I took a twenty-year hiatus from hunting, and since I have returned to it I’ve been going for black-tails at a friends property, which we refer to as ‘The Happy Hunting Grounds.’ Since one seldom even sees a deer beyond fifty yards there my home-grown 7.35mm Carcano carbine‘s iron sights have been just fine. I actually sold my scoped .30-06 because it really didn’t seem like I’d need it. Oops… but more on that later.

This year I had a hankerin’ to try something different; Eastern Washington Mule Deer. I figured to take my Abilene .44 magnum, mount an optic and try my luck. I picked up a Bushnell TRS-25 red dot and planned to mount a rail on the gun. Likely with the right load and a little practice I’d be good-to-go out to 75-100 yards.

…or not. My buddy Jake offered to drag my sorry ass along on his hunt in Eastern Washington, where shots of 100-300 yards happen. Too long for me with a handgun, and I’ve always figured the Carcano to be a 100-yard gun, given my aging eyes and the iron sights. I bemoaned selling the .30-06 to Linda, and she shrugged and said, “So buy a scoped rifle. Pinto’s will have something…”

Is it any wonder I love this woman beyond reason?

Pinto’s did, of course, have something. I was spoiled for choice, in fact. I don’t know if this holds true across the country, but on the used market here a scoped rifle sells for about the same price as one without a scope mounted. Even restricting myself to a scoped rifle in one of a few specific calibers I had a number of options. The one I finally bought was a Remington Model 660 in .243 Winchester. It has a TruGlo scope mounted and a sling. The scope isn’t the best out there, but it’s serviceable, and the sling is a bonus; saved me the time and modest expense of purchasing and mounting one. Another bonus is that the plastic trigger-guard has been replaced by an aluminum unit, which is quite a bit more robust.

The Model 660 was an improved version of the Model 600 carbine; among other changes the sight rib was eliminated and the barrel lengthened by two inches. Over 45,000 of these carbines were made from 1968-1971, after which it was replaced by the Model 600 Mohawk.

I felt that as old, fat and out of shape as I am the handy 6.5 lb. rifle was just about ideal, and the modest recoil and flat trajectory of the .243 Winchester was suited to the task. I got three boxes of PPU 100gr. Spitzer bullets (so I’d have plenty to practice) and headed for Renton Fish and Game Club to try her out.

I got a zeroing target and set it out at 100 yards, though I figured the odds of the rifle already being sighted in to be high. Just for giggles I decided to shoot the first three-shot string standing/unsupported. This produced a 2″ group very slightly high/left. Not shabby at all! Recoil was moderate, the action very smooth and the trigger light, with a nice clean break.

Okay, time to shoot from a rest and see what she’ll really do. I set out the rest with a couple of sandbags and fired my three-shot string, then moved to the spotting scope to check the results. Huh… a 2″ group. Better knuckle down and try harder… Rinse and Repeat, checked the spotting scope and saw another 2″ group. Huh again…

Hmmm… I broke out the range’s Steady Rest, mounted the rifle and fired another string. 2″ group. OK then, good enough.

After much discussion with other firearms boffins I figure this is simply the limit of what this rifle can do with that cartridge. PPU is OK ammo, but it’s no one’s idea of a premium round. For this season it’s good enough; after hunting season I’ll work up some handloads and see what happens.

So, Wednesday morning at zero-dark-hundred Jake and I will hop in Moby Truck and head for the Channelled Scablands, a region of gullies and badlands in Eastern Washington cut into the desert by a massive super-flood during the last ice age. With any luck we’ll bring home some venison. Either way I’ll let you know how it goes.

Michael Tinker Pearce, 13 November 2019

This is not a review of the Standard Arms S333 Thunderstruck; I haven’t so much as seen one in person. Yes, I’ll be talking about this, uh, let’s call it innovative little gun, but this is mostly about a different concept for the role, and why Tinker Should Not Be Left Unsupervised.

Aside from the ‘coming soon to a science fiction movie near you’ looks this gun is odd, innovative and maybe even a little bit cool. It’s designed around the old civilian self-defense saw, ‘Three seconds, three shots, three yards,’ thus the name. This is a very focussed self-defense piece. It’s designed to put four, not three, rounds on target very quickly at three yards. It does this by being weirder than it looks in the picture above.

