With some wood from Home Depot and some deck scrap and some funky stuff from Jonathan's donation, I built 3 smaller wood holders. I'm always over-building everything, so we'll see if this reduced set holds up. There was 1 prototype and then I mass built the pieces for the other two and slapped them together with some modifications. Probably should go back and fix the prototype.... naaa... that's more work for little gain.

Going to give it a try carrying the G26 with a light on it. Without a rail there is exactly 1 choice for a light, a little 100 lumen streamlight TLR-6. They did a nice job of matching up the texture and making sure it fits on there very snugly.

So... Eds had the Ruger Ranch in 556 in stock (for about 5 minutes) and I managed to snag one. I said I liked the rifle wasn't so sure about 300BLK since subsonic is not that accurate (out of anything) and supersonic 300BLK is just kinda strange and expensive. This way I can hand load good 77gr rounds for accuracy, and use steel case blasting stuff for screwing around.

Jason and dad followed me to Eds just to see what I was doing, and Jason took a photo of me standing there explaining something in the parking lot.

I made waffles for breakfast, and then repaired the trim Lugnut chewed off the barn. I'm so handy.

The edge of my poop rake was wearing down, it went from squared off to an angled surface which makes it harder to flip the poop into the catch pan. So.... some quick additions of a piece of metal strapping and now I have a metal edge.

It doesn't need a muzzle brake for 'recoil' reasons, but I wanted to put a brake on there to protect the muzzle crown. I didn't have the right indexing washers to put any of the directional brakes on that I had, so I took the one off the PLR16 that doesn't need to be indexed, there is no real 'up' to this one.

Side effect, with just the thread protector on it the PLR16 fits in the case a lot nicer now, it's 3/4" shorter and no longer hangs up on the side.

New rear sight showed up for the sub2k. It's now metal (not a big deal) but also doesn't auto-deploy. Now you would think that's not a feature, but allowing the rifle to be fired with the sight down makes sense when you have an optic on there...

I kept finding that I wanted 3 desktops up at once, one for the systems, one to hold my spreadsheets/notes/etc and one for all the chat session things. I've got virtuals everywhere but sometimes I'm trying to chat, read and do something on a remote system all at the same time and all that flipping around was annoying. So... pull out one of the extra monitors and use the USB3 video adapter I used to have on the Mac and you get this nonsense:

Went to the range today for a few hours, just to get out there by myself and concentrate on shooting the new rifle. Nice to not have unnecessary spotters, or have to worry about people getting too close to me, etc. Odd side effect of shooting a lot of that Red Army Standard cheapie ammo with the purple sealant:

I've started logging groups on a spreadsheet so I can see how accurate or not this rifle is. So far, it's more accurate than either of the ARs I've tested out. Oddly I don't have any group size info on the Larue upper and that fixed rifle stock + good trigger lower. I have a spot for it on the spreadsheet with all of the handloads I've been firing through the Ruger listed out for it, so clearly I was going to try it at some point. Oh well, it's probably accurate... but just odd that I didn't actually try and document it. Must have been distracted.

With all the ammo types, it's a 2 MOA gun. The stock is really cheapie as I mentioned before so it rewards good technique and really penalizes poor technique.

Wasn't happy with the cross bars on the new wood holders. Yes, they kept things from flexing but they prevented you from stacking the wood too high. You can't stack on top of the supports, they're too weak (maybe a future design will user stronger cross supports and make a 2nd level) so I just did a little re-factoring and made the cross bar move to the back a bit. It seems to work so far.

No real photos, but today I went and picked up 18 quail from Maxwell and one of the coops. This is the last batch of quail, the rest are gone. 2 escaped while I was processing,but the rest are in the freezer.

Why is my head so far forward like that? I look strange.

Rebuilt the other 2 wood holders with the new support structure, and moved some wood around today. Didn't go to the range, still pissed about what happened last time so I'm sorta just ignoring everyone for a while.

Got tired of having to try 3 times to unlock my phone only to have to type in the passcode so I can pull up the calculator app, so I went into my gaming bag and retrieved the old warhorse. So much freakin' faster to get at just sitting there on my desk.

The people renting the house behind us came over to meet the goats and do the barnyard tour. Apparently the goats are very famous over in the neighborhood and Stacey+Mike have 'the hook up' since they both know us and are the only people over there with no backyard fence so they can walk through their yard to get to our property.

