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Afternoon Win Mag - great SNGP, hope your buddy is appreciate of your efforts.

Shooting without glasses, wow, that sure takes me back to my youth...1 power, kinda like a red-dot without the red-dot. :-)

The TLC of my new (to me)Ruger New Army continues..A 1977 vintage. Was able to persuade five of the six nipples out of the cylinder. The sixth will likely either stay put or will be drilled out (with attendant ez-out and re-tap). I reckon it’ll stay put. The hammer needs a repolish, heavily stained. I think the previous owner shot it once, gave it a once over clean, maybe tried to remove a nipple, wiped it down and put it away. I have a few spares in my stash that Imay be installing in the ROA. It will continue....

Afternoon Win Mag - great SNGP, hope your buddy is appreciate of your efforts.

This project is one of my labors of love. We've known each other since 1970, and he's my oldest friend on earth. We do lots of little favors for each other all the time, but this was a "special needs" project.

I was unsure of what configuration he might like best, so I took enough in the way of accessories with me to let him try everything out, and for me to answer any questions or requests he might have. It's been a most gratifying project for both of us.

Sorry about the rusted-in nipple. Percussion ain't my bag, but I'd try a bit of heat with a shop torch, or a rust solvent bath in an ultrasonic cleaner. My last resort would be drill it out, open the hole, and put in a Helicoil. Or go with an oversize-thread nipple (if those critters exist) for all six chambers. YMMV.

Tonight's vey-belated edition of Saturday Night Gun Pron brings us to the finishing touches (Yaaaaay!) of my friend's AR57. The biggest challenge was one I never experienced before. Try focusing, and zeroing, a 1x scope intended for someone else, and add on the fact that my eyesight has gotten noticeably worse in the past year. The doctor said my eye health was still excellent, but vision changes can come quicker when we get older. (Older? What's this "older" business?)

So this was my final sighting-in at 25 yards. At 1x, at that range, all I saw was the central yellow diamond, and I aligned the crosshairs on the corners as the only way to get close to the bullseye.

I have no doubt that with a good 4x-or-better scope, this rifle could shoot minute-of-varmint all day long. I even guessed at the dot on the bottom of the target good enough to say the backup sights were working well enough for their intended purpose.

I swapped him for the original M4E(economy) I built, and he admitted that the chemotherapy took away so much of his muscle mass that he couldn't even operate the charging handle. With that in mind, I put an extra eight hours fitting and tuning every moving part on the AR57 again. He pronounced the final results as "smooth as melted butter on a glass doorknob. That made both our days. Now to arrange for a real sighting-in.

All of this testing allowed me a closer study of the three types of P90 magazines in my inventory. The good news was that one FN factory mag that I loaded and marked two years ago worked flawlessly. All the FN and AR57-branded magazines worked perfectly. FN recently made some cosmetic changes to their magazines, and may have even sold the old tooling to the other company. Careful shopping can now get either brand at a bit under $30, a far cry from the $75-100 demanded during the Great Magazine Shortage.

The Korean P90 clone magazine turned out to be a piece of carp (nine pieces of carp, in my case), with weak springs that caused stoppages about every 10 rounds. Even with swapping in quality FN internal parts for testing, with only the Korean magazine body original, there were fewer stoppages, but "zero" is the only acceptable number.

I found this strange, because I've had good results with their clone M14 magazines, made on original US tooling, and my limited testing with their clone H&K M16 magazines looked good, with no problems.

I learned at the store that they stopped carrying the Korean clone Glock magazines due to high failure rates, but I figured zero-for-nine for the P90 mags was a vey bad omen.

I stripped all their mags, and cut the springs in half. Then I cut each magazine body in half on a bandsaw. I care for the safety of whoever combs through my trash.

That gave me the idea to try an experiment with a California-legal ten-round mag. I dug a few parts out of the trash, and came up with this little cutie, with a proper FN magazine for comparison.

Full disclosure: I'm pulling y'all's leg with that stubby. It can't work, but it held together long enough to take the picture. I salvaged my dummy rounds from it, and threw the scrap out a second time. :)

Plenty of other deferred projects to get back to, and another trip to the range to introduce my old eyes and new glasses to the Leopold 1x prismatic scope.

Oh, and September is officially National Preparedness Month, with plenty of good advice from FEMA and other alphabet agencies, other than mention of edged or projectile weapons, which apparently don't exist in their universe. And September 4 was National Camouflage Day, but I don't think it appeared on many calendars this year. Next year, we'll remember, and double down.