It’s double-barrelled, and fires two rounds of .22 Magnum per trigger pull. No, it is not a ‘machine gun’ according to the BATFmen, so don’t even go there. Yes, it doesn’t have a proper trigger-guard, but this doesn’t seem to be a problem because of the design. You cannot easily pull the trigger by accident because of the Glock-style trigger safety on the upper part of the trigger, and the exceptionally heavy double-action only trigger pull. Some reviewers have estimated that pull at 16+ lbs., but with two fingers on the trigger everyone seems to be finding it manageable. Smooth even. The gun even seems to be reasonably accurate at three yards and not hopeless at five, but that’s about the practical limit.

A lot of innovative thinking went into this gun. It’s not just ‘out of the box,’ I’m not sure Standard Manufacturing’s engineers were aware there was a box. And Standard Manufacturing has been around the block a time or two; Google them and you’ll see what I mean.

At an MSRP of $369 this gun is in the right ballpark for a small defensive revolver. You can find more information here- http://tdgun.com/s333/

Having never seen one in person or handled one several things occur to me. First is that Standard Manufacturing has been around for a while, and they make some genuinely premium-quality products. You can question the concept, but the quality is liable to be first-rate.

The second thing that occurs is that it appears to be about the size of a J-frame .38. Yes, it fires eight shots instead of five- but it’s effectively a four-shot. Pull the trigger four times and it’s empty. Not sure I’m keen on that, but it isn’t a deal-breaker. Also if I am carrying a .22 I’d like it to be significantly smaller than a J-frame.

Are two shots of .22 Magnum more effective than a Federal 130gr. HST Micro? I don’t know. I doubt that they are notably less effective as long as the shooter does their part.

The last concern may be spurious and entirely personal. I can quickly and reliably put hits on target as far away as twenty-five yards with a DOA J-Frame. By all accounts that’s not going to happen with the S333. I know, the likelihood I would ever need to shoot a target more than five yards away in a self-defense scenario are infinitesimal. It’s probably silly, but I like the idea that at need I could.

I have to admit, the novelty and reasonable price are tempting. I like oddball guns. But I am pretty sure after the novelty wore off I’d be right back to my usual carry guns, so I might as well save myself some money.

I buggered up my back the other day fixing the fence, so I have been on my arse all day today. I’m not good at that, and I got to thinking about compact-carry revolvers. I don’t know if the S333 is a ‘better mousetrap,’ but there might be one out there. After I got bored enough I grabbed some paper and a pencil and started sketching. Here’s what I came up with:

I’ll spare you all the pages of messy pencil sketches. The concept here is a last-ditch or back-up revolver. I designed it around .22 Magnum, but it could chamber .22LR just as easily. There’s room for .32 ACP but I am not sure that the mechanism is robust enough. In size it’s between an NAA micro-revolver like the Pug and a J-frame S&W. It’s DAO and has a 1-3/8″ barrel, though that would be the easiest thing to change. It has an Ergo-style sub-compact grip, but again that would be easy to change.

It uses a sliding trigger, and three of the five moving parts on the gun are part of that trigger-unit. The sliding bar actuates the top-hinged concealed hammer, and fires the round. The barrel is located at 6-o’clock like a Chiappa Rhino. This is less for recoil-management- it’s a .22- and more because it allows the use of the simple, compact mechanism.

To load you pull the latch located in front of the cylinder forward and tip the barrel and cylinder up. As conceived there is no ejector; the philosophy of use doesn’t demand the ability to reload in a hurry. Fitting an auto-ejector is possible, but it would increase the expense of making it by a lot.

For sights I’d put a fiber-optic front and a U-notch rear. The sights are deliberately close together; having both sights in the same focal-plane makes up for the short sight radius in my experience.

Does such a gun fill a legitimate nitch? Sure. Does it fill it better than guns that are already on the market? Doubtful. Was I less bored this afternoon? Absolutely.

