Category: Gun/Ammo Tests

You may want to sit down for this one.

Not long ago, I spent some time with Doc Russia and Combat Controller — both, as Longtime Readers know full well, among my dearest and most longtime friends.  While our initial friendship was sparked by our love of guns, over time we’ve become drinking buddies as well, and many’s the night of company well spent in riotous merrymaking of the liquor-abusing kind, wherein we swap tall tales, tell old lies and slag each other off endlessly.

Anyway, on this particular occasion they ganged up on me and derided my love of Old Things Wot Go Bang, and in fact suggested in no uncertain terms that if ever there was a need for gunplay of the social (okay, anti-social) kind, I would not be a welcome companion because… my choice of SHTF firearm (guess) could not share ammo with their anti-personnel platforms.

I should point out that Doc is a former U.S. Marine, and Combat Controller — as his nickname indicates —  was one of those snake-eater AF types called upon to bring in death from the skies from a friendly air force.  So you know what gun they prefer, right?

Ugh.  Anyway, after a while they told me that they could whip together a gun for me just from parts they each had lying around the place, with maybe just a few additions.  In other words, a new gun at almost no cost to me.

I can only plead semi-drunkenness and (the promiscuous, as it turns out) gun love for agreeing to this stupid idea — with the result that I am now the owner of this thing:

…it being classified as an AR-15-style “pistol”, with a 10.5″ barrel and a “brace” — right.  (Who do we think we’re kidding?)  The red dot sight is the same as the one I have mounted on the Buckmark.

Anyway, I took FrankenGun to the range yesterday to see what all the fuss was about.  (I’ve fired several ARs in my life, but never one built like this.)

First impressions:

• Holy shit, this thing is LOUD.
• There’s some recoil but nothing to write home about — about the level of a lever-action shooting .38 Special, if my memory serves me.
• The trigger is outstanding (for those who want details, it’s supposedly a good one:  Geissele).
• I spent more time getting the red-dot scope right than playing with the gun.  Also, I only had 40 rounds (two 20-round Pmags).

“Yeah, yeah, but how does it shoot, Kim?”

(for some reason I loaded only four rounds for the second string instead of my customary five)

And in looking at the pics, I mis-typed:  the distance was 20 yards and not 25.

Then I got a little more businesslike:

Hold was center (where the quarter’s been placed).  I was too busy working the scope’s elevation to worry too much about left-right.  And ammo was running short, so I took a deep breath and got really serious:

Okay, I couldn’t get those kind of groups at that distance with any of my other handguns.  So I can’t fault the accuracy.

Also, the FrankenGun ran like clockwork:  no failures of any kind, no bits fell off, nada.  No problems there.

So I’m left with a BIG question, because I’m still undecided whether I like the thing.  It checks a lot of boxes, to be sure.  But I’m still not convinced of the effectiveness of the 5.56x45mm poodleshooter ammo (a long-held reservation, as Longtime Readers will know about me all too well).

Would it be fit for purpose in some kind of self-defense situation?  Not inside the house — not my house, anyway, because I would have serious issues (i.e. permanent deafness) if I touched off the thing there.

Outside the house — and we all know what I mean here — and assuming I was aiming for a target (or targets) at distances longer than 50 yards (way beyond where I would consider using a 1911, for example), would it work for me under those circumstances?

Here’s the crunch question:  would it work better than a pump shotgun loaded with buckshot?  (I know, you only get a few rounds with a pump, whereas with an AR, you get lots more.)

Or, to change the question around a bit, would it work better for me or would I feel better about it if I swapped out the barrel for something more substantial, like the .300 Blackout (.300 BLK) with its more severe recoil?

Like I said earlier, I’m undecided.  Sure, it’s fun to shoot and ammo is cheap (unlike the Blackout, which costs nearly double).  But I don’t know whether my hesitancy is because at the end of the day, I just don’t feel right about the cartridge.  For fun shooting, I have all my .22 guns, and we all know that the .223 is a lot more of a cartridge than that.  But is it serious enough for me as a SHTF round?

I’m going to have a dozen or so more range sessions to get comfortable with FrankenGun, and I’ll let y’all know then whether I’m going to keep it or not.

Even if Doc and CC would hate me for getting rid of it.

---

As always, all comments and suggestions are welcome… once you’ve recovered from the shock of Kim With AR-15.

