Yesterday my 16 gauge Model 12 returned from Briley with a new set of choke tubes, which finished out this restoration project.  The 1941 Model 12 has been given a new lease on life, retaining its WW2-era charm while gaining modern features as ‘today’ as an iPad.  Here, have a look:

And the before:

The old gun was made in 1941, and the refit, refurbish and refinish has left me with a short, light, handy 16 gauge grouse or quail gun.  The gun originally had an old Poly-Choke mounted, and after that removal there was only about 24″ of barrel left; a bit on the short side, but that matters less than it used to with modern, fast-burning propellants.  Sight radius is shorter but the addition of a center bead to the old, 1940s-style solid rib should help with that.

To the trap range tomorrow to see how she shoots!  Briley still has my 1940 12 gauge Model 12, in the finishing stages, and they tell me I should have it back by the end of the week – watch this space for more.

And while I’m on the topic, I highly recommend Briley; they do quality work, and their customer service folks with whom I had occasion to interface were outstanding.

Stay tuned for tonight’s election live-blogging!

One of the better aspects of self-employment is the between-projects free time, much of which I spend at the range.  This morning’s outing was a nostalgic one.

The rifle pictured is an old Marlin 783 in .22WMR.  Note the old-style Marlin gold trigger, and if you look on the underside of the repeatedly-refinished stock you’ll see the old Marlin bullseye.  I bought this rifle with money I earned detassling corn and haying in the summer of 1975, and proceeded to kill a tall stack of woodchucks and crows with it around the Old Man’s place in the following years.  It was my constant companion on many a long summer day wandering the hills, fields and woods of Allamakee County.

I’ve kept it all this time and, I’m a tad ashamed to admit, it’s been largely occupying a space in the rack with occasional dustings and touch-up cleaning.

Today I decided to take the old gun out and give it a workout.  I burned up 50 rounds of Federal and another 50 rounds of CCI Maxi-Mags of unknown vintage, and the old rifle still shoots great.  I punched some paper and then spent about 60 rounds breaking clay birds at 25 yards, off-hand, as fast as I could work the bolt.

The target shown is three rounds at 25 yards.  One ragged hole, and that’s from a solid sitting position.

The old gun still has it.  It’s always shot as well as I can shoot it, and the mark of a good rifle is that any failure of performance should be not on gun but on shooter.  I’ll be keeping this old Marlin for another 40 years, no doubt, and it will probably be passed on to one of the grandkids – maybe a great-grandkid.

This is, of course, at our own Aurora Gun Club.

The rifle is a DPMS 20″ upper on a polymer lower, and I keep the gun zeroed with mil-spec XM-193 55-grain ammo.  It’s a pretty fair shooter, even with a trigger that’s only so-so; a trigger replacement is on the agenda.  Still, we managed a couple of 1-1/4″ groups today after putting a zero on the new Simmons 24X scope.  This should be a great coyote-killer, and I suppose if ISIL ever invades Colorado, I’ll be more than ready.

Greatest Pistol Ever Stopped Attackers Cold.  That greatest pistol ever, of course, being the Browning 1911.  Excerpt:

The history of the M1911 begins in the Philippines during the Spanish-American War, when U.S. soldiers and Marines found themselves locked in fierce combat with the Moro, a knife-wielding native insurgency that combined religious zeal and potent drug use.

Much of the fighting was close-quarters battle and the hopped-up Moros took round after round from U.S. .38-caliber pistols while they continued to hack away at Americans.

If anything positive came from the bloody 15-year guerrilla war, it was the realization that the U.S. military needed a better pistol.

A look back at an older weapon pointed the way to a solution. In desperation, the Army had issued Colt Model 1873 .45-caliber revolvers—dating back to the Plains Indian Wars—to soldiers fighting the Moros.

The heavier round began to turn the tide. It often took just one well-placed shot from the .45-caliber pistol to kill a Moro.

Yr. obdt. can only agree with the gist of this article; the Browning 1911 is probably the best martial sidearm ever made.  The safe here contains one, not a Colt but a Rock Island Armory 1911, which is basically a Series 70 Colt in WW2-era 1911A1 style.  It’s a no-frills, very basic military-type sidearm which has the advantages of being powerful, reasonably accurate and very, very reliable.

But what’s not mentioned in this article is that the 1911 was just one of many near-immortal firearms designs to spring from the fertile mind of John Moses Browning.  Walk into any gun shop anywhere in the United States and you will, without a doubt, encounter several firearms in the racks that are Browning designs.

That’s not a bad record for a man who passed away in 1926.  The DaVinci of firearms’ designs will certainly be in constant use a hundred years after his death.