Cliff R

Just a reminder about the "cycle of life". Few reading this get to see how folks end more than I do. (CSI for the County for 16 years ) Just ran a case last night where a 24 year old hung himself because of a bad break up with a girlfriend....UGLY. Anyhow, I see WAY too many folks leave this place too early because they spend most of their adults lives on some sort of "body abuse program". The ones on the FULL body abuse program leave here much sooner. That's tobacco, alcohol, drugs, poor nutrition and little if any exercise, cardio, etc. When you are young you can abuse the chit out of your body and bounce right back like it never even happened. After decades of abuse your body will reach a point where it's had enough and you can and most likely will develop issues in one form or another that will lead to either a very poor quality of life or life-ending, or both. I see 30-50 years olds ALL THE TIME succumb to their long history of being on the "full body abuse program". Some of these are folks I've known for many years. Just lost a really good friend two years ago who drank like a fish and smoked like a chimney. He developed COPD about 7 years before his death. He reached a point where he'd smoke a cigarette then step outside and literally cough a lung right on the ground! When he finally got his composure he'd go do a breathing treatment.....WTF? I asked him one day about it and he very quickly snapped at me "fuk-it, gotta die of somthin". Well two years ago that time came as a pieces of tar dislodged from one of his arteries and went to his brain. He fell in the living room and never made it to bed. His wife found him the next morning paralyzed on one side of his body and unable to speak. Three hours later in the ICU the doctor told them that he might be able to save him, but even if they did he would never walk or speak again. Unable to speak the doctor asked them both yes or no (one squeeze on his wife's hand or two) whether to take him off life support. Without hesitation he squeezed his wife's hand once........he was dead in 15 minutes...... Is that the way you want to leave this World, and 20-30 years before you should have?.........FWIW.....

Thanks, I'm liking not working so many hours, leaves time for fun stuff! I can see where it would be beneficial to leave the factory coatings and Cerakote over them. The key to success would be getting all the oil out of the pores of the base material. Heat is your friend with these things for sure, plus a good degreaser.......

"Money in your pockets brother 🍺🍺🇺🇸" You reach a point in your life where you have to decide when to stop "grinding" (paying chit off and staying ahead of the tax man) and to start enjoying what time you have left. I see so many people work their asses off right up to the end then don't get to enjoy any of it. I had a BIG reality check this year as I lost two close friends who just retired. They both had big plans, had saved and sacrificed for decades, then GONE before they could do any fun chit. I reached that point this year. Winding down the carb business and retiring from the CSI job at the end of the year. I've been doing it slowly as I stopped doing carb restorations two years ago. All my employees have left so it's just me doing everything and I'm taking more and more off my plate every day. Currently doing mostly parts sales, only working Monday-Thursday in the shop and not taking in any more work. I'm still going to do some "cash and carry" stuff to support some of my expensive habits, like building AR's and such. Otherwise just going to enjoy what time I have left........

Thanks. I use Brake-Clean here to degrease before heating them up and then again after the warming process if any oily residue bleeds to the surface. Never tried the Cerakote deal. My 450 Bushmaster below was the first AR platform I've camo'd. Have done a few muzzle loaders and shotguns in the past but never really played around with patterns and using leaves and ferns like I did on the 450. Really happy with how the 450 came out. Will be doing one of my 308-AR's in the next month or so before we head out West Elk hunting......

45/70 was my "go to" caliber for decades. I've been shooting and hand loading for them dating clear back to the early 1980's. My favorite load is a 300 grain Remington hollow point backed by a full charge of Reloader 7. I've taken scores of Whitetail Deer with it and Elk out West. Haven't had a deer take another step on a good hit and no Elk has made it over 30 yards hit in the good stuff. Most just drop right where they were standing. I've tried heavier bullets a few times and still have some LOOSE teeth from that deal....NO THANKS! A good friend handed me his Ruger #1 once in 45/70 with a custom 500 grain hand-load. I touched off one round, picked my glasses and hat up off the ground and gave it back to him.........and it still hurts 30 years later!!! Sadly I retired both of my 45/70's a few years back and moved to a 450 Bushmaster. It doesn't have quite the whack of the 45/70 but I like the platform a LOT better. Completely 100 percent weatherproof, lighter and semi-auto for much quicker back up shots. Hornady also got their chit together when they got in on that deal with Bushmaster. I've never seen any commercial cartridge in a semi-auto platform be that accurate. 100 yard groups will pretty much all be in the same hole if you do your part!.........Cliff

Nice setup brother Cliff 👍 Tks, been keeping it pretty close by since the Pandemic started. Would hate to end up someplace and have everybody pointing guns but me!.....

