Tag Archives: guns

.30-30 upgrade

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Well, it took about twenty years but I finally upgraded the sights on my .30-30 carbine. This thing weighs just a tad under five pounds which malkes it a joy to tote through the woods, it breaks down into two pieces small enough to stuff in a pack, and it shoots a .30 caliber cartridge with a respectable amount of energy. But…the factory sights were lacking.

Those sights are darn near halfway down the barrel. And they’re simple notch/post sights…like an AK. And while I respect the AK, I want better sights if I’m going out looking to load up the larder.

I finally got off my butt and order up a peep sight that I’d been meaning to buy for the last couple decades. When you’re using open sights, the longer the sight radius the better.

And it sits all the way at the back of the barrel like it’s supposed to, giving me a rather lengthy sight radius. And an aperature I can swap out if I so desire.

Sure, I have plenty of .308’s that will kill Bambi just fine. But, none of them weigh less than five pounds. And I enjoy handloading for the single-shot .30-30.

Is it a survival gun? I suppose any gun is a ‘survival gun’ if your situation calls for it. But this is really just a fun lightweight(!) carbine that I can stuff into a backpack, hop on my mountain bike, and be miles ahead of everyone on some closed-off logging road when the sun comes up and hunting hours begin.

What willI  be shooting? Most likely some 180 grain hollowpoint cast bullets. I like playing with cast bullets and the Contender is an ideal platform for such foolery. Since it’s a .30 caliber single shot, I can pretty much load it with any bullet from 90 gr. up to 220 gr. Of course, at .30-30 velocities those heavy ones will just meander out there taking their time…but when they hit…ouch.

Whats the sight? Williams. There are other sights out there but I liked how compact this thing was.

However, speaking of sights…wait’ll you see what I put on the Marlin 336.

 

Guns guns guns

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I’m starting to wonder if the guy who texts me the messages about new guns that have come into his shop for sale is really doing me any favors when he does that….

I get the usual “Some guns came in. Come on down and take a look” message.

What I didnt get were two 1940’s era Model 70 Winchesters. One in .30-06, which was nothing remarkable…zillions out there, and the other was a .257 Roberts. Hmmm. I would have bought them with an eye for resale, but the prices were higher than I felt comfortable gambling on. What did I get?

  • A Marlin 39A which I am hoping to trade to a buddy for a very clean, very pre-Remington 336 in .30-30
  • Yet another Remington 870 12 ga.
  • A lovely 6″ S&W 17 K-22 from the 70’s
  • A 6″ S&W 686

Price? Well, I think its a good deal. $1100 for the lot. The 870 goes in the rack with the rest, the 39A gets traded for a .30-30, the K22 is probably going to GunBroker, and the 686 will get flogged around to see if I can trade it for a GP-100.

:::sigh::: I was so sure I wasn’t going to make this as gun-heavy a year as last year.

Magpul 9mm happysticks…only three years late

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Dang near three years ago Magpul announced that they were introducing 27-rd happysticks for the Glock 9mm.

And then……nothing…as I noted almost a year and a half later….

Just in time for hedging my bets against 2020:

Source.  

I ordered….uhm….25….and got free shipping and a bulk discount that lowered it to $17 per magazine. I need to go out to the range tomorrow to adjust the new sights on the G17 so these will come along for the ride.

Anyone know of a leather maker who will make Galco Miami Classic compatible mag pouches that’ll hold extended mags like this?

Your average G17 carried 17 freedom seeds…If the day comes when you need a spare reload of 27 rounds, your life has pegged the needle on the Interesting-O-Meter. However, given the amount of 9mm carbines that take Glock mags these days, why wouldnt you have a dozen of these? True fact: I was going to order a hundred to put away in Deep Sleep but just couldn’t bring myself to commit to that kind of expense. I settled for 25…for this month.

Police Trade-In Guns

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Gotta be careful with that hyphen , otherwise ‘police trade-in guns’ becomes something else completely. (Although sometimes that happens too.)

I’m always on the lookout for bargain priced 9mm Glocks. It used to be that every few years police departments would slough off their old pistols for new ones, and those older pistols would work their way onto the market. Ask any cop and he’ll tell you that they guns look pretty worn, what with all the holster wear and whatnot, but they get fired very little. They are, basically, the used car from that little old lady who only drove it to church on Sundays.

Thing is, just about every police agency in the country migrated to the .40 S&W back in the day and have stayed there up until recently when the 9mm has been making a move back into the cop market. All this to say, while finding police trade-in 9mm Glocks is a bigfoot hunt these days, there is a metric buttload of surplus .40 Glocks out there at stupid prices.

If youre plans revolve around the .40, you can get all sortsa flavors of Glock for $250. Ditto for S&W M&P‘s. A friend of mine just scored a used .45 M&P, with night sights and spare  mags, for around $275 as police trade-in. The deals are out there.

But, as I said, my plans revolve around 9mm so Im kinda left out in the cold. But, if you’re a .40 guy this is going to be a golden era for you to get cheap big-name .40’s.

It reminds me of ‘back in the day’ when the big revolver-to-auto transitions were taking place and the market was awash in Smith Model 10’s and 15’s. I still have a couple of those sitting in the safe.

