Musical Blast from the Past

Mike Nesmith, formerly of the Monkees, was actually one of the first to get on board with the "music video" concept as he was embarking on his post-Monkees solo career. And he put out this gem--Cruisin'--the story of Lucy and Ramona and Sunset Sam.



Interesting trivia--towards the end of the band's existence, Nesmith had it in his contract that every 45rpm record that the Monkees put out would have one of his own "country-rock" numbers on the B-side.

Enjoy...

Since I'm back at work, my wish is that you all at least can enjoy today, and this smooth classic by the late, great Mr. Hoyt Axton should help.



The man had talent, and if you're not careful, you'll be humming this one all day long.

Sick...

And not really feeling like blogging today, so here--have some Ingrid Olava, an up-and-comer from Lillehammer, Norway.



I'll post stuff tomorrow if I don't die today.

Saturday Content

Sorry--was busy yesterday and I'm still busy and tired today. So in lieu of original content:

Music to clean guns by

While I was scrubbing me some revolvers and sipping some Jim Beam tonight, I came across this old classic from Hoyt Axton that never really got much radio play because it was never released as a single. It should have been.

I know that I normally do pics of the guns taken apart for cleaning, but I just did revolvers tonight and they don't get taken apart unless they're Colts, and then it's only because they probably broke. (I kid, I kid...)

Music to clean guns by, yet again.

It's Friday night. It's 11 degrees outside, and the stove's roaring. Time to put some Blues on, bust out some beer and clean a few rifles.

Belle's snugged in behind the rifle rack, Murphy's on the stair landing, and it's Jonny Lang time.

That Justin Beiber pissant could take a lesson from Jonny.

The Spanish 1895 Mauser in 7mm was the first one to get a good scrubbing, just because.

Well because I like it, and because I eventually want to get the whole batch of them done since I've got all this free time.


Cleaned and oiled and ready to shoot some more.

This rifle is a Belgian Mauser, Model 1950, one of the last bolt-action Mausers ever produced. It got a cleaning too, and judging by the crud that came out of it's bore, it needed it. Shame on me.

It was made in .30-06 because the US was giving away so much of that stuff to allies after the war. This one was made in 1952 and bears the Belgian crown over a letter "B" for King Baudouin, the monarch of Belgium.The letters "ABL" stand for Armee Belge-Belgisch Leger, or "Belgian Army Rifle" in both French and Dutch. This one came out on the Fabrique Nationale plant in 1952, and got it's scrubbing just because yesterday was John Browning's birthday.

Time for some B.B. King, Eric Clapton, Jimmy Vaughn and Buddy Guy.

That put on, the Swedish M-96 got some attention too.

When they get to be 115 years old, they've earned a periodic clean and lube.

And the Kar-98a got another scrub, even though it hasn't seen the range in years. It didn't come to me in the best of shape but I'll be damned if I let it get any worse. It's earned a soft retirement judging by the use it's been put to by persons unknown, probably somewhere in France once upon a time.

I needed some Dr. John, too.

But the cleaning wasn't all about Mausers. The Japanese Type 99 Arisaka got hit too. Since I finally discovered what a great shooter it is, it's getting more attention, both on range day and on cleaning day.


And the Ishapore L2a1 got some time on the bench because I had this funny feeling that maybe I hadn't cleaned it the last time I had it out.

This time I was wrong. It was pristine.

And even though they were already cleaned and oiled, all the black powder rifles got an oil patch run down the bores, just because black powder need extra attention to keep the corrosion at bay. Gonna wind it down with some Koko Taylor while I do them.

Now the beer's gone, I'm in a blues state of mind, and life is great.

Music to clean guns by

Tonight, with beer and music aplenty, I clean the Martini-Henry MKII.

I tried to detail photograph the rifle coming apart, but my camera's being temperamental again. So here are the instructions for disassembly.

Large Frame Martini Action Disassembly

When that's done, you've got this:

That's it. Every piece that goes inside the rifle action. Simple, rugged and it only fits back one way. It's pretty much "soldier-proof". Celebrate the disassembly with a beer.

The barrel goes into my shower (guest room, of course) and it gets a good hot water rinse and scrubbing with a .45 caliber bore brush. Then it gets patched with alternating oil and dry patches until the patches come out clean or you run out of patches. With this old war-horse, it's looking like the latter. Drink two beers while scrubbing.



Clean and lightly oil all of those innards. Have another beer while you're doing it. Then put them all back in just the reverse of how they came out.

Large Frame Martini Action Reassembly

If you've done it right, everything is together and functional again. If you didn't get it right, have another beer and try again. There is a little trick to it, but once you've got it, you've got it.

Now go reward yourself with a beer. You've earned it!

The week that my mother was accidentally cool

Yeah, it happened once, years ago.

