Author: oddball

So…. I’m guessing a certain goth bronie would be interested in this…

And knowing Voltaire, I’m certain that he’ll keep his threat promise to “write a song about Dischord from My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic” if he sells out of the run of Ponies of Doom in a month.  By the way, if you don’t know of Voltaire, he’s a damn good goth/folk/geek/humor musician… among other things.

Oh, and appropriately enough, this meme directly followed his announcement in my Facebook feed:

I feel kind of bad that I haven’t linked to either of these yet.  I’m going to claim that I’ve been too busy or something… not that I’m lazy or a bad person.  Yeah… that’s it.

First up is Linoge’s fund raiser for HAVA.  It’s a good cause, plus holy crap the prize packages!  Seriously, I’ve seen fund raisers where the “first prize” wasn’t as nice as a few of those packages.  Be warned, the deadline for the drawing is tomorrow night, so I’d get on that.

The other one is a bit more specific.  One of our fellow gun bloggers, Squeaky, is having a rough time financially and is being hit with some nasty medical costs on top of that.  She is at the point that she’s asking for some help.  I think Erin does a better pitch as to why you should help her than I could.  Oh, speaking Erin, she’s promised to do another “glockenponie” post if the goal is met… which I’ve been told is pretty close to happening.

*disclaimer: the following is merely my opinion based on the reports of one of the interested parties in the story.  This opinion may or may not be shared by WizardPC, and should not be construed as anything beyond one man’s opinion.  By the way, if by some strange circumstance, someone would like me to test and evaluate their equipment after reading this, let me know.  Buying the stuff I review is pretty expensive.*

So, it looks like Linoge got to test and evaluate one of US Firearm’s new ZiP guns, and things did not go well at all.  You can read his write up here.

Initially, I was eager to read a review from him about this weird little new firearm.  Like him, there’s something inside me that attracts me to unusual designs.  This one is about as quirky as it gets with modern firearms.  It’s a .22 pistol that uses Ruger 10/22 mags.  The magazine not only is used to feed the rounds into the chamber, but also as the hand grip.  The creators also designed it with the idea of attaching it to a rail under a long gun.  I’m not sure what practical use having a small .22 slung under your rifle or shotgun would give you, but there you go.

First up, that lovely 25 round BX-25 magazine that you see sticking out of the ZiP gun on their website and other promotional materials?  Yeah… don’t use those.  Well, unless you’re willing to buy their modification parts to mod the “BX-25 magazine you already own.”  So, the magazine that they designed the gun around won’t work with their gun unless you modify it, but they advertise that it will work anyways.  This throws up a red flag in my book from the get go.

As per Linoge’s write up, he unboxed it, examined it, and took it to the range with 5 different brands of .22 ammo.  Apparently it only like one brand out of those 5 and would consistently choke on the rest of them (mostly stove pipes).  While a couple of the brands used were cheap bulk ammo labels, one of them was CCI MiniMag.  As a fellow blogger has stated recently, if it’s not working with CCI MiniMag, it’s broken.

The thing that has really set off alarms  is that the gun fired not once, but twice out of battery.  After those incidents, he packed up and went home with the intent of calling the manufacturer.  He also was able to reliably reproduce the hammer falling with the pistol significantly out of battery.

And then the really, really scary part.  The CEO of US Firearms, Douglas Donnelly first blamed the ammo for the out of battery discharge.  I’ve shot a lot of bulk .22.  I’ve seen my fair share of failures to fire due to bad ammo.  I’ve never seen one spontaneously go off.  When questioned about the firing pin being allowed to drop when the gun is out of battery, apparently his response was “yes, it’s supposed to do that.”

Just in case Mr. Donnelly is unaware, there have been gun manufacturers that have been sued out of existence for lesser design flaws.

Mr. Donnelly also clarified that the reason for the other failures were due to either a. bad ammo, or b. the wrong spring being installed for the type of ammunition being used.  This is the first I’ve heard of someone needing to swap out a spring in a .22 depending on the ammo used, and the ammo being used in this case was, in my unscientific opinion, the most common type that it would see.

So… to sum up, the US Firearms ZiP gun is a gun of questionable use, requires the shooter to swap out recoil springs depending on the ammo, and even then has a high likelihood of blowing up in your hand if you don’t check to make sure that the bolt didn’t properly close ever time.

Do to this callous lack of concern of the safety of the end consumer, I don’t think I’ll ever touch, must less buy something from this manufacturer.  At least they named the gun properly.  Just like the items that that term originally referred to, it might work, and, if you’re lucky, it won’t blow up on you!

So… a buddy of mine posted this picture to his Facebook account:

At first I was confused why he was posting a picture of his HiPoint C9, then I noticed a bit of copper in the chamber…

And then I saw his next post:

Yep… round in backwards.

The story to go with this is that he was clearing a jam using the technique of racking the slide with the ejection port pointed at the ground and his hand over the chamber to catch the jammed round.  He pulled one round out this way, but the slide wouldn’t return to battery and the gun failed to fire a second time.  Upon inspection, he saw this wonderful sight.  He was able to clear the round with a cleaning rod (while praying he didn’t hit the primer).

His theory, which I agree with, is that the jam was a double feed.  Somehow, with the two rounds bouncing around while he was clearing it, one of the rounds managed to turn all the way around and find a comfy home in the chamber.  He’s currently planning on making use of the lifetime warranty that HiPoint offers due to the gun now jamming on him on a regular basis (he claims that it used to run like a top, but he’s put an awful lot of rounds through it).

He’s blaming this particular incident on “a combination of geometry and operator … eccintricity.”

*UPDATE* I was mistaken, the slide did fully cycle and the pistol was in battery with the round in backwards.  The operator didn’t notice the issue until the gun went *click* a second time, and pulling the slide back failed to eject the round.

Looks like Marlin has decided to put out Project Appleseed edition 795’s.  Oleg has a post up about them here that includes close up pictures that would put anything my hamfisted attempts at photography could produce (there’s a reason he gets paid for his stuff, and I don’t).

The Appleseed edition is essentially the same setup as I took when I participated in it.  From the pictures, it looks like a stock 795 .22 semi-auto with Tech-Sights and a GI sling.  What I took differed only in that I used a different kind of sling that frankly didn’t work well as a shooting aid.  Oh, and mine didn’t come with a certificate good for one Appleseed shoot.

I know everyone loves the Ruger 10/22, but I’d wager that the Marlin 795 is just as good of a rifle (some say better out of the box), and costs significantly less.  The base 795 goes for around $150 these days, and it looks like the MSRP for the Appleseed edition is $299, which isn’t far off what it would cost to buy the base, Tech-Sights, sling, second mag, and membership to Appleseed.  For that money, you’re looking at not much more than a base line Ruger 10/22.

Of course, I’ve gone a little further in tricking mine out for the next time I head to Appleseed in hunt for that patch, but that set up will do great for most folks.