Progress on the Mosin Nagants

Cleaning up the second rifle today.
To my surprise, the recoil pads arrived. I just ordered them this past Wednesday.
-got them at www.tickbitesupply.com  AKA David's Collectibles.
The fit the stock well and feel good when I seat the butt in my shoulder.  We'll see before too long how they perform under live fire. ;)

I had some help today.  She operates a screwdriver surprisingly well.
Scooter, my oldest granddaughter.  Future Gunny.

Currently I'm pretending to be a restaurant patron.  Scooter is the waitress.

How to accumulate tools

Projects.

Home projects require at minimum two trips to the hardware store.
Automotive repairs / projects require at least two trips to the auto parts store.
Sometimes they require deep googling and impatient waiting on a UPS delivery of a part or hard to find special tool.

I'll be doing some polishing on the cam surfaces of my Mosin bolt this weekend. The file marks are so bad I can see them without my glasses on.

I ran my Dremel to destruction a while back cutting out a small bolt in a tight space on the Sonnage's Jeep.

It seems I'm now in need of a new Dremel tool. :-)

The bonus is that Scooter, my oldest granddaughter is coming to stay with us over the long weekend.
Scooter, her younger sister and my daughter stopped by to visit Belle the other day.  Scooter was very interested in the table set up at the back of the family room.
"What's all the stuff for?"
"Paw Paw is cleaning the rifles we just got"
"Oooh."

The Paw Paw / Scooter project for the weekend is going to be field stripping, and cleaning the other Mosin Nagant.

Every well bred, well educated young lady should know how to field strip a Mosin, IMHO.

damnit stop helping

The last post left me famished so I'm online trying to order a pizza from Dominos and they've re-vamped their website to make it "more user friendly" I'm sure.

Now I'm confused, and what would have been a rote muscle memory exercise is going to require actual attention to detail.

do not try to help. if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

This is how it starts, isn't it...

I mean the WWII rifle jones.

I've had the good fortune to shoot Mosin Nagants and an M1 at past blogshoots, and of course Belles's Tokorev SVT40 anytime I get the hankering. Others as well I'm sure I'm forgetting.
I thought they were cool to shoot. The M1 almost seemed to not need my participation to put a round on target. But, I had somewhat of a "meh" reaction nonetheless.

Now that I've torn down one of the Mosin's Belle brought back from her trip up yonder, something existential has changed in my mind.
In the process of field stripping I came to know how the rifle was put together. In the process of cleaning I came to know how the moving parts worked, the Mosin bolt I found the most interesting.
Simple solution to a complex problem.

I find I'm searching for ways to make the Mosin bolt work better. (woe is me)
 I've already ordered two recoil pads that fit up in place of the steel butt plate on the stock.*

I've yet to break down the other Mosin Nagant and clean it up.  I'm saving it for this coming weekend, because my brain tells me that I know myself and I will want another rifle to break down and fondle.

The bad / good/ bad? thing is all of the sudden I really, really want an M1 Garand of my own.**
There's also this little niggling spark of a thought in the back of my mind about an Enfield.
must
sit
down
and
grit
my
teeth.
resist urges.








Do not look at me like that!  It's a Mosin Nagant for crikey sake. At $139 it's hardly WWII collector's item.  It's more like buying a rusted out 1968 VW bug with a seized engine. Ripe for a resto-mod.
 I could put on a  buffalo hide coat and a big fur hat I suppose, to damp down the recoil, but I'm pretty sure I'd pass out before I got through twenty rounds in this heat down heah.

** OOh! and a BAR too! what a tall cool drink of water whoopass that would be.  Make a good banner pic for the blog, dontcha think?

Some Chicks Like Big Guns

Belle finally got around to getting her Tokorev taken care of.  There was some mild pucker factor around the BAR Corp. HQ. for a few days as the gunsmith working on her beloved SVT 40 had misplaced the mag. This is the original mag issued with the rifle.  While that was going on I went online looking for some additional mags and bought two.
All is well that ends well.  The original mag was located and the day Belle went by to pick it up she took "Natasha" to the range and ran a few rounds through her.

She texted the image below to me at work.  (mumble, grumble)
Looks like the tango is down to me.




