Happy Belated Birthday to me.

It was that time of year again, so I treated myself.

Yep--another Browning Hi-Power...because you can never have too many of them.

But this one is a bit more interesting. It's a No. 2 Mk1 * made by the John Inglis Company of Toronto, Canada.

Serial number suggests October of 1944 manufacture, so there's a chance that maybe it saw a bit of the war. After that...who knows where it went or what it did. This ex-Canadian service pistol is mine now though, courtesy of another ex-Canadian, Aaron.

Back story to these guns is that when Belgium, home to Fabrique Nationale, fell to the Nazis in 1940, many FN employees fled to Britain, and they brought with them the designs for this then-new sidearm. This did not, however, stop the Germans from using the FN plant to make this pistol for their own troops, and they did, issuing some 300,000 of them as the Pistole 640. But the Allied Command turned the job of making these over to the John Inglis Company, a maker of boilers and heavy machinery, along with a contract for Bren guns. Production was held up for a little bit because FN was demanding royalties despite a World War in progress, but eventually it all got ironed out and Inglis knocked out a bunch of these. The first production run was the No. 1 and it had tangent sights and a slotted grip for a shoulder stock. Those were meant for China but many were diverted to Allied troops. If you find one like that today, look for a serial number that begins with the letters CH--that's a Chinese contract gun.

Mine is a simplified No. 2, meaning a design change. The slot for the stock was omitted and the rear tangent sight was replaced with a simple fixed rear. This was the main service pistol produced.

Over 100 countries used the Hi-Power at one time or another due to it's great design and reliability. The Canadians still use the Hi-Power today--Inglis guns, naturally, even though the last one was made in 1945--and there are photos of Canadian troopers in Afghanistan carrying these right now.

I'm thinking that this one will be a nice companion for my Long Branch Enfield #4 MK1...and maybe my FAL, too. Only things missing on this one are the lanyard ring and the Canadian military instruction manual. But I found a copy of the latter and as a service, I'm reprinting it here.

How to use the Hi-Power, eh?

1. Center sights on enemy. Aim center mass.
2. Depress trigger.
3. Profusely and sincerely apologize to enemy.
4. Go shoot another one.

A Good Day For Shooting

Because Bruce, a relative newbie to shooting, is about to buy a pistol, several of us went out to the range today to put him on various handguns and generally just have some fun on a January afternoon.

Since Bruce wants a 9mm, we brought out three for him to try:

Top to bottom: Browning Hi-Power, Smith and Wesson M&P, and Glock 19.

I don't think that he even shot the Hi-Power, as he was already leaning towards an M&P just from his own research. But he got to shoot a 9mm M&P courtesy of John, who has one, (Mine's a .40.) and he liked it and did pretty good with it when he concentrated on sight alignment and trigger press.

Most importantly though: He was safe. No safety violations, so I was pleased. I'm thinking that he'll go far as a decent shooter.

We also got some rifle shooting in.

Here's Cindy, with her Savage .22:

I forgot to tell her that she needed to shift her rear sight up to go from 25 yards to 100. But she figured it out when she went down to see her target.

Here's John with his DPMS G2 Recon .308.

He added a decent scope and a Harris bipod, and his 200 yard target was a thing of beauty after he got done knocking it's center out. I'm going to have to get one of those now.

Here's Bruce, shooting my M-1 Garand:

And here's my Garand, s/n XXX5009 again.

Also present: A Universal M-1 carbine, one of the older ones that still uses a number of GI parts.

And special mention goes to our friend Keith, who was supposed to come out but decided to finish a cleaning project at home instead.

All in all, a good day indeed.

Spud to the Range for Machine Gun Fun!

So what does one do with a nephew visiting from out of town? Why, you you take him shooting, of course.

Here he is trying out the .300 AAC shorty with full-powered rounds and no suppressor.

And here he is shooting it suppressed.

(And yeah...I belatedly caught the lack of safety glasses here and we had a discussion about that.)

Then we moved on to bigger things. Hell, he's been good enough to earn some trigger time on "the Pig".

