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Doorstep dilemmas

This week we take our inspiration for our Friday firearms feature from the situation faced by both Frank Corti or Lady Griffin – on your own doorstep you are confronted by a violent criminal whom you need to dispose of with alacrity because your gentlemans gentleman is just about to pour pre-dinner drinkiepoos. Of course the simple solution is to get your gamekeeper to shoot said assailant, but unfortunately he is busy resetting the mantraps in the Lower Covert & the underkeeper has taken the wolfhounds to assist with the eviction of estate tenants who are late with their rent. Then to make matter worse & because your humble correspondent is an utter swine, I will add the following complications:

Firstly, one is a stout bulldog (either actual or honorary for the purpose of this post) therefore ones choice of sidearm must be British or Empire

Next, as the Webley Service Revolver has been covered in previous posts, you can’t have one of those – let’s assume that inadvertently it has been loaned to the vicar who is off remonstrating with the Methodists

Thirdly & finally, it is important to cut a dash as you dispatche your adversary. So aside from No.1 above, the bulge created by a Colt & Wesson Model 3000 turbo with 8 inch barrel fluted & ribbed for extra stimulation might undo all of one’s tailors hard work. Therefore think Basil Rathbone, not Dirty Harry

So for starters, we have a true bulldog style revolver

6 into the chest cavity at point blank range would almost certainly draw any doorstep unpleasantness to a swift conclusion & it is small enough not to ruin the cut of ones coat if slipped into a pocket

For friends of semi-autos, what about a .32 Webley & Scott?

I know that .32 is not the most robust of cartridges, but then again, a full mag at point blank probably settles the argument

& although the vicar has your trusty service revolver, even in those days Webley made smaller 'carry' versions - so perhaps you could reach for your back up weapon

Sadly a lot were chambered for the lo-fat .38 cartridge

However, older versions were chambered in the more manly .455 & I think that something like this

would fit the criteria at the top of the page. Of course I have no doubt that that those of you that are knowledgable in such matters might be able to suggest something even more appropriate...

Thursday morning caption competition

& to get you going how about... you are never caught short with the new short action xyz

Eight six shooters: Your Thursday morning Smith & Wesson medley

For your express firearms dedication, this morning we start with an assiette of shortarms & for no particular reason I can think of, I chose the most excellent products of Mr. Horace Smith, Mr. Daniel B. Wesson & their successors

So without further ado, lets kick off with Model 10 Victory revolver so named for the "V" prefix which was placed before the serial number & represented "Victory" against the Axis powers in World War II

In 1957, Smith and Wesson began a convention of using numeric designations to distinguish their various models of handguns. The M&P was renamed the Model 10. The M&P/Model 10 has been available in both blued steel finish and nickel finish for most of its production run. The model has also been offered throughout the years with both the round butt and square butt. Beginning with the Model 10-5 series shown below

in the late 1960s, the tapered barrel and its trademark 'half moon' front sight were replaced by a straight bull barrel and a sloped milled ramp front sight

For those whose tastes demand something a little more meaty, beaty, big & bouncy there is the .357 Magnum Highway Patrolman

In the late 1940s & the first part of the 1950s Smith & Wesson was the only American gun company manufacturing a .357 magnum revolver. Since this was the only revolver available for this cartridge at the time, police departments & individuals could not "shop" around for better prices. Many police departments, as well as individual officers & private shooters, requested from Smith & Wesson a more strictly utilitarian "budget" .357 magnum revolver. S&W responded with the Highway Patrolman (later changed to the Model 28 in 1957). The manufacturing changes made for a more affordable revolver. Mechanically the Highway Patrolman is the same as the more lavishly produced Model 27.The Model 28 was in production from 1954 until 1986. For most of its production run it was a very steady seller with both police officers & civilian shooters

357 Mag a little too much gun? Well then there are always the little snub nose Airweights in .38 Special

Simply perfect for say popping into your pocket when you are off to discuss expenses claims with your local Member of Parliament - also the Airweight Model 37 available in stainless steel which doesn't stain from blood splatter once you have had to explain to your MP exactly how displeased you are with what he (or she) has been claiming on expenses

If you would prefer something a little larger that comes with a cast iron manufacturers guarantee that it

will cause sphincters to dilate if it is produced at exactly the right moment during a drunken post dinner climate change conversation ... or if there are only five faux-environmentalists around the table then the 5 shot .38 Chiefs Special might be just the ticket

Now I know that this post is called "eight six shooters" & the Chiefs Special only holds 5, but its late/early & besides being short one round of .38 S&W is not as bad as this little gold plated number

I thought that we would finish up with it in the true spirit of inclusiveness that has long been the hallmark of this blog but let’s be absolutely crystal clear about this, golden guns are fine if your name is Scaramanga but other than that NO. No excuses or exceptions, even if you hark from da hood !

Pheasant & Leek Pie

First shoot your phessies etc etc etc then ...

2 pheasant breasts
1 tbsp olive oil
Salt & freshly ground black pepper
Knob of butter
1lb sliced white leeks
A good slug of double cream
3/4 lb puff pastry
1 egg, beaten

Lightly brown your pheasant breast in a little olive oil and salt
Meanwhile roll your rough puff pastry to size and cut out a circle for your pie base
Press the base gently into the bottom of a suitably sized bowl
After a few minutes on each side remove your pheasant breasts and let them rest
Make the leek filling for the pie with sliced leeks softened in a little butter and mixed with double cream
Cut your pheasant breast into thin slices and arrange on top of the leeks
An egg wash along the edge of the pie helps to seal the lid. Press the edges together to secure and decorate with the prongs of the fork
Turn out the pie onto a baking tray. Working round it with floured hands, turns up the edges and helps to keep it in shape
Prick to allow steam to escape and bake in a hot oven. After 40 minutes brush with egg and return to the oven for a minute or two to glaze

Stolen from Gill at River Cottage

Mauser 'Broomhandle' 1896

I promised the other day that we would 'do' as it were, the Broomhandle Mauser - so man of my word that I am, here we are....

Contrary to common belief, the C96 was not invented by Paul Mauser, but by the Feederle brothers (Fidel, Friedrich, and Josef). Fidel Feederle was the Superintendent of the Experimental Work Shop, and it is reported that the C96 (then referred to as P-7.63 or the Feederle Pistol) was designed and prototyped without the knowledge and against the wishes of Paul Mauser. Be that as it may, production began in 1896, and ended about 1939 with over one million C96 pistols produced.

Paul Mauser named the C96 the "Mauser Military Pistol" in the hope that it would achieve large sales through its adoption by the Germany army or the army of one of the other major powers, but his hopes were never realized.

While limited numbers of the C96 pistol were purchased for issue to members of the armed forces and/or police of Germany, China, Indonesia, Persia, Turkey, Italy, and possibly Norway (and unofficially used by the troops of a large number of other countries), it was never officially adopted by any country as their primary sidearm.

More from C96 & the Mauser 1896 Unofficial HomePage

Trigger control

Tonight I don’t propose for one moment of delve into the intricacies of perfect trigger control – there are those out there far far more qualified than I will ever be to opine on that particular topic. Rather I would like to very briefly (for a change) make an observation & comment of my own particular experience.

When I am on the range I always know the exact point in time at which the rifle will release the shot: that final exhale & as the cross hairs come up onto the target, I make a conscious decision to squeeze the trigger. However in the field when I am shooting something preferable cute & cuddly – shooting to kill if you like - it’s quite different.

The process all starts in the same way, the exhale & the recognition that the cross hairs now reside upon the point of aim. But after that nothing. When Bambi, Foxy Loxy, or Peter Rabbit get given the good news, I never seem to make a conscious decision to take the shot – the rifle just seems to go off in my hands, without thought if you like

Post shot, I’d say that my recovery & reload drills are very similar on the range or in the field– it’s simply that marked differential in the actual release process. One registers, the other doesnt. I’d be interested to hear if any readers experience anything similar

The Lancaster Pistol

I was sitting in the smoking room of Claridges enjoying a very nice port wine when I was aware of an older gentleman of millitary bearing being introduced to me by the porter. "Ah, young Doctor Sprague, over from the colonies I hear!" I smiled and replied, "No taxation without representation!!" which seemed to serve as a good icebreaker.

And so I met Colonel James Fellows, late of the 13th Bengal Lancers and veteran of campaigns in Sudan and Afganistan, a remarkable old soldier. The conversation turned to firearms and current trends in service sidearms when he told me of an unusual pistol that many officers purchased as personal weapons for campaigns in the late 19th and early 20th century. Reluctant to startle senior members of the club, he invited me round to his town house to view this fasinating pistol...

So I thought, given that we had quite a few VCs from the Mutiny last week we should start today with something a little different such as the Lancaster Pistol

A lot of the old boys had been through the Indian Mutiny and the talk of the officers mess was always how those little beggers would take a few pistol rounds and still keep on coming, so when I got posted to the Sudan I wanted somethng that was stop one of those Fuzzy-Wuzzies in their tracks. Off I go to the Army and Navy Stores 'cause in those days an officer had a lot of leeway in their choice of personal weapons and fell in love with this beauty as soon as I saw her. Fellow behind the counter said they were selling like hot cakes, popular with tiger hunters out in India by all accounts. The level of workmanship is quite evident in the checkering of the butt and the blueing as would be expected from the firm of Lancaster, who by appointment to His Majesty the Prince Consort supplied shotguns to the royal family. The locking mechanism is also shotgun-like as you can see, and operates a self-extractor. Feel the weight, hmm? 2 ¼ lbs so you run out of bullets, HIT THE B*GGERS!

Sometimes classified as a Howdah pistol, the Lancaster pistol enjoyed popularity with British officers in India and Africa owing to its faster rate of fire and increased reliability over contemporary revolvers.

When facing charging tribesmen like the Zulus or Dervishes more modern ammunition tended to go straight through the enemy who would keep going. What was needed was a heavy lead bullet that would lodge in their body and bring them down

It was eventually displaced by the various Webley revolvers in the late 19th century, as revolvers became more reliable and faster to reload, thus removing many of the advantages of the multi-barrel design. A few were still in use as late as World War I, and they were well known to be solidly built and easy to maintain.

Ways to spend a summers day: vermin control

Get yourself a Larsen Trap & pop in the Judas bird, sit back & wait

Be sure to have your rimfire to hand, or alternatively (as I tend to do), simply throttle the magpies

Now the main problem with trapping vermin is that whilst perfectly legal, if the bunny huggers come across them, they either steal or wreck them - but not if they are labelled RSPB Census complete with logos.

Gun Post Thursday: Get a grip

In many ways, the really big question before us this morning is academic: I have shot my trusty Beretta 686 in all weathers: occasionally in the sun, sometimes in the snow but more often than not in the pouring winter rain. The older I get the more I feel the cold & consequently my puds are normally snug in their Barbour neoprene gloves

Apologises for not sporting a pair of custom made kid skin gloves but at about 20 quid Barbour’s finest have served me well for years & even when the water is running down the back of the neck they afford your humble correspondent one thing above all else, a firm grip on his trusty Beretta - this is in marked contrast to his somewhat tenuous grasp of reality. But this morning, over our breakfast kippers, the matter for consideration is

Do shotguns need to have checkering on their stocks?

Aside from trying to grapple with the grip issue, I am of the opinion that well executed checkering sets off a good piece of wood - however it needs to be well executed & some of the machine cutting that you see on cheaper weapons should frankly be left off – they’d look a lot better without it. Take for example this Laurona – the epitome of a simple honest side by side

Cheap checkering would ruin its plain stock. However to move up the scale & if I win the £50 million jackpot in this Friday’s Euromillions lottery draw, among much else I’ll be buying one of these, the Beretta Silverhawk Tartarugato ...

To my alcohol ravaged mind, the quality of that checkering sets off that piece of wood perfectly.
Now let’s set aside the matter of the engraving on the action for another day, come shine or more likely rain, gloved or nor, you will have sufficient purchase to swing through those high birds. So it might well be that checkering is more a question of aesthetics & tradition, rather than say function & I for one am very comfortable with that – however I am not sure about you guys...

Beretta & Laurona pics c/o Collectors Firearms

Gun Post Thursday: Dr. FM’s Proprietary Ounce of Lead Athletes Foot Remedy

Picking up from where we left off last night, now this from TDB

If you rest the barrels of your shotgun on your foot, it is probably wise to check that it is ‘broken’ & unloaded. If you decide not to do this it is generally considered sensible not to pull the trigger...

As our correspondent goes on to point out, in addition to drunks, it now appears God protects mindless Shotgunners

Gun Post Thursday: Scout update

Friend & former colleague Chuckmeister for tis he of spiffy new Blaser fame has also finally got round to getting his Styer Scout scoped up

All he has to do now is:

a) Buy that Schmitt & Bender 8 x 56 scope for the R93 & get it mounted

b) Book some range time, so that we can got & get some serious trigger time, get the toys sighted in

c) & shoot his Blaser 6.5 x 55 against my .243 in our back to back Box’ead Straight Pull Challenge

No pressure you understand

Gun Post Thursday: Guvmint heeds caterwauling Eastern Dudes

Gun Post Thursday: My sorta home loads

Toad, this ones for you... spotted along Bond Street yesterday

& if you think that ammo is big, you should have seen the size of the reloading press out back!

Gun Post Thursday: Firearms collections

As both a starting point & a point of reference, here is stout bulldog E-S's collection

& I would just like to point out the No. 4s ... in the rack, with bayonets fitted really for the call to arms. But thats just an aside to get us warmed up because today is Gun Post Day

When it comes to my own little collection I think that I am doing reasonably well at the moment (in GFWland terms) with 3 bolt action rifles, 2 semi auto 22s, 5 shotguns & 2 blackpowder pistols - well at least I thought that I was until that man from Texas pointed out this Kiwi's collection

Perhaps you all could point me in the right direction on things. I have a mild interest in the Czech firearms and I’m always looking for different models and information on them. I have a couple in a small collection...

Follow the link & weep

Dienstag-Morgen pistoleabbildungen

In honour of Gröfaz Griffin (see posts passim), our gun porn this morning continues the Germanic theme, with the Walther P38...

the venerable Luger 08...

& last but not least, the Walther PP

No doubt, our ersatz Reichsmarschall would think that any one of these would be perfect (perfekt?) for his Völkisch movement

Browning 1919 Light Machine Gun

This morning dear readers I thought that we might as well start our day with another one of JMB’s classic designs, namely the M1919 light machine gun. Inspired by Mr Maxim’s rather natty design, J. Browning Esq. set out to produce something that could do the same but was lighter & in doing so, he came up with this...

... used by the just about everyone & bolted either on to or into just about everything including the Supermarine Spitfire since its date of introduction.

Developed to supersede the Browning M1917, the standard U.S. machine gun of World War I, the M1919 originally fired the .30-06 M1 or M2 rifle cartridge from woven cloth or metallic link belts. Since then it has been chambered for just about any military round you care to mention

As an infantry weapon but at 31 lbs, it was usually crew operated by 2 soldiers: the gunner, who carried the tripod and ammunition; and the assistant gunner, who carried the weapon, spare parts, and sometimes more ammunition and when in action, fed the ammunition belts into the gun to ensure smooth entry of each round in the belt, decreasing the chance of the weapon jamming.

The original idea was to allow the gun to be more easily packed for transport, and featured a light barrel and bipod when first introduced as the M1919A1. Unfortunately, it quickly became clear that the gun was too heavy to be easily moved, while at the same time too light for sustained fire. This led to the M1919A2, which included a heavier barrel and tripod, and could be continuously fired for longer durations.

Another version of the M1919A4, the M1919A6, was an attempt to make the weapon easier to carry by reducing its weight and to make use of a bipod, but it turned out to be heavier at 32 lbs

But as anyone who has ever had an army number knows, in life it is possible to make most things lighter : however to set out to make something lighter but achieve quiet the reverse takes the military

Seeing as how we haven't done any gun porn so far this week...

This morning we have the AK 47 which are now available as Connie du Toit described it to me, in family packs

Zombies Part 1

Sometimes corporate life just isn’t so bad

The boss walks into my office (post lunch), plonks himself down, puts his feet on the desk & announces that he has an important task for me. What’s that I enquire : tin our few remaining asset backed securities traders? Bale out of remnants of my forward Yen positions? No. None of that. I am now tasked with buying six days shooting next season, including a day on the grouse. Stuff the shareholders & sod the accountants, there are a few fleeting moments when corporate life seems all so worthwhile

Fifty cal frivolity

Yesterday was a Bank Holiday here in Blighty, hence the sketchy posting, but now the working week is about to start, it’s time to get back down to it. Now Fridays gun porn prompted a bit of debate which is all for the good, however can I take that this meets with unanimous approval?

Your Friday morning pistol porn: Walther P22

I had the chance to shoot one of these twice last year while in Texas

I will leave it to others to cover the tech stuff

All I have to say is that its a Walther (so it works), its a 22 (so you can shoot it all day long for very little)

& if I had the chance, I'd definately have one.

Calibre Conundrum Concluded

At the end of March, quite a few of you leant a hand to solve a slight calibre conundrum that a pal of mine was having but it gives me not inconsiderable pleasure to report that yesterday, he picked up his Blaser R93

& to conclude the original discussion, it’s in 6.5x55

So that completes his line up (at least for the time being) & looking at it;

Ruger 10/22 (with lots of go faster goodies)
Styer Scout in .223
& now the Blaser

with all of the calibre permutations that that has, that’s not a bad little collection, at least for starters. However I suspect that it isn’t just me that thinks that there is maybe room for say a classic military piece: maybe something in .303, or perhaps 7mm? Just a thought you understand....

Morning morning gun porn

Whilst as Joe Stummer sang Mondays coming like a jail on wheels, I thought that we could ease ourselves into the forthcoming week with this little brace of lovelies...

Now be honest, have had a butchers at those beauties & now tell that Monday morning just does feel quite so bad

Neat Blaser stuff

(Chuckmeister, this one's for you)

Scoop up the stuff & bits that go into a rifle...

