Monday, August 2, 2010

Sharks

So it's Shark Week on Discovery Channel, and I just heard a bumper between the commercials and Dirty Jobs saying something about "every now and then we hear about a shark mistaking a human for food." and I can't help but think to myself; "I don't think they're really mistaking..."

Rubber Band for a Spring?

So last night I mentioned that Cro busted the extractor spring on his M4gery partway through the day at the range yesterday, well before I got there.  On the upside, he's been running his RRA built gun pretty hard for for tens, if not hundreds of thousand of rounds, since 2005.  It's amazing in its own right that the spring lasted this long.

So I offered to grab on of the spare bolts I've got laying around these days. A little later he sent me a cryptic text message saying that he had "fixed it with a rubber band... two mags, so far so good."  Needless to say my mind was racking with how this is possible all the drive home and back out to the range.

Now a little background on Cro.  He is an Army Engineer officer, and has a good amount of gunsmith training.  He's a smart guy to start with, and if you know anything about Army Engineers, we tend to be the "only one sure way to see if it works!" kind of guys.  So he had a thought and ran with it.  Since I can, find out what exactly happened after the jump.  There's even a video!















FYI

Carlson's Snap Caps in .45acp will not chamber in a Kimber Custom II.  That's $15 well spent...

M&P15-22 KB

Not mine, but I'm sure everybody's heard about the Canuk's "blowing up" on him by now.

If you've been reading my stuff for more than a week, you'll know that I'm a huge fan of the little Smith & Wesson.  It is easily my favorite rimfire gun I own at the moment, and one of the best training tools you can get.  So of course my curiosity peaked when I saw the title of that post.

Well here's my thoughts: Yup, it's a rimfire.  It's almost expected to happen at some point, through a whole variety of causes.  There's a reason the system isn't very common on anything larger than a .22, and really it's only used on the diminutive cartridge simply because the round is too small to squeeze a centerfire priming system into.  And that very firing system is probably the most common cause of out of battery firings on the .22anything rimfire auto-loading system.  The rim is completely unprotected, and the freakin' extractor grabs on to that very rim for the gun to work.  Any chunks of crap that are big enough and hard enough to put a decent size dent in that rim that collect on the bolt face or the breach face have to potential to cause an out of battery detonation.  It's the nature of the beast.

Ok, you're gun blew up, some of the parts may have been lost or broken, and that's never a fun thing.  But you've walked away with nary a scratch, and then you mumble something about legal actions against the manufacturer!?  I know there have been enough comments about the retardation of that idea that he's second guessing it, but wow.  Really?  He also has voiced concerns about the lack of a recall since this is apparently "a common problem."  I guess I don't hang out on the right forums, but I haven't seen or heard about enough similar problems to really feel that's really that big of a deal that they'd order a recall.  He also mentions about how he fears that somebody may have bought one for a child, and he'd feel really sorry if that happened to the kid and they received an eye injury.  I'd feel bad for the kid for not having a parent smart enough to pick up a pair of shooting glasses and earplugs to go with the gun.  I'm pretty sure there's a big safety notice in the manual about wearing eye and ear pro when shooting, oh, just about any gun made since well before the kid was born.

Just had to vent I guess.  I just can't stand people with that much of a lack of common sense or moral ethics.