A Great Gun Day. (NFA Fun.)

So I got out to the range yesterday to work on two pet projects of mine, the suppressed .300 Blackout short-barreled AR and the Reising SMG.

I'm now handloading rounds for the shorty AR, using Nosler 220 grain open tip bullets and 9.9 grains of Winchester 296 (Hodgdon 110). I took the first test rounds out to the range with my newish chronograph to see how they were running and also to compare them to some factory Remington ammo with a similar bullet.

My rounds all stayed nicely subsonic so I could shoot the rifle with no hearing protection. They chrono'd between 998feet per second and 1050fps, with one round out of the twenty test rounds hitting 1076, so I excluded that one from the eval. (It was still quiet though.) excluding the flier, my rounds showed a roughly fifty fps variation across the test group, which I wasn't really happy with until I tested the Remington rounds (R300AAC8) and found a 30fps variation between the ten test rounds I shot. The Remington ammo was advertised as having a velocity of 1050fps, but I noticed that it was shooting 960-990fps. The discrepancy can be explained by the fact that Remington uses a 16" barrel in their tests and my rifle sports a 9" barrel. The Remington hit precisely point of aim with my Mag-pul sights (I'd previously zeroed this rifle using that ammo) and my rounds all stuck just a bit high at 50 yards, confirming that mine are traveling a bit faster. I'll probably step the next batch of test rounds dow a tenth of a grain or two, just to get them mirroring the Remington, which I have a fair stockpile of. All in all, I'm happy with the results thus far.

And if you'll notice in the picture above, the magazines for this rifle are all marked for the .300 round. Hopefully, designating specific magazines exclusively for the .300 BLK round will act as a check to keep one of those rounds from being accidentally introduced into a 5.56mm AR and prevent the catastrophe which would surely follow. I also keep this rifle segregated from the others in 5.56 and stored seperately, again to minimize the possibility of an ammo exchange between the two types. It's been shown a few times now that a .300 round WILL chamber in a 5.56mm rifle and fire...once.

Then it was time to try the Reising out once again, because I haven't quite burned up my entire stock of .45 ammo trying to get this gun to run right.

For today's test, I'd tweaked the aftermarket Christie magazine's feed lips with ye olde trusty needlenose pliers and I'd replaced the magazine well housing with a new one ordered from Numerich Arms. Admittedly, in light of this gun's lack of performance on subsequent outings, I wasn't expecting a lot, so I was happily shocked to have it burn through the entire magazine in three bursts without a single hiccup or stoppage. Fantastic! The next two magazines also fired well, although I had the second round of each misfeed. I have a couple of thoughts on tweaking the magazine a bit more, and if it works the way that I think it will, I expect to finally have a light, accurate and reliable .45ACP submachine gun.

It was a great day out, and as an added bonus, I came home with 20 rounds of spent Norma 6.5 Carcano brass that some other shooter didn't bother to pick up. Since I have two Carcanos, that was a nice gift to me from whoever left it behind as well.

So Close...

The Reising fires perfectly in semi-auto, but it still hiccups a bit in full, with the occasional round not sliding completely up the breech face as the bolt closes. And it's so slight that just the faintest pressure from me on the action bar is enough to get the bolt to close properly on the round stopping it. The breech face is pitted,so I'm going to polish it and see if that doesn't cure this last niggling little problem.

Almost fixed. Almost working.

And in semi, I was using it to bat a tennis ball around on the 25m berm. Put the front sight post just under the tennis ball and squeeze off one shot and watch the tennis ball go into near-earth orbit. And the Reising is accurate enough to do that all day. Try THAT with a Thompson or other open-bolt subgun.

It's ALIVE!!!

The sun did not shine, it was too wet to play, so we sat in the house all that cold, cold wet day. I sat there with Murphy, I sat there with Belle. I toyed with my Reising, and I cursed it to hell.

I took all the parts off, then I put them back on. I could never admit, that this damned gun had won.

I took off the mag housing and the action bar. I wanted to junk it, but that'd be going a bit far.

I took out the hammer, I took out the bolt. I could not resolve it, I felt like a dolt.

I cycled rounds though it, dozens by hand. Why it would not work I could not understand.

The action was smooth, and nothing was binding. but this subgun won't run, and my nerves it was grinding.

Then suddenly it hit me, from out of the blue. An epiphany struck me, back together it flew.
I ran to the range, with a witness in tow. And I loaded it up, but I had to shoot slow.
For machine guns are banned at this Fuddly range, so I fired it all semi, although it felt strange.

Thirty rounds with no malfunctions!!! Yee-hah! I'm saving the rest of my .45 for another full-auto test tomorrow at a different range, but it sure looks like I've about got this thing fixed!

Oh, and apologies to Dr. Suess for sampling his story, but I really don't care if he minds, because I've got a functioning Reising now and he probably does not.

Shooting With The Oldies

And I don't just mean Old NFO, who came out for a range day yesterday.

The other oldies that I speak of are these two fine weapons:

The top rifle is my new/old M1 Garand, #5009, that I took out for it's first test-firing since I rebuilt it from a stripped receiver.

I'm happy to say that, other than a few hiccups with some old reloads that were assembled for a belt-fed Browning 1919 some years back, it shot flawlessly.