After that, we put a box of sporting clays down on the 50-yard berm and went "Dueling .22 rifles" on them until they were gone. Here he is with my M&P-15 .22lr. (And yeah, he's got a muddy ass. Boys are supposed to get muddy...even this one.)

And since this is real shooting and not "Call of Duty", he learned some shooting positions today, both prone (above) and sitting (below).

He did great. No clays survived.

Then it was time to try some pistol shooting on the steel plates with the Browning Hi-Power.

He got off to a bit of a slow start here, but surprisingly, as soon as he started listening to what I was telling him about stance, grip, sights and trigger, the plates started dropping like clockwork. Funny how that works, isn't it?

We spent a few hours out there, and he was safe and followed directions. My only real complaint is that when it comes to policing brass, he's the slowest brass-picker-upper I've ever seen. But we can work on that. As far as shooting goes, I'm proud of him.

Classic Pistol Pr0n: From Belgium with love.

In the spirit of the recent "You can choose only two..." games that we played last week, I had to select a pistol to fly north with yesterday. So after several minutes spent staring into the abysses of the gun safes and agonizing over which one to take and which ones to leave like a chick looking into a shoe closet (This is how it is for you ladies, right?) I finally found the perfect week-end traveling pistol--the Browning Hi-Power.

This pistol began as a John Browning design when Fabrique Nationale of Belgium commissioned him to design a new military pistol for the French back in the 1920s. They wanted a pistol that was compact, yet capable of killing a man at 50 meters, held at least ten rounds, and had an external hammer and a magazine disconnect safety. They also wanted reliability and ease of maintenance. Since Browning had already sold the rights to his incredible 1911 to Colt, he had to work around the patents that they now held, and he was still working on two variations--one a locked-breech and one a blow-back design--when he died in 1926. But his work on the locked-breech design was picked up by FN designer Dieudonné Saive, no slouch himself, and eventually the "HP" or "High Power" came to be in 1935, the name being derived from it's 13-round magazine which held more ammo than most of it's contemporaries of the day. Ironically but almost predictably, the French turned up their noses at this pistol, choosing instead to go with the Modele 35, a pistol designed and built in France, that held fewer rounds and was much less cool. The Hi-Power went on to be adopted by over 50 countries with production in the millions, and thanks to the original French demand, they all came out with that magazine-disconnect safety that muddies up the trigger pull. Originally built in Belgium, it was also used by the Nazis after they overran the FN plant and cranked out plenty of Hi-Powers for their own troops as the Pistole 640(b). Meanwhile, seeing this coming, FN brass sent the pistol's plans to Canada, where the John Inglis company continued to make them for the Commonwealth war effort, thus ensuring that Hi-Powers would battle Hi-Powers throughout the war. Of course they would do so again during the Falklands conflict some four decades later, as Argentina and Britain were both still using them as they sparred over those islands out in the middle of nowhere.

Mine is an old Commonwealth military gun, as evidenced by the black baked-on paint, lanyard ring and black plastic grips (replaced by me with Pachmayrs). It's also got a Cylinder and Slide ambidextrous safety that I added so that I, a leftie, can carry it "Condition One". It has a pretty good trigger as it is, although one day I will pull that magazine disconnector out.

I do love this pistol, and shame on me, but it's languished back in a dark corner of the safe for far too long while I've toted Glocks and Smiths and 1911s around. So just to be fair and give an old classic it's due, I brought it along this week-end, both because I like to fly armed and because I might want to go downtown Detroit for a coney dog this week-end, and a foray into "The D" for coneys requires a credible and reliable defensive tool. In that aspect, I couldn't ask for better gear, absent a Sherman tank, of course.

Hippie gun cleaning.

It was just a good night to channel my inner hippie tonight. So I broke out the Bushmills (Did hippies drink Bushmills?), put on the 70's peacenik tunes, and sat down to clean guns.

First, the mood music.


Then the Bushmills, on the rocks, because this could go on all night.


First weapon break down:

An Uzi, as simple as it gets. The stripped receiver at top, with the top cover, barrel retaining nut, bolt, trigger pack and retaining pin, mainspring and barrel. Wood stock to the left, because I like shooting it better with the wood stock than with the folding sheet metal one.

