Work!

I'm going to be working a semiconductor convention-show booth this week, so blogging will be light to non-existant. A friend with a company that does scope-application software, the best in the business, and for whom I did the GUI look-and-feel design needs some booth-candy - so that's me. Ha. My back is already killing me.
Post comments as you like, make something up.

UPDATE: Well that was fast, it's over and they're gone already. It was kinda fun seeing that there was a new business strategy in place, and that the guppies had grown some teeth and turned into sharks - and it was feeding time. It went well.

Underwood or Inland?

Examining the various components and miscellaneous parts that make-up my National Postal Meter carbine I got down to a closer look a the butt-plate. Originally I though it was an Underwood, given the description of diagonal checkering in Craig Reisch's book U.S. M1 Carbines: Wartime Production. However when I Googled "that I found another resource at the fine purveyors of gunny-goodness, Chestnut Ridge Supply, which was a cool and actual visual comparison of all the different manufacturer's M1 Carbine butt-plate
checkering. I had literally overlooked some information in the book itself. So I took their images and tweaked them for color and size and flipped them sideways to compare.

As you can see compared to the top-picture, what I've got is clearly not a NPM butt-plate.

And comparing further the fine checkering visible on the Underwood is also lacking.

Ding! Looks like an early Inland with the more generous checkering to me. Wonder where I can find a "proper" NPM butt-plate?

That's one of the fun conundrums of Carbines, while National Postal Meter made their own butt-plates, they also integrated and used thousands and thousands of components from ALL the other manufacturers. From Inland (just about everything), IBM (trigger housing and stuff), Irwin Pederson (firing pins only), Quality Hardware (including a very few Union Switch & Signal made receivers), Rock-Ola (operating slides and front sights among other things), Saginaw (three things only: front sights, recoil plate, and piston nut), Standard Products (various little bits including hammers and sears), Underwood (most notably their excellent barrels), and Winchester (a few bolts, and several thousand recoil plates).
So an early butt-plate from Inland is actually quite possibly "right" for my early National Postal Meter carbine, as is also an Inland operating slide (5,000) or rear-sight assembly (5,000) - or an Underwood (10,000) rear-sight assembly.
There was probably only a few totally 100% National Postal Meter component-only carbines ever actually made, and on the first day of training and familiarization - when they took everything apart and each soldier threw every piece into a blanket and they washed the cosmoline off in gasoline and re-assembled them randomly - then there were none.

For Whom to Vote?

Got my NRA ballot in the magazine American Rifleman and Bitter recommends the marvelous Sandy Froman - who is a natural and I agree. She's a local gal (or was to me) who is now in Arizona like many refugees from the People's Republic of Ca-Left-ornia - but she knows the nature of the Beast here and what (and with whom) The Fight for the 2nd Amendment is all about. She's a Stanford and Harvard Law graduate so she's smart as hell and also knows how to fight The Fight in the Halls of Power - plus she collects machine-guns!! Woo!
Her husband was a cop and a competitive shooter who passed away from a blood-clot aneurysm-thing, and Bitter relates her very effective insights and the fight during the sunset of the AWB.

I don’t know how many of you watched the various debates in the media during the time of the sunset of the AWB. If you did, you may have seen Sandy. If you actually listened to the debates, you would notice that she used it as a credential to our advantage. See, they could bring on the politically appointed police chiefs of the big cities to talk about the law enforcement perspective, but Sandy shot back by prefacing her argument with, "As a law enforcement widow…" I wish I had captured the debate I was watching on tape. They couldn't come after her anymore as law enforcement's foe. If she had just gotten up and said she knew rank and file cops didn't support this, they would have argued with her until the end of the segment. But as a law enforcement widow, they couldn't. My response was simple. "Damn. She’s good." (my additional emphasis)

Ok so we've got that one nailed-down, and David Hardy Of Arms and the Law includes Carol Bambery (webpage here) as another stellar representative.
So who else?
There's celebrities and congressmen - The Nuge, and Senator Larry Pratt (good to have a seat at the table, in the Halls of Power), Rep. Curtis Jenkins who authored the first law in the Nation prohibiting frivolous lawsuits against firearms manufacturers (yeah!), and book-author/memoir writer H. Joaquin Jackson of "One Ranger" - who seems like just a totally for-real type dude, and then there's Oliver North - but is it just a popularity contest? Who is most effective in The Fight, and for whom would this be a reward - an act of career-recognition? I want kickass fighters at the table in the Halls of Power.

