Interesting article on harvard losing $11Bn and what will happen.

Article is here. One unsettling detail: Larry Summers had a big hand in the destruction. He's now directly involved in the Obama running amuck escapades.

Hat tip, Derek Thompson.

Robots, guns, backwoods inventors.

Very cool article in the New Yorker (though I can't recommend much of their cringingly spiteful recent writing). Unfortunately you need a subscription.

ABSTRACT: ANNALS OF TECHNOLOGY about gunsmith Jerry Baber and the remote-controlled armed machines he has created in partnership with two robotics companies. Jerry Baber, an engineer by training, is an expert in investment casting. He lives in Piney Flats, Tennessee where he operates a small foundry which manufactures gun parts. A few years ago Baber started producing, from start to finish, his own weapon: a fully automatic shotgun called the AA-12, which has the power of a twelve-gauge shotgun but none of its bruising recoil. Baber spent a dozen years and upward of a million and a half dollars of his own money perfecting the gun. Not long ago, he decided that his gun was so reliable and accurate that it could be mounted on unmanned vehicles. Armed, remote-controlled robots, Baber believes, could offer crucial assistance in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Last year, he met with engineers at Robotex and at Neural Robotics. Together, they created prototypes of small, remote-controlled armed machines. Describes three of the machines, a five-foot-long white helicopter Baber calls Junior, and two ground robots. The AA-12, unlike most military weapons, can shoot a variety of ammunition, including non-lethal pellets and mini-grenades. Writer observes a demonstration of Baber’s robots. Discusses the military’s use of some remote-controlled weaponry, such as Predator drones. The Pentagon has approached the subject of armed robots with considerable wariness. Tells about a 2006 incident in which a fried wire caused a demonstration robot to malfunction. Baber, for his part, seems baffled by the military’s worries about deploying armed robots. Writer observes Baber making gun parts in his foundry. Baber grew up an only child in Covington, Virginia. He enlisted in the Army and then obtained a degree in engineering from Virginia Tech. During the Vietnam War, he and a partner found a lucrative niche making bomb springs. Tells how his friend Max Atchisson first presented him with the plans for an automatic shotgun that could harness recoil, called the Atchisson Automatic Shotgun. After some two hundred modifications to Atchisson’s original design, Baber finally built a working gun, christened the Auto Assault-12. After failing to sell the gun to the military, Baber decided that there was only one way to convince the government of the gun’s usefulness: robots. Describes his work with Neural Robotics and Robotex to produce working prototypes of robots armed with AA-12s. Mentions interest from foreign governments. Two of Baber’s guns are being tested by Pentagon R & D centers on their own unmanned vehicles.

Today's tax factoid

Hard to seperate correlation (with recession) from causation (with jackass politicians and the economic illiterates who elect them), but still, from the WJS

Here's a two-minute drill in soak-the-rich economics:

Maryland couldn't balance its budget last year, so the state tried to close the shortfall by fleecing the wealthy. Politicians in Annapolis created a millionaire tax bracket, raising the top marginal income-tax rate to 6.25%. And because cities such as Baltimore and Bethesda also impose income taxes, the state-local tax rate can go as high as 9.45%. Governor Martin O'Malley, a dedicated class warrior, declared that these richest 0.3% of filers were "willing and able to pay their fair share." The Baltimore Sun predicted the rich would "grin and bear it."

One year later, nobody's grinning. One-third of the millionaires have disappeared from Maryland tax rolls. In 2008 roughly 3,000 million-dollar income tax returns were filed by the end of April. This year there were 2,000, which the state comptroller's office concedes is a "substantial decline." On those missing returns, the government collects 6.25% of nothing. Instead of the state coffers gaining the extra $106 million the politicians predicted, millionaires paid $100 million less in taxes than they did last year -- even at higher rates.

To say anything causal, you'd need to look at the other states that *did not* raise upper income taxes and see what happened to the number of millionaire filers.

good used equipment buying advice.

I've been trying to find a good quality lathe and a bridgeport. It's been an adventure (thus far fruitless).

Great advice on evaluating a lathe.

A short screed on buying used equipment (CL + ebay local pickup).

matching bullet diam to chamber throats for best accuracy.

Interesting article: Grant Cunningham on chamber throat and accuracy.

nice grips

Collection of the all the nice colt grips I know. If I missed something please send a pointer!

I really like these oversized ebony grips from eagle, though they often require fitting before they meet precisely. I've bought six pairs...

