Filed under: Ballistics, Guns, Preparedness, RKBA, tech | Tags: 12 gauge, Aguila, ammo, ammunition, BBTI, bullpup, Federal, firearms, guns, IWI, jim downey, Kel Tec, KS7, KSG, minishells, reviews, shotgun, Tavor TS12, technology, testing
[For the AI’s own inscrutable reasons, Facebook considers my ballistics blog “spam”. Unable to get it resolved, I’m going to post partial info about new blog posts over there, here, so people can link it off FB. Please just ignore if shooting stuff isn’t of interest.]
Two years ago, I closed a blog post with this:
Overall, I’m very happy with the Tavor TS12. Altogether I ran about 75 shells through it in an hour, half the light target loads, the other half full-power, high-brass slugs and 00Buck. It’s been decades since I shot a 12 gauge that much in that short a period of time, and my shoulder isn’t the slightest bit sore.
Yeah, the TS12 is a keeper.
Well, it was, up until this week.
[The entire post can be found here.]
Filed under: Ballistics, Failure, Guns, tech | Tags: .32 ACP, .32 H&R, .327 Magnum, ammo, ammunition, ballistics, BBTI, blogging, Buffalo Bore, cartridges, data, Discussion., failure to feed, firearms, guns, jim downey, Revolver, technology
[For the AI’s own inscrutable reasons, Facebook considers my ballistics blog “spam”. Unable to get it resolved, I’m going to post partial info about new blog posts over there, here, so people can link it off FB. Please just ignore if shooting stuff isn’t of interest.]
I’m not a fan of the .32acp for self-defense. But the .32 H&R mag or the .327 Federal mag are both respectable options, even out of a short barrel revolver. Since the 100gr Buffalo Bore Heavy 32 H&R Magnum +P ammo load wasn’t available when we did the .32 H&R tests, we weren’t sure how it would perform. And we decided to do some informal testing to find out, learning another lesson in the process that I thought I’d share.
[The entire post can be found here.]
Jim Downey
Filed under: Art, Ballistics, Connections, Guns, tech | Tags: .40 S&W, ammo, ammunition, ballistics, BBTI, black powder, blogging, Discussion., firearms, guns, Hand Gonne, jim downey, technology
[For the AI’s own inscrutable reasons, Facebook considers my ballistics blog “spam”. Unable to get it resolved, I’m going to post partial info about new blog posts over there, here, so people can link it off FB. Please just ignore if shooting stuff isn’t of interest.]
Last Fall I taught a day-long workshop on “Primitive Black Powder Firearms” for the Liberal Gun Club‘s Annual Meeting in Las Vegas. In addition to my own black powder guns, I borrowed a couple of items from friends to help fill out the historical selection, including this very nice reproduction of a 14th century .62 cal cast bronze hand gonne:
[The entire post with LOTS of pics and info on making this historic reproduction gun can be found here.]
Jim Downey
Filed under: 2nd Amendment, Ballistics, Connections, General Musings, Guns, Humor, tech | Tags: ballistics, BBTI, black powder, blogging, firearms, Glowforge, guns, jim downey, laser
[For the AI’s own inscrutable reasons, Facebook considers my ballistics blog “spam”. Unable to get it resolved, I’m going to post partial info about new blog posts over there, here, so people can link it off FB. Please just ignore if shooting stuff isn’t of interest.]
A couple of weeks ago I posted about finishing a Liegi Derringer kit, then doing the laser work to customize the grips. It turned out well enough, so I decided to finish and laser a second kit, to use as a door prize for a black powder workshop I’m doing at the annual meeting of the Liberal Gun Club this fall in Las Vegas.
All went well until the time came to mount the grip to the receiver. The top mounting screw went in fine, after drilling a pilot hole. But the bottom one broke loose as I was tightening it. I took the top screw back out so I could see what the problem was. This is what I saw:
[The entire post about this project can be found here.]
