Comments Kinda Screwed Up for a Bit

I’m running an experiment.  Hopefully.  Still having problems getting the archive comments to link to their proper posts.  Something is screwed up somewhere. All the archived quotes are there, but they’re dated 100 years before they were actually written.  (Oldest is dated 1903, newest, 1910.)  At any rate, they aren’t linking to their posts.  I had to re-install Echo, which conflicts with DISQUS at least on the main page, to run the experiment.  I have no way to know if it’s actually doing anything, though.

Well, THAT Isn’t Any Better

I’m modifying the template to make TSM look more like it used to. However, the overall width of the damned thing seems to be fixed. Gotta look into that…

UPDATED: Ok, how’s THIS?

UPDATE II, 10:08PM MST 11/21/10: I’m leaving it like this for a while. Comments seem to be functional, but I still have had no success in importing the archives. Dammit. I may contract out for Robb Allen or someone to rewrite the blog template, but I REALLY WANT MY COMMENTS BACK!

UPDATE III, 11/22: Comment importation has begun. We’ll see how it works out. Chris Byrne said it can take well over a day for the import to complete. I can believe that, but I’m seeing comments from as far back as 2003 now, and that gives me hope.

Quote of the Day – Mencius Moldbug Edition

The perfect leftist is the fanatical hypocrite. While his beliefs correspond precisely to his own advantage, he believes in them furiously just the same. His opportunism does not even slightly detract from his sincerity, which is palpable and enormous. Indeed, if the situation changes and so do his interests, his mind will change as well. And change sincerely.
Alas, this character is easier to describe than find. In the day of Gladstone, liberalism was young and crazy and full of juice. Today? The movement exudes the overwhelming odor of fatigue. It remains both fanatical and hypocritical – but not in one person. Its fanatics, who could be broadly described as the amateur left, are devoid of any tactical cunning. And its hypocrites, who despite Robert Gibbs constitute the professional left, are as passionless as an eggplant.
They try to care. They moan, they gasp, they writhe. But their eyes are dead, whore eyes. Now that we’ve seen it in the White House, we’d know it anywhere. You have to be an awfully blind fanatic not to see what you’re looking at. Can the amateur left, the audience, the chumps who buy the magazines, find a professional leftist who actually cares about his ideals? They’ll need a much brighter lantern than it took to find B.H. Obama.
In 2010, there is nothing fresh about the revolution industry. The idealistic professional leftist is the exact counterpart of the romantic porn star – a human impossibility.

Unqualified ReservationsThe Lightworker wants to touch your junk

Found via Daphne. Read the whole thing.

OK, What Do All Y’all Think?

If you want to comment, you may have to click on the post title to bring up that post alone.  The ‘comment’ function seems to be a bit hit-or-miss.  Still no joy on importing the comment archives.  I am NOT HAPPY about this, but the updated template has a lot more features (and a lot less real-estate for blog posts.  480 pixel maximum width for pictures?  That sucks.)  The archive feature is a lot better, IMHO.  I still need to add the “Best Posts” to the sidebar, but that promises to be tedious as hell, and I will save it for another day.

Tighten Your Safety Belts, We’re Going In!

It’s time to dump Echo. This means “upgrading” the blog to a new template, then exporting Echo comments to Blogsnot, and then exporting them from Blogsnot to Disqus, I think. This may take a while. Hopefully you don’t get a 404 Error while I’m attempting this.

UPDATE:  What a PITA.  This is going to take a while.  Bear with me.

UPDATE II: Echo comments do not appear to be even trying to migrate. HEEEELLLPPP!!!!

Range Report: Fiocchi Primer Test

A while back (quite a while back) the folks at LuckyGunner.com asked me if I’d be interested in testing some large rifle primers by Fiocchi. They were willing to send me a sleeve if I would try them out and report on them – good, bad, or indifferent. I said I’d be happy to, but it would be some time before I’d get a chance to actually use them. I told them I would try them out in my Remington 700 5R with my pet load.

Well, that time finally came.

The Fiocchi primers are sold in sleeves of 1,500 rather than the industry standard 1,000.

You get ten packs of 150 rather than 100. The packaging is compact and fairly handy.

At the time of this writing, the Large Rifle primers go for $41/1,500, or 2.73¢ per primer, not including shipping and HazMat fees. By contrast, the CCI BR-2 Benchrest primers I normally use are $50/1000, or 5¢ each not including tax, purchased locally.

To prepare for this test, I decided I wanted everything as identical as possible. I had some Black Hills brass that had originally been the red box (new rather than remanufactured) 168 grain moly-coated match loads. I had reloaded this brass once with 175 grain Sierra Match Kings, so this would be the third time this brass had been loaded. I decapped and trimmed all forty cases to 1.950,” chamfered the inside and outside of the case mouths, and then ran them in my tumbler to make sure they were shiny clean. Afterward, I ran them all through my RCBS small-base X-die to resize them.