Trying to be more 'precision' with the Ruger, and it's just not possible to get a proper grip on the traditional stock they insist on using on everything that's not a tacticool rifle. Rather than dumping $300 on a Boyd's stock (which will be way too heavy) I got creative with some tape, carpet padding and 223 cases and made my own to try it out. It's ugly as all get out, but it fits my hand perfectly and puts my hand/finger in the correct alignment for good trigger control.

It's paying off. Ammo tweaking and technique improvements have taken it from a 2 MOA gun down to this. If I can get those fliers under control, it's got to be a half MOA gun. That's pretty awesome considering it's literally "off the rack" with no machine work done at all.

Other 'improvements' have been removing that cheap brake I put on there, and trying various stock screw torque settings. The spec is 60-80, and of 40, 60 and 75, the latter is providing the best accuracy without as bad of vertical stringing. That stringing is a known result of incorrect stock torque (at least when you have something with bedding blocks, without you're just sorta guessing).

Looking through the phone pictures to see if there is anything else interesting from the last 10 days. Mostly no, however, I did open up the new Dyson and use it. Huge difference! The old one really was worn out.

Another attempt at making the stock better. I cut up that ergo AR grip I hated and used it as a guide to make a 2nd bubba grip. It works pretty well actually. There is some low temp (140F) polymer modeling stuff that you can melt and make things out of, and then if it's wrong you just heat it up again and mold again. I've got it on order, it should make the grip more interesting as I'll be able to fill in the gaps and maybe make a whole grip out of the stuff. We'll see.

I tried accurizing some factory ammo, pulling the bullets and trimming the brass and equalizing the powder charges. Head-to-head with the untouched OEM stuff.... my ammo was about 2x the group size or more. Horrible really. Somehow I got 3 round groups at 0.5" and 0.3" with the OEM stuff, and it's just random 55gr Fiocchi crap. Although maybe I shouldn't say that anymore!

Crock potted some quail, that worked out well.

Took the bones and liquid, tossed in some onion and carrots and a few herbs and made my own stock.

Then, we used the stock and meat to make risotto.

The woman's mom got her a record player for giftmas, and now she can play all that vintage vinyl. It also acts as a bluetooth speaker, and you can rip from vinyl to MP3. Now that's technology.

Grandma's old phone stand makes a viable record player holder too.

Used the new loaf shaping baking pan thing today to make some French bread. It was pretty edible, in spite of the 'bloobage' problem on the end. I cut the recipe by 50% thinking it would just make one loaf and it does, but it's still a big loaf. The pan has two sides, the woman said I should make a half recipe and then use that to make two small loves. Makes sense, now after the first test.

After what, a month, the holster finally arrives? It's huge, so much extra material plus all the extra kydex to hold the light. I've been spoiled using that hard plastic minimalist holster on the G19.5, gotten away with easily carrying a larger gun that usual. Once I let this get shaped to my body a bit I'll figure out all of what excess can be trimmed. There is a lot...

But Glocks never jam!

Knocking out a ton of shitty chores the last few days, actually feels pretty good. I've rotated the generator gas, and put fresh, non-ethanol fuel in the bike (with stabilizer), and dumped out that 6+ year old (I think) diesel in the garage and reused that can with fresh gas.

I've also rotated the van tires, finally. Borrowed two floor jacks from Sean and knocked it out pretty quick. Once I reset the tire pressures, the stupid TPMS light went out. Not sure why it wasn't happy before, the pressures were correct. Maybe it was telling me to rotate? Na, it can't be that smart.

Also got the chimney cleaned. No photos there, but the anti bird screen on the cap was totally plugged, so that's probably why it's not drafting correctly. Unlike last time, this time when I ran the cleaner down the pipe I actually got a bunch of junk out, piled in the fireplace. So at least _something_ noticeable happened.

Modified that Foxx holster after carrying it around a bit to let it adapt to my body shape. Damn thing is still huge, that light adds so much bulk to the gun. It's nice it's there, but I can't see this working in the summer.

While I was switching back to the G26, I removed that forward style slide release and put the OEM unit back. I've changed my grip over time and no longer hit that release on accident so having it forward isn't necessary now. Also, this one keeps hanging up on the new holster which is annoying, and since the one I had on the G34 actually broke, I know they're not as high of quality as the OEM unit.

We've been watching YouTube and practicing disk golf in the yard. Some day we'll be 'good' enough to actually go to the course down the street and try to throw without all the trees in the way. Some day.