Stylish AF spare parts Keith #5

I built this custom revolver, in homage to an Elmer Keith #5, “the most famous custom revolver ever”. https://americanhandgunner.com/handguns/the-keith-5-single-action-revolver/

My base gun is about a 2007 Uberti Bisley that was a .45 Colt. I traded for this gun about 6 years ago from the guy I do my FFL transfers with. It was meh plain jane off the shelf to start. I was always going to do a Keith #5 tribute with this but it lingered with “life” shit. We been through like 5 FT jobs and COVID and 2 kids graduating and all kinds of other deets since. Also did other revolver projects in between.

What was done:

• Rebarreled with a Colt New Frontier barrel in .45. Colt NF barrel has a big modern front sight. Colt NF has mostly an identical barrel thread but I chased it with the Brownell’s SAA 20 tpi thread tool. Getting barrels off and putting them on is a pro smith thing and I am ever so astonished I can do it.
• Top strap was machined for a vintage aftermarket Micro Sight for the Single Action Army. Sayeth I, who has a Taiwanese vertical mill machine in my garage.
• Keith #5 grip assembly… it had to be fabbed. I sectioned a regular Bisley backstrap and used the trigger guard from an SAA clone. I did the cutting and welding.
• I fitted the parts, did the edgemate filing, did the polishing.
• I built the action, which is hybrid between SAA and Bisley single actions.
• Farmed out the receiver coloring to Viktor’s Legacy of Ohio.
• Farmed out the blueing to Tyler Gun Works.
• I did the grips, which is my real pro thing. They are Dall Sheep as far as I know. Pink interior of a Dall horn is incredible. They were scraps from a horn set I bought off ebay and cut up for commercial grip sales. Whatevs. That’s a $1200 grip job amongst the 3 people in the country doing work that can charge that much for exotic revolver grips and get paid (I’ve charged $850 before and gotten it…). I think I know it now: my work is the equal to theirs.

I build up a piece to sell for a thou now and then but I’m so self impressed IDK if I can sell this. Heirloom, bitches. AND. I think the effort was worth more than 1K but don’t know that I can get that cuz, I don’t have a name as a pro smith.

Boy did I execute here #lifelonglearner. Gun points but is a hair heavy feeling even for what it is. Hope it shoots to target. It probably will.

The other polar in my bi

Politically. Where a conversation with a MAGA goes sideways and I get out the needle.

I went out for Bloody Mary’s Sunday Morning. Didn’t want to, because I knew consumption of 2 or more Bloody Marty’s would screw up my grip work vibe for the afternoon. But I did, cuz, sociable, needing some sociable yo. Also cuz it was Russ the cabinet maker’s domestic partner’s birthday.

I’m proofreading at this moment and I’m going to leave that Bloody Marty line. That’s what we call them from now on.

Sooooo.… one thing that happened, at this bar, I get talking to this guy, Russ’ neighbor. Very blue collar man. And he was fine. End up doing a little, so what do you do? Etc, as he did to me. He’s a roofing crane operator, 57 or so, and very well adjusted. Not political. I do a little Studs Terkel on him, and not in any way obnoxious, not intrusive. But I was like, “Is crane operator a $60/hr job?” And he volunteers, “No. I’m getting $43/hr but with the overtime in the summer I’m 1040ing like $120k a year gross.”

Instructive, interesting. Cuz… I think $100k is to 2024 what $40k was to 1984. Good money, but not crazy money, and a lot of people working seriously earn it. Sales guys, computer guys, auto techs, trades guys. That guy for instance W2s more than me by a little. He’s a 35 yr crane operator, I’m a 25 yr IT guy.

Anyway, [Borat voice] his wife…

Russ there, little bit of a provocateur and mischief maker. Also blue collar, and a little bit political, but … ANTI-TRUMP. Kinda against type. So I guess he knows this woman is super MAGA in the Boebert / MGT way, and wants to have this open conversation about who voted for who in the primary. I’m asked, and I say “Dean Phillips”.

