Trego's Mountain Ear

My thoughts drift back 45 years – I had a brand new Thompson Center Contender and an old grade school classmate.  Koocanusa was new, and Bob Herron was getting a maximum of fun on a still evening, shooting my new pistol and listening to the birdshot’s miniature splashes as they fell into the water.  I was raised to be frugal with ammunition – but Bob’s joy at the recoil of the 45/410 still makes those two boxes of 3 inch magnums one of the cheaper joys I have experienced.

Bob loved recoil.  I remember his Hawes 44 magnum – so out of time that it spit lead as the bullet entered the barrel, sometimes to the left and other times to the right.  I remember explaining that a new bolt would solve that problem – but we had different perspectives.  Even then I was oriented to the firing line, while Bob enjoyed recoil.  He wasn’t alone – I recall a cop on the highline whose model 29 was badly out of time – but he had Clint Eastwood’s autograph on the butt, and was afraid he would ruin the autograph if he fixed the gun. 

The bolt on a revolver is a term that goes back to Sam Colt.  It’s a spring-loaded part that pushes up into a milled hole in the cylinder to hold the cylinder in alignment with the barrel as the revolver fires.  Later, the term bolt gained a different meaning – but in revolvers the part still has the name Sam Colt gave it.  Bob’s Hawes, with a lifetime of heavily loaded 44 magnums, had simply shot loose.  My own revolver (marked J.P. Sauer & Sohn instead of the importer Hawes), in 357 magnum (backed with a 9mm cylinder) has had a lifetime of much lighter loads, and 50 years later is still perfectly in time.   Fixed sights, hits about an inch low.  Different purposes, different stresses.

Some people like to use ammunition quickly – for them, the inaccuracy of a bump stock is not the problem it is for me.  I’m stuck with the desire to put one bullet as close to the X as I can.  As I age, that distance seems to be growing with each birthday.   Still, bump stocks have provided for folks who didn’t want to pay the transfer tax for NFA items.  The fact that I don’t want either doesn’t make me more virtuous – my perspective is just different.  I want bullet holes as close to the X as I can get them.