Pop on a bipod...

Attach the barrel, via two captive bolts...

Slide the bolt in & put the scope on...

& you are good to go & head off to the clocktower of your choice.

Reverse this process as required & repeat as necessary - the rifle will hold damn near perfect zero. How neat is that?

However for your humble correspondent, the neatest thing is that all you have to do to convert said rifle from how the good Lord intended it, is to slide out the bolt...

& slide in a right cack handed one...

As much we the loath & detest the Hun, when it comes to engineering, his cunning knows no bounds

I simply have to get myself one of these

Found by Kim over at the Rustmeister's Alehouse

Boots concluded

You might recall that a few days ago, I was pondering boot issues. Anyway, over the weekend I feel that my problems resolved themselves with the purchase of a pair of Irish Setters

Now time to get them well & truly christened ... a days stalking is in order I think

Firearms safety & the selection of a proper backdrop

We all know that when taking any shot, you must ensure at all times that there is a safe backdrop. Furthermore, even if your FAC permits you to use your .243 for vermin control, you should never ever ever use it to shoot pigeons off the roof. No excuses, not ever....

& no officer, that wasn't me

& to bring you all up to date

But over the weekend, Youngest at the age of six years & 10 months joined the ranks of the shooting fraternity

Yes, she did hit the target & yes she is keen as mustard to have another go. Now some of you, especially those of you whose daughters burn through ammunition, will remember the sinking feeling as yet another cost line goes on to the family balance sheet. I’m currently in that place.

Tuesday Machine Guns Part 1: MG34

After the weekends news that leaves me bikeless, thank you to those you have emailed condolences & those that have made suggestions for a replacement. Already a theme is starting to emerge: this from Toad

& this from Ex-Stab

There seems to be a bit of a theme already ... however the concept of Mrs FM givin' it an 'andful while your humble corrspendent pumps rounds into speed cameras has a lot going for it !

Tuesday Machine Guns Part 2: Maxim Gun

A pal of reader JDS, while undertaking super secret research, came upon the following ditty pencilled in the margin of a document:

Now this here is the Maxim gun,
Whose works are a terrible puzzle;
It cocks itself with its own recoil,
And bullets come out of the muzzle.

Top Reloading Tips

Tip 1.
To check that a homeload is not touching the lands of the rifling, colour the bullet with a permanent marker, chamber the round, extract carefully and check for marks in the ink at regular intervals.

Tip 5.
Always do the test in #1 with a non charged round.

Found on The Stalking Forum

The perfect woman?

Found by Robert on CDR Salamander

Women shooters

Found by Jeff

What fates impose, that men must needs abide; It boots not to resist both wind and tide - William Shakespeare

Back in July 2007, your humble correspondent was bemoaning the general state of his outdoor footwear...

Thinking about it, when we returned from Asia (10 years ago), I must have gone out & bought myself new pairs of wellies & Karrimor KSBs. Over the last decade both have seen sterling service but a bit like their owner, they are now pretty much shagged out. In fact the wellies now have so many leaks that on Saturday night I walked into the grain store, only to find them holding their own ‘confidential press briefing’ & as for my beloved KSBs, the soles are pretty much shot & the stitching is coming apart faster than Nu-Liebour’s immigration policy

Well, with my usual Swiss like efficiency, nearly two years on, I have done absolutely naff all about it & my footwear issues continue to compound to the extent that while stalking last weekend, in nothing more than heavy morning dew, me plates ended up wetter than George Osborne. So a lot of yesterday was taken up researching some alternatives & having trawled numerous websites & forums it has become clear to me that basically nobody likes anything. Notwithstanding both that & their simply eyewatering cost, I think that I might well be ordering myself a pair of these....

... unless of course Mr Danner-Boot is a reader & would like to send me a free pair for product review purposes? No? Somehow, I didn’t think that that was very likely.

Diabolus fecit, ut id facerem ...

Cidered Pigeons

The breasts & legs of 4 pigeons
1 small onion & 6 cloves
1 lb dessert apples
1/2 pint cider
1 tsp ground coriander
Salt & pepper
3 tbsp single cream

Place the pigeon breasts & legs with the onion in a flamesproof casserole. Pour over the cider & marinate for 24 hours.

Peel & core the apples & add to the casserole, with the coriander, salt & pepper. Simmer gently for 2 hours.

Lift the meat from the casserole & allow to cool. Meanwhile, rub the apples through a sieve. Return the puree to the casserole, stir in the cream & season to taste.

Remove the meat from the breastbone & slice each wedge into three. Return the meat to the casserole & reheat gently for fifteen minutes.

Serve straight from the pan with creamed new potatos & minted peas.

Just because II

Mel, this one's for you !

Pesky wabbits

More pathetic nonsense...

The composer who wrote the famous theme music for Watership Down has ordered a cull of rabbits on his Surrey estate. Mike Batt's land near Farnham was inundated by hundreds of rabbits which nibbled wires and piping. Mr Batt, who hired a marksman, took advice on the most humane method of control. "It seems that dead rabbits are the story of my life," he said.

An RSPCA spokeswoman said that shooting could be a humane method of killing, depending on the skill of the marksman.

& here is what a humane 156 yard rabbit shot looks like

Shot, sir!

Trigger Time 4

This morning I was up a 4 am – now that is an unholy time of day & should never be seen unless you have the very best of reasons...such as being out before first light to look for some cull roebucks, like here...

It took us about an hour to stalk round to roughly half way down the fence line in the picture above when we saw our first animal. Binos out we saw a Roe, couldn't make out the sex but it was moving up & down the fence with what appeared to be a limp. Stalking to about 250 yards we could see it was a doe, clearly in some distress, trying to get over a 4 foot fence that a healthy animal would clear in a single bound.

Over the next half an hour we worked our way to within about 175 yards of the animal, taking extra care not to spook it, as we wanted to get a really good look at how badly injured to was, even though it was difficult to see its leg which was mostly obscured by long grass. The animal continued to limp up & down the fence line & we continued to wait for what seemed an age but was in fact no more 15 minutes until at about 120 yards, I was presented with a broadside shot, which I took.

I didn’t see the bullet strike but the doe ran 20 yards, stopped & keeled over into the corn. Though the scope I could see the steam from the animals short breaths – one, two, three, four & then no more.

Now the knowledgeable among you will know the closed season for roe does runs from 1 April until 31 October however once we got to the carcass, the decision to take the animal was vindicated – the lower part of its rear left leg was completely missing. Further inspection revealed wounds on flanks, the poor thing had probably been hit by a car which is where it lost half of its leg.

This was the Blaser’s first ‘real’ outing & despite Fridays grouping issues, it performed magnificently. It is zeroed ‘an inch high at a hundred’. The bullet strike was pretty much perfect – although in the wound picture below...

... it looks a little high, but that’s more a result of the angle that the picture was taken from. That 100 grain Norma did the job nicely which I should jolly well hope so given their cost (see posts passim). Beyond that, there isn’t a lot more to say save that my new toy is now properly blooded, the summer & some more bambis beckon

Trigger Time 3

Norma .243 100-grain soft noses - £32.95 for 20

Federal .243 70-grain ballistic tips - £28.50 for 20

Do you need gun bans when ammunition costs this much?

Trigger Time 2

Apologises for today’s lack of posting however your humble correspondent has been busy down at the range

& what with it being Bisley, there is no way that you can ever shoot there without at least one person turning up with a Lee Enfield.

In fact one of the things that I like about this particular club is the range of (firearms) interests that its respective members have ... from at one end of the spectum for this Blaser LRS2

through weapons like this rather spiffy Holland & Holland sporter

to at the other end of the scale, the black powder brigade who seem to take singular pleasure in completely obscuring the firing point

As for me, I shot like an utter numpty all day. This was the best group that I could manage at 100 yrds

or any distance come to that. Now many of you may well have been in a similar position & we know that when you are having one of ‘those days’ the best thing to do is to pack up, pour out another mug of tea from your flask & spend the rest of the afternoon offering helpful advice to other club members. Despite know that that is the sensible course of action, it didn’t stop me for one moment blowing through the thick end of £80 worth or ammo trying to get consistent groups. Now normally it wouldn’t matter, however tomorrow I need to be on top form ... but more on that tomorrow night

Trigger Time 1

Having been away for the last 3 weekends on business, I figure that the company owes me a couple of days (& the boss is away) - so today its been down to the clay range with Boy for a lesson

followed by a couple of hours on the air rifle range

Sure as hell beats being in the office

A brace of doubles

There is something utterly charming about this story pointed out by Martin

Mfuwe Lodge in Zambia happens to have been built next to a mango tree that one family of pachyderms have always visited when the fruit ripens. When they returned one year and found the luxury accommodation in the way, they simply walked through reception.

... so you can sit in the hotel bar a double G&T in your hand, a double .416 Rigby across your lap & the sport comes to you. That certainly would beat every hide I have ever sat in

Lanchester sub machine gun

We start our week with one of our lesser known sub machine guns – the Lanchester – so named because it was “designed” by Mr. George. H. Lanchester

In fact it wasn’t so much designed as a copied from the German Bergmann MP28, manufactured by the Sterling Engineering Company between 1941 & 1945.

The Lanchester was made in two versions, Mk.1 and Mk.1*. The latter was a simplified version of the original Mark 1, with omitted fire mode selector, and thus firing in full automatic mode only.

Chambered for the 9mm cartridge & with a rate of fire of approx. 600 rpm the Lanchester was a heavy weapon, weighing in at nearly 10lbs. Most were issued to the Royal Navy where it served until 1970 & to the Royal Air Force for airfield defence.

... oh yes, apparently they also had a nasty habit: it could accidentally discharge if the gun was dropped or knocked on a hard object while cocked and loaded. This is generally not consideredc to be a very good feature in a fully automatic weapon

Woodcock

Your humble correspondent is lucky enough to have done a little bit of woodcock shooting over the years, so this morning rather than the usual woodcock on toast, we have a slightly different take on how to serve up your left & right

Having done the necessaries & remembered when plucking to retain the pin feathers for your shooting cap, place the woodcock in a casserole dish on a bed of carrots & leeks

Add half a pint of red wine & you can then slurp the rest of the bottle. Add half a pint of water & one tablespoon of dark soy sauce

Season only with pepper as the soy will give it all the saltiness it needs

Place the lid on & cook in a medium oven for thirty minutes

Remove and add one shallot halved & half a pound of white seedless grapes

Back into the oven for a further twenty minutes

Remove & strain the juices into a small pan which you need to reduce

While this is going on, strip the meat from the carcase

Serve the meat with the carrots, leeks & grapes and new potatoes with the reduced 'gravy' over the top

Readers Rifles 1

As we haven't done any Mauser Madness for a while I thought that we would have a quick shufti at Reader AJDS's Swedish M38

Trust me, there are a lot worse ways to start your day !

The Webley Service Revolver

What with having been in the (former) colonies last week I have to confess that after a 12 hour flight back to London you find your humble correspondent with a tummy full of single malt & a head full of dreams of Imperial revival. Consequently, I thought that we could take for our Monday morning gun porn, the iconic Webley revolver – perfectly suited for knocking big chunks out of fuzzy-wuzzies...

... Huns, the Jap, or better still, damned Frenchies.

Webley used to use the advertising slogan, The Sun Never Sets on a Webley – a nice play on Lord Salisbury’s complaint that the £1.5 million spent on colonial defence by Great Britain in 1861 merely enabled the nation to furnish an agreeable variety of stations to our soldiers, and to indulge in the sentiment that the sun never sets on our Empire.

Whilst Colvin de Silva is credited with the repost, That's because God does not trust the British in the dark, consider this – how many of perfidious members of the burgeoning Westminster Village would continue to lie about their expenses or claim absurd amounts of housing allowances if they knew that down the darkened corridors of the Palace of Westminster were stout bulldogs so armed...

... coming to call them to account. Indeed, to my mind, the Webley Mark VI, chambered for the still very respectable .455 round, is the very epitome of a proper Englishman – robust & uncompromising! Known also as the Webley Break-Top Revolver or the Webley Self-Extracting Revolver, it is to this day one of the most powerful top-break revolvers ever produced

& through its numerous variants, served the Empire from 1887 until 1963.

However consider this; the trusty Webley is perhaps a metaphor for our decline & fall. In happier times & say, its Mark VI incarnation, it was a very capable weapon...

... however in the end, it got smaller & ended up becoming emasculated & chambered for the woeful .380/200 round which was never going to get the job done. Much the same can be said for once Great Britain.

Today I have been mainly buying ammunition

Now all I have to do is to find some time to get back down on the range to see which sort the Blaser likes best

The only question in Westminster that really counts

Prompted by Lurch’s comments on this week’s Light Machine Gun post, I thought that I would pose you this little POETS day conundrum...

You have had a tummy full of finest foaming ale, followed by an arse rattling curry. It’s now getting on for midnight which is H-Hour because The Glorious Day is about to start & you are off to storm the Westminster Village. Specifically you will be (ahem) ‘clearing’ the Palace of Westminster which is sitting in late session & so full of perfidious MPs.

You are allowed one personal weapon – anything you want – however not only do you have to carry enough ammunition but you also have to be mindful of collateral damage because once the executions have finished, the PoW will be converted to the London residence of Generalissimo Supreme, King of the Wild Frontier, Lordy Lordy his Majestyness, doesn’t he look great in jodhpurs and a greatcoat, give him a gun someone, he’s so get down funky & sexy & Emperor of Everything & golly I bet he has a whopper, Chief Lord High Priest & Benevolent Dictator in Perpetuity Free Market. Therefore no flame throwers. Sorry.

So what’s it going to be?

L4A3 Light Machine Gun

We last touched upon the LMG in a post about the verenable Bren Gun back in 2006, but this morning dear readers I can think of no better way of starting the working day that with the Bren's offspring, the 7.62mm L4A3 Light Machine Gun

I am happy to report (once again) that your humble correspondent is old enough to have carried one of these for many many miles & if I had to go to war tomorrow, I wouldn't be the slightest bit dismayed to be issued with another one.

To repeat Ian Hogg's comments

The Bren Gun [& by association, the L4 LMG] is spoken of with affection by every British soldier who ever used one, & with good reason. Beyond any doubt it was . . . the finest light machine gun ever adopted in quantity by any army. It was reliable, robust, simple & accurate, and beyond that no one has a right to ask

If you look at those pictues & don't get a warm feeling at the thought of storming the Palace of Westminster with one in your hands, you have no heart whatsoever.

Friday's range report

Note to self – try & remember that when your take a new rifle to the range for the first time, ensure that it is not a day when your fellow club members have decided to bring along their black powder bondooks…

… in fact there was that much discussion going on about whether respective Enfields were a 3 groove or a 5 groove iteration that I have to confess to thinking that I might well be in a nightclub. It is also worth pointing out that clouds of smoke render even German optics all but usless. Still there I was, new rifle on the bench for the first time & as regulars will know, that is a moment to be savoured & relished, even if you can’t quite make out the targets & you are being showered with burning powder from the pan of next doors flintlock.

I started off from the bench at 100 yards, with 85 grain Remington ballistic tips & soon got some reasonable groups, an“inch high at 100”, the classic stalkers zero. Time to move back to the 200 yard point & immediately run out of the aforementioned Remies so a quick switch to RWS & Norma soft noses was required. After a little bit more faffing about - Norma 243 will go into a 243 chamber but identically packaged .308 wont, doh! That aside, the Blaser was starting to produce some quite reasonable groups. The best of the day (prone, off a bipod) at 200 was this one …

& to put it into scale, that’s a 3” target spot

It is also worth noting that if you sight in at 100 yards using 85 grain bullets & then switch to 100 grain rounds at 200 yards, you really do get some bullet drop – double duh! However, early results are encouraging & with a little more testing & I reckon that the Blaser will get only better & better, your humble correspondent's lack of skill allowing

Careless Jane

Jane, who shot her Uncle Bill,
Said his death did not affect her,
But, which makes it sadder still,
Broke my 'Hammerless Ejector.'

Harry Graham

Proof of the theorem that consumption of lentils destroys brain cells

...or was this columnist just being ironic? A wave of the fat capitalist cigar to Rhys for finding it

Posting will be a little thin today

The wheels of industry, the legions of creditors & aggrieved shareholders can wait until Monday. Today your humble correspondent is off to the range

of rifles

The rifle is a noble weapon. It brings pleasure that no scatter-gun ever can. A shotgun takes us into cultivated fields, or those narrow wastes within sight & sound of civilisation. But the rifle entices its bearer into primeval forests, into mountains & deserts untenanted by man. To those in whom the primitive virtues of courage, energy & love of nature have not been sapped, there is scarce a joy comparable to roaming at will through wild regions, viewing the glories of unspoiled earth, & feeling the inexpressible thrill of the hunter, sore tested by privation & hazard, but armed & undismayed.

Horace Kephart – Gunsite

Run rabbit - run rabbit - Run! Run! Run!

Run rabbit - run rabbit - Run! Run! Run!
Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!
Goes the farmer's gun

The new arrival

So this is my new acquisition – a left handed Blaser R93 chambered for .243 Winchester - simply packed full of natural goodness German engineering yumminess

sporting a heavy fluted match barrel, ready cut to accept a moderator which will come later once I have finished setting up the rifle & scope

& yes, detachable saddleback mounts, all topped off with a Zeiss 7x50 illuminated reticule scope - I have to confess that taking scopes on & off goes completely against the grain but all of the reports say that it works & works well

as for the scope, everything that is written about them is bang on - the optics are simply glorious. End of story.

Having worked out to take it apart & put it back together again, its on with a Harris bi-pod (just for EX-STAB because I know just how much he rates their design)

& its good to go. Save for the aforementioned moderator & some flip up scope covers its now down to sorting out some decent loads (one for vermin & one for deer)

Thus this afternoon was spent over at The Englishman’s going through the breaking in the barrel/cleaning routine. Now I have to confess that I am in two minds about this whole running in the barrel debate – indeed both sides seem to hold rather entrenched views – but I figured that at very worst, it can’t hurt.