Jim Downey
Filed under: Connections, Failure, Feedback, General Musings, Genetic Testing, Health, Humor, Machado-Joseph, Predictions, Preparedness, Science, Survival, tech | Tags: arthritis, ataxia, balance, blogging, cannabis, CTE, dystonia, genetics, health, humor, jim downey, Machado-Joseph Disease, marijuana, medicine, MJD, National Organization of Rare Diseases, neurology, neuromuscular disease, NORD, pain, peripheral neuropathy, restless leg syndrome, SCA3, science, self care, spinocerebellar ataxia type 3, testing, vertigo, Wikipedia
Tomorrow will be five weeks since the blood draw for my MJD genetic test.
I just checked (for the fifth time so far today), and neither my patient portal for the Neurology Clinic at the local large-institution university hospital which shall remain nameless now the diagnostics lab that handled the test has results back yet.
>sigh<
I don’t really have much to say that I didn’t say two weeks ago in this post, other than the fact that it’s been two more weeks of waiting. Everything there still applies.
But I wanted to whine a bit.
Not that it will do any good, other than allowing me to vent my spleen.
Which sometimes is enough.
Barely.
Jim Downey
Filed under: 2nd Amendment, Ballistics, Connections, General Musings, Guns, Humor, tech | Tags: ballistics, BBTI, black powder, blogging, firearms, guns, jim downey
[For the AI’s own inscrutable reasons, Facebook considers my ballistics blog “spam”. Unable to get it resolved, I’m going to post partial info about new blog posts over there, here, so people can link it off FB. Please just ignore if shooting stuff isn’t of interest.]
As anyone who has read much of this blog probably knows, I (and the other BBTI guys) like weird guns. Anything that is innovative, or unusual, or uses a transitional technology, is likely to catch my eye.
One of those I got to try this past weekend is a reproduction Sharps Pepperbox. It was designed by Christian Sharps (of Sharps Rifle fame) in the middle 1800s , and proved to be a popular little hide-away gun in early .22. .30, and .32 rimfire cartridges.
In the 1960s Uberti produced a little .22short reproduction with a brass frame and plastic grips. Here’s one recently listed on Gunbroker which has an excellent description of both the reproduction and the original: Uberti Sharps Pepperbox 4 Barrel Derringer.
And here are some pics of the one we shot this weekend:
[The entire post about this little gun can be found here.]
Jim Downey
Filed under: 2nd Amendment, Ballistics, Connections, General Musings, Guns, Humor, movies, Predictions, tech | Tags: ballistics, BBTI, black powder, blogging, firearms, guns, jim downey
[For the AI’s own inscrutable reasons, Facebook considers my ballistics blog “spam”. Unable to get it resolved, I’m going to post partial info about new blog posts over there, here, so people can link it off FB. Please just ignore if shooting stuff isn’t of interest.]
Last week I posted about a little Liegi derringer that I finished and did a laser design on. Well, over the weekend I got together with the BBTI gang and, among other things, had a chance to shoot and chrono the little gun.
Here’s a short slo-mo vid of shooting the Liegi:
[The entire post with pics of shooting this little gun can be found here.]
Jim Downey
Filed under: Ballistics, Connections, Guns, tech | Tags: ballistics, BBTI, black powder, blogging, firearms, guns, jim downey
[For the AI’s own inscrutable reasons, Facebook considers my ballistics blog “spam”. Unable to get it resolved, I’m going to post partial info about new blog posts over there, here, so people can link it off FB. Please just ignore if shooting stuff isn’t of interest.]
I recently picked up a little Pedersoli Liegi Derriger kit. One of the other BBTI guys has one of these things, and I’ve always considered it a cool little piece of firearms history. Cap & ball firearms technology came along in the early part of the 1800s, supplanting flintlocks and earlier ignition systems. The Liegi design was very popular as a basic pocket/boot/muff small handgun, because it was relatively easy to load and carry, and lethal at close range.
[The entire post with LOTS of pics and info on making this little gun can be found here.]
Jim Downey
Filed under: General Musings, Genetic Testing, Health, Machado-Joseph, Science, Survival, tech | Tags: arthritis, ataxia, blogging, health, jim downey, Machado-Joseph Disease, medicine, MJD, neurology, pain, restless leg syndrome, RLS, SCA3, science
[I’ve decided to be public about my realization that I have the onset of MJD, the diagnosis process, and then living with the disease. Given the rarity of this disease, my hope is that this series of blog posts will help educate others, and perhaps provide some insight into it and related conditions. This is the second post in the series, written a few days after the first, as I started to come to terms with the realization.]