(Hey...Woodstock. Gotta be a hippie joke there somewhere.)

The inside of the receiver. Pretty much a stamped metal flat folded to shape, with an ejector welded in and sights added. Any good high school metal shop student could make one.


The bolt. Not much more complex. One solid chunk of steel with a firing pin machined in place. The only removable parts here are the extractor and the pin that holds it in place.


The barrel is really about ten inches long, but you only see 2" when the weapon is assembled. The rest is inside the receiver, going all the way back to the magazine well.


When installed, the bolt rides over the barrel several inches. This is known as a "wrap-around bolt" and it's what makes the Uzi so compact.


Everything is getting brushed and wiped down, then lightly oiled.

Then the trigger pack, enclosed in the pistol grip. The magazine goes up through the grip. Not only does this put the center of balance right over your shooting hand, but it makes mag changes easy under stress with the "hand-finds-hand" muscle memory training.

And again, the mechaism is basic and robust. Relatively few moving parts in here and they're all pretty beefy.

All cleaned and oiled and back together. No tools required for disassembly or reassembly.

This gun was designed in the late 1940's/early 1950's by a man who knew what it was to operate and work on weapons in the field--the legendary Uziel Gal. It's overbuilt and heavy, but it'll outlast any MP-5 or other more modern design precisely because it is a little tank of a subgun.

That one done, let's change the music.


More Bushmills, and grab another dirty weapon.

Break the Browning Hi-Power down by moving the slide back and popping the side stop out right-to-left. Then the slide comes off and the barrel and mainspring come out.

If it looks a lot like a 1911, it should. This was John Browning's last design. He died before ever seeing it in production but you can see a lot of his engineering in it.

The inside of the slide, and the machined barrel locking lugs. It's actually simpler than the 1911 here as there is no barrel bushing or mainspring plug to remove (or pop you in the face if you get careless when trying to re-install it).

Clean and oil the trigger mechanism here.


Then re-install the mainspring and it's guide beneath the barrel. It locks into place a bit better than a 1911, but it can inadvertently be installed upside down. Don't do this.
Wrong:

Right:

See how it's bent in the first one and straight in the second? That makes a difference.

Then the slide goes back on, and the slide stop pushes through the hole in the mainspring guide, and all is right with the world.


Time to put the cleaning gear away because the Bushmills is gone. But I've got two more clean weapons. Cleaner than any hippie, to be sure. As to why hippie music? I dunno. Maybe is has something to do with the duality of man...the Jungian thing.

Or maybe I just felt like it.

The Revenge of the Bench-Resters

So I was rummaging through one of the ammo closets in my gun room last night (I have two such closets--one for pistol ammo and one for rifle ammo) and I happened to find a couple of boxed of Prvi Partisan 6.5x52mm ammunition. Carcano food! I really did not even know that was in there, but there it was, shoehorned in next to the 7.5 French rounds. I really need to inventory those closets one of these days.

So with that stuff in hand, I grabbed up the new Carcano and a couple of pistols and headed back out to the range.

I got out there and joy, oh joy, I had the place to myself! So I set my targets and spotting scope up, got the Carcano out, and loaded some of the ammo into those neat six-round clips that the rifle needs in order to function. And it does need them, as I found out. I tried to single-load a round by pushing it into the chamber and closing the bolt only to find that the extractor will not ride over the base of a cartridge that is already in the chamber. The bolt has to pick the cartridge up as it comes up off the follower, and the only way that the round will stay in position for that is if it's in one of those clips. This is not exactly an engineering point in the rifle's favor as it means that soldiers in the field were dependent on these flimsy clips to be able to load and fire even one round.

But the bolt operated so smoothly that you'd think that it was on rollers. It's not on rollers--it's just well-worn, smoothed out by what was probably considerable military use in one if not two world wars and whatever else it did in it's 113 years of existence. Likewise, the trigger is light and smooth and breaks with no indication at all that it's about to fire. I'm used to a two-stage trigger where you feel a bit of resistance or back-pressure before the rifle actually fires, but this rifle, like a couple of other that I have, is completely smooth. It actually makes for a good "surprise break" and once I got used to it, I started to really enjoy it. That 6.5 cartridge is very mild to shoot compared to the 8mm, .303 and .30-06 that I'm used to. And while I wouldn't exactly call the pattern downrange a "group", it was at least fairly consistent in where it put the rounds and after a bit of experimentation I was at least able to keep most of the shots on the paper plates that I use as targets.