Belle noted that the "new" mags would not fit in the Tok.
The original is in the center.  The two recent additions are to the left and right.*



Belle said it seemed to be the square nubs on the back of the mags. while not clear in the pic, the nubs are slightly taller than the original mag.
Not sure what I'm going to do, return the mags or take a file to the nubs.
I haven't personally inspected, nor tried to insert the mags into the Tok yet. So I'll do my own test fit before I make a decision.
To my own credit and sometimes detriment, I've not much fear of  modding things.
I'm no Redneck Engineer, but you know, Fools tread where angels fear to go.
















* Yes, bed wetters, the "mag clip thing that goes up" on the right is in fact "loaded".
I bet if I dropped it on the floor in front of you, I could get a brown note out of you.

.

What to do about Syria?

Nothing.

The U.S. has no vested interest and certainly no ally in the Syrian Civil War.
Doing nothing is the perfect course of action.  The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
In this case, no.  The enemy of my enemy is my enemy's enemy.  Let them sort it out.  We've shed enough blood in the middle east.


Note the deafening silence from the anti-war protesters?  Code Pink? Hello?
Crickets.

Cleaning the Mosin

De-Cosmolining actually.
Today was 9 hours of working on the Austin project interspersed by periodically going out to the garage to jiggle the pan of Mosin parts soaking in mineral spirits.  That, and re-position the lawn sprinkler.*

Man, that rifle is simplicity defined.








Time to extract the parts from soaking and start brushing, wiping down, and oiling.

Prepare for the Doctor's secret handshake.

Still more cleaning to do on the barrel and stock, which will give me something mindless to do in the evenings over the next few days.  And, I have a whole 'nuther Mosin to strip down and clean.  :-)

Wish I had a ginormous ultrasonic cleaner. I saw on youtube where some guys have bungied an electric sander to the side of a rubbermade tub to agitate the cleaning solution for auto parts. Years ago I had the  idea to attach an audio speaker to a metal tub for the same purpose.  Never tried it though. Certainly not ultrasonic, but some agitation is better than none.





* We had a 68% chance of rain today. I was certain if I started to water the grass, it would rain.
Nary a drop.

.

And speed limits keep people from speeding toooo!

Seattle Mayor encourages businesses to post "gun free" zone signs to deter criminals.

snort, snicker, pbffft.

SRSLY?

Maybe you should just pass a municipal law banning criminals in general.

What became of Aretae?

I've not visited his blog in a while. I just noticed my blog roll shows his most recent post 2 months ago.
So I clicked it and got this:

I've not been invited to the party, so says the error message.

His n Hers

Latest addition to the toy box.
Arriving home with Belle tomorrow.

Terrible pic.

Waiting

I doesn't likes it.
But replacing a windshield is one of those things I cannot do myself.

I did get the fog lamp replaced this morning though.
Soon my rollerskate of A car will be all shiny and new looking again.

Ever get that weird feeling?

That either something good, or bad is about to happen?
I'm going with the "good" part of that.

I've had three people that I've not seen in quite some time ping me in email  this week wanting to get together.

Months:
A long time friend, one of my architorture acolytes that left after ten years and went to the dark side, and became, gasp, a contractor.

Years:
A landscape architect I worked with beginning 13 years ago in California.  He happens to be in Houston for a while, ultimately headed to Boston to open a new office there.

Decades:
One of my most influential and favorite professors from  my college days called me out of the blue. I was kind of expecting a pitch for a donation, or a request to come judge a design charette for the students.
There was none of that.   I answered the phone and he said,"this is Rodney" and I knew who it was like it was yesterday.
He'd run across an old newspaper clipping he'd kept. An article and pics of a bunch of wood carvings we'd done, as students in his class at a  park in College Station.  One of the pics was of me.
I cannot say what I did in his design class that made such an impression on him so many years ago, that he would call me 30 years plus later.  I did work my ass off in his class though.

Oh. shit. It just dawned on me.
It's not me this is about.  I think Rodney's time might be nigh.
I think I may have to make a short road trip Sunday.

Middle Class

According to Wikipedia the definition is,

"The middle class is a class of people in the middle of a societal hierarchy. In Weberian socio-economic terms, the middle class is the broad group of people in contemporary society who fall socio-economically between the working class and upper class. The common measures of what constitutes middle class vary significantly among cultures."

Currently, IMHO the "common measure" is that the middle class is those of us that find criminals below us, and above us.

You know...we really don't have to put up with this.
At your next opportunity, go vote.

