A day at the range

I needed this day. It's been too long, and Southern Decadence festivities are inundating the French Quarter this week-end so it was time to go visit real America for a few hours.

Started out on clays with the Ithaca 12. Took me a bit to find my groove and I missed some ridiculously easy ones, but as soon as I started throwing pairs, I cleaned house. Apparently I do better when I don't have time to think and try to plot the clays. When I don't give myself time to over-think it, I hit them fine.

Then it was over to the rifle line.
I'm old enough to remember when I was literally the only one on the firing line with a "black gun" or "assault rifle" and I got snide remarks from other shooters for having an AR-15 20 years ago. But these days I'm often the only one on the line without one. Times have changed...and good luck banning something that most shooters seem to have these days.

But for me, it was a trip in the Wayback Machine.

Bottom one is a Short Magazine Lee Enfield (SMLE) #1Mk3* made at Lithgow, Australia. This rifle was the British Commonwealth infantry weapon from World War One until it was supplemented and replaced by the #4 above it starting in 1941, but some of the Commonwealth countries like Australia and India kept manufacturing and using this variant through World War Two, and in the case on India, production continued into the 1960's, and then they changed over to the new NATO 7.62x51 cartridge and continued producing it
into the 1980's. But this particular one was made in Australia in 1941 and undoubtedly saw some service in WW2.

The top rifle is an "upgraded" version, the #4mk1. This one was manufactured at the Royal Ordnance Factory, Maltby in South Yorkshire, Britain. It was also made in 1941, and I bought it back in the late 80's for the sum of $76.00 from Southern Ohio Gun when Century International and others were bringing in the "endless" supplies of military surplus arms at dirt cheap prices. (I wish I'd bought so many more but most of us didn't see them ever running out.)

Both rifles fire the .303 cartridge and as I still had seventy rounds left of South African surplus .303, I took these two out to the range. I have not fired this #4 since the late 1980s or early 90's so it needed to be sighted in. The first two rounds at 25M hit at nine o'clock there and didn't really please me. The third took me a second to find...what the heck?! Look at that keyhole at the left edge of the target where the projectile went through sideways.

That got my attention. I recovered the spent brass and it looked fine. I pulled the bolt and checked the bore. Looked ok. I fired two more and they were centered, just a tick low as they should have been. I eventually chalked it up to a ammo quality control matter. The remaining rounds seemed to have fired fine and most of them hit the 8" steel gong at 100M solidly. (And now I wonder how many of the misses were on target but went sideways like the one above...)


Then it was Thompson time.

I took the 1928 Thompson out to play for a bit. Always fun. Set a target out at 30M and made Swiss Cheese out of it by putting front sight on the target belt buckle and firing short bursts, letting muzzle rise carry the rounds up the target's belly and chest area. Easy peasy.

I heard another rapid-firing weapon down the line and curious to see, I popped down to see this joker rapid-firing an AR with NO SIGHTS ON IT! Yep. No front or rear but he was going to town.

Sigh...public ranges.


Still, a great day indeed, and long overdue.

Gun Pron

It was a nice, restful week-end, one spent prepping for a storm that we thankfully didn't get. But there was range time, and the successful test of two Thompson drums that hadn't worked well before. But after a fair bit of gentile filing and tweaking and internal lubrication, I managed to get both drums running flawlessly with this old gun. It was definitely stress-relieving and the entire range went quiet the first time that I ran an entire 50-round drum without a hiccup or pause. Definitely adds weight to an already-heave gun and you can actually feel that weight shift as the drum cycles. Thr drums were not practical for combat due to the cost, fragility, noise of ammo rattling in them and weight, but how could I own a Thompson that takes drums and not have one?

I didn't get and shooting footage as my old camera phone finally bit the dust last week, but I did get a new phone that appears to take much better shots, so here's something that you gun afficianadoes can salivate over.

And if you want to see to see more like it, the World War Two museum is less than two miles from Lair South here, so get off your butts and come visit the Crescent City! Let me know you're coming and we can make a museum visit happen.

Taking a friend to the range.

Took a friend shooting yesterday. She's a local police officer but they don't issue or train on long guns so this was her first time with a long gun of any sort. She liked my AR, and I soon had her hitting steel at 100 yards with it.

Then I put her on my FAL.



She did pretty good. Liked my AR a lot better than the FAL though.

We did some pistol work because she's having issues and qualifications are coming up. It doesn't help that her job issues a Glock with the heavy NY trigger but her wrist keeps breaking and putting rounds high on--or over--the target. Other than dry-firing, anyone got a suggested fix for this?

Then we took played with the Thompson a bit. This she liked.



And yeah, the stance is not the best.

