I finally got my 2nd AK done. Well, almost. I still plan to refinish the wood. My wife is going to do that, or at least help with that. It will be good to get her involved in these projects. Anyway, here’s a couple of pics. The first one is after I first built it but before refinishing. The receiver is unfinished and the rest of the steel was in need of refinishing, though it doesn’t look bad in the pic. The 2nd pic is after refinishing.

The pics don’t really show the difference. I may try to get better pics to replace these.

I got my .45 back together last night after refinishing it. I tried to parkerize it first. My first time parkerizing. Turns out this is a stainless steel gun. I didn’t know that before. So the parkerizing didn’t turn out very well, but apparently it’s still a good base for the final finish. And I think the final finish looks pretty darn good if I do say so.

Before:

After:

We had a great time in Vegas as always. The trip home wasn’t so great, but that’s another story. The purpose of this trip, besides being an excuse to go to Vegas, was to go to the SHOT Show. There were lots of cool new products there and I had an opportunity to handle (fondle) some cool guns I’ve been wanting to check out.

First there was the Robarm XCR. I first saw this at the SAR show last December and loved it. It’s very similar to the AR-15 but better. They took everything that wasn’t perfect about the AR-15 and made it perfect. There isn’t anything I don’t like about it. I must have one.

Then there was the FN PS90. This is a very cool looking gun. A lot of people don’t like it because it looks so futuristic. Fans of Stargate SG-1 will recognize it as the gun they use on the show. The PS90 is the civilian legal version of the P90. They lengthened the barrel to 16″, made it semi-auto and changed the color of it. Even with the longer barrel it is still very short. It’s very light as well. Civilians get a 30 rd magazine but 50 rd mags are available. Rumor has it that the 30 rd mags can be converted to 50 rds. There is a lot of debate as to the effectiveness of the cartridge, but still this is another gun I must have.

FN also had their SCAR rifle. This is the rifle they submitted to the military SCAR (Special forces Capable Assault Rifle) competition. I had wait to see this one because someone was trying to take pictures of it and they didn’t want them to. After he finally left I got to fondle it. It is very nice. It’s similar to an AR-15, but made with composite materials. It’s very light and has a folding stock. The stock is it’s distinctive feature and gives it it’s ugly look. A lot of people don’t like it because it’s ugly. Personally I prefer functionality over the looks of a rifle. It’s shaped the way it is to be adjustable for different users with or without body armor. I like that. This rifle is currently not available to civilians. I forgot to ask if it ever will be.

Of course we didn’t just play with guns the whole time there. We visited our old Friend Scott Ferguson. We used to work with him years ago. Then he moved to Vegas and got married. He now has a 2 year old daughter. It was great catching up with him and meeting his family.

We went to the Erocktica show again. I have a post here somewhere from the last time we went. Basically they have sexy topless dancers and play rock music. It’s a pretty good show. I was a bit disapointed that they didn’t have a live band this time. They just had the singer from the old band. Actually they had two singers. Jay Ray, who seems a bit like a Kid Rock wannabe and Gabriella Versace who was also one of the dancers. They sang over pre recorded music. Still worth the money. Actually, probably not worth the $50/person, but worth it if you get the 50% off deal we got.

We went shooting again. What a pain in the ass. We usually go to Ben Avery range. There is no good time to go there. If you go on the weekend traffic isn’t too horribly bad, but you should plan to wait for a table. During the week, traffic is awful because apparently they think it’s more cost efficient to have six cops direct traffic during rush hour than to put a couple of freakin traffic lights up there! If you get there when they are directing traffic, at least you can get through. Otherwise you have to hope someone has the heart to let you through or you’ll sit there forever. Ok, enough of that rant.

After waiting for 45 minutes we finally got a table. We had to wait another 15 minutes though before we could put our target out, so we sat there and watched all the idiots pretend like they new what they were doing. There was one table with about five people. None of them had eye protection. Whatever, why should I care? What did kind of bother me is they didn’t know how to handle their weapons. One guy looked like he had his thumb on the slide of his semi-auto handgun. And he was trying to teach a new shooter how to shoot! There were many people there who thought nothing of pointing there guns down. There are signs everwhere that say keep muzzles up. If you point your gun at the concrete table and it goes off, someone is likely to get hurt. The people next to us had no eye or ear protection. What the hell are they thinking going to a shooting range without ear protection? It’s only 50 cents for ear plugs there! I was wondering why they kept leaving the table when I was shooting my .308. Oh yeah, the other thing I don’t like about ranges like that is my brass ends up hitting people. My .308 shoots the brass violently upwards and to the right. So it would go right over the screen next to us, bounce off the roof and hit our neighbors in the head. Too bad they didn’t have eye protection.

