Tuesday - June 23, 2009

Bizzy Bee Again

Working. Hey, now I’m Molly the Maid as well. I get to clean the Cat Ladies’ house tomorrow. Oh joy! Still, I feel I owe them for a lot of referenced jobs, so I’ll do them a favor when I can.

Bowling again tonight. Maybe we can win one for a change. We’ve lost all 7 for the past 2 weeks. Boo, hiss. But at least my average is going back down.

I got the last set of hammer shims built and installed on my little Ruger SP101. I did my wife’s gun last week. On a revolver, the hammer sits in a milled groove in the back of the pistol, and rides on a steel pin. Obviously the groove is wider than the hammer is thick, but often they are too wide. If the hammer can “float” around in the groove then you won’t get a repeatable trigger pull, since the hammer will be at at different lateral point on the sear each time you fire the gun. So you install some shims, and that keeps the hammer from moving side to side.

On both the SP101s the overall gap is about 0.021-0.022”. Give each side 0.001” for clearance, and this means you need a 0.010” shim for each side. You can either punch them out of the steel feeler gauges themselves, which is very difficult, or find some other way. It turns out that aluminum roofing flashing is 0.093” thick, so I made a pair from some of that. Aluminum is much softer than hardened steel, so it was a breeze to punch out and drill. 10 seconds on the whetstone cleaned up and burrs, and they went right in. And the trigger pull was instantly better. Hugely better!

I made a pair the hard way, hammering the crap out of some steel feeler gauges. Then I fought the little bastards to a standstill, trying to drill a #6 hole in a 0.5” diameter disk. Not much to hang on to there. But I got it done finally, and it works great. Then I had one of those “D’oh, I could’a had a V-8” moments: feeler gauges come in a pack, all mounted to a hingepin. The hingepin hole is nice and smooth, and it’s barely .01” too big in diameter. So I took the gauges off their pin, snipped off the end with the factory hole, smoothed the cut edge, and tried that. Worked great.

So now I have a 4th pair of shims, just in case the aluminum ones ever wear out.

My (older and much more expensive, but otherwise very similar) Ruger GP-100 has a hammer/frame gap of only 0.06”. Nice. Not worth putting shims in there; they’d only be 0.002” thick.



Ok, it’s raining again. Back to “normal”. We’ve had our 3 hours of sunlight for the day. And it hardly rained yesterday, only for maybe an hour. The guys on TV were joking about that strange bright yellow thing in the sky - the sun. It has rained almost every day for the entire month of June, and the forecast is for another 4 days of rain.

I got the condo association guys to look at our gutters. They don’t seem to be working at all. Clogged? Shouldn’t be as they’re brand new. So the guy goes up there and finds the gutter filled with water. And so was the one on the next unit over. WTF? It turns out that Joe Jenius who installed the downspouts mated the angled spout to the vertical one by cutting a hole and inserting the angled downspout into the vertical downspout ... all the way to the back of the vertical downspout. He “forgot” to mark and trim the angled piece. So both spouts were blocked off. D’ur! So, did I fix them? No. Not allowed. So, did Condo Workman Guy fix them? No, because they’re under warranty. He had to call the gutter company for them to come and do it. Next week maybe. After all the rain is gone probably.
Guess the gutter company never realized you can buy 45 degree connectors at the hardware store.

Posted by Drew458     on 06/23/2009 at 03:57 PM   
Filed Under: • Daily Life • Guns and Gun Control •  
• Comments (3) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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