Glock Bulge Buster

Brass fired from Glocks frequently exhibits a bulge near the base which can cause problems later if the stuff isn't completely resized.

Roger's comment from the previous Glock post notes that:
When a case has a Glock bulge, it will commonly chamber almost all the way in, stopping a few thousandths of an inch before full chambering.
This can and does cause the barrel to fail to go up completely into battery,
This commonly causes misfires and off center (low) primer strikes because the case / barrel are not all the way up in full battery and alignment with the firing pin.

 Some resizers don't reach that far down the case, so Lee sells a kit called the Bulge Buster which consists of an elevated brass pusher and a small bin to catch the resized brass. You need the Lee final crimp die in your caliber with the internal bits removed for this.

Or if you have the die, remove the internals, put an improvised pusher made from an old steel .223 brass with an old 9mm steel brass on top,

 a small plastic tub with a 7/8" hole will catch the brass as it pops through the die.

This brass had already been decapped and sized so this operation addressed only the bulge. There was a great variation in bulge amount from one to the next with most brass passing through the die and staying above the smallest diameter. I did have one that seemed to have no bulge at all that came back out the bottom having encountered no resistance at all going up. 

I tested this batch in my barrel and found them all to drop fully down with no resistance. NOTE: This trick will NOT work on loaded cartridges. Drat! Remember to lube the cases before resizing.

Everybody Talks About The Weather...

Al Gore and Michael Mann assure us that they can actually do something about it but frankly I've got my doubts. Yesterday was in the upper 50's and generally nice. Today the high is to be 34 and I just measured 8-1/2" of heavy, wet Globull Warming on the grass in the back yard. What has hit the roads has been melting as fast as it comes down around here although not so much outside of town where I-70 has been closed in both directions due to accidents.

Good day to stay indoors unless you like this kind of weather. Notice here the large footprints I found going down my drive this morning. Compare to my own footprints following them.

He walked along the sidewalk, apparently preferring the snow to the concrete. Hard to see in this light, but it seems the Yeti is making a comeback in the 'burbs.

It Can Always Be Worse

Here is an Instagram post of Rep. Chaffetz' foot following surgery to repair damage done when he fell off a ladder in his garage. From the look of it he was installing a turbo V-6 garage door opener at the top of a 20 foot ladder, and in the fall the engine landed on his foot.

If you look at the left hand picture, you'll notice a faint arc through the bone just above the ankle joint. That arc, only fainter, is what my wrist looked like when I went in. Recovery from removing the impressive collection of nuts and bolts from Rep. Chaffetz' foot is projected to be 4 weeks. Recovery for the shadowy fracture in my wrist is running 7 weeks but I guess the bone healing takes longer. He doesn't mentioned how long it was before he was able to put on normal socks and shoes again, but I imagine it was quite a while.

Glock K-boom, Rebuilding and testing

When I rebuilt my Glock after blowing it up, my original plan was to take it up to the range as soon as I got done with the Dentist. This plan didn't include breaking my wrist. It's now been about 4 weeks and the doc says I have 3 more weeks in the cast to go. Impatience won though and I tried out the new parts today. Here's what I learned:

1. Pulling the slide back with a left hand in a cast is very difficult.

2. I used to be able to shoot strong hand only passibly well. Now it seems I need some more practice. Shooting 2-handed borders on impossible, and weak hand, let's face it, isn't there.

3. The new barrel from Lone Wolf is very nice. It's also much fussier about the ammo I'm trying to feed it. I'm getting lots of failures to feed which I didn't get before. The cause I originally traced to insufficient final crimp, which seems to be back with the tighter barrel. I guess I get to re-crimp all my ammo.

4. I had been seeing some light strikes before, but much more now and noticeably off center so it looks like I need a new firing pin. I was beginning to suspect that problem before so I can't say I'm terribly surprised.

5. Trying to eject a lightly struck round from a tight-fitting barrel with a cast on your left hand is a waste of time. Change to an empty mag, use the rubber edge of the table against the side of the slide, and push. The stuck round pops right out.

6. Disassembling the gun with the fingers poking out of a cast and with limited flexure seems to be surprisingly difficult. I may need to make a tool to help pull the disassembly buttons down.

Gives me something to do during the impending snow storm. Mighty mountains from tiny molehills grow.