Some of you are probably wondering if I am planning on making one. Nope. While the design presents no novel challenges to a good machinist (I’m not) with a modern, fully-equipped shop (which I don’t have) it’s beyond what I can produce in my knife-making shop. It was, and it remains, a way to pass the tedious hours of forced inactivity. A mental exercise if you will.

On the other hand if you know someone with the resources and a burning desire to build a novel gun of dubious utility that does too little and costs too much, by all means send them my way!

Michael Tinker Pearce, 27 September 2019

For those that haven’t seen this yet .251 TCR (Tinker Centerfire Rimmed) is a wildcat I have been playing around with for a while. The concept is a centerfire round for revolvers that can be loaded in a power range from .22 CB Short all the way to .22 Magnum power levels. A 35gr. Speer Gold Dot loaded to 1000-1100 fps would make an excellent small-game bullet, and loaded to 950 fps or so might offer enough penetration for self-defense use. 50gr. FMC would have it’s uses too, especially when a less destructive bullet was desirable for small animals. If I’ve done my math correctly 1100 fps should be doable with a 50gr. bullet, even from a short barrel. Load a .25 caliber Airgun pellet over a primer and you might have a nice indoor target/vermin shooter.

Sometime back an online pal sent me some .22 Hornet brass to convert, which resulted in a handful of cartridges like the one pictured above (with a .38 Special cartridge for size comparison.)  Only problem is there’s no gun to shoot them out of. The eventual gun I want to use is a centerfire Single-Six, but initially I planned on re-barrelling one of my home-made single-shots for testing. Somehow this never happened, and budget issues being what they are the project stalled for a while.

Then I did a trade, and as part of that the gent threw in a replica Colt 1849 Pocket.

I considered a cartridge conversion to .22, but I’ve been there and done that. I also thought of a .32 S&W, but I was dubious about the chamber-wall thickness. The it occurred to me- chamber it for .25 Auto, get it all working, and when I can afford some gear to help reload .251 TCR bore the chambers out for that!  That way I could have a test-gun much cheaper than a Single Six.  Obviously the .31 caliber cylinder wasn’t going to work, and I really wanted something a bit stouter than whatever mild steel the original was made from. I turned a new cylinder from half-hard 4140, set it up and timed it as a five-shooter (this is a really small gun!)

This cylinder isn’t bored out yet, and obviously there is no breech-ring. To line-bore it I need a barrel. I considered making a .251 barrel liner for the gun’s existing .312 bore, but had concerns about rifling it. It needs to be an undersized smooth-bore initially so I can line-bore the cylinder, and then needs rifling. Trying to press a rifling-button through a lined bore seemed extra problematic; I could easily see shoving the liner out, or any number of other potential disasters. I finally decided to go a different route. I cut the existing barrel at the lug, Then bored out the remaining barrel to .430.

I grabbed some more 4140 and bored it through at 15/64″, then turned it down to size with a .430 stection to pass through the barrel-block. This was ultra-snug, so I slathered it with Red Loctite and press-fit it. Now I have a whole new barrel, and much less concern about rifling it.

This is the same length as the original barrel (3″.)  Now I hit a small snag; the 15/64″ drill is too short to bore the cylinder through the barrel. Oops… OK, a new 6″ Cobalt bit will be arriving Monday courtesy of Amazon. In the meantime I’m going to rig up a two-piece fixture from brass to clamp the cylinder and frame in the drill-press, and if I have the right stock on hand I’ll see about making a chamber-reamer for when the cylinder is bored through. To keep things simple I’ll probably do a hammer-mounted firing-pin. 

There is another issue- the trigger guard is really, really small. I’m considering cutting it away and making a spur-trigger, like a Pocket Remington. With the current trigger geometry it really shouldn’t be too difficult.  A little bress, a little silver solder and Bob’s Your Uncle (he isn’t really… we just tell people that to avoid awkward questions…) 

So progress is being made. One thing that has been suggested is that 5.7x28mm might be a better parent-case for this round than .22 Hornet. I’ll need to look into that. At this rate I might be shooting this before you know it!

Michael Tinker Pearce, 21 September 2019