The similar grips on the bicentennial python are really nice too, but I don't know where to get them other than buying another bicentennial...

The excaliber grips (from ajax?) are nice and are what got used on later model python elites. grips4guns has them, though apparently at a $30 to $40 markup compared to what colt will sell them for to you.

Here they are on a SS from a post at the colt forum:

Of course, the colt medallion pachmayr grips. I don't believe anyone sells these so I've had to buy them off of GB or various forums. Going rate is edging up to $50 apiece. I don't like normal pachs; these seem somewhat larger.

I don't have the rest of these, but am planning on fixing that.

Everyone loves Herret stocks. Inexpensive yet high quality hand made, though be prepared to wait a month or two. You trace your hand, send it in, they make custom grips. Jordan troopers come highly recommended for controlling the recoil on anacondas with full house loads:

Fully checkered aftermarket grips; they claimed they'd have gold medallion ones in a couple of weeks.

These pricey custom badger grips seem to look really nice on bright polish (can't find a photo: they look much better than in isolation):

And this guy has some great grips, though apparently only does colts as custom requests. From a recent post at the colt forum, here they are on a colt:

cool: search firearm forums with google.

The software that is used to run most forums really sucks w.r.t. search.

Google custom search engines are a nice hack around it: you can configure them to just return results from a given site.

Here's an already existing one for calguns.

And here's one I just made for the colt forum.

The book.

If you've read this far and don't have it, I'd suggest opening another window and your wallet...

Removing stacking in the bull barrel python

NOTE: the stuff below is just for entertainment. I am not suggesting this is what you should do or how you should do it. Consider it a fast way to ruin your gun. If you see something where I'm ruining mine please point it out!

After a few hours of messing around I was able to fix the bull barreled python previously discussed here.

It was like a rube goldberg contraption with a bunch of different things wrong but cancelling each other out. Unfortunately, if you fixed one thing, there was nothing to cancel the others.

In any case, if you have a bull barrel and no action work it don't make no sense. So we get to it.

Here's what we have to work with:



To eliminate stacking and cut a couple pounds off of DA we are going to install a trigger with a curved sear (trigger modified by Frank Glenn). A standard colt trigger is next to it for comparision:







First we "drop it in" to see what we have to do. Of course it's always the same thing: cut a groove in the hammer toe. As you can see, the end of the sear is lower (since the entire sear is curved) which prevents the hammer strut from resetting. If the strut can't reset, you have no DA since you'll pull the trigger and it will go up, but not bring the hammer with it.






The solution is cutting a groove in the hammer toe where the sear meets it so it sets lower. So we remove the strut to make it easier to file. From left to right: the bench block we use to knock out the strut pin and the tool used to do so (made by Frank), the strut, spring and hammer. The point of the tool is to knock the struct pin out halfway so it stays in the hammer, which which makes it a lot easier to get back. We'll use the round file to cut the groove:




First pass:






A fair amount of material gets removed, but less than we will probably need. However, since you can't put metal back, it makes sense to put reassemble the hammer and figure out how much more there is to do.

A nice trick for getting the hammer strut spring to stay is to use a heavy grease on the end to make it stick where it should be:






Ok, not as bad, but still more to go:


After another round we get:


Which lets the strut reset:


Note that without the rebound the hammer is tilted slightly forward more which means that the strut may not reset even though it would with the rebound in place. However, I like to leave a bit of space since DA is often rapid fire, and if the fit between strut and sear is too tight, you'll get failures to reset pretty easily.

OK. So now the strut resets. Of course, since it's a I frame, if you change one thing, you have to change 10.

For example: since the trigger has a slightly different resting place it can throw off bolt/hand interplay. In our case, the rebound no longer picks the bolt up instantly, which means the top hand starts pushing on the cylinder before the bolt has withdrawn:




Also the hammer can't get cocked since the lower hand locks up on the cylinder before the sear can go in the cocking notch.





The wrong thing to do at this point is to start filing on the hand. This may be necessary at the end, but the first thing to do is to fix the problem in the lower red rectangle above: the trigger must raise the hand up fairly high to get around the top of the hammer before the sear eventually gets into the cocking notch. Unfortunately, when the sear reaches the cocking notch the hand will be significantly lower. Thus, if you try to solve the problem by merely filing the bottom hand, by the time the sear reaches the cocking notch there will be a gap. This means the cylinder will be supported more by the bolt, rather than the bottom hand, which is not a good setup.