Marching Season

The militant wing of the DNC, Antifa, is making news all over the country, in Berzerkly where they vow to shut out any speech they don't like, and the mayor, who is a member, has promised his police will not interfere. In related news, one of the more violent Antifas has been identified as a professor at Berkley.

In Nashville, Antifa goes back to its roots as the communists version of Hitlers Brownshirts and Mussolini's Blackshirts and has a permit for a May Day march and rally. Some Gadsden Flag types have set up a counter rally in the same area. Be interesting to see how well or even if the Nashville cops keep the two groups apart. Nashville denizen Glenn Reynolds has noted that Amazon has some good deals on Hickory ax handles and heavy Texas style walking sticks.

Hippie reservation Portland has cancelled their spring Rose parade after the local Antifa announced it had some 200 soldiers prepared to rush the parade and forcibly remove the Multonah county Republicans if they attempt to participate. Once again, the Mayor doesn't seem to want to send his cops out against his constituents so the entire parade has been cancelled.

The Donks are aware that between 100 and 200 million people were murdered in the last century in attempts to prove that Socialism in one form or another was a viable system, and they want to make sure that those folk didn't die in vain, no matter how many more have to join them.

NOTE: Don't forget your home improvement projects. On your way to the rally, stop be Home Depot for one of these perhaps.

Springtime

Not much actually going on so here's some non-serious stuff.

A couple weeks back I remarked on a foot bridge being installed apparently leading into some fellow's back yard. Now it seems the curb and gutter was in the wrong place, and his back yard is being shortened.

Until we see water in the canal again, the footpath through the gulch and along the edge of the new chasm is how you cross the canal. More cement is anticipated on the far side at some point, maybe even a sidewalk.

Highline canal is lined with cottonwood trees, most of which are nearing the end of their usual life span of 110 years. Some have been decorated:

Loose pieces of bark aren't hard to find. Sometimes you get lucky and find unexpected stuff growing along the canal. Allium is not native AFAIK, but it's moving in.

Not much to see yet, but that dead puff ball on the upper left is from last year. When they bloom, that is a big blue ball, quite striking. Assuming that the canal maintenance folks don't just mow it down with the weeds.

In other news, I saw the hand doctors today who removed the cast on my wrist, took X-rays, assured me that everything was healing nicely, and then replaced the cast and told me to come back in 3 weeks. Geez, it might have been quicker to use stem cells to simply grow a new one. Under advances in Medical Technology, the old cast was black, but the new one is lime green. Hulk Smash! Still a damn nuisance.

A local Meetup group, Pedals and Pints, has a bike ride planned for the coming weekend. Great ride, 2 of them starting at Great Divide Barrel Bar and visiting 4 other craft breweries and a coffee house over the course of about 27 total miles. Allowing 30 minutes and a 4 oz sampler at each stop, this should be a fun and easy ride. Except for the weather. It's springtime in the Rockies and in the last 4 days, Weather Underground has gone from 4-8" to 1-3" and back to 5-8" of snow. If the weather and the rest of my schedule cooperates the P&P thing is a great way to waste a Saturday. I checked. There are about 65 craft breweries within bicycle range of my house. 'Tis a privilege to live in Colorado, as the local fishwrap used to proclaim.

Antifa Calls For Arming Their Insurrectionists

Smarting from a defeat in Berkley where thugs armed with body armor, bats and bear spray were pushed back by Trump supporters, some of them are advocating for arming their people with firearms.

They are bitching a lot since the states in which they are the strongest also have the strictest gun laws.

Not getting disarmed is a big part of the problem, yes, but we need more than flags and bats. We need to take notes from the John Brown Gun Club and get firearms and training. I know getting firearms in states and cities we have a presence in is usually a hassle, but even handguns would help.

Interestingly in the posted dialog someone asks if using violence to silence opposing voices isn't a form of fascism. The reaction is priceless.

OBSERVATIONS: 1. When the police abdicate their responsibility, vigilantism looks like a reasonable and viable option. 
                               2. When an Antifa in Berkley was unmasked, his comrades couldn't tell him from the Trumpers and attached him with club, skateboard, and bear spray.

First Fix The Blame

Then consider fixing the problem. The NORKs are now blaming a string of missile failures on U.S. tampering with the missile flight software. Let me be the first to confirm their suspicions and point out that it gets even worse from here. If they succeed in finding the parts of the software that cause the missile to explode on the pad or shortly after launch, the next bug will be the one that directs the missile to land in Pyongyang.

