Griz

If NYS in your location is New York State, then the answer is, yep, it could be a legal problem with the wrong DA.

Was this the model which would flicker and/or go out during recoil because of a weak battery spring? There was a rash of problems experienced by the Bedford crew that made some switch away from Burris? (If I Remember Correctly)

How well does the brass group? I once had similar issues and my brass and bullet would both have fliers at the same time. It turned out that the magazine was too low in the gun, which cause some rounds to hang up momentarily, which robbed the slide of momentum, which because of the tight fit caused inconsistent lockup. A raised mag catch solved the flyers as well as the rare (1 in 192 rounds ) jam

Warren, I have the deepest respect for you and understand your frustration.... I have nothing but contempt for NRA Action Pistol HQ, but in my opinion, this thread really is inappropriate for BrianEnos.com Tom should take his bitterness to facebook or somewhere else with low or no standards. I stopped going to the Bianchi Cup partly because of the frustration with many of the accusation Tom has leveled against the NRA. The only catch is, my frustration and disillusionment happened when Tom was in charge and he is guilty of pretty much everything he is bitching about. I've even seen Damian shoot an AP match (it was not pretty) which is more than I can say for Tom!

Carmoney is 100% correct. I am shocked that such a petty, vindictive thread is acceptable here.

I do. I am very good at working around the limitations of my small machine. I just wanted to point out the downsides of a small machine because every time I do anything beyond simply clamping the work piece in a vice I wish I had a bigger table. Speaking of vices, I usually use a 3" Kurt clone that is fast and convenient and has minimal jaw lift... I often have to switch to a screwless vice which is lower profile but less convenient. Did I mention that I wish I had a bigger mill?

The travel is limiting, but that's only part of the problem with a small machine. For a hobby machine where you don't want to make a custom fixture for every little task, the small table can be incredibly frustrating. I often have a project that easily fits in the work envelope of my X2, but I have to spend a lot of time and effort figuring out a work holding solution that will fit on the small table. Tool holding can be a problem as well. Many times I have to drill using collets because I don't have room for a drill chuck.

To be honest, you can get an old used haas vf2 or vf3 for 12k, or an old okuma mx-45 for 15k which are not home owner type machines. You can probably even find one with a 4th axis on it The thing that turns me off when I look at old (or even new) industrial machines are the connectivity and technology limitations. Some are just because they are old and some are intentional handicaps so that they can sell high priced options... A home machine running Mach3 or LinuxCNC in some ways is light years ahead of a used industrial machine. The industrial iron with a hobbyist controller would probably be the best of both worlds and could probably be done but would be expensive and would probably compromise the actual chip making capabilities of the industrial machine just to gain a little convenience.

My main gripe about the Bianchi Cup is that it is only loosely related to NRA Action Pistol. It really has it's own set of rules, some unwritten and some that appear in the dark of the night on a bulletin board kind of like the side of the barn in animal farm. The rules also sometimes change or are enforced differently based on who you are. Instead of having a qualifier match at the Cup before the cool kids shoot the real match maybe use state & regional matches as the qualifiers... crazy, right?

Sloped on the trailing edge like Warren suggested? I posted those microscopic photos to try to document for the forum what that bump looks like and how subtle it is... It is hard to see with the naked eye on my example. As I understand it, the peening at the end of the ball cut (what I called "rebound" peening) is the cause of the chamber skipping and the nasty looking peening on the "impact" side of the notch seems to be the effect of the stop jumping the rebound peening and hitting the impact surface very high.

The only people who have worked on it are me and S&W. I didn't do anything to the stop or spring... But I'm going to replace both. Chamfering the trailing edge of the stop makes a lot of sense to me. I think everyone is telling me to fix the stop and deal with the cylinder peening first and then see where it is timing-wise before I replace the hand.

More pics

My brother asked me to work on his 686 SSR that he uses for IDPA. He told me that it often fails to fire when he's trying to shoot fast. I assume that he is a victim of a gremlin named Skip Chambers, but I can't make it happen in dry fire. There is some obvious cylinder notch peening. I remember a thread here where someone asked for photos of the "rebound peening" but I never saw any photos posted so I used a microscope to take some closeups to share here. Does this look bad enough to cause skipping? It was very hard to capture in a photo. The rebound peening looks much taller using my eyeballs looking through the stereo-microscope as opposed to taking a 2D photo. Two chambers are timed very late. So late that when I pull the trigger, I feel a "clunk" an instant after the hammer falls. I assume that is the cylinder stop locking after the hammer fall. I can also drag a finger on the cylinder and all chambers fail to lock before the hammer falls (but that happens on some of my revolvers that have never given any trouble so I don't put much weight on that test.) Any advice on how to proceed? My preliminary plan of action is: 1) Fit a new cylinder stop (the old one is beat up pretty badly) 2) Fit a new hand to address the late timing 3) Erase the "rebound" peening with a cratex bit on a demel. Should I also remove the primary peening, or should I try to peen it back into place, or just leave it as is? It seems risky to remove that metal as I'm sure it will get peened again and eventually there won't be enough metal left to hold the cylinder in the right position if I keep removing metal.