The rifle's biggest problem at this range is it's sights. It has the old-style "humpback" sight and the gradations go from 600 meters to 2000 meters.Yes, the sight starts at 600 meters. Optimistic in 1897, weren't they? And with the sight parked in the 600M position, it was hitting a bit over a foot high at 100 yards.

So I flipped the sight to the "battle sight" position, which should have been sufficient for 100M-400M body hits, and to my surprise, it actually worked quite well on the 100-yard plates with a six o'clock hold. Brilliant!Here's the battle sight. The rear blade flips up and all the way over into a notch in the front handguard, and the shooter is left with this fixed rear blade that was beneath it.

So with that figured out, I settled in and began firing aimed shot at the plates, one shot every ten seconds or so, with a check of the spotting scope in between each shot. And I was killing those plates--this rifle is no match rifle and I don't see myself keeping it loaded by the bed to deter late-night home invaders, but it was well worth $40.00.

And then, after I finished and went down to retrieve my targets, upon my return I saw the range care-taker come strolling up.

"Hi", I say.

"I got a complaint that you're shooting too fast down here," he said.

"Seriously?"

"Yes, seriously," he says. "And you know that you shoot fast. I've talked to you about it before."

"Yes you have," I admitted. "And it's always been for sustained, well-aimed fire, with every round on target. You know that I'm not out here bump-firing like an asshole or putting rounds over the berms."

"I know," he replied. "But a couple of other members complained and I have to come talk to you when they do."

"Dude, I'm shooting a bolt-action Carcano."

"A what?"

"Car-CAY-no. Italian World War One rifle. Bolt-action, holds six rounds. It's not exactly a machine gun. And I'm checking the target with my scope after every shot, so it's not like I'm making with the rat-a-tat-tat here."

He looked over my rifle, and even used my scope to check my target at my invitation. I wanted him to see and count the holes and know that I was putting a bit of care into actually aiming the rifle. Satisfied, he decided that nothing warranted any official club complaint. But when I asked him who complained, he wouldn't tell me. Not that he had to, because by then I'd seen the trucks parked behind the bench-rest clubhouse. They must have come in while I was downrange or otherwise occupied and they apparently decided to lodge a complaint because some non-bench-rester was daring to shoot on "their" firing line. And then they wonder why the rest of us shooter hate them.

Well I was done on the rifle line anyway, so I packed the rifle back up and headed over to the pistol line. The purpose today was to burn up some of the remaining test rounds from my new 9mm load I'd worked up, and also to try out my Browning Hi-Power now that I've got it's new ambidextrous safety installed. The safety, made by Cylinder and Slide, allows lefties like me to use the thumb safety, a must for condition-one carry.

And yeah, about that...I found out now why Cylinder and Slide charges so much to install this piece on your pistol. It's because there was a lot of fitting required, and all of it involved removing metal from their parts and substituting a roll pin that actually fit for the one that they included. That stuff was WAY out of spec, and it took me and a competent smith quite a while to actually get it to fit together. (Thanks, Mike!)

But it works, and it works well. So I shot this pistol and my Beretta 92, just because I'd been using the 92 as a test platform for the new round and had a couple of loaded magazines for it ready to go.

You know, I'm really starting to enjoy shooting this Beretta. It actually is a nice shooter, and if I can get over my tendency to thumb the decocker down, mistaking it for a thumb safety, I could really get to like it as something more than a wall-hanger. This one is an ex-New Orleans Police Department pistol, and it's marked as such. It's noteworthy as an example of blatant hypocrisy for the time that the City of New Orleans under then-Mayor Marc Morial filed the first lawsuit against gun manufacturers--including Beretta--claiming that the manufacturers had irresponsibly flooded the city with guns that criminals were using to shoot themselves and other people with. It did not take long for one of the defendant gun companies to produce a Beretta much like my own and point out that the City of New Orleans had a long history of selling both seized firearms and surplus city-owned firearms to the same wholesale distributors that the companies being sued sold their products to.