Dear Mr Kim:
Sleep with one eye open
Gripping your pillow tight

Exit: light
Enter: night
Take my hand
We're off to never never land

Article here.

Blog Birthday

Apr 19th is this blogs 9th birthday.If I'd have known I was going to live this long, I'd have learned to write or something.

Robowars

Upcoming this week, Thursday, is the Robowars competition at which the 2 bots from the Jefferson County Open School where I've been advising will appear. The kids have one entry in the 120 lb class, and one in the 220 lb class.

120 lbs of pointy menace. The nose is elevated here to make working on the insides easier.

220 lbs of rolling death (we hope) with the Cthulhu fangs and spinning weapon awaiting installation.

Like a lot of projects these two were barely even mobile when they had to be loaded up and driven to CA for the competition. Hopefully the final assembly won't have too many bugs crop up. As it is the 120 lb machine when it was taken out for its first test drive, blew one of its motor controllers with no spares immediately available. I was told that one was ordered for next day delivery to the hotel where it will be installed.

At this point I'd guess the cause of the failure was grinding grit on the controller connectors. Seems the kids have to build these things in the wood shop and the 4-1/2" hand grinder is the tool of choice for all their metal cutting so there's plenty of grit on everything.

NOT a clean room.

Here's the 220 lb bots weapon installed:

That wheel is about 9 inches in dia, 1.5" thick, and gets spun up to 8000 rpm. The inserts are tool steel. Watch your fingers.

The show will be broadcast on one of the cable channels. Sorry, I don't know which one.

How Dumb Are They?

This is a dangerous question to ask, especially in a political scenario since the answer is frequently depressing but still, sometimes the entertainment value makes it worthwhile. Jazz Shaw at Hot Air is reporting that someone in the Trump circle is suggesting that Notorious RBG* might be talked into retiring if Trump promised to nominate Merrick Garland to replace her thus maintaining the balence of power on the Supreme court.

Don't know if Ginsburg is actually that gullible, but I suspect Trump is thinking that he could safely nominate Garland, fulfilling his end of the deal, knowing that the judiciary committee would never send the nomination out to the Senate. Which would "force" Trump to make another pick from his list of preferred nominees.

*The hip hop name for Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Political Alignments: Where do you stand?

The definitions are changing even as we watch. From the comments here in Samizdata:

“It is rather hazy what ‘left’ and ‘right’ mean in Britain or America these days . . . “

Our current President is a life-long left-liberal Democrat who is considered to be an outrageously conservative extreme-right Republican by our personal-freedom-hating elitist and moneyed left-wing liberal Democrats.
He won office by beating a far-left liberal who is clearly to the right of him on many issues.
Our leftists support a religion of men that kills gays and women when they’re done raping them. Our rightists support government confiscation of private property without due process.
Our leftists support the notion of undemocratic governmental rule by an unelected judiciary. Our rightists disagree strongly, unless they get to appoint the unelected judiciary.
What’s hazy about this?

Taking this as a starting point, lets try this:

Moderate: This is the position of the person speaking. Don't believe me? Just ask him.

Rightist: Generally anyone on the wrong side of the speaker.

Leftist: Anyone supporting the speaker, but perhaps a bit too enthusiastically.

Note that those last two are interchangeable depending on what sort of Moderate the speaker might be.

Too Much Government? Tell Them What To Get Rid Of

Here's the survey to end all surveys (well probably not) in which the Trump administration is asking the public which parts of government don't seem to be accomplishing anything beyond keeping bureaucrats employed.

Go here and work your way through the lists of departments and agencies, noting that there are 2 categories, elimination and reform. It may take a while as there are a LOT of departments and agencies, many of which you've probably never heard of. As a rule of thumb, if you have no idea what an agency actually does, and you can't puzzle out a useful function from its title, vote to dump it.

Remember that most regulatory departments are run by people friendly to the businesses being regulated and are run so as to make competition in that area more difficult. Protection for incumbents.

USPS Moves To 20th Century

Now it seems there's a program to take the last scan of all postal mail before final delivery, and e-mail the picture to you in case you were wondering if you were going to get any mail today.

Just what I need, an e-mail showing the cover of every piece of junk mail that would normally show up in my mail box. By the time I see the e-mail picture, the stuff is already on it's way so I can't reply to dump it there and save the carrier the effort of putting it in my box.

