Jonnin

Congrats on the "new" guns! I also hate gunbroker. I rarely use it, and when I do, I bid ONCE for what I am willing to pay. If someone else will pay more, they can have it. But it is different with used/antique/hard to find items, the things I want are common enough that another is not too hard to find. Another tip about gunbroker and similar sites: a lot of the vendors are actual stores, local gun shops (to someplace somewhere) that put up a few items that have not sold. Use the auction engine to locate the store, then backtrack to the store to browse its inventory online (if available, often it is not) or call the store to ask if they have a whatever. Often, they have several of the item and may cut you a better deal than the auction .... a little virtual legwork can really pay off (and then again, it can be a total waste of time, you never know).

I see you are in south pitts. I am in chattanooga, its not so far if you want any help from me (you would be doing any driving though). Also, the sportsmans warehouse here has a reloading expert who gives classes on the basics (the class is pretty short and only covers the high points) but you can ask him anything afterward or any other time. Its a good place to get powder and primers as well. If this is a one time thing, you could use a lee-loader. It is a pressless system, very cheap, but it works for making a few rounds. If you want to get into it, get a press. http://leeprecision.com/reloading-kits/lee-loader-pistol/ It says to use brass fired in your gun but as I understand it, new brass works as well. Just not someone else's used brass (may or may not work, on a 357, it probably would work anyway). If you want to get serious, buy a press. I strongly recommend a turret press, but a single stage is the least expensive. You also need dies, as you noted, a scale, as you noted, calipers (important!), possibly a brass cleaner (tumbler). You may need a small funnel for the powder. I made one from a rifle cartridge with a tube cutter, but do not use it much. You need bullets (your first batch will be the pulled ones), primers (your first cases will be primed already if you use the ones you pulled the bullets from), powder (you will have to buy this. Accurate #7 is good for magnum loads and comes in a small bottle). That is pretty much it for the basics.

Thanks for the support guys. Sorry to hear of your troubles Dolomite, not much encouraging to say there except hang in there & do anything you can for your mom on the side, as you can. Plank --- wow, quite a scenario. The police only have prints for criminals (and a few others, permit holders, etc) on file. If this guy has never been caught, and is not a permit holder or whatever... they cannot ID him. That is assuming the prints on the gun were any good, they have to be decent quality. The officer didnt even take the prints at my place... he looked for them for a bit and said what little there was on the door were unusable. They may not have gotten much useful off the gun.

Most of the powder manufacturers publish data for free on their sites. Lee dies come with poweder data as well usually. Manual is a pricy waste unless you just want the thing.

Same here, finding one once makes the extra effort worth while. But I do say (and still say) that its nuts to have a clerk check it, then you check it when he hands it to you, then he checks it again when you hand it back, .... sure, you cannot be too careful, but it can become comedic in a hurry.

No clue what the trouble is but try again on the KTOG site, it has stickys for common problems and experts on this gun model. You want to look at their fluff & buff section before shooting it (well, probably) -- most users find a little polish in a couple of areas really help this brand/model to work better. Kel tec has great service, so any problems they will fix. If you cannot fix the mag by hand (take apart, clean it, might be a piece of trash in it from the assembly?) I am sure they will mail you another one. Ah, should have read the whole thread first... yes the GS will know what to do.

Not much to add... 10) its not the brand, its the warrenty. Find a cheap scope with a lifetime warrenty & decent online reviews, and you will be good to go -- the company has enough faith in the product to claim it will hold up. Few people use a scope on a shotgun (unless shooting slugs?). A .22 for rodents, a 4x or so cheap scope is fine. A deer, I would pay a little more to get a variable power so you can adapt the power to the spot you are sitting at, say 3-7 power for example. I like higher powers, you can get by with less probably if you want. 14 yes. You can hunt with a handgun so during the appropriate season (rifles/open?), unliscened carry is also OK. All I have is for 15. Deer cannot see color. It could purple and pink with neon green polka dots as far as the deer go. What you want to avoid is reflective surfaces: deer "understand" that a reflective surface moving around in the woods is not natural and if it is not nautural, it is a threat .... that goes for your entire body, no shinys.

