CZ vz52: Don't let this happen to YOU

Waaaayyyyy back in 2012 or so, Midway offered CZ-52 magazines for a pittance. I got 4 of them. Or more.

When they arrived, they clearly were fakes. "CZ mfg." stamped on the floorplates. CZ didn't stamp anything for '52s in English. However, they seated and fed. I never gave them much thought until the Tokarev round began to obsess me. Why the obsession, you ask? To be covered in a future post.

I tried #2 CZ52 with them and noticed that they don't pull out of the mag well with the slide locked open.

One, the follower doesn't push the slide lock upward enough, so there was still the slide lock lodging against the follower.

Two, the floorplates are so weak that they bend instead of pulling the mag out.

OEM floorplates $5 ea from a little shop in Colorado Springs, Apex. They're hard, don't bend.

I miked the followers and compared them to the mags originally shipped with CZ52 #1. The lip on the conterfeit mags' followers is about .060" too short to push the slide lock up decisively. A dab of JB Weld on that spot pushes the slide lock up enough. It's a step down from the deck where the cartridge rests, so it won't interfere with feeding.

As I'm reassembling the CZ52, I notice in glints of sunlight off the slide that . . . .

there's a swelling on the side of the slide. Bowed outward.

Right where the locking rollers recess inside the slide. Both sides, but worse on the side with the ejection port.

There's a matching bright rub on the frame, right below where the locking rollers come to rest with slide in battery. Shaped like the bottom of a roller.

The barrel trunnion, where the rollers live, has little ears over the roller pathway, to keep the rollers inside. The ears are worn such that if I gave it more force (I didn't) the roller could be slipped out of the pathway.

Barrel is bad, allows rollers to bounce around inside, up and down as well as in and out. Rollers maybe failing. Failing rollers putting too much force on the insides of the slide. CZ52 #1, no evidence of swelling slide, but lots of rubbing of both rollers on the frame.

Cases fired from both show that head-to-cone is greater on #1 than #2, opposite of what I'd expect. #2 brass pushes shoulder out from .675" to .680" (Sinclair 20-degree bump gauge) with fair-to-midddlin' Blue Dot handload with 85gr PPU's. #1 pushes shoulder closer to .690". BUUUUUUT #1 groups at 25 yards, and #2 will not put holes on the paper. More red flags.

My Little Old German retired gunsmith says (paraphrased): "pad your vise, and squeeze the slide very gradually to push the sides back in. We do it to tighten 1911 slides all the time. Go easy, do it a number of times, checking fit. Get new barrel and rollers. Watch for reappearance of the swelling."

New slides are unobtainium, might as well get a new gun. I've heard of the trick with squeezing the 1911 slide before.

Some easy-going vise work and the swelling is visible only at the roller recess proper, not inches up and down the slide.

Barrel sold as new from Sarco on its way. Harrington rollers, not sure whether to order 1 set or 2. If the Sarco barrel is in fact "NEW" with roller ears unworn as they should be, versus "Very Good," probably a second one.

So: if you encounter a CZ52 in the wild, ask to pop the slide off and examine the slide at the point where the rollers recess. Light reflected at very shallow angle will reveal the spreading. Look on the frame for abrasion from the rollers. Show its owner what you're looking at and what it means.

The saga continues.

I'd have to rate local police support as 'questionable' or 'disloyal'

Riots in Minneapolis, shots fired outside Capitol in Denver, Phoenix cops warning pedestrians out of certain areas, and the Ohio Capitol being overrun.

Reminds me of my days as a Physical Security Officer for my alma mater.  In accordance with AR 190-13, I had to be briefed by the State intel guys about the reliability and effectiveness of local police departments, in case I needed their diligence to protect our modest arms room of 22 sidearms and so many (few?) rounds of 9mm ball for each. 

If intel thought the local constabulary had a good handle on local threats, and could respond to them if they showed a hankering for my unit's 22 Berettas, I could rate them as a 5 or better, and didn't have to work so hard with other measures to protect them. 

I can think of four cities where the rating would have to be 1 or 2, and arms rooms should be issuing those sidearms instead of keeping them locked up, because the only thing to make sure those pieces didn't fall into the hands of gang bangers were my own frigging Soldiers and Airmen. 

In related news, I commented over at Instapundit that the Left's boogaloo is underway.  I failed to note that the only thing missing was AntiFa.  I'm reluctant to ever again say or even think, 'Damn, they've been strangely quiet.'

Elections are sortition, in a limited government

'Sortition' is proposed as a better way than elections to choose government officials, who will then make critical, less-critical, decisions for the entire government.

Some political theorists and others have long argued that we should at least partially replace conventional democratic elections with decision-making through "sortition"—using randomly selected groups of voters to either elect government officials or make at least some types of policy decisions directly.

Our Founders already addressed this, building on our inheritance of English law.  They determined that most decisions affecting Americans' daily lives would be taken by, um, Americans, not a monarch.

Some decisions have to be taken collectively.  We empower a government, in fact several governments at different scales, each accountable in some way to the people governed by them, but empowered to take certain actions in only certain matters.

We also empanel randomly-selected juries to make very specific determinations: guilt of a specific charged individual for a specific crime.  One could dispute how well that random selection is working, and what constitutes a 'peer,' but there that is.