One of the Newtonian principles is that of the mass : velocity equilibrium (if I may call it that).  Simply explained in gun terms, it’s that compromise that one has to make between bullet weight and velocity (and eventually, terminal velocity and impact).

The simplest example is a comparison between a .22 bullet and .45-70 Government:  the first zips along with a muzzle velocity in excess of 3,000 feet per second, while (relatively speaking) the huge .45-70 struggles to leave the barrel altogether.  Yet as fast as the .22 may be, its diminutive 40gr weight arrives without much authority, so to speak, at (say) 100 yards distance, while the .45-70’s 300gr lump of lead will crush everything in its path when it eventually gets there.

Which is all very well and good, because the difference between the two bullets is vast.

But what if there’s little difference in bullet weight between two (or three) bullets, the only difference being the amount of powder driving them?

Here’s a fun video of just such a test, made by shooting the .22 LR, .22 Mag (WMR), and the .17 Hornady Magnum.  (By the way, I love the fact that Our Hero eschews the appallingly-expensive ballistic gelatin, using instead large cubes of pottery clay to make his point.  It’s as valid a medium as any other, I think, when making comparisons of this sort.)  Go ahead and watch the thing (it’s just over 10 minutes long), and then come back here for my thoughts.

Read more

Have some fun with the kids at Garand Thumb as they blow some meat apart with some power .45 ACP ammo.

“HST!” “HST!” “HST!” “HST!” 

I would love to see how lighter, zippier boolets (such as my Norma 175gr carry ammo) would test under the same circumstances.

Sometimes an article appears that just resonates with me, but before I talk about this one I need to clear the space a little.

One of the problems that beset gun manufacturers is that they are, in effect, doomed by the quality of their product.  My Swedish Mauser, for example, was designed in 1896 and made in 1906, and after probably several hundred rounds through the barrel — maybe over a thousand, who knows? — it can and does still shoot minute-of-angle (MOA) groups at 100- and 500-yard distances.

So from a manufacturer’s perspective, they produced a rifle that has lasted close to four generations, and counting;  there’s no way they could stay in business with that kind of production cycle, even assuming that the number of shooters would moderately increase every year.  That’s no basis for a business to operate.

Fortunately, gunmakers are blessed with a restless clientele who are always on the search for the “perfect” cartridge — flatter trajectory, higher velocity, harder-hitting, lessened recoil:  you name the goal (or combinations thereof) and there’ll be a market for it.

So it’s no surprise that the manufacturers will come out with some new wunderkind-cartridge that will require a new rifle with a different chamber size, different barrel bore / rifling twist, and so on.

I used to have a problem with this, especially when — as it must — such “improvements” come at the expense of a cartridge doomed to reloader-only status simply by virtue of being old.  There’s only so much room on the shelf, after all, and only so much profit to be made at whatever production runs.

The 6.5x55mm cartridge used by the aforementioned Swedish Mauser is a good example of the above phenomenon.  That 6.5mm (.256″) bullet diameter has been proven to be perhaps the perfect dimension to create the compromise between performance and recoil for most small-to-medium-sized game (and amply adequate for ahem anti-personnel requirements).

One can play around, of course, with the cartridge casing size and/or length to change the propellant quantity that will slow or increase the bullet’s velocity.  So the 6.5mm bullet can appear inside the 55mm casing of the Swede, the 47mm of the 6.5mm (BR) Lapua, the 51mm of the .308 Win (a.k.a. 6.5 Creedmoor), or the 63mm of the .30-06 (a.k.a .25-06 Remington):  the list goes on and on.

And that’s just for the quarter-inch bullet diameter.  Now take it up to 6.7mm (e.g. the .264″) and OMG 7mm, and all hell breaks loose.

So now you can go and read 6 Dying Rifle Cartridges that Deserve a Second Chance, and see if you agree.  Your own choices for redemption can be posted in Comments.

---

For Readers Of More Recent Vintage, I first talked about this topic a couple decades ago, in Nothing Good Since 1955.

And yes, I know that all the cool kids swear by the 6.5 Creed;  we Olde Pharttes know full well that the 6.5 CM is popular only with shooters who’d never shot the 6.5 Swede, which is a superior performer anyway.

In cartridges, as with all things, history is important.