"Carburator I thought everything was fuel injection." You'd be surprised. I probably turn down at least half a dozen carburetor builds a day. The phone just never quits ringing......

Something I do here to help cure the paint quicker and it also helps keep it from "running" if you get to close or apply to much is to put the item to be painted in front of a small 1500 watt electric heater for about 10-15 minutes. The pre-heat also helps get moisture out of the pores of metal parts, especially those with a matt or rougher finish. I've been using this procedure for decades to paint Marine carburetors here in the shop. It's nearly impossible to end up with a "run" in the paint and it "sets" and cures much faster.......

If we are talking "survival" 22LR fits the bill nicely. I can take just about anything with it in these parts but will move up a notch for deer. If I'm going to have to defend myself primary weapon will be one of my AR-15's, probably the one in the pic below with one of my Eotech's on it, secondary will be my Smith and Wesson M & P 2.0. My back-up/off duty is currently either my S & W 38 revolver or Hellcat outfitted with their new 15 round magazine. Retiring from the CSI job end of this year which will end a long career in LE working now for three different agencies. I started WAY back in the late 1970's and continuous service one place or the other till end of this year, then throwing in the towel. Got some really BAD news yesterday, an old friend passed away. We were stationed together from 1999 till 2003 when I retired. We stayed in touch until just before the Pandemic started. I has just thinking about him the other day and was going to call. Got a call instead from a Reservist that came Active Duty and worked with us for a couple of years after 9-11. Freddy was just about in tears when he told me the bad news. Mr T and I did investigations together out of the same office and rode around together just about every day in a big black Suburban. He will certainly be missed and the World is a lesser place without him in it.......we'll raise some shots of Four Roses for you in Elk camp in October........

+2 for .22 LR......

Very nice! Been to the range with it?.....

Update on the magazines. I looked over all the options and decided to upgrade the followers to add two rounds for 12 plus 1. I may get a few more mags at some point and upgrade to 15 plus one, but don't like loosing the feature to hold the slide back after the last round is fired......

Not completely. I'm full time selling parts and custom rebuild kits. That is keeping me so busy I really don't have time for anything else. I stopped doing restoration work almost 3 years ago in December when my last employee moved on. I'm still doing a few rebuilds to fund my expensive hobbies like building AR's and buying handguns, shooting, hunting out West, etc. I also open up a couple of Saturdays a month for troubled combinations folks just can't figure out. The record to date is 1800 miles one way. Most vehicles are trailered or driven for about 200 miles or less, but I've had a few come from great distances. Of course the owner, tuner, engine builder, all their beer drinking buddies, wife's boyfriend and local "guru's" have already had a shot at it. So they do NOT mind bringing it that far or grumble much when I unload their wallet. There are actually grinning from ear to ear after we are finished and they took their first test ride! I'm just winding things down and starting to enjoy life a little more while I'm still above ground, something I've been planning for a long time and putting things in place to make it a reality........

The lemon bar was pretty good too. The coffee mug was a constant reminder for me when I was running two businesses and had a chit ton of employees. We closed one of the businesses right before the COVID pandemic and I retired the other business back in April, at least most of it. No employees these days so the only idiot I can blame now when things get all flucked up in myself!.......

"Anticipation" is a skill set that is very quickly formed by at least 90 percent, if not more of beginning shooters with handguns. Especially hard hitting rounds with a lot of muzzle blast and heavy recoil. It is often difficult if not near impossible to correct the issue since you don't know it's actually happening. It's a natural body reaction to shooting handguns. No matter how much you try to keep a good sight picture and "squeeze" the trigger, when the shooter reaches the moment they want the gun to fire they will try to force the gun to fire the round, jerk the trigger and push forward against the recoil at the same time. This puts the point of impact low and right or left some depending on how hard you jerk the trigger and right or left handed. This happens with rifles too but to a much lesser extent. Case in point. Every Fall we sight in our 308-AR's at 100 yards from a bench rest. I get "hired" to check all the rifles to make sure they are on. Then the owner of the rifle, which is my brother, nephew and my brothers son-in-law will fire their own groups. My groups will not only be tighter they are often in a different location than theirs in relation to center. How does this happen, we are all shooting from the same bench, rest, ammo, rifle, etc? I simply will not flinch, anticipate, jerk or do anything to the weapon to disturb the bullet as it travels down the barrel. I also will not touch off a round unless everything is perfect for sight picture, etc. These skills come from shooting competitively and many thousands of rounds put down range while I was an SAI for 20 years. Even with that said there is ALWAYS some human error involved with target shooting before you throw in environmental factors, like a cross wind, gusting wind, haze from high humidity, etc. Sometimes I read threads where folks on here are sighting in or firing their rifles and mention it was windy that day, or hotter than balls, etc. Wind, for example can have a tremendous impact on where the bullets end up at. Something else seldom if ever mentioned is the position of the sun overhead. If you are using open sights and the sun is directly overhead it will light up both sides of the front sight equally. If it is to your right or left it will not and you'll find your groups thrown slightly right or left accordingly. It's all in the details, and when target shooting we need to have the most ideal conditions and control of what we can, reducing the variables as much as possible to the human error thing.......FWIW......

