Archive for the 'Firearms' Category

Shooting Illustrated.

Lately, I am hearing “experts” claim that a rifle has to be dirty and fouled to shoot accurately. The prevailing theory is that the copper smears fill in the imperfections in the bore and make it more like a hand-lapped barrel. That is wrong on so many levels.

I have tested hundreds—perhaps even thousands—of rifles over my 40-year career as a gunwriter and have shot countless groups with those rifles. There is one simple truth I have learned: Clean barrels shoot much better than fouled barrels.

You must remove all the copper fouling. That means using the proper solvents and spending as much time doing so as is needed to get it all out. I have experimented with a lot of different approaches, but nothing I have found works better than an ammonia-based solvent. Right now, Montana Extreme Copper Killer is the best I have tried. When you open the bottle, the ammonia will make your eyes water, your sinuses seize up and your guts curl into a ball. That’s why it works.

Keep cleaning until you can wet the bore with solvent, wait a timed 5 minutes and then run a patch through and have it emerge out of the muzzle free from blue stains. How long will that take? Nobody knows. It might take five patches or it might take 500. About 70 percent of the time, this alone will correct a misbehaving rifle.

Here I am again asking for gunsmith advice on this.  Since ammonia can cause stress corrosion cracking of steels, I am wondering how best to clear it all out, whether to use Hoppes after cleaning with an ammonia based solvent, then simply use patches to dry it, or perhaps, my favorite tool, a barrel mop?

I laughed when I watched this.  He is having too much fun.  I have to say that my CMMG .45 is the most fun gun I have ever shot.  It’s not even close.

First of all, I prefer the 7.5″ barrel, not the Banshee.  I also found that it ate everything I fed it.  But I really like Browning BPT Performance Target FMJ (for the CMMG and pistols), which increases muzzle velocity to 920 FPS.  I also recommend to the video author that he shoot .450 SMC, which will run 1120 FPS.

I found it easy to ring steel (8″ diameter) at 100 yards with an EOTech red dot, regardless of the ammo brand.  It’s easy to shoot 300 or more rounds with this gun and feel like you’ve only just begun range time.  It’s that much fun, that accurate for a pistol caliber carbine, and that light on recoil.

I learned something simply from watching this video.  I look forward to the next installments.

Tamara K.

ZCQOTD: “A carry gun without a reasonable amount of wear on it should be a source of shame, not pride.”

I’ve blogged before about how I feel that a gun with a bellicose name like the “Wilson Combat CQB” or “Springfield Armory Professional” that looks like it never gets used deserves the epithet “Minnie Pearl gun”.

An inanimate object isn’t deserving of anything.  It just is.

I’ve put thousands upon thousands of rounds through pistols, and I try to take good care of them, inside and out.  I don’t always pull that off, and there are scratches, normal wear and usage marks, dulling of the finish, etc., but generally I try.

I’ve explained before why I try.  When a smartass salesman at a gun store once told me that he shouldn’t have to spray any gun with aluminum parts down with Rem oil or any other kind of protectant because aluminum doesn’t rust, I replied, “Aluminum doesn’t rust, but it does corrode in the presence of salt, and your body has numerous salts.  Corrosion and rust are different chemical processes in that rust only oxidizes iron and its alloys, whereas corrosion occurs with other metals.  Rust is a subset of corrosion.”  High pressures (such as would be experienced in the chamber / barrel) can also lead to IGSSC (intergranular stress corrosion cracking) due to the stretching of grain boundaries and crystalline structures.

So rather than be a fashion Nazi and assume that the appearance of your firearms says something about your soul, I prefer to let you decide how clean, scratch-free and pristine you keep your firearms.  If you do better than I do, then more power to you.  The better you take care of your machines, the better they take care of you.  I hate machines that don’t work, almost as much as I hate it when people abuse machines.  We are in a continual fight against the second law of thermodynamics, whether with your automobile, your HVAC or your firearms.  I don’t consider it an article of shame to take care of yours.  Entropy always increases.  Why help it along?  Why not slow it down when we can?

I consider John Moses Browning and Eugene Stoner to be the two premier weapons designers in American history, and certainly, Browning much more prolific.

The “Extreme Defender” did very well.  I thought it would, and had blogged on this in the past.  The nose flute is designed, combined with the spinning bullet, to cause localized hydrostatic shock with velocities lower than that caused by bullet velocity alone would with a FMJ, whether pointed or flat nose (which is somewhere near 2200 FPS).

This has happened to me more times than I care to count (or tell you about).  It’s frustrating too.  You’d think I’d learn after a while.

In 6.5 Creedmoor.

Yea, well, I’ve never been invited.  But I’m not Jerry, so there’s that.