Oh, how my heart sank when I asked the man for .30 Carbine ammunition and he said, "All's we have is Tulammo." But you know, it worked fine. The carbine was like, "Steel case? Whatevs. Want fries with that?"

(Mind you, I haven't cleaned it yet. That will be tomorrow, when I'm better-rested. After the state a box of Tulammo left my AK in, I'm expecting to have some work to do when I get in there. But it functioned without a problem.)

And I'll tell you what: it shot all over the shop, I assume partly because I'm old and crap but mostly because it's basically a smoothbore, and even with that taken into account, I love this rifle. To the tune of the old Sesame Street song, M1 carbine, you're the one. You make range time lots of fun. I think it might be time to take J&G up on that bulk offer for S&B .30 Carbine ammo I mentioned in the other post.

The guy in the lane next to me was shooting .308 from a brand new rifle he'd just bought. I didn't get a good look at his rifle because one doesn't like to be too nosy (it feels too much like checking the other dude's equipment out at the urinals), but I think it might've been a semiauto FAL or FAL-alike. It was LOUD, anyway, and ejected its empties with such determination that a few of them bounced off the ceiling and down into my space. Which is how I can say for sure that he was shooting .308. I found one of his cases in my shirt pocket afterward. :)

Anyway, he seemed really excited about his new rifle when he left, so good on him. You hate to see people leave disappointed.

One unexpected malfunction occurred; though it didn't involve the carbine itself, it was substantial enough to bring operations in the entire range to a halt for a few minutes, which was a bit embarrassing. I was plugging along with the M2 magazine that originally came with the rifle when I ran out of ammunition.

Huh, I thought, that didn't feel like 30 rounds, and thinking I might've had a failure to feed, I opened the bolt. Nope, nothing in there. Empty. So I locked it open, took the magazine out, and thought, This feels oddly light. Looked down and noticed a flat piece of metal lying on the little table at my firing position. Looked more closely and realized it was the floor plate of the magazine. It had come off, dumping the magazine spring, the follower, and seven live rounds of ammunition on the floor.

That was annoying, but the embarrassing part was that the spring had bounded off into the little sea of spent brass in front of the firing line. Range safety rules say (and quite rightly so) that you can't go after anything you've lost out there yourself, which meant the range master had to call a general cease-fire, have everyone unload and stand back against the wall, open up the lane, pick his way across the brass and retrieve the pieces of my magazine for me. Luckily the place wasn't terribly busy—it was just me, the guy with the .308 rifle, and his girlfriend—but still. Awkward.

(This, by the way, is why I'm reluctant to take my Garand there. Not only would it be a hassle getting the clips back, I couldn't be entirely sure where they'd get off to in the first place. Wouldn't want one falling on some other patron's head. It's also no good if you have rare brass you'd like to get back after shooting what's in it, which is why I don't take my Steyr-Hahn. I mean, in practical terms it probably doesn't matter, I don't handload any more or even really have a place where I could set up the equipment, but I might some day, and 9mm Steyr is rare enough that I'd hate to just throw the brass away like that.)

The weird thing is that the magazine that came apart is the GI one that came with the gun, not the Korean repro 15-rounder I bought online to go with it. Or maybe it's not all that weird, given that the GI one is presumably a lot older. Either way, the Korean one worked just fine. Might have to get a few more of those.

I haven't tried to put the M2 mag back together yet, but I recovered all the parts, so maybe I'll give it a shot during tomorrow's clean-and-oil session.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
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