Pot, meet Kettle. And quit calling him black.

Anyway, I've never been a fan of the Beretta, but the more I shoot this one, the more it grows on me. And this ex-Commonwealth military Hi-Power has been a favorite of mine since the day that I got it. Until now, the only thing keeping me from carrying it has been the lack of an ambi-safety like my 1911s all have. But now it has one. Woot! And here the two of them are together. The Hi-Power (top) and NOPD Beretta 92 (bottom).I've never really been a 9mm fan, despite the fact that it's been the cartridge of choice for police and military use in Europe for over a hundred years now. My figuring is that 9mm is ok for shooting Europeans, but if you want to put an American bad guy in the dirt, you need a .45.

Still, they just keep making so many wonderful pistols in 9mm. Darn it!

But now I'm home with Murphy, and we're going to sit out on the deck and clean these firearms just as soon as I get all the yogurt out of his fur.

Yeah, I accidentally dropped a container of yogurt on him when he was pestering me in the kitchen. Serves him right, but now I'm the one stuck cleaning him up.

Wait a minute...it's starting to rain. Maybe I can just put him out in the rain for a while. That ought to do it!

A nice January day to go afield with dog and gun

Yesterday we had some unseasonably nice weather-- 60 degrees in January. I took advantage of it and took Lagniappe the dog up on Maryland Heights to enjoy the view of Harpers Ferry. For those of you who haven't yet made the climb, I recommend it. (For the somewhat strenuous trail you'll need to be in some sort of shape. Note: Round is not a shape.)




And here's Lagniappe hamming it up. The Armory Engine House is clearly visible behind him. It's that small building right next to the tracks. For the history buffs, that's the building that America's first terrorist, John Brown, holed up in until a party of Marines stormed it and escorted him to jail. The story's dicsussed in greater detail in this blog's December archive so I won't go into it anew.






This one's just Lagniappe, actually standing still and looking good for the camera instead of turning his head or lolling his tongue out as he usually does when I try to photograph him. He's actually behaving here. But I knew it wouldn't last...and it didn't.




As we're walking back down, he finds this stick. A normal dog would ignore it, or chew on it, or maybe offer it up as a fetch toy, but not this one. He has to run back and forth along the trail with it as fast as he can. Naturally it's on this part of the walk that we encounter a couple of senior citizens out for a walk and Lagniappe-- true to form--runs right between them with his stick. Of course being a dog and not having a very good grasp of either physics or spatial dimensions, he doesn't allow clearance room for the stick and it whacked the old man hard enough to nearly knock him down. Once again I have to tell people that I have no idea whose dog that is.




And because it was such a nice day, I took one of my favorite pistols out for a bit of air. There's a nifty litle spot I know on the way back from Harper's Ferry where I sometimes stop to shoot. I love this particular pistol for it's graceful design, it's flawless functioning, and it's history.

It's a vintage military Browning Model 1935, also known as a "Hi-Power" in it's civilian nomenclature. Made by Fabrique Nationale in Herstal, Belgium. It's chambered in 9mm as was typical of European service pistols in the 1900's and it holds 14 rounds of ammunition--almost twice as many as any other service pistol of that time. This one is an old service pistol with the military baked-on black enamel paint but I can't pin down the country that used it since it has suspiciously few markings compared to the usual military guns of it's day. It could have been any one of a number of Allied countries but it's mine now and it shoots accurately and reliably every time I take it out. This design ranks right up there with the U.S. Model 1911 .45 automatic (also a John Browning design) as one of the most prolific pistols in the world. They're still in production today around the world while most militaries have gone on to more modern designs, it's still a favorite of civilian shooters around the globe. I prefer the old veterans like this over the new ones that I could buy today because these old ones have a sense of history about them. I don't know where this gun's been but it was somewhere. And a day like yesterday just begged for a little range time so I took it out for fifty rounds of tin-can-killing exercise.

Lagniappe sat in the car and listened to the radio while I shot. I really can't blame him because the Sean Hannity show was on. Lagniappe loves Sean Hannity.