Anyway, I was trotting through the usual vendor websites and noticed that theres a plethora of .40’s on the market these days andthought Id point it out.
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In other news, a couple cases of AR mags shipped to me yesterday so it looks like we can go ahead and start getting people matched up for those AR mags. You know the drill.

link – Sales of Guns and Ammo. What Could Ever Go Wrong?

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I swear, last one……..

And speaking of gun purchases that may come back to bite you in the buttocks, Claire has a post about something I was reading a few days ago. The article is behind a NYT paywall, but quick fingers with a ctrl+c managed to get me a copy of the article to paste into Word so I could read it. Here’s another outfits take on it.

The gist of the article is that mass shooters, according to the idiot writing the article, woldn’t be able to amass their ‘vast arsenals’ without the use of consumer credit. Therefore, banks should notify ‘the authorities’ when transactions show them buying ‘suspicious’ amounts of guns, ammo, etc.

Never mind that any person with two brain cells to rub together would figure out the easiest way to avoid that would be to buy ‘normal’ stuff on credit, resell it for cash, and then purchase with cash.

But, most importantly, who wants a bank reporting on your purchases to .gov? Cash, baby….thats why theyre trying to push you away from it. Cash makes no enemies. buy your guns without paperwork, for cash, and avoid the whole nonsense.

 

Siege arrival and end of the year

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The bundle o’ Siege’s I ordered up from that megasuperawesome sale a few days ago showed up today. One or two will got out this weekend as holiday gifts. The rest…well….Zero needs lighting.

This recent purchase of a fairly substantial quantity of D-batt using devices means that I need to head up to CostCo this weekend and pick up more batteries. I picked some up last weekend and I was rather shocked at what D-batts cost these days. To be fair, I hadn’t bought any in a while but they still seemed egregiously expensive.

And, as 2018 limps to a finish, my goal is for 2019 to not be an expensive year. This year was a tad heavy on gun purchases. How heavy? Uhmmm….six carbines, seven Ruger 9mm pistols (I clearly lost track of how many on that one), four 12 ga shotguns, a couple Glocks,  and one or two pocket guns.But…also managed to sock away a chunk of Mountain House freeze drieds, put back almost 50k rounds of .22, and actually managed to put a bit of money in the bank.

At the moment, my preparedness goals for 2019 are extremely unsexy: pay off house, get money  in the bank, try not to buy All The Guns.

You’d think that wouldn’t be that hard, but you’d be wrong……..

 

The longing for a .338

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Well, I hope you guys took advantage of that $20 deal onthe Siege’s yesterday. Some of you must have because according to the Amazon affiliate logs, 96 of them were sold off that link I posted. And even though I had bought three last week, who could resist at $20? So I ordered another three for myself. I’ll hand out one or two as holiday gifts.

For those of you who didn’t manage to read that post in time and get under the midnight deadline they had…well…perhaps next year?
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In other news, my gun buying habit, which is starting to get a tad outta control, needs to be reined in because Ruger has finally come out with their precision rifle in .338 Lapua. I got to handle one the other day and it is…big. It’s about 15# of rifle, which is really, really challenging the idea of man-portability. It’s not easy to imagine this gun as something you’d sling over your shoulder while carrying a backpack. It’s a heavy rifle. Of course, if you wanna dish it out you gotta be able to take it. The tradeoff against the 33% lighter .308 is,  of course, bullet weight and a very pronounced increase in range (and operating costs).

Anyway, I’ve been wanting a .338 Lapua for a while and I was pretty much settled in on getting the Savage but I’d like to read the reviews on the Ruger offering.

How expensive? Well, its going to be about $1500 for the base gun, figure another grand (at least) for the scope. Support gear will be another $500 or so. It adds up in a hurry.

I suspect this is one of those things I’ll daydream over for a year or two until some circumstance occurs that affords me the opportunity to get one of these things. But, in the meantime, I can start collecting the less expensive parts of the package, like dies, brass, etc. As I said, the two biggest hits will be the gun and the glass.

You know, if Ruger would come out with a pump or auto shotgun you could have a survivlist’s armory filled with nothing but Ruger products…AR, 1911,  .357 DA revolver, .22 rifle, etc, etc.

Addiction

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So this happened today…….

I know, I know.

And before some well-meaning person posts it in the comments, No, I wouldn’t offer this to the neighbor girl. DA/SA autos arent really a beginners gun. If I were interested in offering her a boomtoy, which Im not, it’d be a Glock, M&P40, or an XD.. basically, a reliable point-n-shoot. The notion that revolvers are the best choice for the I-just-want-a-gun-to-keep-on-the-nightstand crowds (especially chicks) is just silly. Someone who has no interest in becoming a ‘gun person’ isn’t going to do terribly well with a DA revolver (the classic .38) with its long heavy trigger pull. Good, solid, DA revolver shooting takes practice. A good bit of practice.

And to stem the inevitable “My wife/girlfriend/daughter shoots a Beretta 92 and thats a DA/SA and she shoots it quite well!”, yeah, but Im talking generalizations here.

This is Ruger 9mm pistol number..ah.well…its up there in the double digits. But..$200 including shipping. Came without a magazine but thats not a problem these days.