Global Warmering

We have a little pond outside our balcony upon which this morning were some interesting ice-formations. We don't usually get this kind of ice-producing cold that we've been experiencing lately, all due to global warming.

Still I prefer the impending climate of Hawaiian-proportions that we are told by His Majestic Scientific Eminence AlGore is rapidly approaching, Praise Be to Him for the Internet which He invented.

It does get cold here and usually during these months of January and February, and in the past few years we've had snow on both mountain ranges to either side of Silicon Valley - but we should be back to the mid 70's soon enough. I remember it snowed once when I was a kid some forty-plus years ago - just as expertly predicted by the guys writing books about the coming Ice Age. They sure rode that wave of scientific triumph and certitude all the way to the bank.

I'm sure that soft tropical breezes will be blowing-in at any moment, and with them the scent of gardenias and plumeria will fill the garden. Ripe bananas will become the export crop of the future as we paddle environmentally sensitive hemp-bark canoes from islet to islet in the Great California Archipelago, trading our holistic wares of friendship-beads and chanting the friendly kum-ba-jah of Oil-Freedom that Bob Marley sang about. Jah Ire and pass the dutchie mon, Science be kind to you.
"I'm ready for my Luau now, Mr. Algore..."

Bacon!

South Park Pundit reports on a New Year's resolution to go boar hunting on the California Central Coast. That brought back a vivid reminder of something we saw out in the Islands a couple years back.
As we drove along the twisty and damp little Hana Highway, on our way to Mosquito Heaven, I saw two fourwheel-drive pickup-trucks pulled off to the side in a muddy corner. A rutted, jungle-mountain muddy dirt track came steeply down to meet the main road and was closed-off by a locked gate.
One guy had a rifle slung over his shoulder - they were hunters who had stopped to unlock and open the gate to their muddy track.
We had pulled off to the side of the very narrow, incredibly scenic road to let several following cars of gawking tourist-traffic drive past, and while I noticed that they were hunters, something else caught my eye - the gaping maw of a huge pig on the back of the lead truck.
The body was lying on a plywood sheet, across a the top of a big cage in which smaller, yapping heads of very excited and happy dogs poked-up. The other truck had dogs as well but no game.
I yelled, "Wow! Nice pig!" and asked, "What didja shoot 'em with?" And one of the guys called back, "A .270!" They were hurrying to get off the popular tourist road and up the private one, so I took a quick picture and that's what it looked like...
click pic to enlarge
UPDATE: some edits to text, and a better closeup of the beast.

Not Always a Bummer

I don't want to get bogged-down in the negative. There are optimistic old people out there, and I met one who was briefly my FIL's roommate - his name is Norman.
Norman was at Wheeler Field in Hawaii as a part of the 3rd Engineers when Japan attacked, he was a Sergeant already at the time, so he'd been in the Army a while.
He said they liked going to the Air Corps area where they could play tennis - not a bad gig for a kid from Nebraska, living the life of Riley in Paradise.
Being somewhat distant from Pearl Harbor itself, they saw less of the attack, but two planes aroused them while in Mess and dropped bombs and shot up the couple planes that were on the ground. One bomb went clear through one building and didn't explode - and since they were an Engineers unit they were sent to de-fuse it. Afterwards they dragged it out to a beach and were taking pot-shots at it with their rifles when Sargent who "owned" that bit of beach came hustling up in a big heat and told them to get the hell out of there and get rid of it elsewhere, so they had to throw a chain around it and move on.
Norman went to Ranger School and was sent down to New Guinea where he said he spent a lot of time running up and down the hills there. He liked the M1 and qualified Expert - not too much of a stretch for a kid from Nebraska who had hunted and learned to shoot while growing-up. Where he grew-up isn't too far from where my Mom's family comes from, and we both new the names of small towns around that area. Cozad, Broken Bow, and other places where my Uncle Oscar worked and Hobo'd and where my Grandpa grew-up on the ranch.
He didn't care much for the M1 Carbine and said. "It wasn't worth the powder it took to push the bullet down the barrel." He was injured in New Guinea and was sent down to Australia to recuperate, then went back in, and from New Guinea went up through Sumatra and Java. He says his rifle is on display in a museum in Oahu and repeated the serial number - a five-digit number - that's low and an early issue rifle.
I need to know more. I'd like to get a recorder and do his oral-history, meantime I want to go to an Army Surplus store and get him a "Ranger" t-shirt. He doesn't have much in the way of clothing in the convalescent hospital where he's at, but his demeanor is calm and un-ruffled. His shoulders are broad but he's shrunk a bit as age has taken its toll. Cool old dude.

