From time to time I get a gun in the shop that someone has inherited or been given, and they won’t to know if it is safe to shoot, or if it can be fixed.  In the life of every gun there is a chance that it will have an owner that doesn’t maintain it.  When that happens the damage can be disastrous. You have to ask yourself whether or not the gun is salvageable.  If it is badly rusted, it is going to be tough to get right again...

I had a customer bring in an Ithaca 72 to the shop the other day.  He described a feeding malfunction where the gun would not even pick up a round out of the magazine tube.  This gun is a 22lr that has magazine tube with an inner tube providing the spring pressure for feeding. There were immediately problems with this gun.  No reference book I had even cataloged it.  I was able to find it in the Blue Book, but that wasn’t helpful.  I...

I was test firing the other day, and it reminded me how important magazines are for your semi-automatic weapons.  By the way, a clip is sometimes referred to as a magazine, but only by the uniformed.  Don’t make the same mistake that I did and call it a clip to a professional if you want to be taken seriously.  Anyway, back to the point of test firing. In any semi-auto, the magazine will often be the weak link to most of the malfunctions...

Getting the right scope rings makes all of the difference in the world.  I was talking to a shooter today who had experienced some problems with fatigue while shooting his .308.  It came down to the height of his scope rings.  An instructor pointed out that they were too high for him.  A switch to lower rings and he was good to go. Your scope should feel comfortable to look through when you mount the gun.  If you have to raise your head up or...

I just got off the phone with a friend who shared with me an experience about a customer who brought him a box of parts. He wanted a 1911 built, and decided it would be a better deal for him to buy the parts and supply them to the builder even though the builder told him not to do buy anything without first talking to him. When he got his brand new gun back it wouldn’t run properly. Why? Because he had mistakingly bought one part for a...

If you are considering night sights for you pistol you may have heard of a great sight called the Big Dot from XS Sights. These sights have been around for a while. In fact we first heard of them from the Tactical Shooting Academy. D.R. Middlebrooks has variation of this sight called Pro-Sights. While both of the sights use the letter “i” to sight the gun, Middlebrooks makes his v-notch deeper which may improve the accuracy. What no...