Sigh, chattanooga strikes again. Some reject tried to break into our house today, got scared by the alarm I am guessing as they did not steal anything (that we can tell) or (as we can tell?) even come inside. Lucky really, all we had to deal with was a broken door & waiting on the police. Police took 1 hour and 2 phone calls to arrive (alarm company called, 1/2 an hour later I called again, finally came by). Super nice guy, when he got here. Alarm co said it tripped at 4:30, we were home by 4:45, could have been there when we got home, it was close. Really nuts, PC and gaming systems in sight to be taken. Could have been a lot worse all around.

Printing was mostly a joke. Short of a nationwide EMP pulse of some sort, if you had the files you wanted on a couple of cheap thumb disks (heck 4 - 8 MB antique ones is a LOT of data in PDF format) and a laptop and a generator, or transfer it to a tablet PC, or the like. For a while people will have working laptops and so on. But if it were the end of the world, it eventally needs to be printed but ... do not take my above sarcasm too seriously

Its most likely the ammo. If it were the gun, you would see it happen more often. Its hard to imagine a gun defect where it randomly jams less than 1/2 of 1% of the time. Its easy to imagine that 1/2 of 1% of someone else's (CHEAP PLINKER) reloaded ammo had a 3/4 powder charge error or something.

I actually work at a place that makes these things, or used to. We flew them all the time without any problems, but not in "airspace" --- we were at approved sites that allow remote control planes or a time or two on a military base. These days it is a hobby... the RC guys have started making home-made UAVs. You can get some crude (but working) software for the path/navigation/control for free. Likely the FAA will let them fly once they put in a minimalistic transponder and running lights and so on (which many do not have). The thing is, the ones that need lights and transponders are going to be way, way up there and not easy to hit (think passenger plane altitude but the size of a car). The ones you can actually hit would be the toys and hobby craft, not the real deal... I think the last one we built cost the taxpayers some 1/2 a million. It would have been great if some yahoo had shot it down ... get paid to build a replacement...!

A good read for a no-kids guy. Most of my friends have them and it is hard to be patient with them (both the parents and the kids).

try it at 3 times that distance for fun one day The last kimber I tried was dead on at 25 yards.

Ours allows anything but we are not sanctioned. Oddly they allow a 9mm carbine or a .22 rifle but rejected my 223 pistol... A +p 9mm load in a 10 inch or longer barrel can push over 1400 fps. so 173k is your power factor. Why did they make up "power factor" to rename momentum, anyway? Seems silly to rename it. A regular pressure 9mm is lucky to hit 1250. It is still over 150 momentum, but just barely, and you would want to test each ammo brand or your hand loads very, very carefully before you went to a serious event and were disqualified. I am not aware of a necked case requirement. That may rule out the new 300 blackout round which had people excited -- I thought it was a neckless 223?

I can see going pure in a muzzleloader or slugs, for sure (its perfect for that) but I do not think even for those applications the factory bought stuff is pure. It may be, but I suspect they mostly use the same 10 or so hardness that is used in .22 and so on. I am guessing that pure lead would not stand up to shipping, storage, manufacturing, or whatever --- it would get dented up at the slightest thing and from what I have seen of the process, bulk manfacturing would dump them into a collection bucket by the thousands from a modest height... /shrug. Anyway, all that aside, anything under 10 is going to dent/bend/etc in an automatic pistol at an alarming rate, and anything under 15 may be a bad idea in a poly barrel, as a rough guess, so most of the folks here do not want to be making it pure or extra soft. As for 45-70, do not forget the molds for the simiar calibers (45-90, 45-120, etc there are like 10 of them) which would offer everything from 150 to 500 grain choices.

Pure lead is 5 brinell. Most "lead" bullets (factory) are 10-15. 20 is probably excessively hard. Pure lead is so soft you can damage it with just about anything, and is not used in any factory bullets that I know of (same as pure gold, you never see pure 24 karet gold rings as they would dent up fast).

I think you can use the same bullets for both guns. Someone will correct me if I am wrong For both I have not found a better deal than these.... http://www.missouribullet.com/details.php?prodId=156&category=5&secondary=9&keywords=

how far was it really, out of curiosity? The ones I have tried were all accurate at 25 with a nice trigger out of the box. They are pretty as well. I thought about the brand pretty hard when I was looking.