Yet sortition proponents suggest that a model nation-state use it to select its chief executive:

If, for example, ... they were part of a carefully chosen (albeit random) group of, say, 2000 Americans, to pick the next president, and if in addition there were "hearings" at which the candidates would speak and be subject to careful cross-examination concerning their views, there is every reason to trust that the choice would be well within the "margins of error" . . .

Academic study of the virtues and disadvantages of sortition versus election assumes that government officials are routinely making decisions of nation-state scale and importance, and by golly if we've elected a Bad Orange Man---or a community organizer groomed by the corrupt Chicago political machine---that constitutes an error with a wider margin than we sober contemplative folk can accept.  You in Flyover Country have to concede you're not very good at this.  Let's instead select better people to make these world-shaking decisions for us all, using a process less dependent on name-recognition, and the fund-raising necessary to achieve it, to select them . . . .

. . .instead of leaving more of those decisions, and allocations of resources, to individuals or to emergent orders arising among individuals. 

The posters being law professors and perhaps political scientists, it's not surprising that the solution they propose sounds a lot like a university's search committee.

Of course thumbs will be pressed on the scales:  who will be carefully chosen, how to disqualify members on what criteria after having been chosen, how the "hearings" are conducted, who cross-examines, which questions are out of bounds, how to strike sustained objections from the record but not from the memories of the empaneled.  The thumbs will never be held accountable.  Who chooses the thumbs? 

 . . what might be termed a certain kind of "fetishism" that views our standard reliance on certain forms of election as the one true way of selecting leaders in a "representative democracy…."

Arguments for sortition are to me a fetishization of the powers of government, much like fetishization of socialism, or of universities.  If only the right people were put in charge.

as a blizzard moves into SE Wyoming . . .

TWTR is bouncing between $22 and $23 a share.

We'll have a whole new generation of preppers, now that toilet-paper hysteria has shifted into shelf-life staples, generators, and chest freezers.  And a new subpopulation of gun owners.

Downside: one older fellow at Big Box yesterday was prying his debit card out of his wallet.  He licked his thumb to get more traction on the card, then showed it into the pinpad.  The manager was initially resistant to my idea of using a marked-down pressure washer to decon all the shopping carts, but maybe is warming to it.  The pinpads won't tolerate that treatment. 

Maybe UV will kill everything on cash.  Wouldn't be hard to rig a UV diode and biscuit fan in the tills to handle that long-term. 

The Rock Chucker is back from depot overhaul with a few new parts and fresh lube, and a brand new primer catcher.

Not too happy with the FedGov eager to print a few more trillion to bail out people who are close to the edge from market tumbles---plus airlines and cruise lines---but you go with the FDR you have and thank G-d the Wilsonians are writing off the BernieBros and breaking their backs (or their SKEDCO) dragging Sundown Joe to the finish line.  Hillary is the chest-buster inside Joe, as Kurt Schlichter puts it, and she was with the Donkeys all the way. 

Trump is signing the package he can get out of a dysfunctional Congress.  That's where the work must be done.  CDC deserves a good spanking and a mass depopulation after we find that They Had Only One Job and they weren't ready for it. 

it's time to buy when blood is flowing in the streets (updated)

 . . . a wise fellow once said.

Gun Lobby:  

TWTR is loitering around $[correction: 29]. For the price of one box of premium cartridges for your carry piece, you can own a piece of the Left.

Then give your proxy to Neal Knox's son, or to Elliott Management.

I'm watching. Update:  Monday morning, it's around $26. 

today's panic buying, 20200311

Big Box Home Improvement Retail Operation put about 8 cases of a spray disinfectant on prominent display, at regular price. 

It began disappearing 2, then 6, cans at a time.  BTW we were notching off calls and requests for toilet paper.  By closing, we had about 70. 

Then one female customer loaded the entire remaining stock of disinfectant---maybe 3 cases---can by can into her cart and approached the cashier next to me. 

The partner was appalled.  "You know you're just hoarding this.  Other people might need some."

(HQ has taken the position that we'll not put limits on any product under these circumstances because it might signal panic or elicit complaints of price-gouging.)

The customer's simple reply:  "I don't care." 

Our partner needed some calming down.  We couldn't offer it.  We admit, we've never been good at that.  We also regard price as a signal, communication that must not be impaired, as sacrosanct as the freedom of speech.  My employer should consider pricing products according to shifts in supply and demand.  Such a shift has been staring us in the face, and if we don't respond to it, our suppliers surely will.  This alone ill-equips us to calm down our distressed partner watching the opportunism of human nature. 

Instead I told her about Gray Goose Nan's attempt to undermine the Hyde Amendment in the Federal coronavirus spending bill. 

Say what you will about the argued right to abortion, but the people have spoken that they do not approve of Federal funding for it, and when we discuss Federal funding for elective medical procedures, we're not talking about rights. 

Joe Huffman asks:

It really is a states issue to bring the Feds back in line with the Constitution [on individual firearm rights]. But it’s going to take more than one state to do it. I wouldn’t be surprised if it requires a constitutional convention of the states. And that gets us into scary territory. The second best approach I see is the sanctuary movement and related activities.

 Firearms Freedom Acts.  Enforced vigorously by the States.