First, we'll stone the trigger, which we have to do anyway since it's edge is a bit sharp after the torch. Stoning will make it shorter and the problem above less pressing. We'll then take some material off of the end of the hammer toe before messing with the hand.

Here's the stoning fixture. Frank does it freehand, but I don't trust my filing abilities to that extent:



And here's the rough angle you want:



Unfortunately I didn't take clear pictures of before / after so you'll have to use your imagination.

We now enter the NEVER DO THAT EVER part of the programme. We're going to modify the cocking notch. If you do this to your gun it's going to get ruined. For stock sears the shop manual says to throw away hammers with cocking notch alterations. So does dfariswheel.

However, since we are using a curved sear things a slightly different. The angle is different enough that often if you don't do anything to the notch the SA will usually really suck (creep, heavy, bad). If you make the notch more like a right angle and cut the lip of the hammer down, it can escape easier and you can make it as light as you like.

However, again, don't do this at home. For example, Grant Cunningham doesn't do this when he installs such triggers because of concerns about liability. And there are NO GUARANTEES THAT I AM DOING THIS RIGHT. So consider this just entertainment.

However, since I'm not going to sell this gun, we can not worry about most of the above. First put the hammer in a small vise and use a sharpie to mark the general area so that it's easy to tell how much got removed (and whether it was even):



Now file some. Unfortunately, I filed more than is a good idea. It is far from getting push off, but it's not really the right way to do things. I should have been more careful. In any case, here's the hammer:





And as compared to a stock one:


In the end I also had to take some off of the top and bottom parts of the hand, however it was just a few strokes of the file.

After putting everything back together the nice result is that with no other modifications the DA drops from 8.5-9lbs to 7lbs (and with the cylinder open is consistently 6.2lbs) and there is no stacking. Feels much nicer:



There's probably some room left to fuss with the mainspring and such, but that will get left til another time.

oversize bolts

I've been getting bolts from Popperts with oversized cams.

If anyone knows how to fit these I'd be interested in hearing about it. I've ruined a couple. While the last two worked it'd be nice to have a method. The shop manual seems to assume the bolt cam is already pretty much how it should be (with minor modifications).

Here's some pictures comparing to a bolt I pulled out of a python. You can see the cam is bigger in every way.

Amusing way to get free miles on your credit card.

US mint selling $1 coins at face value + free shipping.

Hat tip: Oren, volokh.

Forensic photos: bull barrelled python

Recently came into possession of a bull-barrel python (I know I know, but looks fun to shoot!). Had a really amazing trigger: SA felt feather light and DA very smooth. So of course we took it apart to see what things looked like. This is a short post about that, but it doesn't come to any definitive conclusions, unfortunately.

Now the first thing was a bit unnerving: when measured w/ a trigger scale, the DA was OK and the SA at around 3lbs is pretty good, but not outer-space weird:


I've pulled a lot of different python triggers but this was the largest difference ever between subjective feel and measured reality. I'm still not really sure what the deal is.

In any case, here's a couple of the aristocrat rib:




And like many early, non-safe queen guns, it has "INS" stamped on the frame handle:



I think this is the fourth INS colt for me. I thought it meant "immigration and naturalization service" but the general consensus is that it just means "inspected".

As you probably can't see, the latch is purple:


From this post, it turns out that this does not necessarily mean it was reblued, but just that the blueing tank was a bit off:
Dfariswheel on purple

Now the second major surprise (which the trigger weight should have told us) is that the trigger sear is stock, completely uncurved! I had thought from the pull that there was minimal stacking:



If you look above at the INS stamp again, you can see the severe kink in the spring, closer to the V than I believe the colt manual suggests (though it's where I've tended to put it, too).

OK, so the sear is normal. Why exactly is the snake so smooth?! Looking at the hammer, you can see the lower end is polished compared to a take off one (right) --- most hammers have black marks on the lower end:



Looking at the sear, it does appear polished, though this could also be wear:


The hammer strut too appears polished (as it should be):



And the hand seems polished as does the rebound:





But these are all the normal places to polish. I've done it a lot, and still this python felt noticably nicer than usual.



The strut angle is pretty damn good, but still.


Unfortunately, here's one problem: the bolt spring is completely the wrong one:



If we do rapid DA the cylinder spins past the bolt. And weirdly, this is with the bolt slipping off the side of the rebound. After bending the bolt so it goes off the front of the rebound cam it stops returning at all. I'll spare you the details, but I'm still a bit stuck on what to do. Perhaps a nights sleep :)