No good is not really correct. No good would imply a serious flaw (jams, explosions, poor service, falls apart, something). I hate the things, to be perfectly honest. But they are still fine, great quality guns at a reasonable price. No one, not even a hater, can really present a logical argument that the guns are of poor quality or anything like that. From there it comes down to personal prefs. I hate the lightweight build, because it makes the recoil that much worse. The next guy loves the lightweight build, because he hates having to wear a cowboy sized belt to hold up an all steel gun. I hate the trigger, because it does not go bang when you barely touch it. The next guy loves the trigger, because it has that short reset. All that stuff is just opinion and personal preference, though. The ONLY thing that matters is whether YOU like the gun that YOU purchase. If you buy a glock, I am happy for you, I will not be shooting it anyway so my dislike does not matter a bit. Don't let the back & forth get to you. You just asked a question that, while a great question, usually touches a nerve or 3. If someone tells you a gun is no good, listen up but google it later to see if the person is on the level. If a gun has problems, google will tell you (unless it is a brand new model -- in which case you either choose to be the guiena pig or to wait until info comes out). If someone tells you to buy a specific thing because it is the best, put your hand on your wallet and talk to someone else.

The rami does not suck. It goes bang every time, makes a jagged hole at 20 yards, has never even tried to jam. Its a 9mm that fits in a pocket with either C&L or DA manual of arms. It is an excellent gun, same as the other cz products. It may be too small for some people, same as the 75 is too big for me (to carry). I would rather have the 75 on the range all day long, absolutely. But I am not going to say the 75 sucks because it is big to carry, I am just going to say it is too big for me and leave it at that. If you got down this way I would let you try mine, with and without the extended mags. But its a bit of a drive and the single action conversion may spoil you on the trigger

I also do not get the age thing. Time most people are in college, they are old enough to vote, old enough to die in the army via the draft, old enough to star in an "adult" film, have driven a car for 2+ years, and are just a couple of years from getting a job and being a "normal" adult. They are old enough to be legally responsible for their actions. There is no reason a student with a CCW permit (or not, in the states that allow it) should be unable to carry their weapon. There is every reason why they should be able to carry it, as this sorry incident shows. What is the fear? The same fear that people have when anyone has a gun: the person may get mad and shoot someone, the person cannot be trusted, there may be drugs or booze at XYZ location, there will be shootouts in the streets between rival drunk frat houses, there will be accidents, and so on. The list of imagined problems never ends. But no one protests the rights of students to have cars, which are proven to cause deaths on a regular basis, are often used in crimes, are often abused by intoxicated people, and so on. At the end of the day, there is nothing that can be said about a gun on campus that cannot be said about a car on campus --- some idiot could drive through the crowd lined up to buy football tickets, after all, and kill a lot of people in just a few seconds. None of the reasons for denial of weapons to permit holders make any sense (Yes, I include govt buildings, court, school, airports, and the rest of it) when you look at it from the "car" perspective.

I have had really good luck with accurate powders when using a lee disk powder device. The small, ball like grains are fairly consistent. #5 is a good choice for 45, #7 would really fill the case up. While I like the power pistol powder, it does NOT meter out well in this device and I end up with a huge variation between rounds and unacceptable accuracy. If I hand weigh the charges, the power pistol does great.

the czusa website lists all the models and has the out of production guns listed as such. None of the guns you listed are out of production according to that site.

If you like the PX4 better, get the px4. I have sold 2 glocks, and I kept my px4 (subcompact 40). Glocks are just sort of the default gun that people recommend when you ask "what gun should I get" because they do not know what you want but they do know that a glock is reliable, reasonably accurate, and modestly priced. The glock is not better. The px4 is not better. The 1911 is not better either. All these things are subject to opinion only. A few guns have a reputation for jams, malfunctions, breakage, and so on --- and if you see those same remarks about the same brands/models over and over, you should take heed. The rest of the time, select the gun you want and ignore the commentators. However, if you are new enough to guns to be asking this sort of thing, be sure before you buy anything at all. Test fire them if you can, or if a buddy has one or you can rent one. If not, if allowed, dry fire it in the store. The grip, the weight, the balance, the trigger pull, the sights, the controls, those sorts of things are what you want to look at. If you buy that px, for example, then discover afterwards that a sloppy DA trigger is annoying and that you really wanted a single action, it is too late. If you get the glock and then realize that the thing is too light and recoils too hard, same deal. Find out as much as you can before buying because guns are not easy to return at most shops. Even if they allow it you may have to eat the background check fee.

but now you gotta print it all because when the world implodes, there won't be an internet or any computers to get to it...