I had borrowed her car for some reason or another, and as was the norm back then, I took a few of my music cassettes with me to listen to. (If you have to ask what a cassette was, you're too young to read this blog. And stay off my lawn, you damned kids.)

Some days later, I noticed that I couldn't find a particular one. I didn't think much of it at the time, but about a week later, I was back at my mother's place and when I looked in her car, there it was, still in the cassette player. When I asked her about it, she said that she really liked that cassette and that she'd been playing it all week.

"You liked that cassette?" I asked, rather surprised.

She replied that she did. She said that she liked the singer.

I asked if she knew who he was, and she replied that, no, she did not. Apparently she just liked the ballads that comprised much of the tape. Of course when I explained to her who Meatloaf was, and that the name of the cassette was "Bat out of Hell", she immediately changed her opinion and gave the tape back to me.

And so ended her brief bout of coolness. So sad.

But here you go, Ma. Just in case you want to be cool again when you're out bombing around with your Red Hat posse.

Music to clean guns by

OK, it's Saturday night, and time to do what I should have done a few days ago: put some music on, crack a beer and clean "The Pig".
We shot it, and I put it up dirty, meaning to get back to it. I dithered a few days, but now it's time.

I apologize in advance for the crappy pictures. I ran out of batteries for my dedicated camera and I'm doing these off my iPhone. But the music's good. Tonight, we're doing Meatloaf.

And the beer: Yeungling.

Step one: Barrel off. Rotate this little catch 90 degrees and remove the barrel assembly.

Those of you familiar with the older M60's will see some differences here, this being the newer M60E4, or more accurately, the MK43 Mod 0. It's the upgraded version now in use by the Navy special teams. This one started out as a stock model but it was worn out and beat to the point of being unsafe when I got it (and the seller knew it but swore that it was in great shape) so I sent it out to Desert Ordnance, which is the civilian sales side of US Ordnance, the company the rebuilds the M60 for the Navy. They completely rebuilt my shot-out old junker and sent me this one back--a zero-time, brand new gun (with a factory warranty) and fixes for all of the problems that the old M60 was known for. So that being the case, if you are used to seeing the traditional 60, bear in mind that this one's going to be a mite different. And the barrel assembly above is a great example of that. It's tougher, lighter, shorter, and it comes with a fully adjustable front sight post, which means that spare barrels can be zeroed to the gun in advance. Plus, the carry handle is on the barrel, so you can grab it when changing barrels. Also, to reduce the weight of the spare barrels, the bipod is now mounted to the gun, not each barrel.

The buttstock is shorter and lighter, too. But it comes right off, and then you can pull the retaining clip out, take out the buffer assembly, and pull the drive spring out, just like the original.


Then the bolt and operating rod come out. These are seriously improved metallurgically, and good for about 30,000 round each now, instead of being virtually disposable like the old ones.

The top cover and feed guide come out just like always. The top cover is improved now in that is allows the cover to be slammed shut on an ammo belt without damaging it. It also has about 30% more pulling power on the belt.

Next, the retaining spring is removed and the trigger assembly comes off. This also is lighter and improved with the addition of an ambidextrous safety.

So, with the trigger assembly removed from the gun, I naturally turned it upside down only to hear that sound that every amateur gunsmith fears: the clink of some mystery part falling out of it's place before you saw what it was or how it sat in place.

Yep, there on the floor sat the gun's sear. Fortunately function and wear patterns pretty much indicate how it's supposed to be, so after double-checking with the gun's spare trigger pack and having another beer, I put the sear back in where it was supposed to go.

With all of the components removed, all you have left is the receiver with the operating rod tube, rear sight and ammo hanger. It's pretty easy to clean this out.

Then I work on the barrel assembly. The bore gets cleaned and the gas system gets taken apart. Again, many changes to this area. The gas system has a nice retaining ring set-up which eliminates the need for the safety wire that used to be necessary to keep the gun from disassembling itself, and the gas piston has been modified--it can go in either way and still run, so no more worrying about putting it in backwards and creating a 23lb. single-shot rifle like was commonly done with the old style sixty.


Everything gets scrubbed and oiled, and then I put it all back together. Then I had another beer.

Perfect...oh wait--what's that on the floor?

Please God, please don't let that be an M60 part...please.

It was. It was a small plunger, with a spring beside it. I didn't have to be Kreskin to figure out where that came from. Sure enough--a quick check of the spare trigger pack showed me that I was looking at the sear plunger and spring. Yeah, just great. So the trigger pack came pack off the gun and the sear came back out, and there was an empty hole where the plunger assembly should have been. Derp.

Trigger pack re-assembled and re-installed on the gun again, and it passed it's function check flawlessly. Yay, me. Just as well, too. The beer's all gone and I'm starting to feel like a General Motors line worker here. So that concludes our Saturday Night gun cleaning session.

Music to cleans guns by.

Time for some more "Music to clean guns by".

Tonight, we'll do some blues--Clapton and Dr. John--and have some more Bushmills.