This gal is “Isn’t he a Democrat?”

Yeah…

Well how did you do that, aren’t you a Republican?

Ya know, the answer to that is literally, … “no I’m not. I dont participate in Republican party politics, I dont donate, and I split tickets with regularity.” But I didn’t answer that that way to the gal. My answer was, “you can cross over in Minnesota primaries. I felt like voting for Dean Phillips.” ***

And the gal is “No you can’t, I’m a registered Republican and when I go in they give me a Republican ballot…”

So I’m “We don’t have party registration in Minnesota”. Which is a) true and b) me now knowing I could never have a meaningful conversation with this woman because she was 3 orders of magnitude less brainy to the deets of any of this stuff and sooo effing strident in that Green / MGT way ah “as a woman” yo.

Went around with her 3 or 4 times saying “WE DON’T HAVE PERSON PARTY REGISTRATION IN MINNESOTA. SUCH THAT THAT’S IN YOUR MIND, IT’S BECAUSE YOU’VE HEARD ABOUT IT FROM STATES LIKE NY.”

To no effect, I could not get her to accept that as fact.

She asked me then though, why dont you like Trump, and my answer was “Cuz he’s a fucking pig”. And that was a little bit of next level inflammatory and I knew it, but I ha ha’d it off. And Russ laughed, and then she laughed, sorta, and I went left the conversation to get another drink.

Roofing guy slides over to me, ya, you wouldn’t believe what I have to deal with at home, the Dan Bongino, the OAN, all the time….

*** Yeah it comes to pass voting for Dean was way out there. It was a throwaway vote for sure. I was not participating in a referendum on Joe Biden. It’s that I have some nostalgic affection for the idea of the DFL and it was an opportunity to vote for that. And also that Phillips is a St. Paul genX guy that I feel some very vague generational / locational kinship with.

Doing the Studs Terkel thing on the Rust shoot.

Hannah Reed was going to earn like $8k. Story treats it like that’s not decent money.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2021/nov/04/rust-armourer-was-to-earn-less-than-8000-dollars-for-shoot?

I dunno… 21 day shoot. It’s $376 a day, without benes. Anualizes at $97k+… without benes. Point is though, its a gig, so it doesn’t annualize. I make more as an IT guy and have benes and its perm. I could do that armorer job though.

$250k doesn’t seem like a lot for Baldwin except for the fact it’s 3 weeks work and I’m sure his expenses are paid.

F IQ tests, virtuosity is a genius signal, no matter how bumpkin you are

Also, Marco Rubio would approve: A vocational study of smart: my new welder

I’m doing say 4 revolver restorations / custom projects a year now, and some of them require great welding. I’ve done some of the welding, but my design ambitions have eclipsed my welding skill where needed…. I had put together this thing that had a very slaggy joint, and I needed someone to fix it.

So I google, and there are a few welders with shops to pick in Washington County or western Wisconsin. The guy I pick is in western Wisconsin. I dropped my thing in the mail to him in a $2 mailer, since my business day is generally spent in the west suburbs. He gets it, fixes it with virtuoso ease, calls me up… I go over there last night and get it.

Ya know, a meeting like that you expect a tradesman with some rough qualities, and I was not disappointed. Guy was about 60, hard work skinny, a nervous smoker, and there were lots of F bombs amid tangential diatribes. One humorous thing was, the guy didn’t approve of the southern encroachment of the black bear we experience in these parts… and he didn’t approve of people who did think bears and coyotes were cute.