Anyway, the purpose of this wasn’t to rant about stupid people. My AK that had jammed the first time I shot it, was still jamming. I had thought I had fixed it, but apparently not. That added considerably to my frustration. So since I couldn’t shoot my .308 without hitting people with brass, and my AK kept jamming we brought out the AR. That thing feels so good after shooting the .308. It feels like a bb gun. The AR was fine for a while, but then I had a case get stuck in the chamber. At that point I decided it was time to go home. We were there for about 2 hours and spent less than a half hour shooting.

After all of the frustration of Ben Avery I decided we either had to join a club with an indoor shooting range or find some place in the desert to shoot. We found a place in the desert and went there yesterday. Oh yeah, Sunday night I fiddled with the AK some more and thought for sure I had it fixed. Wrong! Son of a ….. Jessica forgot her ear protection and there wasn’t a place to buy some for 50 cents, so I shot alone and didn’t stay long. My first AK I built worked great. The other one of course was a jam-o-matic and my AR kept getting stuck cases. I’m really hoping that the stuck cases are caused by the cheap-ass steel cased ammo I was shooting. As far as my AK goes, I was out of ideas. Until I got home of course I had an idea. Now it will have to wait until next week before I can find out if it works. That really sucks because I wanted to refinish it this week, but I want it functioning properly before I refinish it. Nothing like grinding on your shiny new finish.

Last night I refinished my .32. The finish on the slide was starting to show a lot of wear. I thought it would be cool to refinish it in olive drab. I typically don’t like olive drab but had seen it on some other guns that looked really good so I thought I’d give it a shot. I really like it! I also did a couple of rifle mags and it looks really good.

Here are some before and after shots.

I haven’t tested it out yet, but I’m fairly confident I have the AK running reliably now. Still have some cosmetic issues to work out but I’m putting that off for a few days. I have matte black gun kote on order for refinishing. When that comes in I’ll strip it down, finish the final details and coat it. I will also sand down the wood and stain it or something.

Here’s a pic of my two home builds. The one on top is the newest one, yet to be refinished. This one was built on a budget. The one below that is my first build. It’s an AMD-65. That is it’s current configuration, without the forward grip it previously had.

We went shooting last night. I am very happy to report that my AK (First one) had no troubles. Also, I was concerned that the metal handguard would get too hot without the pistol grip on it. It didn’t get very hot at all. The gas tube did, so I just have to be careful about not grabbing on to that. I am going to leave it this way. It looks better and the forward grip was getting in the way of mag changes.

My second AK did have a few jams but I am not very surprised. The US made hammer that I’m using is thicker than it should be and puts a lot of pressure against the bolt carrier when it cycles. Seems that pressure is too great for the spring to overcome sometimes. That was the primary problem with my first AK. I was unable to fix this one before we went shooting so I half expected it. Other than that it worked pretty good. When it jammed I just had to give the bolt carrier a little push and it was good to go. I am glad I shot this one before refinishing, it seems the mag well opening is still a little narrow. I took pictures of the rifle last night but won’t be able to post them until tonight.

My new HK clone did pretty good. I had one failure to feed on the last round of a magazine and one jam other than that. It isn’t broken in yet though and using old military surplus mags probably didn’t help. My only complaint about it is it’s so fricken heavy! Have I mentioned how heavy it is? According to the website they say it weighs 9.17 lbs. BS! My scales say 12 lbs. That’s just too heavy for a rifle of this type. I will probably shorten the barrel a couple inches this weekend which will just make it a bit more compact, and I might get a standard stock to replace the fixed stock. That should bring it down to 10 or 11 lbs. Still too fricken heavy. Not sure what else I can do though. I suppose I could start using that bowflex that’s collecting dust.

The gun show wasn’t as good as I had hoped it would be. I was hoping to get a new pistol grip and handguard for my AK, plus a receiver and the other parts I’m missing for a third and (maybe) final AK build. Didn’t find any of that stuff. I did find a shiny new rifle though, so it wasn’t all bad.

Speaking of AKs, I finished fitting and assembline my second one last night. This time I will test fire it before I refinish it so if I have to do any grinding or anything later I won’t mess up the finish. This one will be done in matte black. It still needs some work, but mainly just cosmetic. At least I can test it out now. I never did get to go shooting last weekend so I’m planning on going tonight. Hopefully all goes well.

We went shooting the other day. The AK jammed quite a bit. I think I know what the problem is and have fixed it. I will find out this weekend.

I removed the ugly forward grip. I really don’t like those on a semi-auto rifle. It didn’t seem like the lower handguard got too hot when I was shooting the other day, of course maybe it didn’t get a chance to since it kept jamming. So I will see when I go shooting this weekend if it’s too hot to handle. Or maybe I’ll just pick up a plastic handguard at the gun show this weekend. It would be a shame to replace it though after all that work to make it pretty.