The only downside is that when you are going to run a load of ammo straight into the bank, you tend to buy el-cheapo, in my case PMC. This is the first time I have shot it, but its only £12 for a box of 20. Whilst the price is OKish, its a bit like shooting black powder cartridges. Lets just say that I will be buying some more cleaning patches next weekend.

Anyway, next comes the zeroing

Today is...

Forget all the nonsense & Nu Labour phuquwhittery
Cast aside credit crunch concerns
Today is happy day
Today is one of those days when all of those red eye flights back to London seem worthwhile
The daily 0530 alarm is forgotten, as is the office
Today is my day of jubilee
Today is new rifle day

More pictures tomorrow & no its not a Sako - that's just an old case that the dealer gave me to keep the new toy safe on the trip home

Wednesday Morning Guns, Part 2: The Tampon Blowgun

& this from Reader Gweilicus

Inspired by marshmallow shooters, this air-powered tampon gun turns your feminine hygiene products into high-flying projectiles. Have a shootout between rival tampon brands, or use it as a fun alternative to paintball. The tampon shooter has a range of 10 to 20 feet depending on your ammo and lung capacity

The matching bandolier lets you carry a full “clip” (i.e., box) of 20 tampons, so you’ll never be caught short in the heat of battle.

Wednesday Morning Guns, Part 1: Winchester SX 3

Our first gun post this morning is Reader PK’s semi-auto shotgun

As he says

Your photos of camo rifles reminded me of why I recently bought the fastest firing shotgun in the world, the Winchester SX3 or as I call it, my 'Gypsy scatterer!'

Can’t say fairer than that

One to watch

The full facts about this havent emerged yet…

Two people have been arrested on suspicion of murder after a hunt supporter died when he was hit by a gyrocopter at an airfield. The man, thought to be in his 40s, was pronounced dead at the scene of the incident at Long Marston airfield near Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire. Sam Butler, from the Warwickshire Hunt, said a gyrocopter had recently been following hunts in the area.

but I cant all but guarantee that it will be worth following. No doubt the save the little fuffy wuffy foxys brigade will be foaming at the mouth already. Indeed as topics go, killing foxes red dogs always attracts the digital equivalent of thick green crayon – last weeks comment of the week on a long forgotten post on the topic was

F*ck you al stupid fox killers look at that beautiful animal and you shot it i hate you go and f*ck your mother

The only answer to such erudite censure is to humbly point out that the lads on the Guntrader Forum have been discussing their favourite fox rifle which has led to gun porn like this

& this

being posted. Kit like this only serves to remind me to make some time to go & knock some chunks out of Charlie in the near future

Roasted Grouse

1lb new potatoes
4 sticks celery
1 leek
2 small courgettes
12 baby asparagus tips
8 baby onions
3 tbsp olive oil
2 oz butter
4 whole grouse (oven ready)
4 oz shallots
2 stalks of fresh thyme , chopped
1 fl oz Madeira
Half a pint of game gravy
4 slices black pudding
salt & pepper to taste

Place the new potatoes in a pan, cover with salted water & three-quarter cook (10-12 minutes). Drain & refresh under cold water until cool. While the potatoes are cooking, wash trim and cut the celery, leek, & courgette crossways in to 1 inch rounds at an angle. Leave the asparagus and onions whole. Lightly season the vegetables & brush with olive oil.

Preheat a griddle pan. Slice the new potatoes lengthways into quarters & fry them with the vegetables on the griddle to create a criss-cross effect. Remove & place on oven tray to reheat later.

Preheat oven to 200C. Heat the remaining olive oil & 1oz of the butter in a heavy based frying pan. Season the grouse & seal on all sides of the pan. Place in a roasting tray & cook in the oven for about 20 minutes. Leave to rest for approximately 5 minutes.

To make the sauce, peel & finely shred the shallots. Melt the remaining butter in a saucepan; add the shallots & thyme & cover. Cook for about 2 minutes, until just transparent. Add the Madeira & the game gravy & bring to the boil. Strain & set aside.

Grill the black pudding on both sides until cooked & crispy. Place on kitchen paper to drain for a few seconds. While the black pudding is cooking, place the vegetables back into the oven for 2 - 3 minutes to reheat.

To assemble the dish, place a slice of black pudding in the centre of each plate & arrange some vegetables & potatoes around it. Place the grouse next to the black pudding. Season the sauce & spoon over.

Short Magazine Lee Enfield

The Lee-Enfield the principal military firearm of the British Empire during the first half of the 20th century. Chambered for the very capable .303 cartridge, it was the British Army's standard rifle from its official adoption in 1895 until 1957. A redesign of the Lee-Metford, which had been adopted by the British Army in 1888, the Lee-Enfield remained in widespread British service until well into the early 1960s.

The iconic Lee-Enfield rifle, the SMLE Mk III, was introduced on 26 January 1907, along with a Pattern 1907 (P'07) Sword Bayonet and featured a simplified rear sight arrangement and a fixed, rather than a bolt-head-mounted sliding, charger guide. The design of the handguards and the magazine were also improved, and the chamber was adapted to fire the new Mk VII High Velocity spitzer .303 ammunition.

During the First World War, the standard SMLE Mk III was found to be too complicated to manufacture (an SMLE Mk III rifle cost the British Government £3/15/-), and demand was outstripping supply, so in late 1915 the Mk III* was introduced, which incorporated several changes

The inability of the principal manufacturers (RSAF Enfield, Birmingham Small Arms, and London Small Arms) to meet military production demands led to the development of the "peddled scheme", which contracted out the production of whole rifles and rifle components to several shell companies.

The SMLE Mk III* (redesignated Rifle No.1 Mk III* in 1926) saw extensive service throughout the Second World War as well, especially in the North African, Italian, Pacific and Burmese theatres in the hands of British and Commonwealth forces.

Australia and India retained and manufactured the SMLE Mk III* as their standard-issue rifle during the war, and the rifle remained in Australian military service through the Korean War, until it was replaced by the L1A1 SLR in the late 1950s. The Lithgow Small Arms Factory finally ceased production of the SMLE Mk III* in 1953.

It continues to see official service in a number of British Commonwealth nations to the present day, notably with the Indian Police, and is the longest-serving military bolt-action rifle still in service.

Total production of all Lee-Enfields is estimated at over 17 million rifles.

& you wait hours for a bus to come along & then two come at once - Part 2

Sorry but I forgot to mention that aside from yesterday's assorted yumminess, dealerman also had one of Mr Anshutz's deadly accurate 17HMRs, also a left hooker

complete with shortened barrel, cut & ready to accept a moderator ... maybe just like the one that is currently like the one in my gun cabinet

& you wait hours for a bus to come along & then two come at once - Part 1

Regular readers will know that I do devote not an insubstantial amount of time to tracking down interesting left-handed rifles that (cough cough) errrrrr shall we say, interest me. Anyway, to cut a long story short, on Saturday, I slipped down to a dealer I have not used before & what a mistake that was because when it comes to left hookers, this is what greeted me…

First up was the Heym that I was talking about to the other day – a thing of grace, elegance & beautiful German engineering, topped off in .243 & the actual rifle that I had gone to look at

Next, a fully cam’ed Sauer in .308. Now I am not looking for another 308 (at the moment) as I am more than happy with my Remington 700 VS & even I have to confess that this is a little bit much even for my shabby tastes

& then, a very interesting High Precision HS Pro Series 2000, in .223

It has apparently fired 2,000 rounds & is showing a some wear around the bolt handle etc. However when all is said done, it is heavy fluted barrel cute!

Now for those of you with slightly more traditional tastes, there is a bit of wood under the fold…

For starters, there was a 243 Sako M591.

Although the rifle is over 20 years old, on inspection it was quite clear that it has hardly ever been fired. If you prefer something slightly more avant-garde, a Sauer 202 (also in 243) which by just about any measure, is a cult rifle in deer stalking circles.

Last up was a very tidy Tikka M595 as if, there weren't enough choices on the gunroom table already.

Now I know that you want to know what I bought & the honest answer is nothing .... yet! No, I didn't choke it; I just want a few days to mull over a few options (i.e. how many of these can I sneak by Mrs FM) & lets see what the second half of the week or more specifically, next weekend brings.

Rabbit control

There is something ever so Python-esque about this…

A brick of .22 rimfire to Theo for pointing it out but could I just comment that if Farmer Palmer has a problem with rabbits, instead of an air rifle, he might try one of these...

Forget Flopsy, Mopsy, & Cotton-tail ... take out the entire warren & half the county to boot!

Time now for a Tuesday firearms conundrum…

All other things being equal, which would you go for: the Blaser that I mentioned the other day, or this left hooker Heym SR21

Both are in .243, the main difference is that the Heym is half the price of the Blaser. What d’you reckon?

An open ended question

A second hand Blaser R93, synthetic Realtree stock & retro fitted with a left handed bolt kit

.243 fluted match barrel, cut

& reproofed to accept a Wildcat moderator

Maybe topped off with a Zeiss Diatal 8 x 56

Can anyone think of reason why not?

More on the deer issue

From Simon Heffer's weekend column

There are more deer now than at any time since the Middle Ages. The failure to cull them is causing severe environmental problems, affecting the balance of the countryside, and leading to the destruction of woodland. The problem is that many people, having watched Bambi once too often, think of such animals as superior to humans and requiring the sort of consideration normally applied to maiden aunts. Of course there should be a cull: and it should not stop there.

Wild boar now cause havoc in some parts of the country — the celebrated vegetarian Sir Paul McCartney refused a few weeks ago to cull some on his estate that were running wild. Foxes are everywhere and need to be slaughtered in huge quantities, just when hunting is banned; and even badgers are spreading bovine TB. This is not Beatrix Potter, it’s real life. Take aim, and fire.

Such sadness

Today is the last day of the season

Even though I am not shooting today I am still imbued with a sense of melancholy.

More gun trolley goodness

Just following up on Sunday's Cabelas product feature, we have this...

Not so much a picture, as a work of art.

Sunday afternoon round at FM Towers: Birdwatch time

Bird lovers across Britain have joined in the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds Big Garden Birdwatch

Hush, hush, whisper who dares
Little boy stands at the top of the stairs
Wearing a hoddie and armed with a rifle
…errrrrrr as usual, any vermin in the paddock is going to get shot

Ah, chalk up another rook

Now before anyone starts whinging, rooks (Corvus frugilegus) are covered by what is knows as a “General Licence”

General licences are issued by government agencies to provide a legal basis for people to carry out a range of activities relating to wildlife. The general licences relevant to pest birds are issued on the basis of one or more purposes (prevent damage to crops, conservation of wild birds, preserve public health etc.) and include a list of bird species for which that purpose is a valid reason for control measures to be taken.

Besides, our village is absolutely overrun with the damn things & it’s a shame that more people round here don’t shoot them.

Every family needs one of these

You know those 3 wheeled pushchairs, they have knobbly tyres & come in bright purple? Well we used to have one. It lived in the back of Mrs FM’s Landrover & saw us through two nippers. It went everywhere with us & finally feel apart after probably six years of solid abuse. I think that it is now rusting somewhere at the back of the barn, still covered in mud.

Fast forward a little, in November, we were in Cabelas & saw this…

& if you can’t get to Cabelas, they are available online here. For the life of me I can't think of a reason as to why you wouldn't want one. Just think of the look on the yummy mummies faces when you turn up at the creche with one of these "fully loaded"!

"no real interest in firearms" ...what?

Last night, I read the following comment on the Shooting UK website

The US stalking ethos is very different to that in Britain. Many hunters often have no real interest in firearms and are happy to borrow or purchase a cheap rifle that is shot once a year and then locked up after the hunting season.

I am not sure if author, Lewis Potter, means that US hunters or UK stalkers have no real interest in firearms...but I shall duck out of this one, citing jet lag & leave it to you lot to decide

Your Wednesday morning quiz

What is missing from this picture?

Luggage I wish I had

Well maybe not. The colour isn’t great & then there is the small matter of every time that you got to the airport & tried to check in, the term full body cavity search springs to mind. However if you fancy one, they are available here & if you fancy a full body cavity search, they are probably available at just about any airport you care to mention

The Gamekeeper

A good gamekeeper is a great asset to an estate & he should be paid more than the minimum agricultural wage. A house, fuel & a suit of clothes are generally provided in addition to wages, & also a dog allowance. He must be a man of character, hard working, always striving for greater perfection, entirely honest & trustworthy, & a good vermin killer. He must be an efficient organiser, good at handling beaters & tactful with tenants.

Throughout the year the owner or agent should follow with interest the keeper’s work, & before a shooting day should consult him on all matters & plan every detail with him personally.

from Rural Estate Management (4th Edition), edited by R. Charles Walmsley FRICS

Your Start the Week Free Gun Porn: Kimber Crimson Carry 1911 .45 ACP

I had the pleasure of shoot one of the aforementioned Kimbers on our visit to Texas. We had all been down to an evil gunshow in Dallas & Doc Russia had just bought one. So as you can imagine, its was straight down to the range

Now what can I say, other than it’s a Kimber (tick) it comes fitted with Crimson trace grips (tick)

& I want one, very very badly!

Your Friday Morning Gun Porn - M1A1 Carbine

During our little trip to Texas in November, I had the opportunity to shoot the M1 Carbine for the first time – what a neat little piece of kit, demonstrated here by our gracious host while we were down at the DFW Range

Anyway I thought that we would start to round the week with a few piccies & a little narrative shameless right clicked from here

The original request for a compact and lightweight shoulder arm to replace service handguns for second-line (non-fighting) troops was first issued by US Army in 1938. The idea behind this request was that a shoulder arm, such as carbine, firing ammunition of moderate power, will have more effective range and will be much simpler to train the users to fire it accurately, than the standard .45 caliber semi-automatic pistol or revolver.

Between 1942 – 1945, a total of more than 6 millions of carbines were manufactured. After the end of the WW2 production continued for some time, and M1 carbine and its variations saw some serious action as a first-line weapon not only during the WW2, but also during Korean and early stages of Vietnam war. M1 carbines also were widely exported by US Government to numerous friendly nations, mostly in South-East Asia. M1 carbines saw limited use in the post-war West Germany and France. It should be also noted that M1 carbines are still manufactured by various small US companies for civilian sales

In general, M1 Carbine was a really compact and handy weapon. It was lightweight and short enough to be more suitable for jungle combat, than a full-size battle rifles such as M1 Garand. It also offered relatively high practical rate of fire due to large-capacity, detachable magazines and low recoil. The M2 modification, which had a select-fire capability and a magazines of larger capacity (30 rounds, interchangeable with the older 15-round ones), could be described as an "almost an assault rifle" ("almost" is added due to the lack of effective range)

Another modification was the even more compact "paratrooper" version, M1A1, with side-folding metallic buttstock and a pistol grip

Technically, the M1 Carbine is a gas operated, magazine fed, semi-automatic or select-fire (M2) short rifle. Carbines were issued with sling and sometimes with additional pouch that was mounted on the buttstock and allowed to carry two spare magazines on the gun itself. Early M1 carbines had no provisions to mount a bayonet, however, some older models had bayonet lugs on the barrel.

More liberal fun

Also from Martin

Today, I have mainly been ...

... cleaning my Remington.

Friday was spent rootling around in the woods, sadly unsuccessfully. We fleetingly saw both roe & muntjac deer, but none were shootable – in fact none of us managed to get a shot off & after six hours, we retired for meat in buns with fried potato salad.

However a day spent out in the woods, in the company of three other stout bulldogs, is a lot lot better than just about anything else I can think of.

Friday morning

I am sorry about the rather thin posting this morning, but your humble correspondent is off with Bambi Basher in search of a few Monties…

Hopeful there might be one or two death pics later on

Start the week gun porn

Well not so much real gun porn as mini-gun porn. Take one nipper, add an air pistol & a tin of pellets. Garnish will a few targets & leave in the farmyard for an hour or two

Now tell why exactly shouldn't children have ready access to air weapons?

(Snapped round at The Englishman's)

Venison & Mushroom Pie

Cousin Bird dog is on the hunt for venison recipes – so here is my little offering.

Pie: 1 lb of well hung venison, ½ lb of field mushrooms, 6 tbsp corn flour, 3 tbsp butter 12 small shallots, 2 tbsp fresh thyme, finely chopped

Marinade: 1 pint of red wine, 1 onion, finely sliced, 1 garlic clove crushed, 1 carrot, peeled and sliced, 1 celery stick, sliced, 1 rosemary sprig, 2 bay leaves, 6 juniper berries

Method

First, go & shoot your deer. I am assuming that you know what to do from pulling the trigger to ending up with your pound of venison, cubed & ready for cooking.

Marinade: Mix all the marinade ingredients together in a bowl. Place the venison in the marinade and cover the bowl cling film and set aside for at least 4 hours to marinate. Much better to leave to marinate overnight

Once that is done, strain the venison from the marinade and reserve the wine. Toss the venison in the cornflour so that it is well coated.

Melt the butter in a large casserole pan over a moderate high heat. Add the meat to the pan and cook it for 2-3 minutes, browning it on all sides. Add the mushrooms, shallots and thyme to the pan and cook for a further 2 minutes, stirring regularly.

Reduce the heat slightly and stir in the reserved red wine and stock. Bring the liquid to a strong simmer, spoon off any scum that comes to the top. Reduce the heat to the lowest setting and leave the meat to cook gently for 2-3 hours, stirring it at regular intervals so the ingredients cook evenly and the base doesn't burn (the longer and slower the cooking the more tender the meat will be).

The stew should have thickened but the liquid should still cover the meat and vegetables. Remove from the heat.

Preheat the oven to 200°C. Roll the pastry out. Place the venison into the pie dish. Place the pastry over the top of the pie dish, trim, seal and crimp around the edges.

Make 2 small wholes in the centre of the pie. Brush the pie with the egg and place it on the centre shelf of the preheated oven. Cook the pie for 15-20 minutes until the pastry has risen and is golden brown.