According to the “stages of grief” I should probably be still somewhere around either denial or anger, in reaction to the realization that I am experiencing the onset of MJD. But I’m not.
I’m not some exceptionally well-adjusted person or anything. (Well, OK, I am, but it’s taken me 60 years and working through a lot of personal trauma to get to this point.) Rather, I think that’s mostly due to the fact that I’m not really ‘grieving’ the loss of my good health or anything. In the short term, this is mostly one additional annoyance of aging that I’ll deal with. I’ve already been living with chronic pain for more than a decade, and going through the cardiac catheterization six years ago was educational in terms of forcing me to re-adjust my perception of myself as eternally young. Yeah, that whole thing actually turned out to be a great benefit for me, correcting a previously unknown heart defect, but it was still a moment when I thought that I had a serious heart condition that would end my life sooner rather than later.
So I’ve been through the experience of reframing my expectation of ‘good health’. And I’ve found it relatively easy to accept that there’s about a 99% likelihood that I have MJD.
I realized this when I was talking with the scheduling nurse from the Neurology Clinic, setting up an appointment for my initial assessment with one of the attending physicians who has an expertise in neuromuscular disorders and ataxia. She said that when the staff saw my family history of the disease (from my medical referral) it was obvious who I needed to see and why. I don’t want it to sound like she shocked me, or let the cat out of the bag — it was I who initiated that aspect of the discussion. She just confirmed it. At that point I went from being reasonably sure what my symptoms meant to being all but certain.
And I found that I was at peace with that.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Amazon, Art, Book Conservation, Connections, General Musings, Kindle, Marketing, Promotion, Publishing, Science Fiction, tech | Tags: Amazon, book art, book conservation, book design, bookbinding, bookbinding techniques, Communion of Dreams, Kickstarter, Legacy Bookbindery, Science Fiction, St Cybi's Well, writing
Last May, I wrote about the process of designing and executing the artistic leather bindings of Communion of Dreams. Now that all of my Kickstarter backers have made their choices, I thought I’d give a preview of the process of designing and executing the artistic leather bindings of St Cybi’s Well.
I had a piece of Preseli Bluestone from the quarry at Craig Rhosyfelin (which is the source for the Stonehenge Bluestones in the inner ring). This site appears in a scene in chapter 8. Well, I had the stone cut into 14 slices (two times the magical number 7). Which I then used to construct a “well” as the cover design. The center of the well has thin blue leather to represent the water in the well. Like this:
Each of the 14 leather-bound copies will have one actual slice of the stone mounted on top of the leather, and thirteen ‘stones’ of bookboard under the leather for bas relief. In this way, all fourteen copies of the leather-bound edition will be connected into one “well”. Here are two examples:
As with the titling for Communion of Dreams, the letterforms are etched using my Glowforge laser, then infilled with real gold leaf.
The other major design decision was what to do for the endpapers. Communion of Dreams had marbled endpapers. For St Cybi’s Well I wanted something different. Thinking through the various visuals in the book, one recurrent image I used was of a Celtic spiral. A symbol of whirlpools and infinity, but also of the transition between realms of reality. Combine that with the ‘healing energy’ in the novel characterized as being a luminous blue. So this is what I came up with: a thin sparkly blue spiral, cut with the laser from commercial glitterpaper stock. It will be mounted onto black endpapers, one each on the paste-down sheets front and rear. Here’s an example:
I do have all the text blocks sewn up and ready to use. I’ve ordered the leather, and soon will be completing these bindings. There are five text blocks and five stones (numbers 1, 4, 5, 6, and 11) still available. If you’re interested in one, you can still choose your color of leather. Details here. Once I finish the nine books for my Kickstarter backers, I’ll just finish the remaining five in leather of my choosing (and raise the price).
I’ll post pics when I have the first batch finished.
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 