. But I worked with guys who were so wrapped up in their toys that every time we got a pay raise they calculated how much their net pay had increased and then proceeded to buy something on credit that had a payment that equaled their net pay raise. Bonkers.   I've always had all the guns I wanted and I usually bought them with money saved up from unexpected windfalls, sales of other guns, overtime, and so on. Only once did I ever just whip out a card and buy a gun on the spot. I once figured out that in my lifetime if I added up all the money I spent on guns, ammo, reloading gear, accessories, etc, and subtracted the amount I sold them for later on, my total expenditures on these things wouldn't equal enough to buy more than a modest bass boat, and probably a used one at that. So as I get older I feel like I was pretty responsible about it and had a lot of fun to boot.

.....and then there's CBTS - Can't Be Told S---

I hear that GAS only applies to AR's when you get to 10. So I'm disease free for six more. :rofl:

Check under the dash of his car and you'll prolly find a cigar box painted up like a police radio mounted on brackets. I actually saw one of those a few years back.

"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has limits." Albert Einstein. 

  Yes it is to be expected. One "Awcrap" trumps a thousand "Attaboys" and no good deed goes unpunished. .Back in the day we had a four foot high cartoon hanging on the office wall that depicted a man in our outfit standing there with a massive wood screw turning into his belly button. The caption said: "Be loyal and devoted and you will receive your just reward." The guy who drew that one really knew what he was talking about. :pleased:

Sorry, my SDI (Sudden Divorce Index) has already reached critical mass for this month and may melt down any minute. :surrender:  :rofl: Looks like a good buy however.