Remove from the oven and allow it to cool for a few minutes before serving.

Hunt ban not meant to save foxes' lives

I originally posted the following little piece in December 2006 after seeing a letter published in The Independent. It is with great pleasure that I repost it today, if for no other reason than the quality of the commenters that it still seems to attract....

Sir: James Barrington (letter, 29 November) is wrong when he says that the Hunting Act was passed to supposedly save animals' lives. As one of those who voted for the Act, I made it clear beforehand in many discussions with the pro-hunting lobby that I expected farmers to shoot more foxes (an acknowledged agricultural pest) after the Act was passed. By that time they would no longer need to keep the number of foxes up to ensure that there were enough to hunt.

David Rendel
Bucklebury, Berkshire
(Rendel was MP for Newbury 1993-2005)

Photos stolen from Guntraders forum ... sorry guys

Saturday afternoon

This afternoon, your humble correspondent & Boy have been over at The Englishman's

Christmas present ideas for the shooting man

The early bird?

The Law of Unintended Consequences

Found by the Bambi Basher

Today your humble correspondent & a few chums are off to stalk some deer

A pint of finest foaming to Theo for finding this one

Partridge Pie

From Mrs Beetons original...

Ingredients:
3 partridges
pepper and salt to taste
1 teaspoonful of minced parsley (when obtainable, a few mushrooms)
3/4 lb. of veal cutlet
a slice of ham
1/2 pint of stock
puff paste (pastry)

Note; Should the partridges be very large, split them in half; they will then lie in the dish more compactly. When at hand, a few mushrooms should always be added

A day at the ranges (Part 1)

As some of you have already worked out, we spent last week as guests of the du Toits, enjoying their bounteous hospitality & good company in north Dallas. Now I could at this point spend the rest of this post waxing lyrical about how their dining room table groaned under the weight of a Thanksgiving Dinner of truly biblical proportions: however knowing my loyal readers as I do, I know that you would much rather hear about tables down at the range that were also groaning, but under the weight of firearms, ammunition & other sundry goodies

& so it was that we found ourselves as guests down at the Dallas Pistol Club…& if the very mention of that august institution doesn’t quicken the heart, it should. In fact, in one of his pre-retirement posts, Kim pretty much covered off what we, Family du T & Doc Russia got up to

However from my perspective it did prove a most amusing range day as Mrs FM had never fired a pistol before. So under our hosts supervision, she warmed up on a varity of .22s (Colt, Ruger, Walther, Browning & Kim’s Taurus pump action)

before graduating through 9mm & 357 Magnum (Browning and Smith & Wesson)

& from there, on to 45 Auto

& why did I think that it would be otherwise?? Sometimes I am so stupid, even by my own very shabby standards

Home home on the range (again)

Once again dear readers, sorry about the lack of posting but todays itinery was;
Get up
Have breakfast
Go to gunshow
Go to the range
Shoot gracious host's M1 carbine

Finish up with dinner ... boozing etc

Sorry about the lack of posting but...

most of today has been spent here

& as you can imagine, it involved quite a lot of this

Full range report to follow in due course

More start the week SLRs

Last week we kicked off with a few half decent piccies of some SLRs (or FN FAL if you like) & I thought that we should do the same today. So here you have 'em... complete a blank firing attachment (remember those?)…

but for those that have never seen the original post on this particular topic, its here

Its November 19 which means its...

Just a gentle reminder

Your start the week free rifle porn

This morning dear readers, we start our week with one of Precision Rifle Services redoubtable products …

the Classic Precision Rifle, a snip at a credit crunch busting £9,995 (inclusive of VAT you will be delighted to know). For that sort of money, what do you get aside from ¼” – ½” group at 100 yards? Well the rest of the menu will have you slavering in your seat…

Action: Hand built waith a Grisel or Sunny Hill custom hinged floorplate & prigger guard

Trigger: Arnold Jewell stainless match-grade with top safety

Barrel: Shilen chrome-moly match-grade with hand polished, black finish; contour, length, weight & twist rate to customers specification

Chamber: What ever you want up to 338 Lapua

& if that isn’t enough to you, as an extra you can have an exhibition grade walnut stock

Ooooh nurse! Now many of you might quite correctly say that you can get just as much for a lot less money. But come on, fess up ... if you won the lottery you would wouldn't you? & before anyone asks, no I haven't just ordered one, but if I could, rest asured I would.

Last weeks comment of the week

Cue drum roll…..comes from Diana whose website is here. Anyway her winning entry that she left on what I thought was a long forgotten post on fox shooting is …

WTF is wrong with you hunt ass bitches??? Don't you f*cktards understand that animals have feelings, too? Well I guess you guys don't so go on being heartless and CRUEL, b*stards!

Do you know what? When I read stuff like that I am just seized by the urge to go & shoot something

Roll on the weekend!

Expensive birds ... & lots of them

I have to confess that the start of this years shooting season has gone really rather well – maybe not in terms of the number of days out, but certainly in terms of the number of birds. A month ago in Monmouthshire we had a total of 261 on the day (185 pheasants & 76 pheasants). On Friday, over in East Sussex we got 147 pheasants & 169 partridges. lets just say that currently the freezer is bulging with game.

Ah, a day in the countryside … rolling chalk downlands

& the scene behind your humble correspondents peg at the end of the first drive after lunch – on days like that, you simply can’t have enough shells in your cartridge bag

followed by the pickers up doing their stuff

The only downside to all of this that I am rapidly getting a taste for some very very expensive shooting. To put that into some sort of perspective, a smart driven day will cost circa £30 + VAT a bird shot. Given the current economic climate there are plenty of people trying to offload shooting that has already been paid for or is part paid – prices being quoted by some of the sporting agents are apparently as low as £15 per bird. However even had that sort of price, I still need to keep buying those lottery tickets

Start the week FAL fun

Abbiamo ricevuto un lotto di un centinaio di FAL L1A1 inglesi. Si tratta di armi ricondizionate in arsenale, in eccellenti condizioni, con rigatura dal 95% al 100%. Gli otturatori, usati ma in ottime condizioni, sono stati rimatricolati. La calciatura è in plastica e nella maggior parte degli esemplari è nuova. Su alcuni impugnature a pistola e su alcune maniglie ci sono tracce di usura da movimentazione.

As PG who sent me this link comments, no translation is really necessary

Sorry about the lack of posting but…

lets just say that I going to be rather busy today

Hip flask etiquette

Earlier this week, our favourite African American posted a comment that I made the other day

Time for one of my favourite pastimes: weapons cleaning. Now that is one of the advantages of a semi-automatic…lots of lovely little bits to clean. Yes I know, some actually regard this part of the post-shooting ritual as a bit of an anathema, but I take a simple pleasure in sitting down with either a mug of tea (or a large glass of whiskey) & taking the time to clean a firearm really well. Well it sure beats having to talk to the children

which got this reply from 1776 Rebel

I get nervous when folks talk about whiskey and guns. Even unloaded guns. Lots of time for the whiskey when everything is back in its cabinet or safe or wherever. Then the mind does the final safety check and the bottle opens up. I’m a gin and toxic guy.

Firstly lets get this straight, when I am down at the clay ground or on a rifle range I never touch a drop. Afterwards..oh yes & indeed there have been times when I have needed a couple of come back bracers to keep a hangover & the shakes at bay before picking up a rifle first thing in the morning. OK, but that being said, when your humble correspondent is out game shooting matters are slightly different. On a typical days pheasant shooting, my basket will contain at least the following:

Frankly, in between drives how are you going to properly enjoy the company of your fellow guns without a little social lubricant being passed around. However recently I have decided to stop messing about with all of those little metrosexual girlyman sized hip flasks & bought one of these wee fellows…

& yes that is a full sized shotgun next to it & those are 12 bore cartridges! Trust me when I say that a few snorts from that bad boy & you don’t have to worry about whether you should be shooting ‘maintained lead’ or ‘swinging through’ the birds …if you get my drift

Of course, this sort thing causes our cousins on the left hand side of the pond for blanche somewhat. A couple of weeks ago when I was smart shooting – we had 75 partridges & 165 pheasants on the day – one of the guns hailed from Chicago. Although he was an experienced shot, he had never shot driven game before. When after the first drive, we all tucked into the slogasms (sloe gin cut with champagne), his face was an utter picture & he wouldn't touch a drop all day. Of course we respected his views & got stuck in

Your Tuesday morning battle rifle conundrum

It would appear that on the left hand side of the pond there is an election of some note due very shortly. This seems to be preoccupying pundits & pollsters alike. Therefore out of respect for our cousins over the water I thought that we would conduct a little polling of our own but on an altogether much more interesting topic & here is the scenario…

Sanity has returned to our foreign policy in the finest traditions of Crecy, Agincourt & Waterloo, we are off to fight the French. When to get to armoury, there are only 2 rifles left in the rack; a Lee Enfield No.4

& a Mauser K98

Which one would you take.

On the face of it, there is little to choose between the two as both a proven designs, capable of surviving both the rigours of the campaign & still cut a dash on your shoulder as you march under the Eiffel Tower as part of the victory celebrations.

To all intents & purposes, there is no particular advantage in using either 7.92mm or .303. Either will leave suitably sized exit wounds in Jean-Claude’s chest.

In combat conditions & in the firefight, again there is nothing to separate either weapon in terms of accuracy.

The Lee Enfield’s 10 round capacity beats the Mauser’s 5. However, remember we are fighting the French here & there is a school of thought that says, with some justification I will add, that a couple of rounds is all your are going to need before the drapeau blanc is flying …

Assuming that plentiful ammunition will be available for both, which one would you sign out?

UPDATE - Sorry, but I have had to take the poll down as it had become corrupted. When I last checked it, after 150 votes, the No.4 was in the lead by a ratio of about 4:1

Of Franchis & log fires

The clocks went back on Saturday night, heralding the start of autumn. Maybe that is why it was raining so hard on Sunday morning or maybe it because simply because it was a Sunday. Still the rain was pouring down but reader Tricky & your humble correspondent had decided to head off to the clay range regardless – well it was either go & get wet or face the bedlam that is Free Market Towers on a Sunday, so no choice really.

Now instead of taking my Beretta, for some reason that I can’t quite fathom, I decided to break out the Franchi 20-guage. The reason that I try to kid myself that I bought in the first place was I thought that it would be an ideal little gun for Mrs FM to learn to shoot with – light & next to no recoil. However I must have been kidding myself because the moment she clapped eyes on it, out came a loud yuck & since that day about 5 years ago, I think that she has only shot it once.

It could be because it is a semi-automatic or maybe it is because of the Realtree paint job but Mrs FM, bless her little traditionalist little heart simply refuses to use it which is why I bought a Beretta Silver Pigeon & even that, an over & under, she secretly regards as a tad too modern.

So, in 5 years of ownership, I doubt that it has shot more than a thousand rounds. I have used it on quite a few bunny bashing expeditions where its synthetic finish comes into its own – bouncing around in a Landie at night - but the few times that I have tried to shoot clays, for whatever reason I have never been able to consistently connect with anything. But what the heck, there’s a first time for everything & its raining like billy-o

Of course, all of this missing is completely down to operator error. If I do have any criticisms of the gun, firstly the cocking handle, its way way too small. Maybe it has been designed for dainty designer Italian hands or maybe, after years of using military weapons I am used to something a little larger & more robust but to my way of thinking, that handle is far too small.

Secondly, when it comes to ammunition, its more sensitive than a Welshman with a grievance. I have shot it dry, wet, dirty, clean & every combination thereof, but try as I might, I just can’t get it to cycle on 24 gram shells. Now I know that the answer is to shoot 28’s (doh!) but a lot a clay grounds will only let you shoot their own ammo & invariably those will be low fat loads. However yesterday the range we were at allows to to use your own shells so I shot a combination of both. Predictably, the 24’s wouldn't cycle but the Franchi was flawless on the 28’s.

In fact, aside for the aforementioned ammunition issues, that little gun went really really well. I even managed to connect with between 50-60% of everything which I was absolutely delighted with, especially given that the conditions were slightly less than ideal.

But when it comes to getting home wet, lets just say that is why we have Aga – not because of all of that slow cooking blah blah blah nonsense but because designer kitchens might be all very well for Gordon or Jamie, but they don’t have anywhere where you can dry sopping shooting kit. That takes Mrs Aga

With all the clobber gently drying out, time for one of my favourite pastimes: weapons cleaning. Now that is one of the advantages of a semi-automatic…lots of lovely little bits to clean. Yes I know, some regard actually this part of the post shooting ritual as a bit of an anathema, but I take a simple pleasure in sitting down with either a mug of tea (or a large glass of whiskey) & taking the time to clean a firearm really well. Well it sure beats having to talk to the children

& with everything sorted out & stowed away, only then did your humble correspondent feel that he had earned the right to settle down on the sofa of sloth, as some of The Englishman’s logs crackled away cheerfully in the wood burner & get stuck into an immense stack of gun porn oh yes, & an equally large drinky-poos

How glad am I to be back from Asia?

Today I shall be mainly listening to...

Today I will be shirking – well not shirking exactly. After the school run I have to pop down to Salisbury. From there it will be cross country to Cirencester for a spot of luncheon

& then on to Monmouthshire where I shall be staying in this fine hostelry tomorrow night, with seven other stout bulldogs

Do you recall all of those 12-bore cartridges … well we fully intend to put them to good use on Friday. Given that I shall be driving through some of the most beautiful & quintessentially English countryside you could ever imagine, I think that it is entirely appropriate to spend the journey listening to this man’s music

Very very loudly.

Not really the grand homecoming...

... but I got home at seven this morning & by three I was down at Greenfields of Salisbury, topping up FM Tower's magazine with a couple of thousand rounds of Eley's excellent VIP Game

Well the season has already started & I have some catching up to do

Friday Mauser porn

Apologies for the lamentable lack of firearms posting but being stuck in Hong Kong for the last few months, I have managed very little shooting etc etc. That sorry state of affairs will soon be rectified. Shall we just say that now I have my appetite back, I thought that we would round of the week with this…

a Mauser K98k in 8x57 caliber, manufactured by Feinmechanische Werke GmbH Erfurt (ERMA) & sporting a rather swanky Zeiss Zelvier telescope sight on high turret mounts.

For those of you that have five grand burning a hole & an empty slot on your FAC, its available for a mere £4,250 from R J Holloway. As an alternative, if you are down to your last fifteen hundred quid, you might want to consider this

A K98k fitted with the ZF41 sharpshooters scope which Fulton’s currently have in the rack. Of course Fultons being Fultons, they only have a picture of half the rifle. Somethings never change & that is certainly true of those guys!

Quack quack ... bang!

& so the season opens

Today dear readers is The Glorious Twelfth & for those of you lucky enough to be out on the high hill, what sport awaits you…

Your humble correspondent is stuck in Cathay’s bosom however, reading sad news like this

The grouse shooting industry could become the latest casualty of the credit crisis, it is feared.

So if anyone out there is pondering the cost of a days shooting, just go do it. I havent manged to get up to Scotland for a couple of years now, but if you have never been up on the moor in pursuit of those elusive little red birds, I guarantee you that your game book is incomplete. Rectify that inexcuable omission. Now

Monday morning literature

In 1959, Ed Zern reviewed Lady Chatterley's Lover for Field & Stream:

This fictional account of the day-by-day life of the English gamekeeper is still of considerable interest to outdoor-minded readers, as it contains many passages on pheasant-raising, the apprehending of poachers, ways to control vermin, and other chores and duties of the professional gamekeeper. Unfortunately one is obliged to wade through many pages of extraneous material in order to discover and savour these sidelights on the management of a Midlands shooting estate, and in this reviewer's opinion this book cannot take the place of J.R. Miller's Practical Gamekeeping.

On another occasion, a reader complained that his wife wanted him to give up outdoor sports:
"If this keeps on I'm going to blow my brains out. Please give me whatever advice you can."

Zern responded: "Since trajectory isn't important here, our recommendation would be a .35 Remington with 200-grain soft-nose bullet."

Pointed out by Gweilicus & shamlessly stolen from the Futility Closet

Achtung Brassiere?

Just following up from yesterdays body armour post, it now seems that German Police have also come up with a similar system... only its for its women officers

The new underwear was developed as a second barrier of defence after normal bras were found to cause injuries while on duty. The officers' bullet-proof vests, while stopping the force of gunshots in an attack, pushed the plastic and metal parts of their underwear into their flesh, causing injury.

Carmen Kibat, a policewoman in Hamburg who tested the new underwear, said: "These can save someone's life so it's not a laughing matter." She organised "Action Brassiere" across Germany, getting hundreds of policewomen to try the bras out in the line of duty.

Sadly at the moment, I cannot find any clips of Officer Kibat testing her underwear!

"Mitch, I'd like you to shoot me again, to prove the point..."

You probably don't want to be trying this one at home

& the latest pig news

From reader Peter

Will you look at this nice harmless little piggy? There he was, just quietly minding his own little piggy business.... eating his little piggy dinner.... which he paid for himself, of course... and then BLAM.... some cruel neo-fascist crypto-terrorist, quite unreasonable armed with a murderous lethal weapon... that COULD be used to shoot a small child.... just goes and cruelly takes away his little piggy life.... wiping out his dreams of settling down and providing for his family.....

I am pretty sure this is directly linked to the cause of stabbing in inner cities and pretty much everything else that is wrong with the world....... including the woefully inadequate suspension springs that they fit on trucks nowadays. I am disgusted, of course..... and have only set it as the wallpaper on my computer as a warning against the threat of global warming.

I feel the need, the need for leeeeeeeeed

This morning, the redoubtable Mrs FM & your humble correspondent have been to the clay range to give the Berettas a good rousting. Whilst my 12-bore Model 686 (on the right in the picture below)

is still a wonderful wonderful gun to shoot with, Mrs FM’s 20-bore Silver Pigeon is just about the most delightful, light, fast handling shotgun that I have ever used. If I had my time again, it is probably the only shotgun that I’d ever use.