Then it's time to clean the M1 Garand.

This one's a Springfield Armory rifle, manufactured in August, 1945. It still sports it's original barrel. This one followed me home from one of my Camp Perry trips.

To start, drop the trigger guard, then remove the trigger assembly.


Then pull the stock off the action and remove the operating rod, spring, and bolt.

Brush and swab the bore, making sure to hold the action upside down to keep the cleaning solvents from running down into the gas tube below the barrel. If you want to clean the gas tube too, unscrew the plug at the end, remove the lock, and clean the tube without removing it from the rifle. Too much taking it off and putting it back makes for a loose fit and this messes up your accuracy.

Clean and oil all the little pieces & parts from the action, then put 'em all back where they belong along with the bolt and the operating rod.



And if you forgot to put grease on the operating surfaces where metal rides on metal, take it back apart and do that I use Tetra grease in the bolt and operating rod tracks and militech oil on the little parts. If it moves, it gets one or the other.
Now put the stock and trigger group back (after cleaning and oiling the trigger group), check it for function, and wipe it all down with an oil rag. Then rack it.

Repeat x10.


We're gonna need another rendition of St. James Infirmary. And more Bushmills. This is gonna be a long night.

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.

Frag order: Overflight of the special place.

Took the plane up today. Second time since it came out of annual with a clean bill of health other than one vacuum hose.


While waiting to take off, I got to see this uber-cool KCAB Decathlon.

Yeah, I could so go for one of those. Stick and rudder flying and as aerobatic as you wanna get.

The last flight when unrecorded because my camera died, but this time I went up with a new one, and I decided that I would pop over to an interesting training facility in the area and shoot some photos of some neat things that I saw there on the last flight when I accidentally strayed over the place. I won't name this place, but they advertise themselves as a driver's training school for hi-speed driving instruction for government and private contractors and those who want to drive race cars. They do have several really good driving tracks around their complex, including simulated city street and dirt track courses, and they've sure got an awful lot of fancy cars down there, from Crown Vics to Porsches, but looking closely, it's apparent that these folks offer a bit more than that. Think "Triple Canopy" or "Blackwater" type training. God love 'em for it, because there's a need, but that doesn't mean that I can't have some fun playing Francis Gary Powers with them.

Here's my approach to the place. Note the nice race tracks around it. Some of it is even open to the public on some week-ends for racing.

Here's one of the two shooting ranges that they admit to having. I can't fault them for this. They admit to having this one and offering some training on it.They even open it to the public for USPSA and Three GUn matches a few times a year.

Lot of cars, huh? I only caught part of their training fleet in this shot. Those white cars are all Ford Crown Victorias.

More cars, and the range again.

Here we go. Behind some tall fencing, we have helicopters set up for people to practice doing stuff with. It's a CH-47 CH-46, A UH-1, and a CH-53 type. All of these are current military helicopters. Coincidence?

And here's two shots of a small city mock-up that they've built from shipping containers.


The helicopters again.

So what's this little sub-compound? Unless I miss my guess, it's a shoot-house complex, where people train on dynamic entry and room/building clearing.

Looks like more shoot houses to me. Funny these aren't mentioned on the corporate website.

Here's the whole complex, set back from their public race tracks and protected by fences and trees from prying eyes...most of them anyway.

I spy with my little eye...HUMVEEs. Looks like the up-armored versions, too.

Uh-oh...another HUMVEE and an MRAP (Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected) truck. Betcha those SUVs are armored all to hell, too. What neat toys they have!

Looking at the shape of this building and it's clearly massive ventilation system, if this isn't an indoor shooting range, I'm a duck.

And here's more outdoor shooting ranges. Looks like a great place to train or just hang out.


Again, not knocking it, because America needs places like this. For that reason, I'm not disclosing who they are or where they're located. But I'm still liable to overfly them every now and again though, just out of curiosity.

On the way back, here's a few random landscape shots--houses down in the woods below, the Shenandoah River,and Harpers Ferry where the Shenandoah flows into the Potomac.

Then it's back home, for a series of practice landings.

The first two landings were atrocious, and the third attempt was merely horrible. But since no parts fell off the plane that I was aware of, I just kept going around the pattern to try again. Eventually Dave, the tower controller, called to ask me if I was going to make a full-stop landing any time soon.
"Eventually," I replied. "But I'm going to keep at this until I get at least three in a row that aren't pathetic."
"Roger that," came the response from the tower. "Be advised that you only have about three hours of daylight left."

EFF YOU DAVE!!! Just EFF YOU, OK?

Finally I got four landings in a row that I was happy with and I shut it down. But as I taxied in, I couldn't help but recall an old song which just begged for a few new words:

"I think it's gonna be all right.
Yeah, the worst is over now.
The little Cessna's landing like
a red rubber ball."

Apologies to the Cyrkle and Paul Simon.