Over the years my life in a state that is either burning or flooding brought me into an intimate relationship with a lot of evacuations - my wife and I even had to bug out ourselves in the face of a bad flood in 1986. Because of these experiences I’ve tried to have my bugout stuff all ready to go, including my AR’s. I should explain before getting started that my Army and LE experiences led me to consider my firearms as complete individual weapons systems, with little to nothing shared between the different guns. Each rifle has it’s own individual case, sling, supply of extra mags, spare parts, oil, tools, and so on. Each pistol is contained in its own case with extra mags, oil, rod, and mag loader. Not too long ago I woke up to a goodly flaw in my bugout planning - it finally dawned on me that I didn’t have a bugout rifle maintenance kit for each rifle. So here’s what I did to correct the problem. I really enjoy repurposing stuff, so I decided to make a bugout maintenance kit for each AR from extra items I already have on hand. The kit had to be compact, bare bones simple, inexpensive, effective, and it had to last long enough to clean the rifle several times. So to get started I had to decide what to put in the kit. After some study I decided that each kit had to have these things: Solvent Oil Patches Rags Pipe cleaners Bore brush and chamber brush Toothbrush Homemade bore pull A bore rod OK, I figured out what to put in the kit, so the next problem was to figure out what to contain this stuff in. A couple of years ago I bought a couple of wallets that were packed in very compact metal tins. These tins were flat, strong, and had enough room in them to hold many of the things I needed, so they became my kit containers. To store the oil and solvent, I needed two containers that would fit into the tin, last a long time, and wouldn’t be broken down by the oil and solvent. The answer was a couple of empty nose drop sprayers with the labels removed, straws discarded, and soaked in 90% Isopropyl Alcohol to sanitize them. They are about as close to ideal as you can get without having to buy a specialized container. They hold a good quantity of liquid, have a very useful pointy spout with a screw-on cap to prevent leaks, dispense liquid at a useful rate, and lay flat in the tin. Just what the doctor ordered. OK, what else? For oil I went to the tried-and-true Mobil 1 0W20 synthetic motor oil for lubrication, and M Pro-7 for my solvent. I actually prefer Ed’s Red, but I chose the M Pro-7 because it has a water base that doesn’t attack the container, and because it’s a darn good cleaner. (I think the Ed’s Red would eat away at the squirter, so I didn’t use it.) You may be aware that the Army and Armalite Corporation conducted a study and determined that the two most commonly available substances that can be used to clean and lube these rifles are synthetic motor oil and automatic transmission fluid. I’m sure that in a bugout situation I will always be in close proximity to an automobile, so I kept my quantities in the kits small. I had a couple of extra five dollar Walmart coated steel .22 rods, so I put one in each rifle case, essential for knocking out stuck cases, but primarily to use for cleaning the receiver and chamber (woops, next photo). For bore cleaning I made a chain pull out of a 6” piece of bead chain tied to some 20lb. monofilament fishing line, which was in turn attached to the cut-off lower hem of a T shirt. I’ve used these homemade pulls for a long time and they’re super. This photo shows the entire kit all laid out. For brushes, I included a .22 caliber nylon rifle bore brush for general bore cleaning, and a .45 caliber nylon rifle bore brush (or else a nylon chamber brush ) to double as a chamber brush and mandrel for rags used to clean out both ends of the bolt carrier. Then there is the double ended nylon gun cleaning toothbrush for getting into the barrel extension and just about everything else. For rags, I had some 8”x 8” storebought cleaning rags left over from a revolver class I’d done a couple of years ago, so I included four of them and four rough pipe cleaners and a dozen or thereabouts .22 caliber patches. Just for good measure I included some 12 gauge patches to augment the cleaning rags. I’d like to say I can get everything into the tins, but I can’t. The cleaning rags, chain pull, and toothbrush have to be kept in separate zip lok bag in the same compartment in the rifle case as the tin, usually rubber banded to it. And obviously I have to carry the bore rod in the case with the rifle. I figured I wouldn’t be able to get everything I needed into them, and sure enough couldn’t. But I’ll claim credit for a near miss on that one. They do a great job of protecting the oil and solvent dispensers. During the writing of this post I acquired another rifle but didn’t have any more tins. So I raided my tackle box for a plastic Plano lure box and found that the nose drop bottles wouldn’t fit, so I used some other bottles instead. Here’s a photo of it. Moral: More than one way to skin a cat. And here is a photo showing the two kits all set up and ready to go into their rifle cases. Hopefully this will give you an idea of their size and bulk. You'll note that both are wrapped in a good plastic bag to protect the gun cases from leaks. There are things I was tempted to do differently, like use commercial Bore Snakes and add grease to the ingredients. But I was trying to do this as cheaply as possible while including only the very essentials. Besides, I don’t intend to spend that much effort on the bore in a field situation. I’m a firm believer that 90% of field cleaning effort should be devoted to the action and only 10% to the bore, especially with the AR. And that’s where my chrome lined bores and chambers come in handy, IMHO. I’m sure my kits aren’t everyone’s cup of tea. Some will find them too simple or too basic, and some guys just don't like home made stuff. My Army experience was light weapons infantry, so I’m accustomed to cleaning rifles with the barest of barebones cleaning gear, and I had to practice economy of space in order to get everything into the rifle cases I want to bug out with. So I kept them very, very basic. After all, they are intended to get me through a rough spot in the road, not support the rifle for a long period of time. Anyway, these kits are what I believe will suit my needs if push comes to shove and I hope you might have gotten some ideas from them for your own use. Good luck. EssOne

I'm very sorry that happened to you, BigK. Best wishes on finding a new gig.

Well Pete, now that you know their rules, it should be OK to go ahead and do business with them if you can save a buck. Just understand that their bedside manner sucks and let your experience work for you.  These big gun companies like SOG, Bud's, Century International, etc, can have some strange rules, so you need to look them over carefully before ordering. You just have to learn how to negotiate their individual mine fields to your own advantage.   P.S. In the gun community, Southern Ohio Guns is simply referred to as S.O.G.

OK to go looking, but just remember the title of a book Irma Bombeck wrote back in the '70's - "The Grass Is Always Greener Above The Septic Tank."

What goes 'round comes 'round and they may just be very sorry for what they're doing. I'm sorry you were fired, but if you want to pin a piece of mistletoe to yor shirt tail I'll provide the safety pin.