Anyway, the War Office’s shooting is coming along nicely – she is currently connecting about 50% of the time. However, when she connects, it is slap bang in the middle of the pattern stuff. So as soon as she stops thinking about what she is doing, starts to relax & shoot instinctively, that average will come up worryingly quickly. Grrrrrrrrrr!

Other than that, I feel it incumbent upon me to point out the gratuitous matching of cap, jacket & shirt…

…sometimes, just sometimes, she is such a girl!

Today, I have mainly been...

Taking the dogs for a walk & the enivitable swim this morning

followed by a trip over to The Englishman's Castle this afternoon

for a little noise creation

followed by a few cups of tea, round at mein hosts. This evening before supper, I shall wander across the field to the pub for a couple of jars of Wadsworths' finest. Racing around the globe is all very well, but this really is my sort of a day.

Your start the week Kalashnikov fun

Two things sprang to mind when I saw this photo: firstly, really really hope that she had that AK set to fully automatic fire & secondly ...

… looking at the only vague proximity of rifle butt & shoulder, deep regret that this is a single picture & not one of a series, taken she hoyed back on the trigger …!

New arrivals

Sorry for the lack of posting over the last day or so but your humble corrspondent has found himself seeking respite from the heat & humidity of Hong Kong with literally, a flying visit home.

Now 24 hours in Blighty might not seem long, but it has proved long enough to pick up these little fellows …

A brace of black powder pistols might not seem very much to those of you that live in civilised parts of the world, but here in GFWland, owning these at the very very least probably classifies me a deemed enemy of what passes these days for society.

Sadly I haven’t had time to give them a good rousting as tomorrow, I am back on the plane but soon soon my precious ones...

Firearms torture

Ensconced as your humble correspondent currently is in Cathey’s bosom, life has pretty much reverted of hedonistic bachelordom as this is (on & off) an ‘unaccompanied’ secondment until mid September. There are however a couple of downsides. Firstly, as maddening as they can be at times, I miss my ... dogs. Secondly, at nearly 44 years old, there is simply no way that my body can recover from Hong Kong's hangovers pace of life quickly enough these days. So, after nearly two weeks out on the screaming this week has been a little more sedate, mainly because Megacorp has very kindly flown Family FM out for the half term break. Needless to say, my schedule has been a little more restrained now that the handbrake is in town, which for the sake of my liver/kidneys/waistline is probably just as well.

Anyway, aside from half a ton of junk & two very petulant children, Mrs FM brought out my unopened post from the UK which comprised two categories: firstly, final demand notices / written threats from money lenders to pay the usurious rates of interest & secondly, my Firearms Certificate which has just come back from the Police after my last variation application.

Deep joy!

They even acquiesced to all my requests

Even deeper joy!

So I now have empty ‘slots’ for a .17 rifle, a fully moderated .223 rifle, a .303 rifle & a brace of .44 black powder pistols. Therefore, upon getting home in the autumn, I will be able to indulge my compulsive firearms purchasing disorder with a vengeance.

Now regulars will know that I bought the pistols some months ago now but haven’t picked them up because I have been laggardly in getting my FAC varied. So that’s just a question of popping 10 miles down the road to get them.The .303 is going to be quite easy as my favourite gunship has several very nice looking Lee Enfield No.4’s under refurbishment at the moment. That will be a case of a 60 mile round trip & cutting a cheque. Sorted.

However, the .17 & the .223 present more problems as there is nothing out there (available in the UK in a left handed version) that really appeals. So I am now faced with the prospect of two custom builds … quelle hardship I know!

Current thinking is that I will base the .17 on a Savage because the CZ/Brno isn’t available with a heavy barrel as a left hooker. In fact all I am proposing to do is to junk the stock & fit it with something a bit better. In the UK, all Savage rimfires already come with the barrel cut for a moderator so it will just be a case of screwing on my existing T8.

The .223, will prove a little more difficult. If Steyr produced their excellent Scout in a left hooker I'd just get one of those. Sadly they don’t, so something a little more proprietary is in order. Because the biggest constraint is the action, the chances are that I will base it on a blueprinted Remington & indeed a lefty one of these

(available from Rimfire Magic) fitted with an over the barrel PES moderator would fit the bill nicely.

The real complications are however more fundamental & serious. The second hand 7.62mm Blaser LRS leftie that I looked at a few months ago is still available... oh & favourite gunsmith currently has another really nice looking Mauser which will be ready shortly & I fancy building an ersatz Short Slide Rail K98 to compliment my Long Slide Rail K98k. But Nipper is growing up fast & will need a 28g shotgun soon.

I know, I know ... the answer is to sell the kids to a passing Austrian, beg my local Firearms Licensing Office for yet another variation & just go and buy the lot. At least if I have sold the kids I'll be saved the cost of a half decent shotgun!

Proof that cowboys were larger than life

Can to think of it, if say your average run of the mill Glock can bring on a bout of PSH among the GFW fraternity, this wee fella should induce a full rectal prolapse

h/t to Axe Wielding Manic for this one

Browning Hi-Power Pistol

Today dear readers, our Monday morning gun porn is somewhat bittersweet for me as my Hi Power was seized by the State as few years ago. Notwithstanding the UKs absurd firearms legislation, today we celebrate John Moses Browning’s classic design

Initially, the "High Power" pistol was designed by John M. Browning in 1925 and was patented in the USA in 1927, soon after the death of the Browning. The design was aquired by Belgian state-owned company FN Herstal, and improved by FN designer Dieudonne Saive. The resulting pistol was shelved until 1935, when Belgian army was ready to adopt new sidearm.

The HP was offered for trials and won, and was adopted as a Model 1935 pistol. Soon after that it was also adopted by Belgian police and by many foreign countries, including the Britich Commonwealth ones. The High Power is the only sidearm that served for both sides in WW2. Germany used many HPs manufactured in occupied Belgium, while Allies used HPs manufactured mostly in Canada by Inglis. The HP continues its service well into the 21st century with many armies and police forces, being the second longest 'living' service pistol after another famous Browning design, the Colt 1911.

Technically, the High Power pistol, also known as Browning HP 35, GP 35 or Model 1935, is a recoil operated, locked breech pistol. It uses a linkless barrel to slide locking invented by Browning. The trigger is single action, with external hammer. The original HPs featured frame mounted safety at the left side of the frame, that locks both sear and slide. Modern versions, since Mark II, also featured ambidextrous safety levers, that are also more comfortable to operate.

Some pre- and WW2-time guns also featured backstraps with cuts to accomodate removable shoulder stocks/holsters. The HP was the first military pistol to have high capacity, staggered column magazine for 13 rounds plus one loaded in the chamber.

Pump it up

If you were to take a little look on Guntrader, a cursory glace would reveal that of the 2,464 rifles that are for sale, only 21 are pump actions. Unlike our American cousins, for no real reason us stout bulldogs don’t consider them to be ‘part of the woodwork’. Indeed the same said search of Guntrader would reveal that most of the ‘pumps’ that are for sale are old Brownings such as this

that are in the rack at £150, less dealer discount. So, cut to an undisclosed location in Texas just over a month ago when I had the opportunity to shoot a Taurus thingy or to give it its full title a Model 62C-SS

Now I have to ‘fess up’ that my initial reaction was less than even tepid right up until the moment when I actually shot it.

In the interests of brevity, shall we skip what might laughably be described as a technical description because that would miss the whole point of these things - here’s what you do with them

1. Stuff them full of ammo
2. Shoot said ammo off as quickly as possible
3. Reload
4. Repeat #s 3&4 until you are out of ammo
5. Go to the gun store, buy more ammo and then repeat #’s3&4 ad nauseam

… what they don’t tell you on the tin is these things are small, light, childishly simple & utterly addictive to shoot.

As Kim advises about his Taurus (the one I was shooting)

I could not put this little rifle down.Now, I’m not saying that you’ll have as much fun as I did when you get to shooting your pump-action .22 rifle. I bet you’ll have even more fun than I did. My advice to you: take twice as much ammo to the range than you normally take, then you won’t be as disappointed as I was when I finally had to quit. Set aside some extra ammo for other guys to shoot too, just like I had to

You don’t one of these, you need one … now. Trust me, I’d never tell a porkie about such weighty matters

Mauser G33/40

This mornings gun porn is a Mauser oddity, the Mauser G33/40 which was usually issued to the Alpenkorps

The G33/40, is a shortened and lightened version of the K98 rifle. Built by Waffen Werke Brunn it was only in production for 3 years, from 1940-1942. It fired the exact same 7.92mm round, and had the same Mauser 98 action. However, that is where the similarities end.

The G33/40 had several different parts that were not matching with the K98. These included: the bolt, stock, cleaning rod, sight hood cover, upper hand guard, barrel bands, sling, and even the bayonet.

This particular survivor is fitted with a ZF41 scope it would have been issued to a marksman for short distance sniper duties.

What to do with an old BSA?

There are lots of ‘em kicking around, old BSA .22s, for the most part, unused & unloved, consigned to the back of the gun safe gently gathering dust & worse. The fact that there is still such a supply of these rifles that haven’t now been produced for several decades, is an indication of how well they were put together in the first place. However both time & shooting fashions have somewhat passed the venerable BSA Martini by. Even me, Mr Black Plastic have to confess that there is something about these old rifles, even though I sold mine a few years ago.

Anyway, on Sunday night as I whiled away the evening half watching television but mainly surfing gun porn & fantasising about future gun purchases, I came upon this up for sale by one of my local dealers

Now at £595 it is way way too spendy given that whilst cute, even the glass is nothing special (it is sporting an Optimate 6x44). Then again, just look at that walnut stock

With a 21” barrel & sound moderator fitted, to my way of thinking, you could while away many a happy afternoon just plinking away at either tins or targets. The only down side that I can see is the way the scope is mounted

With the rear bell sitting so far back over the action, swift reloads might prove a little fiddly & this in turn might any serious vermin control slightly difficult. But then, a little more research revealed this which is currently for sale by the same dealer that I bought my Mauser & Ruger 1022 Evolution from

At only £295, complete with forward mounted scope & moderator, to my mind, that looks a very handy little package. The cut down barrel might make it a little butt heavy but the addition of the moderator, even though not heavy should help keep the centre of balance between your hands

Now I know that there is an argument that says you should chop up these old rifles but to be honest, its not like there is a shortage of old BSAs & they go fo very little at auction.

In any case, I would rather see these old 12/15s refurbished & modified than have them rotting away unused. This to my mind would be a great little all round rifle as long as you dont get too hung up on the Martini action. It would certainly be short enough to have with you at night, bouncing around in your Landrover potting rabbits & will almost certainly be more accurate than the average shooter.

So, if you dont fancy buying the usual CZ or indeed a 1022, you might want to try something a little bit different. I can guarantee you that if you were to turn up on the range with either of the above, everyone would want to have a go.

Rifle, .303 Pattern 1914

Continuing our very intermittent series of predominantly British infantry weapons, this morning dear readers we turn our attention to the venerable Pattern 14 (or P14) rifle.

Originally designed before the Great War for .276” caliber, it was ultimately produced in the more usual .303 caliber in the United States under contract by Remington, Winchester & Eddystone as to re-tooling British factories that were running at fully capacity producing SMLE’s would have been impractical. Interestingly, being based upon the Mauser action, it represented a departure from the more usual Enfield style action

During the Boer War the British Army had faced accurate long-range fire from insurgents (eh? Ed) using Model 1895 Mausers chambered for the 7x57mm round.. This smaller, high-velocity cartridge prompted the War Department to develop their own "magnum" round in 1910, using a .276 calibre round patterned from that of the Canadian Ross rifle.

However being prduced by three manufacturers, caused serious production problems;

Each factory produced parts from their own designs, leading to interchangeability issues; Winchester was particularly troublesome in this regard, going so far as to refuse for months to change to the new Mk I* standard. Therefore, the official designation of the rifle was dependent upon its manufacturer: e.g., the Pattern 1914 Mk I W is a Mk I of Winchester manufacture, R would be Remington, or E for Eddystone.

The P14's principal combat use during WWI was as a sniper rifle, since it was deemed to be more accurate than the SMLE at longer ranges, either in standard issue form or with modified or telescopic sights (modified and telescopic sights were used only on Winchester-manufactured rifles).

When the U.S. entered the war, the P14 was modified and standardized by the U.S. Ordinance Department and went into production at the same factories as had produced the P14, production of that rifle having ceased, as the Model of 1917, commonly known as the M1917 Enfield, chambered for the standard US 30-06 cartridge. It enjoyed considerable success as a complement for the Springfield M1903 rifles which were America's official standard issue, soon far surpassing the Springfield in terms of both total production and breadth of issue.

Prior to and during World War II, the P14 was used, after undergoing modification ("Weedon repair standard", formally the Mk II standard) in Britain as a rearguard rifle, primarily to equip the WWII Home Guard (the soldiers of Dad's Army carried P14s); the rifle was also used again as a sniper rifle (the configuration being different from the WWI incarnation

Indeed, as one pundit puts it

the P14 was a British design, based on a German action, manufactured in America.

Therefore, the next time you see some ponytailed protesters waving their 4 x 2 placards about the international arms trade, you might like to politely point out that it really is nothing new!

Women at Arms

Lots more here. Found by Walt who swears blind that he stumbled upon it while researching the Lee Enfield carbines Model 1888 bayonet.

Mondays weapons systems quiz

This should get the old grey matter turning over ...

(a) Sketch and label a CD versus Mach number plot for a typical bullet. What physically occurs at the Mach numbers for drag divergence and maximum CD? (5 marks)

(d) Describe the origins of equilibrium yaw and magnus effect on spin-stabilised shells. How does a point-mass trajectory model differ from a modified point-mass model? (5 marks)

Lots more (as pointed out to us by EX_STAB) here

Aftermarth

How was yesterday for y'all??

It seems as though I havent been here been shooting for a long long time. Well lets just say that over the last two days I have been shooting these ... a lot!

I wish that I could write you a full range report but sadly 1) its way too late & 2) I am still grinning far too much to be able to even try to put a half sensible post together ... & yes I know, that doesnt normally stop me but tonight I am afraid it will

Scope issues resolved

Idont know if you rcall, but back in January I was trying to work out how on earth the adjustments on the ZF scope that Mickey is now sporting, works

This morning, thanks to TSgt Matt, I have the answer

I own one of these fine scopes and I can tell you EXACTLY how this thing works. First off, the "canoe" shaped dial in the middle is solely to focus the optic. To adjust the elevation, simply loosen the small thumbscrew (it is attached to the post with the arrow pointing to the range dial) and simply rotate the range dial until you are right on target. Don't worry about what the range dial is pointed to...we will take care of that now. The numbers are basically a bullet drop compensator for the military issue 7.92mm (192gr. I believe) and is set in meters.

Now, with your rifle sighted at 100m, loosen the 3 screws on top of the turret (under the "canoe" focus lever...NOT on the scope tube itself). Next just rotate the range ring to have the arrow point to the 100 and then tighten down the screws. When the screws are loose, you should be able to rotate the ring without moving the crosshair up/down. With the screws now tight, it clamps the elevation adjustment to the range dial, so when you turn the dial to the next range, it will affect the elevation.

Once I get home, it will be straight round to The Englishmans for a spot of zeroing

Trigger control?

Pink pistols ...

... whatever next.

(via The Englishman who is 'resting' in a darkened room having sent me this)

Your breakfast issues resolved

Its that perennial morning after problem: you cant focus because of the jackhammer in your head & you have a mouth like a Kurdish lorry drivers jockstrap. Still, help is on the way in the shape of the fry up that you have on the go but then it all grinds to a halt because you simply can’t decide how you want your eggs.

Fear not, because those clever fellows in Hong Kong have come you with these …

You don’t need one, you will simply just have to buy all four. In fact, this is so good that I am nearly moved to invite four GFW’s round for brunch on Saturday but on second thoughts, fortunately I don’t know any. Maybe as a replacement I will just have to extend an open invitation to Mothers Against Reality & hope a few show up

& in the spirit of today’s Teutonic theme…

We have looked before at one or two of the rather (cough cough) more interesting weapons that are currently coming out of Germany at the moment, such as this excellent H&K MP5 clone.
Now as EX_STAB points out, this copy of the legendary Sturmgewehr MP-44 is becoming available.

Whilst we would all like to see it in a more mainly cartridge than .22LR, the advantage is that in this smaller calibre, it is fully UK legal in semi-auto format. At EUR. 1749, it is certainly ssssspendy but surely that is a mere bagatelle when compared to the pleasure that you would have owning one

Lao ji xuelei chou, jin wo shou zhong qiang

Never forget the hatred forged of blood and tears,
and hold that gun tightly in your hands

Forget "doing it for the children", just arm them now

Via Kim

The rise of violent crime was highlighted yesterday when it was revealed that children as young as eight have been caught with guns.

This photograph was taken three years ago, when Boy was seven years old. It was a beautiful evening & with a couple of hours of daylight left, we thought that we would the opportunity to go & pot some rabbits before supper.

Down in these yerrrr parrrrrrts, this is pretty much normal behaviour. In fact I simply cannot exactly recall at what age I did the same with my father. However (via The Englishman) it would seem that the GFWs don’t want our children to be taught how to safely handle legally owned weapons …

Did you realise there is no minimum age requirement for a shotgun licence, and that children as young as 10 are being issued with them?

However, I don’t feel comfortable about this, do you? Anti-gun campaigners do not feel children are mature enough to use a powerful weapon. I would be interested to know how many young shotgun holders have been involved in accidents. Do the police ask why pre-teens want a shotgun? I would like to see the data on that too.