Yep. It always amazed me how poorly most folks are with a handgun. Good damn thing it's usually a secondary weapon, because most recruits/entry level personnel have trouble putting rounds on paper even at close range and it's not moving nor is it shooting back at you!.......

The "ball and dummy" exercise is the absolute best way I know of to show a shooter that they are anticipating the shot with a hand gun. With auto pistols it is easy. The instructor has the student continue to face the target, they remain in that position thru the entire exercise. You start out with the slide locked to the rear and a magazine with one round in it. Show this to the student. The pistol will be in your shooting hand, the mag in the other and the pistol pointed down range. You are standing just to the left of the shooter.. The next part takes a little practice but you insert the magazine and hit the slide lock at what appears to the shooter at the same time charging the weapon. IF you want the shooter to get a live round the magazine hits home and at the same instant you hit the slide lock and a round gets chambered. Hand the weapon back to the shooter and tell them to fire one round on target. IF you want them to get a "dummy" hit the slide lock just an instant before the magazine hits home and it will NOT chamber a round. Hand the weapon to the shooter and tell them to fire a round on target. The cool part is that they can't tell the difference if the weapon chamber is loaded or empty even if they are looking right at the weapon when you load it. It takes a little practice with the "timing" thing when inserting mags and hitting the slide lock to either chamber a round or not. After each shot you reach up and take the weapon from them with your left hand, keeping it pointed down range remove the mag and lock the slide to the rear if it isn't already there. Load one round in the mag and repeat the process. I usually give them one or two live rounds before a "dummy". This way they can see their rounds kick up dirt if front of the target, then on the first empty round they see the pistol tip WAY down as they anticipate the shot. With a revolver you work with only one round in the cylinder and have to take the weapon from the shooter, eject that round and load one back into the cylinder. As you close the cylinder simply pay attention to the orientation of the round whether you want it to rotate into position to fire or not. Even if you are off and a round gets fired once in a while it's still OK because it's a "ball and dummy" exercise right to start with. You are trying to hit on empty rounds often enough to surprise the student and so they can see what they are doing wrong, so mixing it up in no certain pattern anyhow. This exercise absolutely works and I've helped the worse handgun shooters you've ever seen improve the skills and get qualified. I hope that drop dead gorgeous blond LT from the Academy I had a the range in the late 1980's sees this. She was by far and above the WORST shooter I've ever seen. No kidding when she touched off a round from the M-9 pistol the rounds were hitting the dirt only 5-8 feet in front of her!....YIKES! It took a half hour of "ball and dummy" but she managed to figure it out and get qualified. I didn't mind the extra time at all because she was pretty easy to look at........LOL.....

plus 2, 3 and 4.

A friend of mine showed up last Saturday with NIB Taurus Judge in .410. Hey, look at what I just bought he said. So we walk over to my 55 gallon drum burn barrel to ventilate it a few times, or that was the plan. We are about 20 feet away and my friend fires one round and hits it dead center. Then he fires two more rounds and hits about a foot in front and a foot to the left of the barrel. He finished off the remaining rounds and same thing, it's shooting about 3 feet low and 1 foot to the left. I said hey man, the worms are putting up white flags and you are tearing up my yard. So he grumbles at me under his breath, reloads, and fires again, same thing. So I ask him to hand it to me and I fire two rounds and they hit dead center. Before handing it back to him I open the cylinder and rotate it back so it's going to come up on an empty round the next shot (we called this "ball and dummy" back in my Military range days and used to train new shooters with huge "anticipation" problems). So I hand it back to him and he takes careful aim and "click". At the same time the gun goes down about 2" as he anticipates the shot and jerks the trigger at the same moment. He turned to me and said you SOB. I just smiled and told him that he needs to work on fundamentals and to quit worrying about the recoil. Case in point here, my friend, like many hundred of other shooters I've seen over the years had no idea that subconsciously he was doing anything at all wrong........FWIW......

