Recent content by Mr. Standfast

A classic old Western accident was caused by hanging a stirrup on the saddle horn, making a high loop to give you some purchase for tightening up the girth. For if the horse fancies an easy time, he will inhale or flex his stomach muscles to stop you. He isn't going to be the one who falls off...

I think any trigger safety is a bad idea. It can only be as good as the engagement of sear to hammer or cocking-piece, which can wear. Break-open shotguns manage pretty well with them, but they are often used either alone or with strict rules of etiquette in operation, and they don't need as...

That would probably be cheaper than a new barrel. Set up a standing search with e-mail notifications on eBay, and a good stock from someone who has restocked his gun in self-indulgent wood should come along soon. Actually those are some of the easiest guns to restock yourself, from scratch...

Powder charge weight doesn't have that much effect on the barrel regulation of a double, any more than on the height of impact of a revolver. Make the gun recoil or flex its barrel more that way, and you make the bullet exit before it has done as much of it. It is bullet weight that controls...

If you glass-bed a barrel, you can put a piece of dymotape on the bottom with your name embossed on it. Remove it and a mirror image of the writing will be in there forever ready to be held to a mirror. It might be enough to charge a criminal who gets caught with it.

The problem is stopping them from rolling in the bore, or bouncing from side to side - and possibly worst of all, stopping the from bouncing when the travel along one side and hit the choke. Some very knowledgeable people report results about as good as you can get with more sophisticated slugs...

The Carcano was designed around a heavier bullet than most, but don't worry too much about nose shape. This is the Hornady bullet I use in my 6.5x54 Mannlicher-Schoenauer, suspended together with a very cheap clone of the lighter Swedish military FMJ, in a caliper set to the land diameter...

Whether it does a worthwhile amount of good depends partly on your requirements, the fit of brass to chamber, and pressure. The first thing to do is check whether the pressure forces the case head out of alignment with the bore axis, with the rifle as supplied. If it doesn't, any benefit to be...

If the reason for return was documented, and you could get a copy of the press cuttings, it might improve collectability How about if it was from Abilene in the earlies? A lot of guns get stolen in the dark, and anything that turns out embarrassing in the light of day gets dumped. In these days...

The only tool necessary to dismantle the P14 Enfield bolt is a loop of string, which you hook onto the cocking-piece. Raise it, and you can hold it slightly back and unscrew. I didn't have anything against cock-on-closing, which if anything cushions the wrist against jarring, but I wanted the...

I believe the most important problem with the use of smokeless in muzzle-loaders is controlling the initial burning space as closely as a cartridge case can. Shaped pellets, unless you can crush them. Burning rates can be modified to some extent by composition and by coatings. Solid grains of...

You can't speed up the passage of the years, but you can speed up the procreating. How about "I really need an interest to stop me wasting so much money on all those nights out with the boys"?

It might be better if it did. In 1910 Franklin Mann wanted to test the effect of an airspace over the powder. So as altering the charge would be introducing another variable, it seemed natural to top off a given charge with an inert substance. He chose sand, presumably in a barrel reaching the...

They sound beautiful. Some sort of white epoxy filler might be even better than wood, for a perfect fit to metal to stop mother of pearl cracking. I wonder, does fossil ivory still have the property it does when straight from the elephant's mouth, or a mere century or two later, of being...