I installed the air shock when I first got the X2. It goes inside the column. I removed it when I converted to CNC since it caused my Z axis to lose steps unless I slowed my rapids way down.

Still on V5, but he's done some of work on waterline and pencil cleanup that is turning out great 2.5d results for me now.

I spent about 15 minutes in OnShape refining my silencer endcap and endcap tool... I am really digging OnShape... I was also pleasantly surprised when I updated MeshCAM to find that it does a much better job at 2.5d designs than it did when I first bought it... I think my G-code hand-coding days are over unless I need to optimize something for a big run of parts.

Here's my version of the X2 stiffener plate. I bolted the mill to a steel plate and then have a pice of angle on the back of the mill that I can jack, pull and twist to tram the column dead nuts on. Before this mod, the column used to "nod" forward with no way to adjust it. It also adds a lot of rigidity.

Anyone else who doesn't have access to pro tools try out OnShape yet? It's a "cloud" CAD tool by the guys who did Solidworks. It's basically free unless you need fancy collaboration features. You get 5 "active" files at any one time, but you can have as many "inactive" files as you want. Changing a file from active to inactive takes one click. I struggle with FreeCAD, but picked this up right away and turned out 2 simple parts pretty effortlessly. My only gripe was that both copy in sketches and variables are not released yet, so I had to manually repeat features and will have to edit each one if I want to tweak a parameter. No CAM included, but I have MeshCAM. It which isn't ideal for this kind of stuff, but it was cheap and gives acceptable results with basically zero effort.

Thanks for the advice! Those cutters just showed up from China and I did a quick test run using your feed and speed recommendation. It worked great on some scrap test pieces. I even did a test on a scrap of the tube for my silencer and that worked out nicely too. I did 0.070 tall characters 0.010 deep which looks fine. I used the free version of Stickfont which required no editing, I just opened the output file in Mach 3 and hit Start

I had looked at with G-wizard a while back and it seemed to only do "closed loop" fonts that I think would not work very well for my purposes. I never played with it though. I had expected someone to recommend Stickfont for this as it looks promising for simple Form 1 markings and best of all, it's free I had always thought that Vectric's tools were aimed at CNC routers for woodworkers.. But it looks like VCarve would work great for a lot of stuff that I hand code as well as engraving. I just ordered some of those engraving bits from ebay that look like the 2L Inc half round bits. Thanks for the guidance. That's crazy talk! The first steel that I ever cut was a 2011 slide Surely the first engraving I do should be on a stainless steel tube.

What is everyone using for engraving software and tooling? I have a couple of form 1s, a SBR and a Silencer, that will each need my name and town engraved to ATF specs. I'm planning to go deeper and bigger than that so that it's more forgiving of my setup and accuracy. Maybe 0.250" tall font 0.010" deep or maybe more on the silencer. The SBR is hard anodized aluminum and I'm planning on the Silencer using a 1.5"x.065 tube of 304L. I had an earlier SBR engraved by a local trophy shop that absolutely butchered it. Turns out they drag engraved it and when they said hard anodized Al was no problem they had never actually tried it before.. So this time I'm going to either do it myself with a live tool or send it out to someone who knows what they're doing. I have been hand coding all of my G-code except for a little tinkering with FreeCAD and MeshCAM. I'm pretty sure MechCAM would be an epic fail at engraving so I'm hoping to find a simple piece of software that will just convert text to G-code in any reasonable font. I don't want a new project so am hoping to do this without a secondary engraving spindle. My mini-mill can do about 4k rpms. Any suggestions on a bit and if this has any hope of success with a slow enough feed rate?

I use this pendant with my X2 run by Mach3: http://www.vistacnc.com/b08_pendant_P2/pendant_p2-S.htm It's like a manual mill with a remote control To the guys looking at benchtop mills, if I had it to do over, I would skip the DRO and convert it to CNC from day 1. If you spend money on a DRO, you'll have to rip all that out when you convert to CNC.

You could no doubt build such a system using microphones at each shooter like on a trap field but I think you'd be constantly tweaking sensativity. ... I assume you know that the plates at Bianchi lock so that late shots cant knock down a plate.

Just be carefull... a "forward grip" on a handgun makes it an AOW which requires a NFA tax stamp. I don't think anyone has had an issue with bianchi guns but if an atf agent thinks it crosses the line it's possibly worth 10 years and $250,000

I have a hard enough time hitting the "X" ring with a gun, I don't need to be jamming up my case/bullet feeder because I missed with a handful of bullets! I think I'll stick with separate hoppers.