Spring

Finally, it seems. No more freezes in the immediate future and the popcorn trees are fruiting:

O.K. they're plums, but they sure look like popcorn at this point don't they? D'Wife found some stuff, Hydrolyzed Collagen, that has done wonders for the arthritis, allowing me to add some 40 lbs to the weights on the mini-gym. Finally I get to add some strength. Up until I trip and fall, catching myself on my hands, fracturing my left wrist, which the doctor says will keep me in a cast for 6-8 weeks.

Hand doctors are the most conservative...

He may have a point. It hurts bad enough from the swelling that I somehow don't want to run out and test the repairs on my pistol.

The Coveted General Nathan Bedford Forrest Award Goes To...

State Rep Joe "Pop pop" Salazar who initially rose to fame favoring a bill to insure that women on college campuses here would be unable to defend themselves from attacks by carrying a firearm.
His latest award-winning antic is to put forward legislation that would remove Columbus Day as a state holiday in Colorado.*

Normally days like this are a local excuse to drink some form of native booze and have a good time, the best known example of which is probably St. Patricks day when we all get to identify with Irish Catholics ane drink Guiness and Tully's. Columbus day has morphed into a multi-culti celebration when Italians and anyone who wants to join them parade in the street and drink wine while diverse other ethnicities parade along the sidewalks and protest the beginning of the end of a perfectly good stone age culture which included such festivities as slavery and human sacrifice.

Salazar is presumably aggrieved as he represents the native Hispanic culture that originally inhabited the island of Hispaniola. Rumor has it he would also like to be a Senator or maybe Governor and needs some more name recognition.

Hey Joe! I'm here to help. In recognition of your efforts to further divide your constituents long racial lines, here you are, nominated for the prestigious Nathan Bedford Forrest** award for furthering cross cultural harmony.



*To the credit of the Donks, the House leadership (D) has referred his bill to the House State, Veterans and Military Affairs Committee, AKA the Kill Committee.

**Founder and first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. To his credit he unsuccessfully tried to disband it after he grew critical of the Klan’s excessive violence. Ever a problem with movements that they all too often get taken over by extremists.

When The Plan Comes Together

It is indeed a beautiful thing.
First Chuckie "Smirkin' Chimp" Schumer declares war on the Reps to the point that he demands all his flying monkeys in the Senate filibuster probably the best qualified nominee since I don't know when, which rather forces the R's hand:

Then the WSJ online comes up with this bit of doggeral:

Fili Busta Rhymes
There once was a nominee, Gorsuch,
Whose judicial philosophy bore such
Resemblance to Nino’s,
The Dems (not the RINOs)
Compelled us to nuke. There’ll be more such.
-- Myles Pollin

Reportedly the button gets pushed today, and Gorsuch gets confirmed tomorrow. Thanks Chuck for stiffening the GOP spines to the point that they'd actually do this.

Reloading Protection

Once bitten, twice shy, so in the aftermath of my Glock K-boom, here's my answer to inadvertent double charging.

Shown here mounted to the top of my Lee 1000 press, this is a quick and dirty device to find those doubles and warn me about them before they get into my gun. I could have spent more tome and made something more elegant, and maybe this summer I will. This is a bit clunky and bulky, but it works.
The Lee press has only 3 stations but I've found the priming part to be kind of spotty so I don't use it. This leaves 1 station open. Decapping and priming are handled separately so this setup does first powder dispensing, second powder checking, and third bullet insertion and seating.

The wood piece is a plunger that goes down through a powder dispenser die in a caliber I don't use. When the powder filled cartridge comes up it rises about 1/4" if it's correctly filled, and about 1/2" if it's gotten hit twice. Inside the plunger are 2 Lithium batteries and the wires from the bright blue LED seen hanging out the left side.

If the powder level is correct, nothing happens, but with an overcharge, the plunger goes up far enough that the bolt presses the led lead down onto the top of the battery stack illuminating the LED. The operators seating position is off to the left in this picture, and the LED is pointing pretty much right at my eye and trust me, this little baby is bright. The spring allows the device to catch anything from a little over to a lot over without jamming the press.

The drawback is that the device is bulky and takes up space that might be used for adjusting the powder reservoir.  There is no doubt in my mind that this thing could be made to fit entirely inside a die with little more than the LED poking out, but that's for Rev B. Meantime I'll suffer.