These had been fired through the 5R before. I could tell because they all fit into my case gauge already, albeit just a little tightly. After sizing, they fall in and out with ease, and have just a tiny bit of wiggle-room at the case head end. This is what I have to do to get my reloads to feed in my M25 gas gun. In addition to testing the Fiocchi primers, I wanted to see what the small-base sizer does to accuracy in the 5R as opposed to neck-sizing only, which is what I normally do when reloading for my bolt-guns.

After decapping, trimming, chamfering, and resizing the brass, I sat down and hand-primed twenty cases with CCI BR-2’s, and twenty cases with Fiocchi Large Rifle NIK primers using my Lee Auto-Prime. The all seated firmly and consistently, so dimensionally the Fiocchi primers are very uniform. Then, using my modified RCBS ChargeMaster (my technique with that particular device has been thoroughly revised since that post), I threw forty identical 46.4 (± 0.05) grain loads of Alliant Reloder-15 powder (Caution: use load data you find on strange web sites at your own risk!), and seated forty Lapua 155 grain Scenar hollow-point boattail bullets to a cartridge overall length of 2.80″ using my Dillon RL-450 press and an RCBS seating die.

(Note to whom it may concern: The only thing I’ve been given in this entire review is 1,500 Fiocchi primers donated by LuckyGunner.com. Everything else I mention in this post, I bought.)

Anyway, now that I had forty rounds of .308 that differ only in the primer used to light them off, it was RANGE TIME! I swapped out the Leupold scope for the Nightforce I bought awhile back, and I’ve had to play with it to get the right eye relief, but I think I’ve got it now. Still, I had to make sure the scope was on target, so I sat down and put my last eight rounds of Black Hills 175 grain through the rifle at 100 yards. Here’s that group:

The low-center hole is the cold-bore shot.  Even including it, that’s a hair over an inch, center-to-center, and about what I’ve come to expect out of that ammo. Next I ran ten rounds of each test load over the chronograph, with a cooling off period between. Here’s the data:

CCI BR-2 Load
Average Velocity: 2876fps
Extreme Spread: 58.40fps
Standard Deviation: 16.52fps

Fiocchi Load
Average Velocity: 2917fps
Extreme Spread: 42.96fps
Standard Deviation: 14.83fps

Now, I’ve gotten this particular load under 10fps Sd using neck-sized Lapua cases, but those are still damned good numbers. Obviously, the Fiocchi is a hair hotter than the BR-2, but it’s every bit, if not more consistent.

How was accuracy, you ask? Here’s the BR-2 load:

If you can’t read it, that’s 0.65MOA at 200 yards for ten shots.

Here’s the Fiocchi:

If you throw out that one far-right shot, the group is easily under 1MOA. Both of these loads ran a bit hotter than I’m used to seeing. Normally that load gives me right at 2800fps, not 2880+, and that seems to be right where the rifle/bullet combination works best. I will blame the difference on the Black Hills cases, sized in the small-base sizer. UPDATE: Nope, I checked my records, and 2880 is normal. Case capacity is probably reduced compared to the Lapua cases. I still think I need to re-run the test with Lapua cases but the purpose of this test has been met: the Fiocchi Large Rifle primer is damned good, and a real value compared to CCI’s Benchrest offering. I’m glad I have a whole lot more of them to experiment with. Thanks to LuckyGunner.com for the chance to try them out!

Another Excuse for Not Blogging

This is my current book queue:

(Click for full size)

I’m a bit over halfway through Sowell’s Intellectuals and Society at the moment, and I just finished reading John Ringo’s Live Free or Die (recommended, BTW) and Stephen Hunter’s I, Sniper. That stack on the right is books I’ve already read. Those are all novels, mostly SciFi. Hardbacks go in a different pile. I read probably three or four novels to each non-fiction book. I had planned on slogging through those pretty much in the order they’re stacked (not including books I pick up in the mean time), but after reading Tam’s review of The Gun, I’ll probably start on it as soon as I’ve finished Intellectuals.

I swear, sometimes I think my house is just a repository of horizontal surfaces on which I stack books.

Engineer Joke

This came out of a seminar at work today on the importance of specifications. Supposedly it’s a true story from a few years ago. (And if I have to explain it to you, you’re not an engineer and it won’t be funny to you anyway.)

A note found on a Drawing at an Advanced Micro Devices semiconductor fabrication facility in Austin, Texas:

“3. Furnish and Install per MIL-TFD-1111.”

The contractor filed a Request for Information:

“We find no MIL-TFD-1111 specification. Please provide.”

The engineer replied to the RFI:

“MIL-TFD-1111: Make It Like The Friggin’ Drawing For Once.”