Whilst my heart is uplifted to learn that in Suffolk alone, 182 under-16s have received Shotgun Certificates, this sort of thing really causes me to spend hours, sitting in the dark, stroking my Remington while whispering softly to her soon soon my precious, soon soon. In fact, as regular readers will know, this sort of rage is normally followed by your humble correspondent heading straight down to the gun shop to buy himself another little something (once the urge to head for the clock tower has receded). But not this time however, oh no. This time I am going to do something a little different…

The big irony in all of this is that Boy, now ten years old, doesn’t actually need a Shotgun Certificate to shoot on a regular basis & shoot on a regular basis he certainly does. However, thanks to the likes of Ms Seymour (someone who labels herself as a Member of the Chartered Institute of Public Relations , Press Consultant, Journalist, Political & PR Blogger), that is about to change. If young people being approved by their local Firearms Licensing Officer to have a Certificate causes such PSH, there is clearly only one course of action open.

Looks like I will be filling in the forms this weekend!

Yours, aye

Mr FM
(someone who when he is sober enough to remember, wants to see EVERY ONE one of Her Majesty's law abiding subjects armed & trained in the use of those arms)

Time to start this year's Christmas list

Forget Surefire, what you want is one of these...

A wave of the fat capitalist cigar to TDB for the link & for this one from EX_STAB
(warning, some of the lyrics aren't shall we say terribly work safe)

One from the vault

Xiong huai chouhen, dan wu xu fa

Tebie yao zhuajin xue sheji, zhandou zhongjian zui daliang zui pubian de ying benshi jiu shi sheji. Yiding yao ba sheji xunlian gao hao.

With vengeance in your heart, no bullet will be fired in vain.

You must especially make the best use of your time to learn how to fire a gun, because in combat this is the most widely used practical skill.

Ensure that training for shooting a gun is thoroughly carried out.

& for those of you that thought that their tactical rifles were fully kitted out...

you really need one of these

Stolen from Last of the Few

Saul has slain his thousands; But David his tens of thousands

In view of yesterdays report (that the Army has run out of machine guns), perhaps the time is now right to scour our many military museums for suitable replacement weapons & lets be honest, with the possible exception of the greatest light machine gun ever produced, nothing screams stout bulldog like the venerable Vickers medium machine gun. Deploy a few of those to the North West Frontier & the Pathans heads would be kept well & truly down in the gutter

Yes, it harks from a different much happier age & indeed it was in 1881 when Hiram Maxim, was attending a Paris exhibition that he was told that if he was to achieve pay parity with Croesus he was going to need

to invent something that will enable these Europeans to cut each others' throats with greater facility.

Sensing the commercial opportunity, he wisely set up shop in London’s Hatton Garden, an area long noted for its very very commercial outlook &

between 1883 & 1885 patented almost every process by which automatic fire could be produced. In 1884 a press report stated "Hiram Maxim, the well known American electrician has made an automatic machine gun with a single barrel, using the standard .45 rifle cartridge, that will load and fire itself by energy derived from recoil at a rate of over 600 rounds a minute."

The bulldogs adopted the Vickers.303 (basically a go-faster version of Maxim’s original machine gun with a slightly reduced rate of fire) in 1912 & its crew of six could produce the equivalent weight of fire of 40 well drilled riflemen.

The following tale related by Ian Hogg gives you an idea of just how good a weapon this was

The Vickers gun accompanied the BEF to France in 1914, and in the years that followed proved itself to be the most reliable weapon on the battlefield, some of its feats of endurance entering military mythology. Perhaps the most incredible was the action by the 100th Company of the Machine Gun Corps at High Wood on August 24, 1916.

One team fired 120,000 from one gun to win a five-franc prize offered to the highest-scoring gun. And at the end of that 12 hours every gun was working perfectly and not one gun had broken down during the whole period. It was this absolute foolproof reliability which endeared the Vickers to every British soldier who ever fired one. It never broke down; it just kept on firing and came back for more. And that was why the Mark 1 Vickers gun was to remain the standard medium machine-gun from 1912 to 1968.

Sadly, I have never had the opportunity for fire this most quintessentially British of weapons. However in light of the current shortages of both men & material, I don’t discount being recalled to the Colours at any time (heaven help us all) & indeed, if I were to find myself east of Suez equipped with one of these fine old pieces ...

... I wouldn’t be too disappointed

Of Courts Martial

Retired Army Green Beret James T. (Smokey) Taylor got his court martial this weekend and came away feeling pretty good about it. Taylor, at age 79, is one of the oldest members of Chapter XXXIII (The Larry Thorne Chapter) of the Special Forces Association. He was placed on trial by fellow Chapter XXXIII members under the charge of "failing to use a weapon of sufficient caliber" in the shooting of an intruder at his home in Knoxville, TN, in November.

The court martial, of course, was very much tongue in cheek. The event itself was deadly serious.

Taylor had been awakened in the early morning hours of November 5, 2007,when an intruder broke into his home. He investigated the noises with one of his many weapons in hand.

"It was just after Halloween, on Monday morning at 4:30," Taylor said. I heard this commotion at the door and grabbed my fishing gun, a little 22 revolver, to see what was going on. I got to the front door and this fellow had ripped my security door out of its frame. He said, 'you're
going to have to kill me. I'm coming in.'"

When a warning to leave went unheeded, Taylor brought his .22 caliber pistol to bear and shot him right between the eyes.

"I was about four feet away from him when I shot," Taylor said. "Looking back now, I'm glad he didn't die, but that boy had the hardest head I've ever seen. The bullet bounced right off."

The impact knocked the would-be thief down momentarily. He crawled out of the house then got up and ran down the street. Taylor dialed 911 and
Knoxville police apprehended the wounded man about 200 yards away, hiding in a hedgerow.

Complicating the case, as well as the court martial, the offender was released on bail but failed to appear for his court date. Knoxville police said the man was homeless. They did not know his whereabouts or why he had been given bail.

The charges brought against Taylor by his fellow Green Berets were considered to be serious. He is a retired Special Forces Weapons Sergeant with extensive combat experience during the wars in Korea and
Vietnam.

"Charges were brought against him under the premise that he should have saved the county and taxpayers the expense of a trial," said Chapter XXXIII President Bill Long of Asheville, NC.

The trial was held at the Hampton Inn in Brevard, part of the group's regularly scheduled quarterly meeting. Long appointed a judge, Bert Bates, a defense counsel, Jim Hash, and a prosecutor, Charlie Ponds. All are retired Special Forces non-commissioned officers with extensive
combat and weapons experience.

Ponds outlined the case against Taylor, emphasizing that the citizens of Knox County were going to be burdened with significant costs to again apprehend, and then prosecute and defend the would-be burglar.

"Proper choice of a larger caliber gun would have spared the citizens this financial burden," Ponds said, "while removing one bad guy from the streets for good. He could have used a .45 or .38. The .22 just wasn't
big enough to get the job done. Hash disagreed. He said Taylor had done the right thing in choosing to arm himself with a 22.

"If he'd used a .45 or something like that the round would have gone right through the perp, the wall, the neighbor's wall and possibly injured some innocent child asleep in its bed. I believe the evidence shows that Smokey Taylor exercised excellent judgment in his choice of weapons. He clearly remains to this day an excellent weapons man."

Hash then floated a theory as to why the bullet bounced off the perp's forehead.

"He was victimized by old ammunition," he said, "just as he was in Korea and again in Vietnam, when his units were issued ammo left over from World War II."

Taylor said nothing in his own defense, choosing instead to allow his peers to debate the matter. The jury, consisting of all the members of the Chapter, discussed the merits of choosing a larger caliber weapon as
well as the obvious benefits to society of permanently deleting the intruder so he would never again threaten any private citizen.

The other side of the coin, that of accidentally causing injury to a completely innocent citizen if a more powerful gun had been used, also gained considerable support.

Following testimony from both sides, Judge Bates determined the charges should be dismissed. The decision was met with a round of applause. In
fact, there was strong sentiment expressed that Taylor should receive an award for not only choosing wisely in picking up the 22, but for the accuracy of his aim under difficult and dangerous conditions.

After the trial Taylor said the ammunition was indeed old and added the new information that the perp had soiled his pants as he crawled out the door.

"I would have had an even worse mess to clean up if it had gone through his forehead," Taylor said. "It was good for both of us that it didn't."

Meanwhile, back in Knox County, the word is out: Don't go messing with Smokey Taylor. He just bought a whole bunch of fresh ammo.

A wave of TDB for this one

This mornings 3rd firearms related post

On Monday, Lego is celebrating the 50th anniversary of the day it filed its first patent for the iconic plastic brick. Since the beginning, Lego sets have been themed, and the very first theme was space. Not long afterward, Lego added castle and pirate themes. One of the first major elements of the "System of Play" was the Lego Town Plan. To celebrate the 50th anniversary, the company is releasing a new, updated commemorative Town Plan this year. While updated, it includes '50s-era elements like a gas station, car wash, and garage, plus a movie theater and, of course, a town hall.

& what wonderful stuff Lego is, especially when you can do things like this with it

Harris Bipods

EX_STAB in the comments section yesterday opined on "what is wrong with Harris bipods?"

1) The attachment to the rifle is insecure and insufficient.

6) The bipod is of a construction that is inclined to snag on vegetation etc and due to the exposed springs is especially noisy when this occurs.

7) The feet of the standard bipod do not provide a good grip in turf, vegetation or aggregate - they are only suitable for shooting from a bench.

Just buy a Parker Hale (Not the nasty Versapod copy) and leave your worries behind.
Of course if you buy the TRG, its dedicated bipod is superb.

I currently have 2 Harris bipods: one is fitted to my Remington, the other to one of my Ruger 1022s & I find them OK. Therefore as a partial observer on this, I shall take the 5th & leave it to you all to decide if EX_STAB has a point

Tuesday mornings gun post

Whilst I don’t agree with the Israelis on everything, there are some things that they do that are just so so right

Yet it has a very serious side it … this via Double Tapper

Two terrorists were killed by armed civilians less than an hour ago after they infiltrated a high school in Kibbutz Kfar Etzion, south of Jerusalem. The terrorists, armed with knives and possibly with a pistol, infiltrated the kibbutz and snuck into a the Makor Haim High School. The school was filled with more than 200 students.

The attack took place in the library when the two terrorists, dressed in black, burst into the room and ordered everyone to raise their hands and stand against the wall. The terrorists stabbed two students before their counselors were able to draw their personal handguns and kill the terrorists on the spot.

The De Lisle Carbine

One of the more usual WW2 British military firearms is the De Lisle Carbine, designed somewhat predictably by Mr De Lisle (William to his chums) & based on the ubiquitous Short Magazine Lee Enfield MkIII* - converted to .45 ACP by modifying the receiver, altering the bolt/bolt head, replacing the barrel with a modified Thompson submachine gun barrel & using modified magazines from the M1911 pistol.

The primary feature of the De Lisle was its very effective suppressor which made it very quiet in action - indeed working the bolt to chamber the next round makes a louder noise than firing a round. The De Lisle carbine was used by British commandos and special forces, and was accurate to 250 yards.

Thompson submachine gun barrels were modified to provide the .45 caliber barrel, which was ported to provide a slow release of high pressure gas. The suppressor, 2 inches in diameter, went all the way from the back of the barrel to well beyond the muzzle (the suppressor makes up half the overall length of the rifle), providing a very large volume of space to contain the gases produced by firing. This large volume was one of the keys to the effectiveness of the suppressor. The Lee-Enfield bolt was modified to feed the .45 ACP rounds, and the Lee-Enfield's magazine assembly was replaced with a new assembly that held a modified M1911 magazine.

However as ARRSEpedia sadly reports, most of the De Lisles were destroyed after the war to avoid them falling into the wrong hands. (the wrong hands? you mean drunk squaddies with a desire for midnight lightbulb hunting?)

But now, Thames Valley Guns have got one in: not an original but one of a small batch manufactured from the original drawings in Scotland in 2002/3. It is in pristine condition with 100% bluing, matching numbers with no blemishes to the woodwork.

Yes, its very very spendy (on at a bank balance destroying £989.00) but its a chance to own an iconic weapon … plus, just think of all of its potential uses!

& no, I am not on commission. However if you want proof of how good Mr De Lisle's design is ...

Go on, reach for the credit card - you know it makes sense in oh so many ways. BTW Valkyrie Arms are marketing what they call their De Lisle Commando Carbine ™ for US$ 1,995.

& so the shooting season finishes, not with a bang but a long haul flight

As game shooters will know, this weekend is the last of the season & as regular readers will also know, your humble correspondent hasn’t had much time this year to get the barrels of his Beretta warm. If fact, he didn’t even manage to make his annual pilgrimage to the moors of Scotland & if that wasn’t injury enough, not being to even get to Bisley over the last couple of months has only served to heaped up further insult. Still, all of that is going to be rectified this weekend as we have our annual end of season ‘cocks only’ day on Saturday, followed by Short Siberia japery care of EX_STAB on Sunday … assuming that the Saturday night doesn’t become as errrrrrrrrr liquid has it normally is.

As plans go, it wasn’t a bad one, right up until the moment that the CEO needed someone, experienced in dealing with whiley Oriental chappies to go at short notice to further Sino-British relations & try to undo some of the damage that the arch-nanger Brown has been doing in Peking this week. This sadly will entail missing my shooting weekend but on the flip side, it will mean abusing Cathay Pacific’s drinks trolley service for about 12 hours tonight, as I fly to Hong Kong. Yes it’s a bummer about the shooting, as is also the woeful lack of entries in the Game Book this year … but on the flip side there is the opportunity to visit old haunts in Whanchai & ‘the Fong’ – a tough call I know, but someone has to put their liver on the line for the greater corporate good.

Having left Hong Kong in 1997, returning only once a year later for a short visit, if the truth be known, I will be fascinated to see how the place has changed after what is now, nearly 11 years since Mrs T sold out to the Communists: but like everything in life, there is no such thing as a free lunch (unless you have a generous expense account) & for a few days, I shall be locked in earnest discussions with some of the more tedious lawyers it has ever been my sorry displease to meet – however when you are hung over to billy-oh, the last thing that you actually want is Bobby Broker pitching you the latest credit crunch busting financial product, with all the accompanying bluster that seems to accompany the occupants of certain Investment Bank’s ‘front desk’ personnel – so I will settle for dull lawyers, a pile of legal documentation & another Alka-Seltzer thank you very much.

Whilst the end of the week will see me up-country in some unspeakable Chinese city with a completely unpronounceable name, eating the local delicacy which will inevitably be badgers balls (or someone equally vomit inducing), on the up side, I get to drink in possibly my favourite bar (note bar, not pub) ever … The Captain’s Bar in the Mandarin Oriental Hotel.

I hear rumours that it has had a bit of a freshen up but by all that is good & holy, if they have ruined it, I’m on the next flight home! So I shall direct my following comments to the old bar, as I remember it in when old Mr Lee was last building me gins in ’98 & the condensation formed on pewter tankards full of ice cold foaming Carlsberg (pronounced Carls-i-berg in HK). In fact, said esteemed hostelry almost defies description … a head on car collision between orient & 70’s chic. & boy o boy, did it ever work. Forget those faceless hotel lobby bars which could be anywhere in the world; sit in the Captains Bar & know just know that you are in Hong Kong; just don’t be surprised if an immaculate Roger Moore should walk into the place & ask for his drink not to be stirred. It’s that sort of place.

If it has been ruined by ‘refurbishment’ then expect my howls to be heard around the globe on early Wednesday evening when I fully intend to be sitting down at the end of the bar, kicking off with a couple of post flight bracers. In that case I would have to retire to the floor above , home to the wood panelled Chinnery Bar which was originally opened in 1963 but didn’t open to women until 1990. Aside from its gentleman’s club feel, it is noted for serving serving traditional colonial cuisine & whiskey. Need I say any more?

Saturday shooting

In the five minutes that it wasn't raining, Boy & your humble corrspondent whiled away time shooting tin cans

Nanny keeps saying that young people need to spend more time outdoors, but the same Nanny would keck itself if it knew just how much ammo Nipper goes through. Nothing like giving a young lad an air rifle, a tin of pellets & watch him enjoy himself.

My sort of TV criticism

Fed up with the tripe on TV? Go ahead, just do it. You know you want to!

Easy like Sunday morning

This morning you find your humble correspondent sitting at the kitchen table undertaking that onerous of tasks … filling in his tax return. Taxes are of course one of the most odious things that the state foists upon us bulldogs & to add to the indignity of it all, we are required to fill in a form that reminds us just how much we are forced to pay for such good governance. Its enough to make you want to hit the bottle hard – but even by my shabby standards, 10:15 on a Sunday morning is just a tad early to be breaking out Scotland’s finest. Now one or two of you might have noticed that I have two other forms also sitting on the table that need to be completed. The first for a variation to my FAC, the other is an application for an Explosives Certificate … oh yes!

That form is slightly different to the normal FAC/Shotgun Certificate forms. On page 8, you have to specify the generic class of explosives that you are applying for & as menus go, everything looks absolutely delicious.

For example, do you want Explosives, Blasting, Type D or what about Charges, shaped, commercial without detonator? Better still would be some Cord, detonating, flexible as there is always fun to be had playing with detcord just as there is with Charges, shaped, flexible, linear. In fact, I think I will just apply for the lot as sadly I can’t see a box entitled Enough damn explosives to overthrow the State & Bring send the entire edifice of Government sky high. Maybe the Glorious Day just took one small step closer?

Indecision

It was all going to be so simple … following on from last weeks post about building a semi-custom .17 rig, I was simply going to indulge my Compulsive Firearms Purchasing Disorder, get the credit card out & phone up my dealer - & I use the term ‘dealer’ in every sense of the word because it is he that feeds my addiction.

Anyway, one last quick look on the netty thing & then pick up the phone … when I stumbled upon this

a Mark 3 Short Slide Rail Mount for a Mauser K98 … oh dear, doubts start to form in my already troubled head … & it transpires that he also has one of these

for sale as well …complete with the claw mounts … confussion reigns.& then elsewhere I find this very smart looking K98 in 7.92mm

…… OOOOOOOOMG! In the words of Sir Henry Rawlinson

I don’t know what I want, but I want it NOW!

The ultimate shopping bag?

The capital's local government organisation London Councils has claimed a public mandate for a levy or ban on disposable shopping bags.