As a footnote, we might keep Rand Paul and Ted Cruz.
It's time for Paul Ryan to take up tractor driving and I think a new career as a "lady boy" in Miami would be an excellent choice for Marco Rubio.*





* did I actually say that out loud?
I must be more upset than I thought.  It must be time to go connect with my inner curmudgeon in a junk yard again.

Image stolen from Borepatch with no guilt whatsoever.

Global Warming is just not Cooperating

Michael Mann's hockey stick graph has gone completely flacid.
I'll dispense with the heavy duty sciency graphs, tables and homogenized data bases and just get to my personal complaint.

I have a garagenering experiment all lined up for tomorrow for which I wanted the high temp to hit 100 degrees, minimum.  This is not too much to ask down here in SE Texas in August. It is a frequent occurrence   The chances of rain were kind enough to take the weekend off, but the heat decided to go with it.

















Not one day above 100 degrees and note the overnight lows.  WTF?
Oh don't give me that crap about how it's now called "Climate Change" and the "climate", aka weather, is now experiencing "extremes" just because you re-labeled your failed narrative.
There's only one thing based on more useful lies than fishing - economics.*
There's only one thing based on more variables and fewer constants than Golf - meteorology.*

Looks like it's time to get out the old books about the impending ice age and dust them off.  Eventually one of those crackpots might be right.








* In only two of the four undertakings can you be wrong 90% of the time and remain employed.
Choose two:
A. Fishing
B. Economics
C. Golf
D. Meteorology
E. All of the above.
F. None of the above.
G. Tests give me panic attacks.

The replacement arrived

Ow!*

There, there. It will all be better soon.

This should be a quick Saturday fix. The hardest part will be figuring out how to disassemble the plastic pan on the bottom side of the car to get to the fog lamp.
Then it's off to have the windshield replaced.  My wallet moaned when it saw the price, but my little car  gets very little respect as it is. It is much too young to let it go all ghetto already.

Also slated for this weekend are adventures in washing a black car with hard water in 100 degree heat.
I have an experiment in the works, a test if you will, of a method to reduce water spots.  We shall see.
More on that later.



* caught a rock at 70+, which makes me wonder; what does that feel like when you are riding a motorcycle and it's not the lamp that picks up the one hop grounder but your torso?

Jaw Saw

Worx Jaw Saw.
I bought one. Yeah, I know, it's an infomercial tool, but it's better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick!
Bought it on Amazon.
It actually works pretty well. I turned a big pile of branches I pruned off the trees 4 months a while ago and left in a pile in the back yard, into itty bitty sticks.  Living in suburbia, I can't burn 'em or just pile them up on the curb for pickup.
The pile of branches is now neatly tucked away in my municipal utility district approved trash can.
You aren't going to cut down any trees with it, but it's not intended for that anyway.  Well, maybe a wayward china berry sapling.
It is reasonably well constructed, although the advertised self adjusting chain tensioning system doesn't actually self adjust without some assistance.*
Pruning is like eating Lays potato chips.  You can't just eat one.
Before you know it you've got a massive pile of branches. The pruning is the fun part.
The branch cleanup sucks.  Less so now.
Aside from the chain adjustment, the only other downside I found to the tool was the lack of an air conditioner to keep me from perspiring...heavily.





 *don't tell me I'm doin it wrong. I read the instructions and everthin

One of the best statements I've read in a while

"You can't demand a right to make your own definition of right and wrong but deny someone else the same right."

In that single sentence,  Proud Hillbilly succinctly defines the fundamental problem with the progtard mindset.

Unfortunately, liberalism is a mental disorder, and so, their response is, "can too", because they are spoiled little three year olds in adult bodies.

The Mosin conversation

Bob posted up that a fresh batch of Mosin Nagants were available at Military Gun Supply.
Bob has a scary collection of Mosins, of which I've had the displeasure pleasure of shooting.
Brutal rifle to shoot. 7.62 x 54R round fired out of the most un-ergonomic boomstick ever produced.
But.
I want one.
And so does the Lovely Belle. She has mentioned this on more than one occasion.
It so happens that Belle is headed up Bob's way to visit friends in a week.

And, I find I'm having to "lobby" for a short diversion from her weekend activities to buy not just one, BUT TWO, Mosins.

SRSLY?



Someone talk some sense into this woman......plz?

