Stripper clips and guide for 6.5mm Grendel

The case head dimensions for the 6.5mm Grendel cartridge are close enough to those of the 7.62x45mm Czech that their stripper clips work.  7.62x39 clips won't because they're curved to follow the tapered case body.

One or two eBay sellers had the stripper clips.  They're 5-rounders.  For a 25-round magazine (C-Products in this photo), 5 clips fill it. 

The GG&G stripper clip guides for 5.56mm ammo can be modified to take the Czech stripper clips.  Bend outward slightly the rails that attach the guide to the magazine, bend outward a bit more the rails that hold the stripper clip to the guide.  Your mags will get a little scratched. 

The Czech clips have bumps that stop the clips from entering more than about .500" into the guide.  The first clip will strip into the mag OK but not following clips, because there's too much gap between the end of the clip and the top of the magazine.  The cartridges pile up instead of schmoozing on into the mag.

Your Dremel, with a cutting wheel, can carve open a slot on each side of the guide to let those bumps in so the clip seats deeply into the guide.  The slots need to be long enough so there is barely enough space for one cartridge case head between the top of the mag and the end of the clip.  The bottom round of the clip should be almost touching the follower.

The slots will be the width of about two thicknesses of cutting wheel, to accommodate the bumps.  See the red markup on the photo.  A needle file down the insides of the clip guide rails will help the clips to slide in squarely. 

Wirebrush the slots to clean up your work.  If you're obsessive, degrease the guide(s) and reparkerize or zotch them with teflon/moly.

I think a rub or two of paraffin on the clips themselves will help the cartridges slip out of them. 

reloading 5.56mm with CFE223 and 55gr FMJ----with update

Sounds kinda boring and vanilla, right?

Lake City never-fired pulldown cases, still have the Uncle Sugar primer.  I miked a pile of them for head-to-cone length and separated them into cases with .003" or less under nominal, and those with .004 or more under nominal, and used these shorter ones for this trial.

Generic 55 grain FMJ (Hornady?  IMI?  Milsurp?  can't remember) but they've been tumbled in molybdenum disulfide powder in a pill bottle for a few hours.

Hornady's manual, on the page for 5.56mm NATO instead of .223 or 5.56 Service Rifle, says CFE223 goes max at 27.6 grains  Hodgdon's site says 27.4.  With a 20" barrel, a startling 3200 fps. 

So I rolled 5 each starting there and going downward to 26.6 gr in .2gr increments, so I would start shooting them at the bottom of the charge weights and move up, stop at first pressure signs. 16" Bushmaster barrel.  I should be able to stretch 3050 fps out of that with 55 grainers, maybe? 

Nope.  2826fps. The bolt wasn't locking open until I shot the 27.4 grainers.  Cases come back out with HTC of about .002" over.

Feedback, people.  Meanwhile I'm pulling all that are left, and starting over. 

Update 20190201:  Small sample size, but 27.6gr yields 2834 fps.  27.8gr, 2865fps.  28.0gr the MV dips to 2862, 28.2gr @ 2916fps.

I'm moving back to WC844.   

The Collective needs martial poster artists!

Sourced from one of the social disease networks: 

What the artist should have been going for:  

  

One more bold, dramatic face fixed on a bold, dramatic future somewhere in the distance, off to the  reader's Left. 

another wish list item

I've always gotten an adrenaline rush from ELP's "The Barbarian."

Since youngest Toad, now in excess of 6 vertical feet of stature, has joined his school's marching band, I suggested that somehow The Barbarian could be arranged for a marching band.  I can hear it in my mind's ear. 

While looking for a marching band arrangement, this you tu b came up.  Who knew that, yet again, ELP repurposed a classical piece as spaceman progrock?

These guys---3 Hungarians and a Usonan---knocked it the fuck out of the park. 

well we just sit around here

Midway 1292:  new motor from Grainger costs more than a new tumbler. 

New tumbler:  Amazon is undercutting MidwayUSA something sick. 

Amazon:  "hey why not stream some music from a bearded Justin Timberlake while you are sitting around in your house waiting for your tumbler?" 

Midway 1292 tumbler

It just blew up. 

I was cleaning up some 6.5 Grendel brass and some Lake City 7.62 after success at a range.  Stopped the tumbler to have a look, figured they needed a little more cowbell. 

I flicked the switch, and sparks jumped out from beneath the bowl, then smoke curled up from within. 

Motor is smoked.  It had a good run, I probably bought it in '92 or '93, before joining my Sainted Wife in matrimony. 

Though running it on the floor of a dusty garage might have hastened its demise.  

Maybe somebody has a replacement motor. 

Hello, Miss Margaret

 

Luth-AR out back, Wolff extra power buffer spring, home-milled 80% lower, no-name eBay modular trigger, Voodoo integral bolt carrier, DeadShot 24" Grendel barrel and bolt, Odin click-adjustable gas block, no-name tubular handguard.   Athlon 4-14x44 FFP.  

and I'm out a 20-year-old drill press, it roasted as I was finishing the milling in this lower. The Polymer80 jig kit was handy, it will probably make it through a second lower.  I'll do a new lower for Bobbie Jo.  