Evantually the Tommy gun brought down one of the Range Safety Officers who used to be in the sub service in the Navy and he told me how they had M1A1 Thompsons on his boat. And when he handled my gun you could tell that he still remembered how to use it.

It was a good afternoon.

27 new Thompsons in circulation

St. Louis Police Department is sensibly bringing in some hard cash to upgrade their officers' defensive weapons.

St. Louis police sell surplus weapons, including Tommy guns, for $1.2 million

So twenty seven of these historic shooters are now going out to collectors and the city's making some serious bank.

This is so much better than the time back in the early 90's that the City of Detroit held a press conference and smashed ten of these collectible guns with a roller as an anti-crime publicity stunt, saying that they were committed to keeping dangerous weapons off the streets. (They then turned around and sold all of their .38 Special revolvers to a nationally-known distributor for $15 each and they popped up in about every wholesaler's catalog within weeks.)

(Here's the one I bought shortly thereafter, complete with DPD markings.)

I think that in celebration of St. Louis wise decision, I shall take my Thompson out to shoot this week.

Let the sound of freedom be heard!

More Thompson

Now that it's back from the repair shop and fit for duty.

All new GI wood and a proper matte-blue finish such as was used on military 1928 guns. And a real 1928 rear sight instead of the half-assed Enfield ladder sight that AO had put on the gun with their crappy drift pin that kept coming out. Frankly, this thing was an embarrassment when I got it, but then most West Hurley AO's were. But you know that when you buy them and have to expect to fix them if not done already. John Andrewski did me right here.

Truth be told, it's a fun gun, and they were great in their day, but nowadays there's nothing it does that an AR or similar carbine won't do easier and better (and with less weight, greater range and far fewer tears if it gets damaged or lost.) Still, it's a classic and now it's at least to the point where I can shoot it without embarrassing jams and fight it if I really have to.

Still alive...and 100 Years of the .45

I'm still here. was a bit sicker after Mardi Gras (And I didn't even get to go out much...) and then when I got back to wrk, I found out that I can no longer post to Blogger from our work machines so that's going to sting a bit.

But today I got out to the range and fired a few of the best .45s out there.

(Top: Thompson 1928. Lower Left: Springfield Armory 1911A1 Lower Right: Smith and Wesson Model 1917.)

The 1911 is my first gun, purchased new back in 1988 from Patrick Sweeney back when we were both a lot younger. It's got thousands of rounds through it and it's still my "go-to" handgun. The M1917 came aboard a few years back, complete with it's "US Property" markings and wearing it's original World War One blued finish. The Thompson... What a problem child. I bought it from a "well respected" dealer in Pennsylvania who allegedly warranties the guns he sells, but I guess "All Guns Guaranteed" means "I'll take it back and let some guy mess with it two or three times and make it worse, then tell you that it's as good as it will ever shoot."

Fuck him. I finally sent it off to John Andrewski up in New Hampshire and he fixed it right and put a real spec finish on it instead of sprayed-on duracoat, and it just came back today so it was right off to the range. 200 rounds later, with just a few hiccups that seemed restricted to specific magazines, I'm pretty damned happy. And it even swallows hollow-points!

20-yard target. (Head shots came from the 1911.)

Yeah, that Thompson gun can do the job, I'm thinking.

This calls for some Zevon.

North Carolina Sheriff auctions off a Thompson gun.

So nice. So rare. Going to be out of my price range without a doubt.

1928 Colt .45 Caliber Thompson Sub-Machine Gun



Actually issued to their SWAT guys in the 1980s because they didn't have enough M-16s. I gotta say that, shortcomings aside, that would be a pretty cool gun to have issued.

Get your bids in.

And on the Thompson front, mine has been shipped off again for repair, this time to John Andrewski, who, like his father, legendary machine gun expert Stan Andrewski, has likely forgotten more about these guns than most of us will ever learn. The first time I talked to him on the phone about mine, he described exactly what it was doing without me telling him, and then he explained why it did what did did...or in this case, didn't. So he got the gun and I'll be writing him a check while cursing the seller's (David Spiwak) "100% guarantee", which apparently meant "I'll take it back three or four times and have my guy do the bare minimum on it until it runs half-way decent and that's as good as these guns will ever work so stop sending it to me."

Can you guess that I'm not a fan of this guy any more? I don't want a gun that works 90% of the time, or 95%. I want one that goes "BANG!" every single time I pull the trigger...or in this case, I want one that goes "BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!..." And one that doesn't look like mis-matched shit would be nice too, but John's going to take care of that as well.

Anyway, great guns from the past, the Thompsons. Heavy and not the easiest gun to reload quickly in a fight, but .45ACP and too damned cool otherwise.