In fact even from we-don’t-give-a-sh1t- about-the-environment China we are reading more & more of stories like this

Declaring war on the "white pollution" choking its cities, farms and waterways, China is banning free plastic shopping bags

& for once, I agree with the sentiment, if not the mechanism, that the eco-weenies are promoting. In comparison, the Free Market Corporation is proud to announce its new Last A Lifetime shopping bag. Be honest, once you had one of these

you are never going to throw it away & use it time after time. There, yet another ‘perceived’ problem solved. Next please….

Before you pull the trigger...

check that the barrel is clear

A wave of the fat capitalist cigar to Theo Spark who is now blogging at Last of the Few

Mickey Mauser Update

Since Mickey got scoped up, what with one thing & another, have only had the opportunity to shoot him once – on a very damp Sunday morning, over on the rolling acres that comprise The Englishman’s Castle.
I had a go at bore sighting the ol’ Nazi beast so weeks ago, therefore having one real idea of where he was actually going to shoot, in the interest of discretion & not wanting to pepper the West Country countryside with 7.62mm sized holes, we set up at a meagre 25 yards.

Now much to both my surprise & delight, windage was just about spot on (well may be shooting a smidge down the right hand size) – or at least as good as I could expect it to be without going back a further 75 yards to get a more accurate measure of drift. Elevation was a different matter however.

At said range (25 yards) Mickey was shooting almost exactly 5 inches low. Now a quick check on the Remington ballistic calculator free download thingy that I use for time to time shows that one a 100 yard zero, it should be shooting only approx an inch low. So, how to crank the sights up??

Windage adjustment is easy, there are 2 opposed screws on the mount to handle that. However, elevation is a bit more complex & try as I might, I cant figure out how the focus ring / range estimator /elevation control (pictured below) works.

I seem to recall reading somewhere that you slacken off the 3 screws in the middle of the dial & somehow dial in the adjustment. However I am loathed to fiddle around too much as I don’t want the entire thing to fall apart. So, has anyone go any idea of how to dial in some elevation into one of these?

Odd looking rifles

While rootlin’ round this afternoon, I found this picture

here. The accompanying text might as well be in the international language of flubber-dud as

FN BAR Bullpup on jälleen päässyt tositoimiin. Ase on viime syksyn jälkeen viimeistelty ja alkaa olla valmis.

is not especially helpful! Any ideas?

The first project of 2008

So the New Year is upon us & quite naturally, with the festive season rapidly disappearing in the rear view mirror, a chaps thoughts turn to which rifle he is going to christen 2008 with. Now if you recall, in December I gave you a menu of 3 options & possibly not surprisingly given that even though I say so myself, what fine choices they were, the voting was remarkably close:

Blaser LRS2 7.62mm/.308 - 35.1%
H-S Precision Pro Series 2000 .223 - 33.8%
Custom .17 rig - 31.2%

Now the one thing that I didn’t factor in at that stage was price. The first two are quite easy, as ignoring dealer discount, the Blaser is in the rack for £1,400 & the H-S Precision, £1,150. I suspect that if I had put the price tags on, that might have changed one or two opinions. Anyway, forget all of that, the next project is going to be a .17HMR semi-custom build - I am certain ... well sort of.

However, I am never being one to take an easy path when it comes to firearms, partly by being left handed, but also because I know what I want, even if I cant have it now; & what I really want is one of these

a Savage Arms .17 HMR 93R17 BTVSS bolt action rifle, complete with thumbhole laminate stock. The only addition I would make, save for the addition of a scope & bipod, would be an over the barrel PES Sound Moderator, shown here, mounted on a Ruger No.1.

In my humble opinion, I think that the light laminate stock married to the stainless steel action looks fabulous & the moddie would give it a very ‘purposeful’ look. I would particularly go for an over the barrel moderator, rather than the T8 already have as they cut down on the overall length of the weapon & as anyone who has been out lamping from a vehicle at night can testify to, length or at least lack of it helps.

Sadly to the best of my knowledge (& several dealers I have contacted), Savage don’t do a left hooker - curses! Thwarted once more. However what is available is this

The Savage 93R17 GLV 17 complete with heavy barrel which on UK imports is ready cut to accept a moderator, so you dont need to get it reproofed. I have seen right handed versions advertised for £280, so on a special order, it might be possible to pick one up for say £300.

Now I know that there are those of you that would say I should be buying a CZ as their left handled version is widely available however to date & in the manufacturers infinite wisdom, they have not yet produced a heavy barrel version. This does seem strange as .17HMR is essentially a vermin control round & a lot, if not most vermin shooters prefer heavy barrels for their nocturnal japery.

OK, so assuming my man can supply the OEM version I will be off first base. Sadly it will be blued & not stainless, but if that is the only concession I have to make, I certainly wont be too disappointed.

The next thing to sort out once the moderator is fitted will be a custom stock & lets be honest here, what it comes fitted with is hardly a thing of grace & beauty. The obvious choice is McMillan, but even by my normal black tac standards, the stocks are damn ugly - yes, even the 'sporting' ones. So at the moment I am starting to think about one of these, in a racey laminate, to jazz things up a little. I suspose that one advantage of replacing the stock will be that there are one excuses for not getting a really good bedding job done at the same time so that that is taken care of. One of the advantages of the Savy is that it comes fitted with one of their half-decent triggers so that is one little task/cost that you don't have to worry about.

So there you have it, the first little project for the New Year which regular readers will know, should consume at least the first half of this year. But my mind is made up on this ... but on the other hand, what about the H-S Precision??

Range day issues

Its bad enough when you turn up on the firing point & see that the fellow on the next lane has a bleeding great muzzle brake fitted & you are going to spend the afternoon dodging the blast … but what about when someone turns up with a cannon?

& this morning ...

Boy has been busy around the barns ... shooting rats

Foxes & Badgers

Just continuing this mornings ‘vermin’ theme …

The country's population of foxes might double and a rabies outbreak could spread quicker, if a badger cull is used to cut tuberculosis in cattle, a study has found.

I just love these so-called scientific surveys that take up huge amounts of time & money yet completely ignore the actual reality of what goes on in the countryside.

The essential truth is that
1. Badgers spread bovine TB
2. We are not allowed to control badger numbers
3. If we are allowed to shoot badgers, yes we might get more foxes…

… but we will shoot them like we should have been shooting the damn badgers in the first place. There, once again irrefutable proof that a well zeroed rifle can sort out a lot of the ‘issues’ that society faces. Problem solved, next please

Monday morning firearms dilemmas

Regular readers will know that their humble correspondent spends huge amounts of time scouring Blighty for left handed rifles as generally in GFWland, they are rarer than rocking horse sh1t. Now as anyone who is in similar circumstance will know, it is a thankless task. Whilst I am happy to report on behalf of all left handed shooters, importers are getting a bit better & LH Tikka T3s / basic Remington 700s are becoming more widely available, trying to find anything just a little bit (cough cough) interesting is a little like trying to stay sober in Ireland – you can do it, but you are very much on your own.

Now that Mickey is finished, I am hunting around for the next ‘project’ & just like anyone who lives in London knows waiting for a bus to come along & not get mugged by a gang of Home Office security guards posing a Kurdish asylum seekers, you can wait for weeks for a No.137 bus & then for no reason, two come along at once.

& its pretty much the same with the ole collection – the next task, aside for black powder pistol fun, was to be building an interesting .17 small vermin rig when two rather fun looking S/H left hookers have become available.

The first is an H-S Precision Pro-Series 2000 Varmint in .223 that would make both an excellent short range tactical / foxing rig (with the addition of a moderator)

The second is a Blaser LRS2 7.62mm which in terms of the PSH-o-meter must score at least a zillion de-merits with the GFW brigade

Both have their advantages & disadvantages: I don’t currently have a .223 & it could fill a gap in the burgeoning armoury – but then again, whilst the LRS2 would be confined to range use only, you can never ever discount that wonderful German engineering as well as gun grabbers with their trousers full of poo!

Therefore, this morning as a little adjunct to my musings over the course of this week, I thought that I would solicit a little feedback from my knowledgeable firearms friendly readership. All other things (such as price & both would come unscoped), what would you go for?

Now thats what I call shooting

I know that this pic is doing the rounds at the moment but when I think of all the times that I have spent standing in a boggy field with the rain trickling down my neck, I realise that others have it so so right ...

Adverts I'd like to see

& Saturdays final score was ...

(despite intermittent torrential downpours & it blowing a gale)

67 pheasants, 1 pigeon & a rabbit. Winter is starting to look up.

Now while we are on the subject of wet & windy afternoons (like today), what else is there to do other than to take already clean rifles apart & clean them again

For a change, some happy UK firearms news

I see that these fine gentlemen will soon be importing this to the UK ...

OK, so its only a clone & because of our crazy laws, will only be available in .22RF with a 16" barrel. However, clamp a moddie on the end of it & you will be well away.

Do I need one? No

Do I want one? Oh yessssssssssss ... if for no other reason than it will induce PSH among the GFW community

PSH: Pants Sh*tting Hysteria (Copyright Kim du Toit)

The Sten Gun

You wicked piece of vicious tin!
Call you a gun? Don't make me grin.
You're just a bloated piece of pipe.
You couldn't hit a hunk of tripe.
But when you're with me in the night,
I'll tell you pal, you're just alright!

You conceited pile of salvage junk.
I think this prowess talk is bunk.
Yet if I want a wall of lead
Thrown at some Jerry's head
It is to you I raise my hat;
You're a damn good pal...
You silly gat!

Ode to a Sten Gun by Gunner. S.N. Teed

Of all of the weapons that Her Majesty used to loan me on a periodic basis, I suppose that I liked the Sterling Sub Machine Gun the least. Its not that I had a real disliked of it; with the benefit of hindsight I suppose that I was just ambivalent to it. If you asked me to sum up my feelings I would have to say well at least it was light which when on exercise is the most important feature of any weapon, coupled with the fact that you had as much chance of being issued with any 9mm blank as you have of holding a politician to an election pledge – so at ENDEX, all that was required was a quick wipe over as it wouldn’t have been fired. However, in comparison to say the SLR or the LMG, the Sterling just wasn’t in the same league

Despite its shortcomings, the Sterling represents the (cough cough) pinnacle of development of its predecessor, the Sten gun … or to give it its great & glorious full official designation, the Carbine, Machine, Sten.

Notwithstanding any lingering misgivings that I might harbour for its final variant, there is something terribly British about the Sten: a design cobbled together in somewhat of a panic because we had sent an Army to war with very little of the kit that it actually needed – see, times don’t change do they dear readers. But forget the engineering excellence of the German MP38s & MP40s or indeed the solidity of the American’s Thompson … we produce over 4 million sub machine guns that … errrrr didn’t really work very well.

So what can we say about the Sten? Well first of all & importantly for a country that was fighting for its life, it was cheap & easy to produce - you could produce approximately 15 Stens for the cost of one Lee Enfield No.4.

The Sten emerged while Britain was engaged in the Battle of Britain, facing invasion by the Nazis. The army was forced to replace weapons lost during the evacuation from Dunkirk while expanding at the same time. Prior to 1941 (and even later) the British were purchasing all the Thompson submachine guns they could from the United States of America, but this did not begin to meet demand. The American entry into the war at the end of 1941 placed an even bigger demand on the facilities making Thompsons. In order to rapidly equip a sufficient fighting force to counter the Axis threat, the Royal Small Arms Factory, Enfield, was commissioned to produce a significantly cheaper alternative.

The credited designers were Major R. V. Shepherd, OBE, Inspector of Armaments in the Ministry of Supply Design Department at The Royal Arsenal, Woolwich, (later Assistant Chief Superintendent at the Armaments Design Department) and Mr. Harold John Turpin, Senior Draughtsman of the Design Department of the Royal Small Arms Factory (RSAF) Enfield. Shepherd had been recalled to service after having retired and spending some time at BSA.

However, that basic design & ease of manufacturing was also its Achilles heel

It was not very reliable. It was not very accurate and could carry on firing when you let go of the trigger and even go off when the trigger was not pulled (if dropped or it received some other form of shock or impact). It was often regarded as being just as dangerous to your own men as to the enemy.

Another source of problems was magazine spring, so magazines were routinely loaded with 28-30 rounds instead of "full capacity" 32 rounds to reduce strain on the magazine spring.

These are features that tend not to be considered as very good in your infantry’s weapons

Over the period of manufacture the Sten design was further simplified: the most basic model, the Mark III, could be produced from just five man-hours work.

Some of the cheapest versions were made from only 47 different parts. It was distinctive for its bare appearance (just a pipe with a metal loop for a stock), and its horizontal magazine.

From 1943, the Mark 2S were produced which incorporated an integral supressor. This would heat up rapidly when fired & a canvas cover was laced around for some protection. The suppressed models were produced at the request of the Special Operations Executive for use by their teams in occupied Europe.

These guns had shortened barrels enclosed into integral silencer. The silencer was rather effective so most audible sound when firing Mark 2S was the clattering of the bolt moving back and forth in the receiver. Contemporary manuals advised that the weapon was to be fired in semi-automatic mode; the full automatic fire was reserved for emergency situations, as it decreased the service life of silencer significantly.

So there you have it, a shorter history of one of our most numerous & iconic weapons which will never be held up as an example of either design excellence. It worked some of the time & sometimes when you didn't want it to. Call it what you will; the "Plumber's Nightmare", "Plumber's Abortion", "Stench Gun" or "Woolworth's Gun", it is now, for better or worse, embedded into our military history

Saturdays bag

Aside from some pheasants, we had lots of Daffys in the bag by the end of the day

Tasty enough but still not as exotic sounding as Mojave quail (as mentioned last week). Still, time to reach for the oranges

That time of year again

A swift trip through the bollroll last night shows that at least some of you are making good use of the 'season' ... unlike me who has yet of wave a shotgun in anger.

Bambi Basher has been out foxing

meanwhile Gwynnie has been putting a few ducks in the gamebag

& Thomas has bagged a few exotic Mojave Quail

The weather looks good for tomorrow - cold & sunny, so I think that Nipper & I will go beating on our local shoot

Last Fridays trigger time

I don't really want to mention that last Friday that it was still dark when your humble correspondent fired up Disco Dave, or indeed that it was even colder than the day before

nor indeed should I mention that I spent the day cheerfully munching through the cheap 7.62mm ammo I bought the other week

However it is worth pointing out that if you have going to shoot eeeeeevil black 'tactical' rifles, it is absolutely essential that you have matching black coffee from your matching black tactical thermos

But while we touch upon evil black rifles, I don’t want to talk about the ones above, but rather the one below … a .223 Steyr Mannlicher Scout which reader Chuckmeister has just purchased

I have never shot a Scout before & by just about by any measure, since it was first introduced, it has become a ‘cult’ rifle. Now like a lot of products that attract that epithet, opinion tends to be strongly divided about their merits & that is certainly true of the Scout – shooters tend to either love ‘em or loath ‘em. However, having being pretty much instrumental in talking its new owner into buying it (a lot my acquaintances tend to steer clear of me when I suggest that we just pop down to the gunshop when I am not buying firearms for myself, I seem to be quite good at persuading others to part with their money) I was very keen to have a whiz on it.

Taking the easy bit first – its made by the box’eads & it is very well made. Even though the version that I was shooting had a plastic stock, it still has a quality well engineered feel to it like a lot of things that emanate from sausage-side.

There are a number of neat features: full length Picatinny rail, built in bipod & space in the underside of the butt for a spare mag. Light & very very short, even if fitted with a moderator means that it would certainly make an excellent vermin rifle for night time lamping missions. Hummmmm … its possibly just as well that they don’t do a left handed version or Barry bank account might be taking yet another hammering

& finally, Mickey gets scoped up ...

If you will indulge me this morning, rather than post a range report of Friday’s trip to Bisley, there is another matter of not inconsiderable importance that I would like to draw to your attention. Ok, so it has taken a few months, hunting around in some of the darker recesses of internet & then the battle to get someone to do the work, but finally, yes finally, Micky has been ‘scoped up’

When I started this little voyage, the intention was always & has only ever been to create an ersatz sniper rifle as to buy in genuine WWII parts is way way beyond my humble means. However, what I wanted was something that ‘looked’ right & shot as well as could be expected for day to day range work. I certainly have no place for wall hangers – if its on my ticket, then expect the barrel to get hot in fairly short order.

Now just for the record, the scope is a copy of the Zeiss ZF41 & it is mounted on a repro Long Slide Rail (LSR) mount. To achieve this, a small amount of woodwork has had to be cut away from the left hand side of the receiver

& despite being a (& lets not mince our words here) a cheap knock off, the inital fit seems to be pretty good ... I wonder with use if it will stay that way

But, does it look the part? Well have to say, I think so

however, just for a moment, let’s recap on what we have here:
... a rifle that was built before WWII in Germany that was re-barrelled by the Vikings after the Hun’s didn’t seem to have any use for it any more
... the scope is a copy that was made in the Ukraine & has ended up in Blighty having been shipped from the States
... as for the mounts, they came from Russia.
Talk about the global arms trade!

The final & most important hurdle is still to come. Will Mickey hold zero & indeed, given that the LSR system has very limited windage adjustment, will it be possible to zero him at all? Alternatively, what with the scope being a copy, will its internals fall apart like a cheap suit within a hundred rounds?

Sadly, its a couple of weeks until I have any prospect of getting down to the range to see how he will shoot & yes, this final bit of waiting is by far the worst part.

Fox hunting with a difference

Shamelessly stolen from Theo Spark

The arms trade is alive & well in the West Country

Today dear readers started sensibly enough, youngster was shooting rabbits from his favourite position, out of his bedroom window & just after breakfast, I phoned up one of our local RFDs (who shall we just say that I am well known to) & ordered a couple of thousand rounds of CCI Mini Mag. Why so much you may ask? Well, firstly & most importantly because I can, & secondly because next week is …

Then, it was over to another one of our local RFD’s who is retiring. He has nearly sold all of his stock but has a few odds & ends remaining. Now I knew that he had some 7.62mm left & was keen to shift it - well, what with National Ammo Day coming up etc etc etc well lets just say that I picked up 140 rounds for seven quid. 60 rounds were boxed Radway Green vintage ’85 with a further 30 loose rounds of mixed. All absolutely fine for feeding to Mickey Mauser. But the bonus was 50 rounds of rebuilt RG, in Winchester cases, the powder having been remeasured & the cases hand selected & weighed. Those should go well in my Remington.

