Well now what?

The trapper pistol will be graded tomorrow.  

Pics were sent out and as soon as I get a good place to host them I’ll link em here.

Expect to see some start to finish pictures this summer.  

My next project is to finish a 1911 safety installation for a friend of mine, and then work on my 1911.  

I have a final in bench metal tomorrow and then I’m 1/4 of the way to being a real life smith.

Now, what do I do with myself in the mean time?

It survived.

Gun worked fine.  Shot pretty well.  Pics will have to wait however, I forgot my camera.

Headed East for a day or so, I’ll be back Monday.

Done.

Finished my last project for this semester today.  I shoot it tomorrow. I’ll post pictures if it survives.  

Looking forward to having next weekend off.  However, the smithing doesn’t stop, I have to fit a ambi-safety for a friend of mine, and clean up the grips so they will fit.  

Then I start summer classes.

Being Heeled.

I’ve carried a pistol off and on for quite some time.  I went through a forest of options for both pistols and holsters.  I’ve recently settled on a pretty good solution.  I managed to score one of the new production Smith and Wesson 642s, without the lock.  (The lock is here to stay folks, even though it is indeed stupid.)  Now were I have to go during the day and the environment that I’m in I have to keep deep concealment.  So I went with a ankle rig.  It works rather well.  Now it’s not quick, but situational awareness has to be my friend.

Now when I get home I either immediatly switch to a Glock 19 in Raven Ghost holster.  (Sadly discontinued.  And by discontinuing Raven has assured I will never by another holster from them.) My other option is a Smith 36-1 in a Galco slide.

I do a bit of managerial money handling so being heeled at home has become rather necessary.  My choices are by all accounts pedestrian.  However should I need to use any of them I’m not out much for a replacement.

Doctor, Doctor, it hurts when I do this.

Well it’s a good thing I’m a gunsmith (in training) rather than a doctor.  My finger isn’t broken…..it was just severely dislocated.  Which I found out when I attempted to set it the second time.  Not to cast aspersions on my classmate’s, he’s a former paramedic, abilities and it sure as hell felt like he set it when he taped the two popsicle sticks to it.  When I attempted to set it, after getting a finger splint at the local drugstore, it popped back into place.

Only twice have I ever thought I was gonna pass out.  The first time is when they removed the pin from the top of my foot after surgery.  The second was last night when I thought the end of my finger had popped off and rolled under the stove.  

It was swollen and tender as hell this morning.  The finger-splint seems to be helping, but I have managed to bump it into just about everything. 

Plus side, it’s not broken.

Sometimes I wonder if it’s too late to join the circus.

We’re in the last week of the semester.  So far I’ve had quite a bit of fun and learned quit a bit by totally destroying a bunch of stuff and making about every mistake possible.   I will have a working trapper pistol when this is all over with, but I ran into a slight snag.  The general diagnosis is that I broke my left hand’s ring finger when I dropped the 4-jaw chuck on the lathe rails, which my finger happened to be resting on.  That has made filing sort of a pain and pretty well wasted my whole day.  Oh well, the semester is over on the 10th.  I can manage that long.  

But I’d have made a great human cannonball.

May Day.

Bin Laden Killed by US Forces.

That’s all.

I personally know a squad worth of guys that have been killed or injured severely in this ongoing war.  

I hope it stops someday.

I got all fired up to write something.

Then I read this, and decided that I really couldn’t add anything intelligent.

On the plus side I didn’t have to sleep in my Suburban.

That is about the only good thing I can say about my Thursday night.  Leaving the Community College Town in what can charitably be described as whiteout conditions I made it all the way to the first major city before I slid into the guardrail.  I managed to bang up the passenger side front quarter-panel and bang up the bumper.  Oh well, it was slick and lousy out, and my Uncle owns a car fixing shop.  If any one knows me they know I’m not huge on cosmetics so I can deal with a busted looking vehicle.  When I passed through Major Western City I really managed to screw up my truck when I got into what I can only guess was black ice.

Just last week I had a discussion with a few friends of mine about how the human brain deals with stress.  We we talking about gunfights, I’ve never been in one, but I have been in a couple of vehicle accidents.  The phenomenon is called tachypsychia when everything seems to slow down.  I experienced it when my truck started to slide out from under me, it seemed like I had gone from driving on a road to driving on a hockey rink.

I felt the rear begin to slide out to the left.  I attempted to counter-steer and momentarily regained control.  I immediately lost it again.  I knew that there was no way I was going to get it back.  I looked at the speedometer, 54 mph.  I reached over the wheel with my left hand and turned on the emergency flasher.  I then used my right hand to turn off the radio and the heater.  ( I’m still not sure why I thought the heater would be important.)   I checked the wheel one more time noticing that I was now moving pretty much perpendicular to my original direction of travel.  Nothing I was going to be able to do about it now so I put my hands in my lap and took a deep zazen breath.

The impact was in damn near the same spot that I managed to hit earlier in the night.  I rebounded off of the guardrail and noticed that I had broken the headlight as I recrossed the rumble bars as I went back across the road.  The snow on the road had limited my vision to pretty well a cocoon of white. I felt the rear wheels hit the rumble bars on the other side of the interstate and I was hoping that the ditch wasn’t going to provide traction to the wheels or else I was going to roll.  Thankfully, it didn’t.  I felt the truck shut off as it smashed into the guardrail at the passenger-side taillights.   I had come to a stop with all of the dash alarm lights lit and beeping.  I turned the key and the truck fired up imediately.  I limped it another mile down the road to a truck stop and called the cavalry.

I limped my busted truck about ten miles to a Motel 6.  They left the light on for me.  The cavalry came in the morning.

Road Warrior

3550 Miles since the 19th of January.  I still have a run to my hometown for the last of my stuff to complete this move to Community College Town.  This is growing tiresome, and the prospect of spending the night in my truck tomorrow night isn’t promising.