Coming Soon To A Gun Shop Near You

I can't see the traditional style of handguns and rifles completely disappearing, but fairly shortly I expect that most rifles will look a lot like this

or this

and semi-auto pistols will be some variant of this

with differing sizes of the block in front, but no change in length. This would likely be the result of passage of the Hearing Protection Act which would treat a loose suppressor the same as a single firearm. Given this, incorporating the suppressor into the gun would add nothing to the complexity of the purchase while selling a significant reduction in ear-damaging noise to the gun-buying public.With mass production, the cost delta should be minimal.

EU To Commit Suicide, Asks For Assistance

On the heels of the Brexit vote, the EU upper management has told Hungary and Poland to either accept more Muslim "refugees" or get out. Hungary and Poland, who have each independently decided that they don't really need another couple hundred thousand unproductive members of the army of the Ummah cluttering up their countries, have pointed out the relative stability each are enjoying compared to France, Belgium, or Sweden.

From my vantage, it looks to me like they would be well served to jump the sinking ship, possibly taking the rest of Eastern Europe with them, and join a free trade union with England to be named the Un-Islamic Union of Countries Who Will Not Be Bailing Out the PIGS.

On a possibly related note, I have it on excellent authority that the Colorado Muslims are planning to build a new mosque in the otherwise sleepy town of Golden, just West of me. Not just the biggest  mosque in the state, but possibly the biggest in the entire country. The existing mosque there serves about 500 parishioners but the new one is geared toward 10,000 or more. The Imam says that the balance are expected to be "refugees" which Colorado makes easy to import.

New Puppy

My daughters BF got a puppy. Now daughters dog won't be lonesome.

Only problem is that daughters dog is the 12 year old heeler who has NO use at all for puppies at this point.

The sleeping puppy is 3 months old. Italian Mastiffs are very laid back dogs. What I expect will happen is that GSXR will treat him like a sheep and bully him all over the yard and Lurch will think it's great that the little dog is playing with him. Win-win.

ATF New Technology Tracing Informants

The ATF has announced that it has adapted the technology that allows a small tattoo to monitor, for example, blood sugar in diabetics, to make tattoos RFID traceable across wide geographical areas. The addition of the tracing compounds to the tattoo ink will make it harder for the agency to misplace its informants, the bigger the tattoo, the wider the range. An informant with full-body tattoos will be satellite traceable anywhere in the country. Research is continuing to add flexible circuitry to the ink to make an informant a permanently wired infiltrator without the bulky and easily detectable boxes associated with the current "wires".





Update: Sorry this was late. Should have been up yesterday.

Headline Of The Month

So far, anyway. Found on Drudge:

BLITZ: CAR CARRYING SUPER BOWL TROPHY HITS DEER IN MAINE...

The trophies keep getting bigger and bigger. No mention of who was driving it.

Glock Mini K-Boom - Analysis

As a follow up, I've been reloading for quite some time now and the double charge I got last month was the first I've had. The equipment I use is pretty reliable and when something goes wrong in the process, it's pretty apparent. Still, I've added a station to the turret to check the powder level in each cartridge from here on out.

Looking at my shelf, I have some 500 rounds of .40 S&W sitting there and of course I have to wonder if there are any more surprises lurking in the boxes. The obvious solution is to weigh each cartridge which I started to do:

Sorry if my bench is a bit messy, but you can see the distribution of weights of a selection of loaded bullets. They range from 15.2 to 15.9 grams. The problem is that I only use 4 grains of powder per bullet which comes to .26 grams. The bullets are pretty consistent in weight (10.69 gram) with less than .1 gram between them and it's probably safe to say that the powder would normally be just as consistent. Over on the right is a small selection of primed cases which range from 4.5 grams to 4.9 grams, a variation about equal to 2 loads of powder. The sample size for the cases is too small to show the whole variation, but you can see the problem. I pulled one of the 15.9 rounds apart and discovered exactly 4 grains of powder, a consistent bullet, and a 5 gram case. Pulled a 15.2 gram cartridge and found 3.8 grains of powder, 10.6 grains of bullet, and 4.3 grains of brass. Obviously weighing the finished bullets is a waste of time as the brass varies over 2-1/2 shots of powder.

I suppose I could specialize in the PCC class at the matches for a while as the Hi Point is famously indestructible.