Anybody make a pistol grip that looks like a Springer XD?  

maybe this can be witnessed only in flyover country

or again, maybe not: 

along the shoulder of a US highway as it passes through the former economic dynamo of the town, there poddled an electric scooter, facing against the traffic, with a guy sitting on it, using one leg to try to push it along. 

So let me get this straight.  A person who depends on an electric scooter to get around, riding a scooter with maybe not enough power left in the battery, or a motor nearly worn out, using one leg to boost it. 

If he's strong enough to boost his own electric scooter, maybe he does not need an electric scooter. 

At his rate, I've been home half an hour since driving past him.  I could probably find him and capture some video. 

tracer for 6.5mm

it's begun to annoy me that tracers are not available for 6.5mm, compared to US or Soviet calibers.

The prospect of  forming a cavity in a boattail and filling it with barium nitrate, magnesium, and other pyrophoric unobtainium compounds doesn't thrill me either.

Applique tracer devices stuck to otherwise non-tracer bullets intrigue me.  Glowammo seems to have disappeared, and may never have been introduced in rifle calibers anyway.  And there may be a reason they were not introduced.  Velocities too high for human eyes to track the glow or for the device to hang on to the tail, chamber pressures too high for the applique to withstand?

So I wonder if a phosphor compound could be mixed with ground glass filler and an epoxy, and dabbed on the tail of a bullet?  Would the intense heat and light of the burning propellant cause the phosphor to light up, but not burn up?

the next Grendel

I need a woman's name for this. She'll wear a 24" barrel and a 4-14x44 scope. 

stuff

who's the banana republic now?

Venezuela.
(mic drop)

too cheap to buy genuine Yaesu batteries

but I'll spend out the ass to hack together battery packs from 18650 cells and trays. Four trays fit, each with four cells in series, 3.7Vdc each.

the hard part is getting the connectors that mate to the radio. I might just bind all four trays in parallel and wire them out through the charging access and over to the external DC molex. I have those parts already.

Tweet for yesterday

Frank J. Fleming (@IMAO_) tweeted at 08:52 on Aug 04: Difference between Nazi and Communist is when you say how horrible Nazis have been, they don't say, "Well, real Nazism has never been tried" https://twitter.com/IMAO_/status/893484730221547520

tired of all the winning

I believe ammunition prices are falling since the Trumpening. Gun prices, not so much, so I hear.

but when Wolf steel-cased 6.5 Grendel fodder is priced near twenty-three cents delivered, it smells time to buy.

Uniform sorting

As new uniforms roll in, I've sought to keep them together in sets so as they wear out or fade, they get disposed of in sets.  At first, I labeled jacket and trousers with the month and year I got that set.  Then at times I got more than one set at a time.  Not very helpful for Sainted Wife to keep them together.

There were also a few sets that didn't get marked with anything when I got them, because I didn't realize how quickly the camo pattern faded.  Sainted Wife got into the act, when I noticed one set  with a red square Sharpied on the labels because she couldn't find any month and year. 

So the next uniforms I received, 3 sets of ripstops, arrived just as a muharib shot up a nightclub in Orlando.  Three sets at once, that needed to stay together as sets.

I labeled one set "Orlando."  Then another set "Garland" and the third "Ft Hood."

With our new normal of Islamic atrocities on US soil, I will be renaming the other uniforms.

Update:  today a uniform has been marked OHIO STATE.  

the best-kept secret in the Air Force (updated)

 . . . so secret, in fact, that even members of the Air Force do not know it.  Or if they do, they do not reveal it.

I refer, of course, to AFI 1-1, paragraph 1.6.5, forms of address for all Air Force ranks, and the habit of Enlisted folk addressing one another as "sir."  It's not there;  the AFI does not permit nor require it. Yet Airmen literally of all stripes continue to do it; I've been addressed hundreds of times at this location as "sir" but thank the ghost of Hap Arnold I haven't been called out for not addressing others that way myself. 

Among the enlisted, Chiefs may be addressed in the short form as "Chief."  All other NCO ranks may be addressed in the short form as "Sergeant."  That's what I do, though usually with the Army-approved "Sar'nt."  

Yet as an E-8, I am also addressed regularly by officers as "Senior."  The AFI does not sanction that either.

Music covers I'd like to hear

Meaghan Trainor should cover Amy Winehouse's Rehab, but maybe Meaghan's whole shtick is a cover of Rehab without the drugs and booze.

Somewhere in 38S

The Italian desert uniform looks like it was borrowed from the Canadians. 

Except that instead of cotton T-shirts worn under the jackets, the Italians wear a thicker, tighter-fitting synthetic shirt that looks like part of a cycling team uniform. 

Come to think of it, even Italian gas-station attendants wear stuff that looks like cycling team wear. 

Back in teh bukkit and teh bukkit been poured

Am back in the area of responsibility, where this blog started.