The ammo that it didn't like was reloaded stuff that functioned fine in the machine gun that it was made for and in other Garands and Springfields,, but this one, with a brand new barrel, still has pretty tight tolerances and it wasn't keen to chamber a few of them. But when I switched to some other ammo that I'd loaded with a little more care for CMP matches...Wow!

Can't do much better that that at 50 yards, off-hand from the bench...not unless your name is Old NFO. His cherry 1903A3 Springfield shot this beautiful target:

Then I got the Reising M50 on line.

I wish that I could say that it shot flawlessly as well, but it did not. It was having problems with the bolt not going all the way rearward and riding up on the back of the next round instead of smacking it into the chamber. We got some bursts off of it, and one or two mag dumps without a malfunction, but it needs work. Of course it only came with two 12-round magazines, and a sub-gun with a 12-round magazine is about as much fun as a tricycle with two wheels. Still, when it did shoot, recoil was very manageable and it grouped nicely at 50 yards...better than my Uzi does. Verdict: I like it. new 30-round Ken Christie magazines are on order, as is a new Wolff spring kit.

NFO had more of his typical Batman-style toys with him in the form of a slick Ruger 10-22 with an AAC supressor that shot touching groups at 50 yards and a vintage Colt AR-15 "slabside" SP-1 complete with original Colt 3x BCD optic.

It was a great day, with decent weather and light crowds, and the only flaw in the slaw was that the range had it's 100 yard line closed for repair, so we had to do all of our shooting at 50. I don't know about you, but I always feel like a mook shooting a .30 battle rifle (or even a full-length AR) at less than 100 yards.

But it was a good time with great company, and it needs to happen a lot more often.

Now what doesn't need to happen? The dognanigans that I had to put up with yesterday, namely Belle leaping the gate to go see NFO when he got out of his truck, after which, she loaded herself into my jeep with the guns, no doubt figuring that her presence in the jeep ensured that she too would be going to the range.

Not so much, huh, Belle? She got dragged out and brought into the house and we left sans dogs, only to return a few hours later to discover that they'd taken the full trash bag that I'd left by the back door (forgot to lock it up...dumb me.) and they'd scattered it's contents over the kitchen floor.

Effin' dogs.

Now as to the Reising, I fiddled with it this morning a bit and discovered that the bumper plug on the rear of the receiver was not fully tightened, and when I corrected that, it shot a couple of more magazines almost perfectly. (And to be fair, these 70 year old factory magazines have seen better days themselves.) I really think I'm close to having it running right, and we'll see what a new spring set and new magazines do for it.

Happy Reising Birthday to Me!

OK, actually my birthday was back in April, and I bought my birthday present to me in March...and due to the current incredibly slow NFA paperwork processing times, it just got here today. Oh, joy!

It's a Reising Model 50 .45 submachine gun.

Designed by Eugene Reising, an ordnance engineer who once worked for John Browning, the weapon was built by Harrington and Richardson and offered to the US military as an alternative to the expensive Thompson M1928 sub-machine gun, which was also something of a bear to manufacture due to the machining required. The Reising was lighter, easier and cheaper to make ($62 dollars vs $200 for the Thompson), and on paper, a beautiful concept weapon. The Army tested if and wasn't impressed, but the the Navy and the Marine Corps bought bunches of them. it first saw action when the Marines hit the beaches at Guadalcanal with it in August of 1942, and...well let's just say that it didn't fare too well. Actually, it did so poorly in it's first combat engagement that Lt. Col. Merritt Edson, Commander of the First Marine Raider Battalion, ordered his troops to pitch them all into Guadalcanal's crocodile-infested Lunga River, and the Marines went back to using World War 1 1903 Springfield bolt-action rifles, at least until they could steal sufficient M1 Garands from the Army.

The problem with the Reising was that it has many moving parts, a large percentage of which were hand-fitted at the factory. This is fine for guns not subjected to hard use and the Marines' "group cleaning" method wherein all guns are disassembled and dumped into pots of hot water, then everyone reassembles their guns with whichever parts they grab back. You can do that with some guns, but the Reising was and is not one of them.

The gun had other problems too, and while it was and still is a decent design, it was too fragile and user-unfriendly for military use. Many of them wound up getting turned over to US police departments, and in that capacity, they served well and some departments were still fielding them in the 1980s.

Mine's kind of a mutt; it has a mix of blued and parkerized parts. It does not have a serial number S prefix though, which would indicate that it was built by Numerich Arms from H&R's stocks of spare parts that Numerich bought in the 1960's. Best I can figure, it's just a nice old SMG that's been kicking around somewhere since the 1940s.

Cock the gun via this charging handle under the stock, just behind the forward sling swivel. This one it a bitch to cock if the hammer is down.

Muzzle compensator, intended to cut down on felt recoil.

A bigger plus was it's more traditional stock that puts the recoil square into the shooter's shoulder as opposed to the Thompson stocks that direct the recoil force down on an awkward angle. As such, the Reising is actually more ergonomic to shoot than that Thompson.

Weather permitting, it's going out to the range tomorrow morning once a certain guest arrives. Stay tuned for an AAR. Here's hoping that it works!