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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.