Entropy

The inevitable disintegration of order into disorder.

Pretty much sums up the State of the Union  now that I think about it, but that's not where I was going with this.

I seem, regardless of vehicle ground clearance, to have an innate ability to follow at just the right distance to catch every rock and flicked cigarette butt* that comes out of the vehicle in front of me.

Truck, vans, compact car, car the size of a ballerina slipper, doesn't matter, most of my vehicles have had a major crack in the windshield.

The ballerina slipper, my current car - Scion tC - is a rock magnet. It started with a chip. When that failed to develop into a crack, the universe deemed that a rock impact was needed at the lower edge of the windshield where it could not be seen from inside the car.  That rapidly developed into an exquisite question mark shaped crack.
 This was not enough to defile the first new car I have owned since 1996.  The right front fog lamp apparently needed a good killin as well.

Of course, I can't just buy a replacement lens for the fog lamp.  I can buy a replacement fog lamp, from Toyota for $260.  Oy, such a deal?
A set of aftermarket fog lamps, that is, two fog lamps, are on the way for half that price.  The windshield replacement?  That will be roughly $500.  I was expecting worse considering the car was built in Japan and imported.  I still need a Tums to quell the acid reflux.

I am not proud. I have driven vehicles that embarrassed my children for many, many years, cracked windshields and all, but the crack in the Scion windshield is annoying the bejeezus out of me.
I'm used to having to constantly repair the junkyard fleet, but I hadn't expected to have to start fighting entropy on a car, bought new, that I've had 18 months just yet. (well, I have clocked 31,000 miles on it already. Like I always say, "it ain't the years, it's the mileage" when people tell me I don't look so good)
Could be worse I suppose.**








* Had a lit butt land on my Jeep hood at 30 mph in the "sweet spot" where the negative pressure bubble was just perfect.  It just laid there and quivered while burning the clear coat. Thankfully after a few minutes a cross wind took pity on me and blew it off the hood.
** Years ago, the AC had crapped out in my Ford Ranger and I was driving down 59 South next to a Semi with the window down.  Semi ran over a flattened metal hub cap and launched it into the air.
It passed by the driver's side open window in a vertical orientation a few inches from the cab.  The air flow, thankfully, caught it and directed it just past the back left corner of the cab and out between the two back posts of the rack over the bed of the truck, pretty much dead center over the tailgate.
I did have presence of mind to lean to the right just a bit, just in case.  I recall thinking, "wow, I'm really glad that didn't shred the left side of my face."  I was more handsome back then. It is less of a concern these days. :-)

Und Zo

It begins.
We ditched Comcast because their internet service kept dropping out and went back to ATT.
ATT has been rock solid riiight up until now.
I am posting from my phone.
Moments ago I WAS working from home.
Emeffers.

Fracking a Threat to the Kingdom

"A Saudi prince has warned that his oil-reliant nation is under threat because of fracking technology being developed elsewhere around the world."

I can just imagine the thought process, "oh, shit, I didn't see that coming"

Maybe the libtards are right, maybe we should just leave the middle east alone to live their 7th century lifestyle.  After all, our meddling in the middle east is why they hate us all, right?  Never mind the fact that the western countries developed the oil industry that made them billionaires.

Since we now, via technology developed in a free* society, have access to more oil than resides under your god forbidden country, we don't need  you so much anymore.

Since we don't need your oil, our interests in your country, and all the countries in close proximity have diminished greatly.  

Were we to turn Iran into a radio active stained glass mosaic, there would be no strategic reason for our military to be anywhere near you bunch of inbreeds.

We could pull our military out and let the lot of you have at one another.

We could cut off the foreign aid to all the islamist American haters.

And, there wouldn't be a damn thing you could do about it.

Well, I suppose you could threaten to embargo oil deliveries to France, but ya know, they haven't done much for us lately either.

I suppose the U.N. could pass a scathing resolution between shrimp cocktail and wine parties, firmly scolding the U.S. for oppressing the billionaire royal family.

Were we to to just say whiskey tango foxtrot and walk away, you would spend every last dime you have defending yourself from your own subjects and the inbred malcontents you have oppressed in the entire region for generations.

Fracking isn't the threat.  

Good luck with the new Caliphate.  

Oh, and best of luck diversifying your economy.  You are quite a few centuries behind the curve.

*mostly free. less so every day it seems.