However & there’s a sickening inevitability about this bit dear readers, also up for sale at never to be repeated prices blah blah blah were a number of black powder pistols (which for those of you that aren’t aware despite our pernicious firearms legislation are still legal in the UK). So before you could say my Firearms Certificate needs yet another variation, The Englishman (for he was my willing accomplice in this little plan – no surprises eh?) & I were mulling over these two: A Colt .44 and a Rogers & Spencer also in .44

Anyway to cut at least 5 seconds of anguished decision making short, for £30 I bought the Colt

& for a similarly derisory sum, The Englishman is now the proud owner of the Rogers & Spencer.

In all truth, neither of the two large pictures above do either weapon justice although the Rogers does need a bit of TLC but then again, thats what wet winter nights are made for.

Now black powder is something that I know very little about save for the fact that one of the gun clubs that I belong to has a club Ruger which I use reasonably regularly. However, its as close as you can get to real pistol shooting in GFWland & the numpties who collective wet themselves at the very mention of the word firearm, don’t know that these are antiques that take about half an hour to load.

Sadly, I don’t think that I will get round to taking delivery of the new toy until after Christmas but the best way to beat those New Year blues could be simply to disappear into a cloud of thick black gunsmoke & not come out until spring.

Mauser update - Scope happiness

In the post today, the scope & mounts for Mickey Mauser.

These aren’t actual pictures, but are taken from the suppliers advertisement & oh deep joy, the product is exactly as advertised.

All that remains now is to check that the base mount fits properly on to the receiver, a little task for this evening & then take the whole bally lot down to my man to get it all fitted by someone who knows what they are doing … really dear readers, you didn’t for one moment expect me to be able a mange even a simple job like that?

If only all range days were like this

Sexy Girls Shooting Guns - Click here for another funny movie.

Via Where there's a William

RSPB, this ones for you

Project Mauser Update

Whilst I don’t suppose that a lot of you will feel that I need to make an excuse for a gratuitous Mauser post, so this morning I am afraid that you are going to get one, if for no other reason than I have had these pictures kicking around for some time.

With regard to Micky, a suitable ersatz repro scope has been found & purchased. Now starts the agonizing wait for it to arrive – it should take a month or so. Curses! Still, I always knew that this would take time.

Unlike the optics in these pics which I believe are mounted on ‘ low turret mounts’ or are they 'high turret mounts' your humble correspondents latest acquisition should come with Long Slide Rail mounts. Quite why the Hun had to keep messing around with different types of both optics & mounting systems, I really have no idea.

Indeed, it says a lot about respective national psyche’s in that the bulldogs developed a scope & mounting system in the shape of the No.32 Scope that just worked & got on with using it … for years.

Jerry on the other hand, no doubt in the pursuit of engineering supremacy, kept endlessly frigging about with different sights. Reading several of the Mauser bulletin boards, it would appear that to this day most of these systems still require locktite to keep them secure.

Anyway, baring any disasters in the shambles that constitutes the Royal Mail in not too many weeks, I will cross the next little hurdle to getting the rifle sorted out. Then, it will be off to the range to really see how well Micky can shoot.

The bunny huggers will be wailing again

Driving home from the pub through the lanes about a month ago, your humble correspondent did his own little bit to try & commence the badger cull by driving over one with both axles & the thick end of 6,000 lbs of Disco Dave. Looking back through my rear view mirror, the animal rolled over once, dusted itself off & disappeared into the hedgerow. Curses … & there I was dreaming of roadkill stew for lunch the next day

Now the bunny huggers mightn’t like this but our burgeoning badger population is a reservoir of bovine tuberculosis. No doubt. Whilst the badgers do enjoy excellent PR, it would appear that the government’s chief scientist Sir David King has finally accepted fact & thinks its time to start the cull

Together with five well-respected experts, I have assessed the ISG report and other research relating to badgers and TB in cattle. It is clear that badgers are a continuing source of infection for cattle and could account for 40% of cattle breakdowns in some areas. Cattle controls remain essential but I consider that, in certain circumstances and under strict conditions, badger removal can reduce the overall incidence of TB in cattle.

What the same bunny huggers whose rabid howling will certainly drown out the crrrackthhhump of gunfire, conveniently forget how much damage that badgers do to other wildlife. So those of us that have a view of the countryside that is formed by what we actually see & not the latest BBC2 anthropomorphist pseudo-nature programme load of twaddle might just have been right all along.

In any case, if you have ever sat out waiting for the red dogs to appear as the light starts to fail & seen a clan of badgers fan out to hoover a field, you will understand why ground nesting wild bird numbers are under such threat. Sadly, although threatened, said birds for some reason don’t seem to enjoy the same level of public support as brock does. Still, at night & at say +150 yrds over winter plough, old stripey will present a curiously sporting shot

& yes yes yes, I want one of these

Tell me that this doesn't remind you of Paddy's old 'Mark 10'

Ah, serendipity. Being in the right place at the right time. As it happened, this fine and sunny September Sunday morning found me and a few others at the local gun range, sighting in- or trying to- some rifles. Some were cooperating, some weren't. A normal outing to the range, really... until this fellow pulls up and starts unloading a big 'ol hunk o' pipe.

Lots more here. A free fire mission for John for the link

Shotgun Musings

When it comes to firearms, your humble correspondent is firmly of the opinion that sufficient is never enough. Aside form my boyhood fascination with guns that I freely admit that I have never grown out of, I want them all – at times I am not quite sure what I want, or indeed why I want it … but I want it NOW! Even today, with nine firearms that can call Free Market Towers home sweet home, I spend hours secretly plotting further purchases, either on the my ‘puter or pouring over the positively Alpine sized pile of gunporn that resides in the downstairs kharzi.

It hasn’t always been thus but since 1978 there hasn’t been a time when I haven’t owned at least one firearm. The actual number has gone up & down over the years, depending upon where I have been living, how much dosh I have been making, availability of shooting & lastly (cue red mist at this point) how many of my lawfully owned processions the State has seen fit to seize in a parliamentary mandated fit of vindictiveness.

At the moment, the Gat-o-meter is at nine & trust me when I say that the needle is going in one direction. However when we quit London & moved back to civilisation, all that was in the cabinet in those days was my Beretta 12-bore.

Now as you can see, she isn’t one of their rather spiffy SO models, or indeed even one of the higher grade 687s, she was & I think, still is just about the cheapest model in the range.

I bought her because at the time (1989 I think) it was the best that I could afford & back in those days £500 for a nearly new half decent shotgun was a lot of money.

Unlike my rifles, the tech spec of shotguns holds little interest for me. She has fixed chokes (what they are I don’t know) & I couldn’t tell you what I barrel lengths are … I just shoot the damn thing … & over the last 18 years, shot her a great deal.

I can tell you without having to resort to going & actually looking in the shotgun safe that there are four marks on the woodwork. I can tell you the circumstances & story of each one. The gold plating on the trigger face has long since worn away & if I look after her & believe you me I do, she wont just see Boy out so much as see his nippers out as well.

When chums start talking about the latest okkie cokey high velocity cartridge, I have tendency to shug my shoulders: clays, I’ll use any old cr*p, but for game I shoot Eley’s excellent VIP 32g No.6s. Nothing else. Again, it just works & I can’t even begin to count the amount of game as well as vermin that I have killed with that combination over the years.

Currently, there are four other shotguns in the shotgun safe: Mrs FM’s Beretta Silver Pigeon 20g, my Franchi semi-auto 20g bunny gun, an AYA .410 single barrel that Boy will have in a couple of years, as well as my father in laws Spanish 12g side by side that will also become Boy’s in due course. After all, every lad should in time have his grandfather’s gun – it doesn’t matter how cheap, old or battered it is- that’s not the point.

I try to shoot everything in that safe on a reasonably regular basis, just to keep everything moving & if nothing else regularly cleaned & oiled. However my default setting is always to reach for the Beretta. It doesn’t matter whether I am on a smart 300 bird driven day or just walking round the farm potting the odd pigeon, she never looks out of place. My only reservation is when out lamping rabbits in– bouncing across a ploughed field at night in Larry Landrover is a sure fire way of destroying woodwork; hence that why I have the synthetically stocked Franchi.

Would I like a half decent side by side box lock ejector – you betcha! I can regularly we seen scanning the racks in the numerous gun shops that I frequent for the right deal. Will I ever buy myself another shotgun … possibly not.

People of the Gun

NBC pointed out this post by The Trainer. It would be good to see a good bulldog representation. Go there now & sign up. You know it makes sense to join the 'tribe'.

While we are doing some Sunday gunday stuff, have a little look at the following:

Think about this one as we head into winter & the prospect of sodden wind swept ranges await us Brits ... Traction Control has also been down at the range. Check out not only the yummy kit, but also the weather!

Pheasant shooting woes

Regular readers will have noticed some time ago now that there has been a complete dearth of posts about our little shoot. Sadly at the end of last season, the syndicate in the finest traditions of all dark matter, imploded upon itself & we all went our separate ways, mainly because of our complete inability to hold our birds. It might have been the foxes but we shot all of those. It could have been shoot sabs abducting our poults at night … or more likely it was that we didn’t have a clue what on earth it was were supposed to be doing.

In truth, there were probably two main reasons for the abject failure. Firstly, & we knew this from day one, the ground was never going to be easy & with little cover available we were always going to find it difficult to stop the pheasants from wandering off. In fact the final nail in the coffin really was hearing from the next door shoot who are in the fortunate position of having a surfeit of scruffy ground, that they were getting well & truly stuck into the birds that we were putting down. They knew this because all of the birds that we put down (approx 550 over 2 seasons) were ringed.

Secondly & this is always the way, four of us were doing 90% of the work required. Even then, because of work pressures we could never get down to the pen enough at the critical times of day to dog in. This only compounded the problems created by the topography. So in the end, we decided to draw stumps & put the shoot out of its misery.

Now all of this has left your humble correspondent at somewhat of a loose end this season which given the amount of time that I am currently having to devote to work, is probably no bad thing. However with only a couple of days booked (although there are a couple of trips starting to take shape) things are looking a little thin at the moment. This is probably no bad thing because just at the moment I am stuggling to find even a day a month to get to the range & certainly at the moment, the concept of morning / evenings feeding birds & out doing virmin control are completely out of the question.

Still, as the leaves start to come off the trees, it gets colder & the evenings start drawing in, I am having terrible urges to break out the Beretta & not put it away until the beginning of Feburary. Looks like I have just for a change, get my finger out & get a few days organised.

A little shooting project

Of course, I completely & utterly blame reader EX-STAB for this, but somewhere in the murky depths of your humble correspondent’s alcohol ravaged bonce is the establishment of the Defence of the Realm (Stout Bulldogs) Rifle Club for oh so many reasons.

Starting to mull over what might pass for a constitution (for Home Office purposes), I was thinking about something along the lines of …

The object of the Club is to encourage skill at arms by providing instruction, marksmanship training & practice in the use of arms to any of Her Majesty’s subjects so that they will be better fitted to serve their country in the Regular, Reserve Armed Forces, Territorial Army or any other organisation in which their services may be required in the Defence of the Realm during times of peril.

Ah, I can almost already hear the happy crackle of gratuitous gunfire while nostrils fill with a heady mixture of gunsmoke & bloody meat, gently cooking on the BBQ.

Any takers??

Family Handguns - Reprise

It seems that my family seem to have a habit of losing their handguns - sometimes through their own fault, other times not. However for one reason or another, we just do not seem to be able to hang on to them. Now whilst all stout bulldogs rile against the UK's insane handgun ban, the loss over the years of these firearms represent a piece of my family's history & service.

So this morning dear readers, we start our little tour with the Webley IV .455, carried by Grandfather Free Market during the Great War

Not the most sophisticated of weapons even while 'in issue', it is precisely the sort of sidearm a proper bulldog should carry - like its owner, slightly old fashioned, solid, reliable but packing a decent punch.

Grandfather FM kept it after the armistice of 1918 but handed it in at the start of World War II with one of these, a Luger 9mm which be had taken as a trophy off a German officer who surrendered to him

I still have the holsters for both weapons, but its not quite the same is it?

Moving forward a generation, at the end of World War II, Father FM had acquired a brace of these Colt 1911s

At the end of the war, he dropped them down a well. As he confessed to me, he only used one of them on one occasion, when he managed to shoot out one of his parents kitchen windows by mistake - after that, I think he rather lost his appetite for JMB's classic design.

As for your dear author, well the taxpayer trained me to use one of these.

Like it? I purchased a civilian version as well, which I really enjoyed shooting. Not the most imaginative choice, but spares & repairs are rather cheap when they use the same thing at the 'office' if you get my (cough cough) drift. Yes I know the the Browning has its faults & there are those of you that will decry the 9mm round, but it just worked. What more can you ask for?

However, when Michael Howard (my he die both slowly & in pain) banned Her Majesty's law-abiding citizens for owning side arms, it was surrendered & has no doubt long since been destroyed. So for the time being, here endth Family FM's handgun collection. However rest assured that I see this only as a temporary interuption & in the course of events, normal service will be resumed.

When jihad strikes

Looks like the boys from the Cavalry Arms Corporation have the proper kit for your personal fight against the global holy war & as they say
... always take more ammo with you because you never know how much jihad you are going to have to deal with

A wave of fat capitalist cigar to Rednecks Revenge for this one

A Day at the Ranges - The Old Bill

Yesterday was spent, not so much ensuring that the wheels of industry remain well oiled, rather more that the bolt was had just enough oil – shooting on Bisley’s Short Siberia range in The Old Bill competition - Old Bill of course being a reference to Captain Bruce Bairnsfather, meaning that it was WWI weapons only … no eeeevil black rifles; darkest of rages!

This goes someway to explaining why here you see your humble correspondent using an Eddystone P14 .303 instead of some of his more slightly more up to date firearms ...

However the finest traditions of all good range days were maintained, as you can see here, with one person shooting, another spotting & everybody else standing around giving good jaw. Ever noticed that? Forget the fact that we all spend a huge amount of time looking forward to range days - when the event actually happens, much more time is spent shooting a line than shooting target ... ah, I remember my old Fothetgill-Scrotum etc etc etc

The course of fire from the 200 yrd firing point comprised 2 sighters, then 5 rounds snap on a Fig. 12 target followed by a further 5 rounds rapid

Needless to say (& even I have to admit) there was a lot & I do mean a lot a rather tasty old kit on display - in fact on several occasions during the morning I caught The Englishman wandering around like a kid in a sweet shop or alternatively, my own facial expression when I visited the Kittery Trading Post

After a sterling lunch comprising Bambibasher's finest home made game snorkers (truly proof of an Almighty), 3 of us retired to the 100 yrd firing point for gratuitous expenditure of ammo - mainly other peoples but thats the way of the world …

... playing with other assorted toys, not forgetting to take lots of time out to drink a lot of coffee & 'give good gun' - well at least talk about it

& yes, I did sneak out my plastic Remington 700 for a little of this

A perfect day?

With Saturday nights rage behind me (see posts passim) we headed over to The Englishman’s Castle – now for those on you that don’t believe me when I say that it comprises rolling acres, this was the view looking back from our impromptu firing point

As for the toys … well we only took out a limited selection: my new Mauser (its first outing), one of my Ruger 1022s & the Englishman’s beloved Marlin

Now needless to say your humble correspondent had hardly has a whiz on his new toy before his oppo was also busily giving the new sausage machine a good rousting. This is probably because his Marlin, whilst cycling happily on .357 Magnum loads, it just didn’t want to have anything to do with the 38 Specials – ok ok, so I know that the answer is just to use 357, but you don't have to tell me that

... as for the new rifle

well, I only put 20 rounds through it, but it all seems to work & even for a first outing shot well enough – actually, I can’t wait to give it a proper workout in a couple of weeks time at Bisley.

Now not having shot a service rifle for some time, I have to 'fess up that it was a very pleasent surprise. In comparision to my Remy 700, Mickey is 25% lighter, weighing in at 9lbs - the recoil was very managable - I please remember, I am a complete & utter recoil wuss.

While all of this was going on & the rounds were going down, we actually found a use for Boy

... stuffing Ruger mags. Who needs one of those hand cranked mag loaders when you ha ve a nipper to do it for you? & so the morning was spent thus, in fine company, with the happy crackle of gunfire echoing around the Vale.

Footnote: when we finished up, it was a short drive across the fields down to the village & of course the pub. When we got there, this was the sight that greeted us ...

Sitting in the sun, drinking pints of Mr Ws finest foaming, munching on chunks of roast pig & talking about shooting ... does it get any better than that??

Why I am breaking open the FM armoury this morning

Kevin has done yet another brutal dissection of the UKs crazy ineffectual firearms legislation in this latest piece: Cognitive Dissonance. Having read it late last night, your humble correspondent was so consumed with rage at the very thought of GFW nangers dictating what I can & cannot own that I decided to break out me’gats in the morning & get some rounds down – hence the lack of posting. See you all later when equilibrium has been restored

Warning – watching this may necessitate the need for a change of underwear

Unmitigated hilarity from The Dissident Frogman.

Thank you to everyone that sent the link - it ranks up there with The AnarchAngel's Team Infidel

Why do I know you'll like this?

via Oleg Volk

Micky comes home

Workwise, the last couple of weeks have been completely & utterly tonk - hence the the papacy of posting. Still this evening moral has been raised because Micky came home this evening

Oh deep joy!

Thus far, Micky has had a sort of a trigger job - the first stage is still creepy, but the second stage has been lightened & is pretty crisp. So now, its time to get serious about sorting out some optics

OK, so Oleg Volk I'm not. I'll try & get some better ones over the weekend