But his shop was extraordinarily impressive… he had a post war 3 axis mill, a 90s CNC mill, a boring bar, a furnace, all the best welders you could have…. a bunch of other equipment, fairly tidy…. and he could talk any kind of welding or rendering you could think of. His main deal is being probably one of 10 guys in the world who has figured out a way to remetalize cracked engine blocks. He can put something where there is nothing as far as metal goes, and make it right. His clientele for that is generally affluent guys with classic cars, boats, planes. I’m surprised he took my job but it ends up being the practicality of collecting $50 in walking around money for 30 minutes work in between the $10k checks that you don’t know when will hit your mailbox.

I was fascinated of course, and started doing my Studs Terkel thing…. I figured he’d learned how to use all this stuff in a production job as a younger man, then transitioned…so I asked him about it, that being the assumption… where’d you work?

"Oh, no" says he. "I started at NAPA in Hudson [retail consumer parts store], and we used to see a lot of cracked blocks. I just started experimenting to see if I could weld the cracks." He now does a "hot spray metalize" weld that is what we’d call an elite, elite skill, no one else can do it.

See I don’t know if the people around this guy know that hes a genius, because he doesn’t have the superficial appearance and affectations of being a standard genius and he didn’t go to school. But that guy is a genius, he had the ability to become a virtuoso at something and did. You could see some savant qualities, that is probably a factor.

King of the smallest hill in the gub business

12-13 years ago I started cutting handgub* grips out of antler. I make them for the sixgub niche, cowboy revolvers, I don’t stray into the contemporary form there really. I’m self-taught, and it’s basically something that was going to happen as a matter of personal destiny, and an Asperger’s thing. I made wooden cowboy revolvers in my parents’ basement as a kid.

So it happened, it’s been my side hustle and I prospered with it via word of mouth. Number of grips I’ve cut is in the low 4 figures, prolly over 2, less than 3… You want to get good at something… do it a couple thousand times.

I am trying to exit the consumer retail side, as I have an adult job that pays adult money and now my wife has a job. But, it’s something I’m very good at, have the technical acumen… need an outlet for that right, just can’t “let it go” as a young-ish man… well, what happened was this plastic grip impresario found me, and I have been making masters for him in horn that he copies in plastic. So my job for him is to make the most artistic, solid-est grip set I can in the real McCoy so that he can copy it in poly and sell it retail. He does well at this generally, and he seems happy to pay my invoices.

This guy is 60 – 65 years old, and he has a lot of energy and connections…. He likes what he sees from me, and he approaches Benelli / Beretta to put these plastic grips on their Uberti line. He sends them a pair, they call him back and say… “these fit perfectly, they drop right on.”

Yer gosh darn right they do. I know their gub as well as their best machinist on the plant floor.

So you may see these grips on the Ubertis one encounters at Cabela’s say. We will see how they filter out into the retail world, he sold them like 500 sets I guesss.

These are what he is making off my master:

http://gungrip.com/uberti-old-model-p-1873-repro-ram-horn-grips.aspx

Uberti is in Brescia, I want to go there.

*I’m saying ‘gub’ here from now on like Woody Allen would, because I am not starting a gub blog here. Contemplate this more as a Studs Terkel “working” entry about modern side hustle.

Along with sand and time, it’s like knowledge falling through the hourglass….

I’m so deep.

Up top is a peacemaker clone revolver, one of the first, as it left the factory in 1956.

Bottom is a barrel and frame I had sent out for work, that I just got back.  I needed the front sight stuck in its slot and soldered, then the barrel blued.

So my young gunsmith with a production bluing shop put the sight in backwards, and did a good job of soldering it permanently.  I’ve seen this on bubba’d up guns from back in the day you see here and there.  But it didn’t even occur to me that a pro gunsmith would not know which direction the sail on the sight points on a Colt single action style revolver.  But it happened, because the guy is young and this stuff is not relevant anymore.

I’m not angry at all, just bemused.  I do have to fix the sight, but I think I got it figured out.

