Weapons Man

We have mentioned before that the great benefits of 3-D printing include not only the direct printing of parts, but the printing of tooling, models, and patterns. It was inevitable that sooner or later someone was going to 3D print a PLA (polylactic acid, the easiest and most common plastic for 3-D printing) pattern for a firearm receiver, and then make an aluminum alloy casting using the Lost PLA process, essentially identical to the lost wax process used by jewelers and dentists for millennia. And now someone has done it, yielding this receiver, which builds up into a clone of the popular Ruger 10/22.

Karl and Ian from Full30.com and Forgotten Weapons.com are not strangers to this site. They have something cool and new: a customized slide-fire rifle designed to make slide-firing easy as falling off a log.

(Note: link removed while we fix embed code. Bear with us!) Should be fixed now, apologies.

The company that makes their trigger, KE Arms, has since introduced its own line of complete slide-fire rifles they call the Poor Man’s SAW (minus the bipod, the importance and details of which Karl explains in the video) and several variations of parts and components. Listen carefully to Karl; he tells you what features are important, and what has and hasn’t worked, in the video. Then go forth and build your own.

Brrrrrrrrt.

We think we know our way around guns and gun history, but in fact we know, mostly, the success stories — the winners that went forward into widespread use, more than the many other ways that were tried and found wanting. This Civil War veteran revolver is one of those also-rans; can you identify it?

MTV has a new series of that name. It purports to show how young people can throw their lives disastrously off track with just the eponymous screw up. We watched exactly one episode, and we got a completely different message from the fact patterns that were largely hinted at in the show, as it was making excuses for its young protagonist. The protagonist, one Kumari Fulbright, never seemed to take responsibility for what was not one bad choice, but a never-ending stream of them, culminating in some galactically bad choices.

Sean Benschop, 2013 mugshot.

Most people know at least a couple of things about the Battle of Jericho. The Biblically learned may even have studied the relevant verses (Joshua 5:13-6:27), and most everybody in the USA can probably recognize the old Negro spiritual, here delivered very musically, but with less authentic African vibe, by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir:

A guy on Reddit has a pretty sad gunsmith story. In Reddit tradition, in memory of the martyred Chairman Pao, we’ll give you the tl;dr version first:

How did firewood kill Russell E. Davis, 39, of Freedom, Pennsylvania?

The upsides are many and glorious. The downsides? You can get whacked. Michael J. “Brownie” Brown was one of those guys — you know, the guy who spent a lot of time in Hondo or El Sal and kind of went native. He had married a much younger Salvadoran woman, and that was what brought about his end.

What do you do when you’re branded?1 Well, when you’re a 7 1/2″ Colt 1873 Single-Action Army Revolver and Army inspectors reject you, the word is not “branded,” technically, but “condemned.” And you get pulled from the ranks of all your brothers going to Artillery troopers, and sent back to Colt. And 139 years later, you’re a puzzle and a delight to collectors — a mass-produced firearm with a one-off story to tell.

After a couple of youths knocked themselves out in a fiery crash in the industrial city of Lorain, Ohio, bystanders dashed to the scene, mostly to try to extricate the youths from the mangled, burning car.

Everybody in the small Baltic Sea village of Heikendorf near Kiel knew the old man was a collector. A retired financier, his name is not being reported, or it’s being reported with just a last initial, as German custom reports those under criminal charges, as “Hans-Dieter F.”  Everyone, it seems, but the German authorities. The locals knew about his Panther tank too — as recently as 1978, he’d used its go-anywhere capability to help neighbors out in a particularly bad winter, remembered as Schneekatastrophe 1978 by the Burgermeister. But the German authorities take a hard line on this type of collecting, and they sent the Bundeswehr to collect the Panther, and the man’s other treasures.

We haven’t been over there (GunLab.net) in a while, and Chuck is always up to something cool. Recently he had something nice to say about us, in a longer post on reverse-engineering; to be explicit, reverse-engineering the MP44 trunnion. But forget what he says about WeaponsMan.com, how cool is it to be making an MP.44 trunnion for (almost) the first time since a T-34 did a pivot turn on the ruins of the factory?

Abdulazeez mugshot from a previous crime. If you look at that beard and wonder about his ties to Duck Dynasty, You Just Might Be a New York Media Nabob

Two years ago today a street racer named Khusen Akhmedov (an immigrant from Uzbekistan) raced into the history books in Philadelphia when he slammed at high speed into four of a family of five — thereby ending his street race with some premature kinetics.

That’s the most chilling phrase in the English language these days.

Recently, a friend commented, to a third guy looking for an accurate rifle cheap, that cheap wasn’t the right way to do it.

This is not a weapons site at all, but it is extremely useful, and beyond its immediate utility, its potential is staggering. It came to mind recently when we were looking at some undersized holes, and couldn’t remember the decimal size of a particular numbered drill bit. We did the equivalent of a Hail Mary pass: asked Siri, the voice processor in the iPhone. She used Wolfram Alpha to tell us.

We mentioned, a while back, a few SF concepts, like Big Boy Rules and invited you to compare and contrast another SF concept: “The Catch Me/Fuck Me Rule.” This is a very different thing. While Big Boy Rules unleash the individual’s creativity within the parameters of the law and behavioral norms, a CM/FM rule is normally the result of higher command pressure, often about something stupid.