Month: November 2009

Cane Trials – Update

/ hsoi / 3 Comments

James over at hellinahandbasket just posted his investigations into cane durability. This was something spurred by one of my postings, and it’s great that he sought to check this stuff out. Thanx, James!

It should be noted that James was looking at general durability for whacking someone with a cane. For many people, this is probably all they would do with a cane, using it to strike people in an untrained manner. Don’t get me wrong, there’s certainly nothing wrong with this. My personal goals are slightly different, being able to use a cane for locking, throwing, trapping, and other such things in addition to striking (my background in Kuk Sool and Kali give me many options). Nevertheless, if a cane can’t take a good whack against a tree, it’s doubtful it would be useful in any other way.

If you are going for a cane to just strike someone about the head and shoulders with, I would recommend a lighter cane. Yes more mass (at the same velocity) would yield more force upon impact, but more mass also means more momentum to have to bring to a stop, which you may well need to do to strike again especially if your first one missed. But exactly how heavy the cane should be depends 100% upon you, the way you’ll use the cane, and your strength and ability. Make sure you check this out and don’t settle on a cane until you find one that you can properly wield to suit your goals.

The lucite cane surprised me. But if it works, it works. I would want to feel it for heft and grip before I bought and/or settled on it, but the durability was nice to see. I wonder how easily you can trim the cane for a walking fit, or if it can be ordered to size.

On the other hand, the lack of durability in the rattan cane surprised me. I’ve used rattan staffs in Kuk Sool and we’ve struck each other at full force, no harm. I use rattan sticks in my kali practice, and we strike full force, no harm. I’ve struck the trees in my yard with these sticks, no harm. So I can only assume that it’s not rattan, but perhaps the construction of that particular cane.

In the end, James is right: some cane is better than no cane. Even those purely medical canes are better than nothing (tho they are certainly bottom of the list). But do you need to go out and spend big bucks on some specialty martial arts cane? Probably not. There is advantage there as they are certainly purpose-built (especially when looking at a training cane to ensure the “mouth” of the crook is wide enough to minimize chances of injury to a training partner), but they certainly aren’t a hard-fast requirement. I would also encourage anyone that opts to use a cane for self-defense to get some sort of training with it and to practice with it.

Thanx again, James!

Background check to be a parent

/ hsoi

Continuing this morning’s theme of “Asinine in England”, apparently now there’s a proposal for homeschooling parents to have to undergo a criminal background check in order for the government to deem them fit and qualified to teach their children.

Unbelievable.

So you don’t need a background check to send your children to government school, but if you want to teach them then you do. Of course we can enter into the slippery slope here because if you’re unfit to teach your children, wouldn’t you be unfit to be a parent? How soon until your children would be taken away from you (given how the UK governments behave these days)? Who deems what a fit or unfit parent is? Why just stop at a parent that wishes to teach, how about any and every parent because if you’re not fit to be with the child during the day, why should you be fit to be with them during the nights and weekends?

As well, one side-effect would be killing off homeschooling, which is well-likely a hidden goal. Lord knows we can’t have free-thinkers in our midst, nor encourage thought other than government-sponsored. Too dangerous for a well-controlled society.

This is government gone amuck. This is intrusion. This is daft.

Bowling is dangerous (apparently)

/ hsoi

Who knew that bowling could be so dangerous, but thankfully we’ve now got a UK Government study telling us so. Thank God for the government telling us these things.

Back in my day, people took bowling as a P.E. class because it was a joke. But apparently now evil bowling lanes are just waiting to gobble up and physically mangle our children. They must be banned! Or at least:

 

Its authors even considered ordering every bowling alley to put barriers across lanes. But they were forced to admit defeat – after realising that bowlers must be able to see what they are aiming at.

 

I wouldn’t even call that a modicum of common sense winning out; that’s still too generous.

And did you know, if you continue to breathe, you might suck in a bug that could cause you to choke and die. Better stop breathing now because the risks of choking on a bug are too great!

*sigh*

How To Improve Your Split Times

/ hsoi / 2 Comments

Some emails were being exchanged between KR Training instructors and students. One person mentioned how he was wanting to work on improving his split times (time between shots). Karl Rehn gave an informative reply and was kind enough to grant me permission to reprint his reply here.

1. Gunsmith the gun to have a lighter trigger pull with a shorter reset. This will buy you the most improvement fastest.

2. Don’t wait to see the sights again to start resetting and pressing the trigger again. If you work on this, put the target up against the back of the backstop and start at 3 yards from the backstop so if you let one go early (high) it does not go over the berm.

3. Work on Bill Drills (6 shots) not “double taps.” Practicing “double taps” will teach you to get one sight picture and slap the trigger twice (Alpha-Mike syndrome). Bill Drills will teach you how to be consistent in your shot cycle. Set up a full IPSC target at 3 yards, set yourself a par time of 4 sec to draw and fire 6 shots. If you hit all A’s in 4 sec, drop the par time by 10% (0.4 sec) and try it again. Keep dropping by 10% until you are shooting ½ A’s and ½ C’s. Don’t worry about what you are seeing or “not seeing.” Just look at the hits on the paper after each drill. A Master class score for a 3 yard Bill Drill is 2 sec (1 sec draw, 0.16 splits approx).

Repeat the drill at 7 yards, 10 yards, 15 yards. Longer distances — draw time should be the same but splits will slow down as distance increases.

The best way to learn to go fast is to set par times and force yourself to go fast and make the times regardless of the hits. You have to teach your brain to process the information at that speed. Once you have basic technique down, trying to get fast by being careful and consistent won’t get you there. You have to start in your comfort zone, then push to find the edge of what you can do and then dial it back to 90% of your max.

What you have to learn is the “rhythm” of your gun — when it is ready to fire again. At some point you may have to go back to equipment mods — heavier guide rods, lighter loads, trying different weight recoil sprints, to “tune” the gun’s recoil cycle. If you get your splits down in the 0.15 – 0.20 level at 7 yards then there’s limited “return in investment” by spending ammo trying to go beyond that. There are a lot of other skills that are more important than split times (target acquisition, movement) that shouldn’t be neglected obsessing about hitting 0.11 splits.

If you don’t know what some of these terms mean, I intentionally did not link to stuff because either it should mean you’re not ready for this level of stuff or you’ll be better served by Googling on it yourself and exploring and learning.

But I did want to post one cool thing about the Bill Drill, from Brian Enos:

With a target, what do you need to see? One thing you might notice is that you’ve gotten in a blind rush to make the time. So what did (or didn’t) you see? Sometimes recollecting what you didn’t see tells as much as knowing what you did see.

As the old Kuk Sool saying goes “We need more practice, sir!”

My first .38 Special reloads

/ hsoi / 3 Comments

I don’t have scads of .38 Special ammo, but I do have a fair lot of .38 Special brass. In my push to get myself into reloading, I’m trying to avoid buying factory ammo and instead putting that money towards reloading components (bullets, primers, powder, etc.) and reloading equipment. Now that I have my S&W 442 back from the gunsmith and with the snub-nose revolver class coming up, I figure it’s time to start working up a .38 Special load to use for target/practice shooting.

There are lots of .38 Special data out there, but I’ve noticed it tends to have a bias towards lead bullets like semi-wadcutters, or towards hollow-points like the Hornady XTP. This is generally all good, but I had picked up 500 rounds of Berry’s .38 Special 158 grain plated round nose bullets because they were the most inexpensive bullets I could find locally. This posed two issues for me: 1. plated bullets reload a bit differently, 2. finding a cartridge overall length for a 158 grain round nose bullet was next to impossible. Making it a bit more difficult, I was limiting my powder to Titegroup. Again, when I bought all of exodus’ reloading equipment the two pistol powders I obtained were Titegroup and Power Pistol. Being as I don’t know one powder from another, my current approach is to use the powders I have and get a good feel for them; after that, I can explore other powders. I was told Titegroup and Trail Boss were good for large volume cases, like in .38 Special. Furthermore, Titegroup is fairly fast burning, which would be preferred for a snub. So having Titegroup I figured that’d be the place to start. So if it wasn’t hard enough to find something based upon the particular style of bullet I was using, throw in wanting to use Titegroup, and throw in a desire to get data that provides a COL and well…. I failed in finding any sort of existing recipes.

Consequently, I had to come up with my own load. I looked at all the data I could find and tried to come up with something that was workable yet conservative. Here’s what I have:

Bullet: Berry’s .38 Special 158 grain plated round nose double struck

Powder: 3.5 grains, Titegroup

Primer: Remington 1.5 small pistol primers

Cases: used, headstamp “CBC – 38 SPL”

C.O.L.: 1.510″

Also note the dies I used were RCBS carbide 3-die set #18212. This doesn’t have a taper-crimp die. As well, the bullets don’t have any sort of cannelure, so there’s really no crimp here.

As of this writing I have not tried this out. I just loaded 20 rounds and will try them out next time I get to the gun range. There won’t be any chronographing, just seeing if it goes bang, puts the bullet where I wanted it to go, and any other data that I can obtain (e.g. muzzle flash, how sooty things get, felt recoil, etc.).

Hopefully I can get to the range soon. I’ve still got my other set of 9mm experiments to try too.

Returning to normal

/ hsoi

Dad visited first half of last week. Mom and Little Sister visited second half of last week.

It was great to see them all, especially since it had been too long since our last visit.

But oh, I’m tired. Wife is tired. Kids are tired.

Today, we get things back in order and back to normal. But I almost wish I had another few days off work so I could recover from my “vacation”; funny how that tends to happen, thus why my preferred vacation is just doing nothing. 🙂

Blogging should return to normal too.

Sunday Metal – Danzig

/ hsoi / 5 Comments

Some people love him, some people hate him. Me, I don’t care much about the man one way or the other, but I do like the music. Plus, you can’t deny Glenn Danzig’s place in music history from The Misfits to Samhain to his solo work in Danzig.

What always drew me to Danzig was not just the heaviness of the riffs, the darker overtones of the music, and Glenn’s powerful voice, but the blues influence throughout. Take a listen to the song “Bodies”

Is it me? Or does that bass line sound like Led Zeppelin’s “How Many More Times”? The song is still its own thing, and it’s a pretty good jam.

“Twist of Cain” perfectly manifests that vocal styling, the heavy but bluesy and slightly evil sounding riffage. Yes, I’m a fan of John Christ‘s guitar work. I even bought his solo album, “Flesh Caffeine” which had some good moments on it (wonder where he is now). I like that he’s not all about power chords; not that there’s anything wrong with power chords, but John has some great riffs.

And of course, the song that put Danzig on the map, “Mother”

My waistline

/ hsoi / 4 Comments

Mom is visiting.

She arrives at the house. Talking ensues. Hugs. Warm welcomes.

Eventually she goes to put an arm around my waist. Of course I’ve got my Batman utility belt on. Mom’s hand immediately impacts steel objects. I brace myself for the debate that will ensue (remember: this is the first time since obtaining my concealed handgun license that I’ve been around my mother, who’s not a big fan of firearms having been born into and growing up in war-torn and Japanese-occupied Korea). Mom’s hand starts to feel around my waist. Bracing for it….  But where does she end up? Squarely in the front of my waist, on my little pouch of belly fat. All the odd objects on my waist matter not. All I got a lecture about was the little paunch. 😆

Man. All my years growing up and she lectured me to gain weight (tall skinny kid growing up). Now that I’ve gained the weight, now she wants me to take it off. Can my mother ever be satisfied?  😉

(Yes, a discussion on the guns did happen at a later time. She’s still not happy with it… blames my moving to Texas over 15 years ago. Kept discussion calm and rational. She seems to understand but still doesn’t like it.)

Reading this post from Tam reminded me to post this.

Smoked Turkey

/ hsoi / 2 Comments

The past some years I’ve been smoking a turkey for Thanksgiving.

Let’s get the main joke out of the way…. how do you smoke a turkey? really big rolling papers. Or some have said since I live in Austin, I could use a bong or other sort of pipe. Ha ha ha. Joke over. 🙂

It started out of necessity: Continue reading →

Buck shot with buckshot

/ hsoi

New Jovian Thunderbolt ruminates on the buck shot with buckshot. Implications not just for hunters, but for those that opt for shotguns for self and/or home defense.

The article is not long but the final word is simple: 00 buckshot, not birdshot.