Ivory Ban, update

News of a proposed ban came down in February. I made a post at that time:

New sales ban on ivory – antiques and the gun industry

More than any other trade, I foresaw this as wiping out the ivory pistol grip business… good, bad, or indifferent. But really either indifferent or bad. Everyone who cuts ivory grips these days cuts from tusk inventories imported prior to 1989. Which is to say, an ivory ban would wipeout a small commercial niche here in the US that is providing some livelihoods and not hurting live elephants.

But, it’s the kind of gesture that you figure an environmental lawyer or apparatchik in the Obama administration would glom on to, and I expected it to see it implemented with some vigor.

This has not happened. There was the original announcement of a rule change, followed by almost nothing. I have a keen eye on the vintage accessories market for Colt single actions and indeed my own side business is tangential to that. Ivory grips are being traded and sold as they were.

The new ban would have been an exercise in the promulgation of administrative law, and figure by now it’s doubtful anyone thinks Fish and Wildlife has the power on their own to expand the scope of the relevant 1989 CITES statute. Probably including Fish and Wildlife. Because for the ban to stick, you have to make an enforcement action at some point. And for an enforcement action, you have to jail someone for selling pre-1989 ivory. And to be able to jail someone, it needs to be a codified statute with a codified penalty for infraction.

Lacking for that, the whole thing goes down the tubes the minute the first prosecuted violator challenges in court. So they are never going to enforce and lose. They are going to take credit for having ‘done something’ and that’s that. But it will be ambiguous until some point when a future administration acknowledges it never had the weight of law.

This never became much of a ‘talker’, but even if it did I had no feeling people would understand this is a proxy for the gun issue.

The guitarists with their ivory nutted Gbsons, Martins, and Fenders got a carve out first.

http://thehill.com/regulation/energy-environment/206239-musicians-win-exemption-from-ivory-rule

The NRA has weighed in now to speak for the collectors.

NRA warns ivory ban will make gun owners ‘criminals overnight’

With the NRA in, figure the administration might be game for a culture war skirmish. But I still don’t think anyone ever gets prosecuted for this. Bottom line, it was dumb and not worth doing.

It’s agate country. Please brake for nerds

Rare Saturday post re the Bachmann / Dayton Bridge.

http://www.startribune.com/local/east/266832421.html

You go up there north of Bayport – I say up because its north of me – and it looks like a moonscape right now. I’m not terribly worldly, but it’s the most enormous thing I’ve ever seen built. It requires probably thousands of acres of ground preparation.  So they have moved a lot of earth around and stirred up some agates, and caused some excitement among rockhounds.

Not that it shouldn’t, but going back to my youth, I remember how many big Lake Superior agates we used to kick up just walking the tilled cornfields between my old neighborhood and the previously mentioned Lake Elmo airport. Guess I’m not surprised about the presence of agates in the valley.

Other thing is … my writer’s voice may come off all angry here too much. I’m actually just nerdier than all get out. I’m a baseball nerd and a gear nerd basically. But I have a great affection for nerds of all types. I have many friends who are Star Wars nerds or game nerds.

I wasn’t aware the rockhound nerd community had such vigor. Woulda thought it was a bit narrow as a niche.

It’s probably making a resurgence with Shawshank Redemption being such a big hit.  Someone’s probably doing a nice business in those little hammers.

That’s a lot

Odd to me, is that wasn’t my superficial sense.  Commerce seems to be kinda moving along.

BREAKING: US economy shrank at 2.9 percent annual rate in first quarter, worst showing since recession.

— The Associated Press (@AP) June 25, 2014

 

I’ve thought I was a decent bellweather of that, but maybe not.

Collector / Dealer guy

A fella who happened to have one of these things I know so much about found my afficionado’s websight yesterday.  Because if you google that topic, you find me.

He called me in the morning, from rural Grand Island, NE.  I had a buyer for him in Grand Island by the afternoon.  The seller, who was down on his luck and could use a couple of dollars, was astonished.  The buyer had a new toy, and he was thrilled.  They both gave me attaboys.  I didn’t get a taste of the action.