I didn't buy the Taurus mostly because of the size and my track history with Taurus has NOT been good at all. I'm not going to be specific there, as I'm sure they have some good weapons in the line-up, but I'm zero for three so will tread softly if I go that direction again. Anyhow, just sitting here enjoying a lemon bar desert Deb came up with and glad to get out of the heat, it was pretty brutal here today. I logged another 400 rounds thru the M & P over the weekend. I ran more Remington, CCI and some Mexican stuff, all flawless. Still haven't cleaned it or even wiped it off and it's had zero malfunctions other than three ammo related from one box of Remington Thunderbolt that I mentioned earlier. I'm going to continue to fire it until it malfunctions, then strip it down for a thorough cleaning. Hoping to make it to 1000 rounds without issues. I never got around to ordering any magazine upgrades, still firing the factory 10 round mags. I'll get back on that later this week and report back on how well they work.......

I shot High Power matches competitively for several years while on active duty. For the most part the majority of the folks shooting did well until we went to standing/off-hand. I grew up hunting and shooting game with almost all of it off hand so had an edge on that deal. It still takes a lot of practice and most of it can be dry-fire. There are various techniques or ways to shoot off-hand, but it boils right down to what you are comfortable with and the skill level you obtain thru practice and repetition. I've never much been fond of heavy or long barrel rifles even for Match shooting. They have their place but for off-hand a light rifle that drills sub 1" MOA will be fine. You'll find it easier to hold steady especially for multiple shots on the same target. Pretty much for each shot you are working your sight picture down to the tightest little figure 8 you can keep in the black and timing your shot for when you are closest to dead center as possible. It's a skill set developed over time and I've not ran into too many folks who were all that good at it........

Call Smith & Wesson's warranty department, they have excellent customer service.. I had issues with a 45 Shield couple of years ago. They emailed a shipping label to me in minutes and UPS picked it up the next day. It was gone a couple of weeks, and came back completely rebuilt with a full page listing of the parts replaced and explanation of the issues found, etc......

That's what I was looking for tks. I can deal with the slide not locking back after the last round if I can get 16 + 1. Some say the little 22 lacks stopping power right to start with, so MORE is always better with this sort of thing........

Some loose the function and others don't. I didn't do much research but did find followers that increase capacity to 12 rounds and keep the hold open function. It appears anything greater than that and you loose it. You'd think someone would be making a high capacity mag for these pistols. The darned thing is only half full with 10 rounds in it. It would seem one could nearly double that number without much effort with a grip extension.......

Was finally able to get one, bypassed the new Taurus 22 waiting on the M & P. I know the Taurus gets raving reviews but I've had ZERO luck with their pistols to date, plus the 22 is full size and I wanted something a little smaller. The Smith M & P 22 turned out to be a good choice. Very accurate for this type of pistol, and so far 100 percent dead solid reliable aside from two ammo related issues (not enough powder charge and one "dud"). I've ran about 600 rounds thru it so far, all cheaper ammo, bulk pack Remington, Federal, and some imported stuff. All three issues came from the same box of Remington Thunderbolt 22 which I consider pretty "spotty" as I also have had trouble with it in my 10-22 with inconsistent power charges leading to jams or failing to eject/feed the next round. Anyhow, I'm looking to upgrade the magazines for higher capacity or buy new ones that hold more than 10 rounds. I did a little searching on Google and didn't come up with much where you don't loose the lock back the slide on the last round deal. What's out there and how to they work? The only negatives with the M & P 22 so far are a "gritty" trigger, which is getting better with every outing and soaking the mechanism good with gun oil (home brew). It's also got a little more take-up for the next round than I like, but getting used to it. After a little practice I'm hitting 100 percent on our steel targets at 25-30' at the range, and 3 for 3 on raccoons the Min-Pins treed late at night out at the chicken coup, but rapid fire is a little weird with this trigger and striker fired set-up. In these times it's certainly a LOT less expensive to shoot than my 45's and 9mm's as I've been able to pick up bricks of 500 rounds for about $40 on a regular basis. Thanks in advance for any advice on high capacity mags and maybe getting this trigger to be a bit more user friendly.......Cliff