It's ALIVE!! Thompson 1928 finally works!

Those of you who have been following this particular Class 3 hot mess know that I acquired a West Hurley 1928 Thompson nearly a year ago, only to have nothing but problems with it from day 1.

The gun is a West Hurley-produced Auto Ordnance. These guns were rushed out in the mid-1980's before the law took effect banning the addition of any new or old unregistered machine guns to the registry. AO was making these guns but didn't have access to enough GI surplus Thompson parts so they farmed production out to several local manufacturers, many of which just did a craptastic job.

The comprehensive article on this can be found here.

THOSE WEST HURLEY THOMPSON PARTS

This article tells which parts specifically were farmed out and what problems they were known to have.

I expected teething problems, as my gun had been a safe queen and allegedly never fired. And I've been in the gun game long enough to know that when a seller says that he's never fired a used gun, it's often because he wants to plausibly deny the problems that he knows or suspects that it has. So I expected a bit, and factored that into my decision to buy this one at the listed price.

Of course I also took the seller--a dealer with a good reputation--at his word when he told me that all of the internal parts had been replaced with USGI parts. I found this not to be the case, and he wound up replacing most of them with real USGI parts when the gun went back for warranty repair twice. Or was it three times? After a while, I lost count. But he was paying shipping both ways each time and paying for a lot of new parts and finish work.

After the last time it came back, I took it out and again it was malfunctioning. Rounds would be stripped off of the magazine and rammed into the chamber but not fired. The primer would have a light dent, but wasn't being hit hard enough to set the round off. Again I contacted the seller--he did warrant that all guns that he sold would work reliably--and all I got back was a rude e-mail that he had forwarded from the alleged "gunsmith" that had been working on the gun. That jerk basically accused me of causing the problems by limp-wristing the gun...as if that's even possible with a ten pound firearm. He also told the seller that, in his opinion, they'd done enough work on this gun and given me more than enough USGI parts already. The seller seemed to agree, so I just gave up dealing with them and bought a new used USGI trigger frame for it. I then stripped down the West Hurley commercial frame and rebuilt the new frame using the few confirmed USGI parts that were in the old frame along with replacement parts that I bought to swap out every non-USGI part in there, down to the tiniest spring. I dura-coated the new frame and almost got it to match the receiver, and then put it all back together. I noticed right off that the magazines fit snugly on the new frame, whereas in the old one, they rattled like a maraca. Cause of the problems? Bet.

Yesterday I took it out to the range for a quick test.


FINALLY! It WORKS!

It fired every round run through it with the exception of some Fiocci FMJ that it just did not like. This is apparently not uncommon though, as other Thompson owners report problems with their guns and Fiocci, too. Something to do with their cases. (And before you bomb me with comments about how your pistols work fine with Fiocci, so do mine. Flawlessly, every one. It's just this subgun that hates it.) And when it's running, this big heavy beast is smooth and quite controllable so long as I have a solid stance and a firm grasp on it.

I did have one magazine out of the bunch I was using that would not stay locked in the gun. That mag is getting tossed. Aside from that, it was a great runner in both semi and full auto, and finally I was able to walk off the range with this gun without having to cover my face in shame. Yeah...I'm happy. A few hundred more rounds without any hiccups and I'll pronounce this one my new "Go to" tool for emergencies.

Next thing: Get real USGI wood on this gun and ditch the glossy "presentation" wood that AO put on it.

As for the seller, supposedly a reputable Thompson dealer...I'll be charitable and not name him, but you can bet for damned sure that he won't be getting repeat business or any referrals from me.

My new .45 is here.

It was a birthday present to me this year, bought and paid for several months ago. It's finally here.

Because what's better than a pistol that shoots 8 rounds of .45ACP?

A submachine gun that shoots 50 rounds of .45ACP.

Thompson Gun, Model 1928. Favorite of Prohibition-era gangsters, the US military, and pretty much anyone else who wanted to kill their enemies with style.

It's a West Hurley commercial gun, not a genuine Colt or Savage, but on the plus side, I can shoot the tar out of this one without worrying about damaging a collectible.

Being a 1928, it does take the drums. All I have for it is stick mags now though.

Shown with my 1911.

This one came out of an estate and was never fired by it's original owner. An actual unfired Thompson gun.

Well it's been fired now.

Of course, like many West Hurley Thompsons, this one seems to have a couple of minor issues. Or maybe it just doesn't like my reloads. But I hope to have it squared away before the blogshoot on October 24, and it'll be there if I do. So if you're coming--and I hope that you are--bring a box or two of .45 FMJ.

Cue the theme song: