The Extra Shot

I’m always on the hunt for interesting things to shoot.

Killing animals really doesn’t appeal to me much, and punching holes in paper (while fun) lacks a certain panache in addition to forcing you to walk up on the target to see how you shot. Granted, having a nice little cluster of holes to hang on your mom’s fridge is pretty wonderful, but sometimes you want something a little more… reactive. And for the record, my mom has likened me bringing in good targets for her fridge to a cat dragging a recently eviscerated rodent up to the front door and leaving it in your shoes.

Exactly like this.

Enter steel shooting.

The concept has been around for a while. The advantages are that you get instant feedback from good distance on your hits and after the initial expense, your equipment is more-or-less reusable. More recently, steel shooting has taken a prominent place in timed / speed shooting competitions, as those events are less about getting your holes very (very) close together, and more about just getting rounds on target as fast as you can. And if your steel target is about the same size as a (say) Coast Guard qualification target’s 5-ring, then every “ping” means a good hit. Sounds like a plan.

Let’s kick the research.

The first instinct when considering shooting at metal is to say “won’t it ricochet back?” Not so, sir, not so. First of all, bullets are made mostly of soft lead, with enough copper to hold it together in flight. Not very hard. Secondly, it is moving very, very fast. Whenever it impacts a flat object at a right angle, one of the two things will happen: 1) the bullet will stay together and its insane kinetic energy will punch through whatever it hits, or 2) the bullet will fail to penetrate the target and “splash” on impact, sending low-velocity lead fragments at right angles away from its original trajectory.

The key to getting category (2) impacts is to use heavy, hardened steel that will resist penetration and cratering. The internet told me that 3/8″ or 1/2″ AR400-500 or Brinel 500 steel is the way to go. I have no idea what those are; don’t ask. There are places out there who sell good steel targets for this use. Here are some links.

One thing that should be apparrent from these places is that “real” steel targets are expensive, especially if you get ones that fall down and spring back up or move around or do your taxes for you. Anyway. So if buying a legit plate rack was out of my price range, what’s a guy to do? Easy. Make it yourself!

The key to DIY projects with very particular material components is (I’ve found) to go to a supplier who is small enough that they’ll take your call, but big enough that your project would be trivial for them. I found “Bunker Manufacturing” in Sault Ste Marie who use 1/2″ AR400 hardened steel for snow plows on big trucks. They also had a 7-inch wide strip left over from a project that was functionally scrap for them. At my bequest (and a few bucks), they plasma-torched five squares for me, and put a couple holes in them for hanging.

They were not pretty, but pretty wasn’t the goal. The guy I talked to at Bunker offered to have it CNC machined for me, but when I told him that I was just going to be throwing high-velocity lead at it, we had a good laugh and agreed that a simple torching would be sufficient. This ain’t fine art, people. As far as coming up with a way to hang them from… whatever, my original idea was to put a couple of stainless steel snap hooks through the holes, but the half-inch steel made that impractical, as did the >$5 cost per hook. The best thing that Fireman McGarry and I were able to come up with was a solution involving loops of steel cable and little hammer-down clamps. No word yet on how they’ll stand up to gunfire. Also, at the suggestion of a hardware store proprietor, I obtained a few electrical conduit hangers with cross bolts that seem to fit well enough. Cheap, but of questionable durability.

And now, for something to hang them from. From which to hang them. Them hang for which from.

*ahem*

And now that I had the plates, I needed some sort of hanging system. There we go. With the assistance of the aforementioned Alex McGarry, we constructed a frame out of 2×4s and three threaded rods (two pictured) in a ladder configuration. A series of nuts and washers made the whole thing easily collapsable for transport, as well as offering the means to configure my five target plates however I like.

This is the product of going to the range a half-hour before sunset on a very cold day.

Okay, so let’s talk some science. The things that will wreck steel targets are kinetic energy over a small impact area and excessively hard projectile composition.

Last things, first: the rounds. Most bullets will penetrate a half-inch of hardened steel, but only if they can stay together. Fortunately, they can’t (most of the time). Several commenters on forums that I read expressed chagrin at people who would bring M855 steel-core rounds to the range and turn their beautiful (and costly) steel plates into swiss cheese. Full-lead or soft-point (the copper jacket on the projectile doesn’t cover the tip) rounds are ideal.

KE
Kinetic Energy, or how “hard” the round hits the target, is also crucial to consider. Since KE is related to the mass of the bullet, times the square of its velocity (KE=mv^2), if you make the round move twice as fast, it will hit four times as hard. I hope that makes sense for you.
Some Numbers:
9mm Para: hits the target 25 yards away with 583(ish) joules of energy over a surface area of about 64mm^2.
.223 Remington (a small, fast-moving rifle round) hits the target with 936(ish) joules of energy, over a surface area of 24mm^2, but only at 200 yards away from the target. Bring it into 50 yards, and you’re hitting with 1490 joules over a much smaller area than the nine-mil, which is why everyone on the inter-nets seemed to caution against bringing small, fast rifle rounds in close. The generally agreed-upon principles seem to be these: 1) Don’t shoot hot rifle rounds inside of 50 yards, and 2) Don’t shoot within 10 yards, period, as “splash” can still happen.

My Report
It was cold out, so I didn’t shoot much. But what I did shoot gave me some interesting data. First off, I hit it a few times at 25 yards or so with some full-jacketed, 115gr 9mm, out of my venerable H&K USP Compact (now on its second firing pin!). As you can see in the picture below, the worst thing that happened to the plate was that it was stained by the lead splattering everywhere. No damage to the steel.

And then I shot it with the AR. At 50 yards. Nearly 1500 Joules of “ping,” which I believe is deemed “a whole lot” by whoever classifies such things. As you can see below, the effects were slightly more tangable.

Conclusions
As you can see, the .223 hits did crater the plates a bit, but I won’t be shooting that rifle in at that distance very often, and the handgun rounds were only minorly inconvenient to the steel. And in both cases, the shooting was very, very fun. The “BANpGingggg” coupled with the swinging plate makes you think that the bullet actually did some work, above and beyond simply making a hole where before there was none.

In the above picture, you might also note that a round landed nearly in one of the hanging holes. It actually ended up punching the bolt clean through (I never found it) and making the plate swing over like an old-timey sign after the villain storms out and slams the door too hard. The simile worked in my head, I promise. At the end of the day, if the cable-hangs don’t offer anything better in the way of survivability, I swear I’ll just go to zip-ties. Here’s to becoming a better shot!

New post, been a while, etc. etc. etc.

Sort of a crazy day today.

My day began with a phone call at 0345 (that’s still-sleeping o’clock for all ‘ya civillians) which a co-worker across the room answered. I’m a light sleeper, so the phone ringing woke me up and I was able to peripherially understand his end of the conversation. It went something like this:

“hey, not bad, how are you?”
(pause)
“yeah, we have a boat.”
(long sigh)
(to the rest of us in the room): “Bridge jumper.”

Everything jumped into motion.

Seaman Wirick ran up to comms to get the relevant information and start the case, Fireman Bowne, my roommate and fellow guitar/gun nut lept from his rack and took of down the hallway towards the SAR room (and made it halfway there) before realizing that he was still in his boxers.

The rest of us rolled out and grabbed our cold-weather gear from the ready room and began the arduous process of putting on the clothes that would keep us alive if we fell into 32-degree water. Polypropeline underwear, check. Sock liners, check. Wool socks, check. MSD-901 dry suit… hang on, gotta contort… myself… check. Wool beanie under fleece balaclava, check. Ski goggles, check. Boots, check. Big snow gloves, check. An assortment of knives, pens and flashlights, check. That feeling in your gut that is equal parts apprehension and adrenaline dump… check.

Because the weather here has been windy above the average, we’ve been keeping the boat moored at a better protected slip, so after we were all dressed out, we piled into our Dodge Caravan and took off down the road. On arriving, we ran down the pier to our faithful Textron Marine motor lifeboat where the engineers got everything engine-related warming up and the “deckies” pried the frozen lines from bits and cleats. At sometime between “way too early” and “way too late,” we were off.

After a brief stop to the station to pick up a SLDMB, we navigated around the Graham Shoal waters and pulled up to the bridge, some eighty feet below the flashing lights of rescue vehicles on the road above. We flipped a life ring with a flashing light overboard and BM3 Feldman gave me steering directions through a “victor sierra” search pattern, which we used to determine “set and drift,” or the general direction that the wind and water were pushing things. Sector Sault Ste. Marie also wanted to track the currents, so they directed us to drop the SLDMB at the same place that we threw our life ring. Aye aye, and MK3 Gagnon and I drug the long cardboard box out of the survivor’s compartment, looked at each other, and realized that neither of us had any idea how this dang thing worked. Fortunately, I’m a nerd and it came with an instruction booklet. Here’s how the conversation went:
Gagnon: “What are we supposed to do?”
me: “um… it has instructions for dropping from a helo, a c-130, a hu-25 and a few other aircraft.”
Gagnon: “We’re on a boat.”
me: “yes. yes, we are.”
(flips pages)
me: (skimming) “… upon contact with water the tape will dissolve… something, something… Hey, just throw it overboard.”
Gagnon: “Really? Just… overboard?”
me: “… yeah. pretty sure. Just chuck it.”
Gagnon: “uh… aye aye!” (throws tube over)

With our set and our drift in hand and a Dolphin buzzing overhead giving us spotlight envy, we received instructions from the powers that be to begin our search west of the bridge, going up and down the length of the bridge, gradually working our way east: the direction of the drift. By this point, the spray screen in front of the open bridge was completely iced over, as well as the non-skid on the bow of the boat. For the record, when non-skid is iced over, you may as well just call it “skid.” So to begin our search, Fireman Bowne and MK3 Gagnon put on a couple of heavy-weather harnesses (used here as “icy deck harnesses”) and clipped into the very front of the boat, Gagnon on the left, Bowne on the right.

A few notes for the statistics-minded:
Time: oh-cold-thirty
Water Temp: 35f
Air Temp: 15f
Wind Chill: 8f
Waves: 4-6 feet

After roughly 45 minutes of our “creeping line” search, Bowne and Gagnon had been added to the list of boat fixtures that were frozen over, and those of us sitting on the top parts of the boat were either losing our dinner or coming close to it. The search track that we were running went roughly north-south across the straits. The waves in that area predominately travel east-west. Taking waves to the side of your boat (beam-to) makes the boat roll. Rolling boats make boatswain’s mates paint the deck.

Having seen nothing in the water, we continued on.

At one point, our engineer-cicles came below to warm up and BM3 Ryan and I skated our way to the bow, clipped in, and scanned the water as the boat ran the straits, back and forth, back and forth.

Gradually, very gradually, the skies in the East began to lighten up, beginning with the surface of the water changing from an impenetrable black to a deep blue with the pink of an early-morning sunrise lighting off the wave peaks.

It’s 0800 now, and the sun is beginning to claw its way over the horizon, signifying the end of our searching. Sector told us that we would likely be recalled at “first light,” so as our eyes grew tired from the long night of peering into the darkness, our hope rose that we would soon be allowed to return for a few hours of well-deserved sleep. The colors of the morning sky have always made me catch my breath. The one patch of cloud in a field of cold, pale blue that catches on fire in the pre-dawn, a blazing pink portent of the day to come.

And I wondered.

If the individual for whom we were searching had just waited. Just waited four hours and seen what we were seeing, would things have turned out differently? Does a sunrise only matter to people who love life, or can it do the work of convincing those who hate it? It was all academic, anyway; a poet’s attempt at explaining war. But in those dawning moments, I had great pity for that person; that human, made in the likeness of God himself, who loves us enough to give us sunrises and still let us cast ourselves into dark water out of hate or spite or blindness.

We all reacted differently to this unseen, unfound person.

There was anger. Reciprocal hatred for this person who despised life enough to cast it away.

There were shrugs and falling-back on tired phrases: “it’s a permanent solution to a temporary problem,” as though we knew what those temporary problems were.

One guy sat down and wrote far too much.

And many people permitted themselves to feel nothing but chagrin at the inconvenience that had been wrought on their night’s sleep. Selfishness begets selfishness.

And so now, the day after, I still am no closer to solving this great problem: Is life merely cruel and cold? I think not. The one conclusion that I am certain of is that life is necessarily active. It will never simply take care of itself. Just like the wind whipped across our boat, come to steal heat from our hands and feet and exposed skin, we had to put on our dry suits and stamp our feet and rub our hands and go inside the boat to get warm when it all just got too much. And maybe some people just don’t realize that they need warm boats when the wind blows cold.

It would feel suitably poetic to leave things there, no conclusions or imperitives, but I do have one. Friends, when life gets chilly, relieve each other somehow. Nobody can stand on the bow in the freezing spray forever.

I think we all knew it was coming to this.

And frankly, I’m relieved.

mmm.

Hey! All of my old (pre-2009) posts are at kadescoffee.net. I thought they were gone forever!

edit:
maybe they still are. At this point, I don’t care enough to sort through all of the different server aliases and databases.

When Nick and Andy came to town, we attempted to hit all of the coffee-selling establishments and rate their brewed coffee, atmosphere and espresso shots. The results were so disappointing that I won’t bother to post them.

So where can you go to get good coffee around here?

One option: Marquette, MI.

Analog.

Analog is the word that I would use to describe Dead River Coffee.
From the could-be-in-an-antique store scales to the faded rugs and the friendly roaster who still prefers to roast according to flame heights, this place is a definite anachronism. I had two cups of coffee from East Asia while I was there: a Monsooned Malbar and a Sumatra Manhelding, both brewed through an “Aero Press.” They were both incredible.

Is it wrong to want to move to a city just because you found an amazing coffee shop? It is? What if they get their green from one of the better importers out there? What if it’s obvious that they don’t take seriously anything that isn’t coffee or people?

There was a “National Audubon Society Field Guide to Insects and Spiders” sitting on the adjacent table. I imagine it was there because somebody else was reading it. And I think that’s pretty rare. Ella’s infamous butchery of “Mack the Knife” was playing out of an old stereo in the corner.

But the part of this store that I love most of all is this: there’s not really any walls. Espressoland, the People’s Republic of Roaster and Cash Register Heights are all free for you just to wander into, no passport required. I had to leave before I went AWOL just over a cup of bean soup.

I met a couple of college kids, Mia and Matt, who seem to spend their days thinking, which is something of a rarity these days. It was good being around nerds who know that “nerd” isn’t derisive.

So. Here’s the numbers:
Coords: N 46 32.4442′ W 087 23.6354′
Coffee: A solid 9. Small-batch roasted on-site, not afraid to hold a roast back to “cinnamon” if it gets you the best cup.
Espresso: 6. I really wanted to like it, but if you’ve ever chewed on a coffee bean, the gross tannic taste that makes the experience un-delicious was in my doppio.
Atmosphere: Just the shop: 9. Include the town: 11. Seriously, this place felt like Boulder or something. Bikers everywhere, legit multi-use paths (not just paint-designated shoulders), farmers’ markets and cute shops. And a massive lake.

Images:

Oh, and I also got a kayak. Details in the alt-text.

From Camping with Nick & Andy:

From Open Mic night at Brother’s:

Also, Kant, rain, poorly eq’ed PA system and a blog post written on an iPod.

I sit presently at Brother’s Coffee, in Gaylord, MI. Every Tuesday, they have an open mic night: black Takamine guitars, bumper-stickered cases, tight jeans, Converse low-tops and t-shirts advocating bands with an appropriate level of obscurity. You know the scene. Mix that with on-site roasting and a LaMarzocco FB-70 and I deem it worth the hour-long drive. I’m not entirely sure where I’m going with this post; I’m mostly just writing to test the usability of the iPod touch Wordpress app and to gain a small reprieve from “Critique of Pure Reason.”. Heck, I’m not yet halfway through the introduction. I might shift to “Hawke,” an Aunt Pat-recommended thriller.

The guys on stage have put the ‘Tak down and are now
riffing with a didgory-do and a djembe. I’m reasonably confident that I spelled at least one of those right. Anyway, I’m pretty sure Mandy would completely dig this. I wonder if they’ll play any Josh Radin. I doubt it; they’ve been sticking pretty close to Fallout Boy and Three Doors Down and for the love of all that is good, will somebody de-muddy the high-mids?!

Hey, here’s something cool: last Thursday and Friday found my good friends Andy and Nick (of olden-day extrashot fame) up in the northern regions for a visit. We went camping and shooting and trail-riding. It was a killer time; I’ll post some pictures when I get home.

Okay, back to Kant. Keep livin’ the adventure, friends.

While this morning began somewhat drizzlesome, once training concluded and I was allowed to leave, it turned into a legitimate spring day!  Furthermore, yesterday I splurged on a plastic Adirondack chair at Ace Hardware.  Having a beautiful view with no place to sit is dumb.

Here’s some pictures.

As I was sitting outside, our 47′ MLB was on a training run.  She’s a beaut.

I also played around with HDR for a bit, but that one’s not ready yet.

Peace!

-Marc

Today, I had the good fortune to speak with two close friends from Peoria. I also decided to write a letter to a third while on a walk down by the lake. And, as is often the case, the motions of walking and writing and skipping rocks turned me to thinking.

Much of what I say on here (imagine for a moment that I say much on here), and much of what I read on other people’s blogs and internet journals is content that previously could be found in letters to one another.  How is life?  What have you been doing?  What new thoughts have crossed your brain?  So why do I blog now instead of write letters (imagine for a moment that I once wrote letters regularly)?

brb, getting pizza.

Right.  So perhaps the burden of having so many wonderful people now so far away that I want to stay so close to has compelled me to trade the precision of individual letters for the shotgun blog approach.  “But Marc,” you say, “You haven’t been doing either!” to which I reply:

silence!

That’s my internal theory, but I also have to admit seeing this happen on a larger scale.  With the means at our fingertips as never before, we spew information on our lives out into the ether, trusting that someone who values us will pick it up and know us better for it.  So then why didn’t we just contact that person directly?

Maybe we’re scared.

I know I am.  I’m scared of what burdening someone with knowledge of my life will do to our friendship.  If I shout “Help!” into the ‘nethers of the internets, there is no obligation to any recipient to render any help.  But if I send it in a letter, then a reply of some kind is fairly demanded.  And I think it’s sort of sad that we don’t give each other the opportunity to respond and join in with each others’ needs and victories as much as we could.

So I’m going to try to send more letters about the real stuff and blog more about the day-to-day stuff.  Like what it’s like to ride in a boat going really fast or get the radio call when somebody needs help.

Bye for now.

Today, my mission is to reduce my handgun’s frame to its smallest number of parts.

I know I promised some writing, but that’ll have to wait until I get this thing back together. See y’all in 2012.