Damn it--just DAMN IT!

Ever have one of those days when nothing works right? Well this has been one of those so far. Keads, of Another Day...Another... was here today after spending the week-end doing...well he can tell you on his blog when he gets home what he was doing here. I won't steal his thunder. But we'd planned to do some shooting today, and I brought out the Uzi, the M60, and a still-classified "secret weapon" that hasn't been blogged about here. Little did I suspect that two of the three weapons would go "Tango Uniform" on me almost right out of the gate, leaving us standing there on a range that we'd driven an hour to get to. (The "secret weapon" worked fine, but I only had a little test ammo left for it and we quickly exhausted that.)
The Uzi started choking on the commercial Remington ammo that Keads had brought, and it wasn't even shooting totally reliably with the high-powered stuff that I reloaded specially for it. Needless to say, Vector Arms is about to get this one back for a check-up. I've tried everything to get it to run 100% reliably like it used to and frankly, I give up.

So we put that one up and went to the Big Dawg, the M60. I fired a belt and other than one stovepipe, it gave me no trouble. But then when Keads took a whack at it... A case separated and shut the gun down. Naturally I had no broken case extractor with me.

In a perfect world, I'd have just swapped barrels and kept shooting, but there was no spare barrel to be had either, in large part because every time a barrel assembly pops up for sale on Gunbroker at a reasonable price, a certain dealer whom I won't name buys it up to flip it at a ridiculous price. But that's not relevant to the problem we had where we now had a 23lb. paperweight sitting on the tarp doing pretty much nothing. Big sigh.

Well now I'm back at the Lair with a ton of unfired ammunition, Keads is on his way back to Keads land, and I'm contemplating ditching all of this high-tech full-auto felgercarb and just getting a bolt-action Mauser that WORKS!

But anyway, here's Keads on the Sixty before the stoppage.


At least I got to meet Keads, and I can say that meeting Keads was truly a pleasure. He's a class guy all around and the next time he's up this way, we will burn the rest of that ammunition and then some.