Correction: It was Malaria that got him sent down to Australia to recover, not an injury.

Resuscitation in Convalescence

With respect for my wife's wishes and family privacy I have removed this post, we deeply appreciate all your condolences and concern, and very thoughtfull comments.

All That Glitters

Guess how many?
In the Slough of Despond, the Lost Time Between Worlds, during the dog-days between Christmas and New Years Resolutions, I came across a nice little, used, .20-gauge Wingmaster that gave me considerable pause to think.
I wanted it in one single flash of recognition - and it came with a slug-barrel, besides I have a box of AA .20ga target loads that I accidentally bought in haste, now they could be used...
The voices in my head grew loud while the Christmas Money in my pocket jangled like a Salvation Army bell-ringer on crack. I was like a trout on a Mepps. I needed a time-out, so I emailed a buddy back in the Frozen Upper Midwest who knows a bit about shotguns, quite a bit.
Awaiting his reply I took a deep breath and went to a few other places where smallbore scatterguns exist. I had to think strategy, not gimmee. At one Emporium-of-Exotica-and-Militaria there were some fine samples; a Browning A-5, in 20-gauge with a fitted box-case for $750, or a fine old Ithaca M37 in 16-gauge for half-that, or a Winchester Model 12 in 20.... I wrote down sizes and numbers in a little notebook.
What to do? I've never hunted and don't even know any hunters. Yeh my cousin duck-hunts with some buddies off the levees up north, but he's an hour and a half across the Bay through the worst Liberal BMW and Lexus traffic you can imagine. Haven't seen him in a couple years. Hell, I don't even see my brother very much and he's up there too.
Then came the Pushback. It was Newish-New and all my stuff is old. I'm not sure what to do with a slug-barrel. I have little space for more guns - so with the space it takes-up I have to be sure that The Gun is Happy as much as I'm Happy, it has to see use. We're at the point where if/when something new comes in, something old or useless has to go out, and we determine that in an instant at this time of year when we clean-out before New Year's. My friend's e-mail reply came, and in it he asked me if I was at-one with the Garand? He thought it sounded-so. I thought, but-sorta - I want to be better.
My wife spoke up amid all this deliberation and said, "You want to get-up to the next level, right? Won't this new gun distract from your concentration? Look, I've seen you taking all that time carefully weighing-out the brass and separating all the different measurements, why not spend the same money on components that are already weighed and spec'd and ready to load?" And a light went-on in my tiny cranium. "Just One Thing"
So there's no little .20-gauge in my closet, but an order from Midway is headed this way instead. On-sale I found premium brass from Nosler and Hornady bullets. There's still a compositional element involved, bullet and charge weights. But the chubby ladies of Lake City '66 will have to wait for another damn brass-weighing contest. Not for a while anyhow.

Yappy New Hear!

I have a lot more blogs bookmarked than blogrolled for one reason (laziness) or another (confusion) and seriously lapsed towards the year-end in my housekeeping duties, but this being the beginning of a New Year it's time to do some cleanup and de-cluttering around the house. I noticed a gaping discrepancy among the Gunbloggers listed, and regret the time it took to correct and add Traction Control to the sidebar list, since he was already in my bookmarks. Scroll-dowwn and checkout the range-day pictures.