Weekend Fun

Quite the busy weekend, tempered with the tragedy in Connecticut that I will blog about later.

On the upside guess who came to town?

Murphy and ML came in on a short-notice visit.

We had a nice dinner Saturday night with Murphy's Law, his mom, and all the gang. Even with a cast on, she put on a fantastic dinner.

Murphy became quite attached to Leah, laying down right beside her during dinner. Whether this was from her playing with him just before dinner, or his figuring that the smallest one at the table would drop the most turkey to him, I'm not sure.

After dessert, ML, Abby, Corbin and I went out after dessert to play laser tag at Zap Zone. Abby is getting seriously into laser tag and getting pretty good at it too. Her short size keeps her below most people's line of sight until she lases them. She had a blast and did pretty well indeed.

On Sunday morning, ML, Corbin and I went to the range. We were distracted on the way by ML spotting a Unimog for sale that he needed to check out and a further delay was then caused but I'll let him explain it.

It's accurate to say that once we finally got to the range, Corbin had a blast.

Yes, that's ML's .41 magnum, a really nice shooting pistol. Having had the opportunity to shoot it, I can see what the fuss is all about - less recoil than a .44, great accuracy and a great trigger in double or single action.

As for my 45 reloads fresh off the Dillon they worked great.

No problems feeding, every round went where it was sent and they had plenty of oomph to drop plates and poppers with aplomb. Nice and accurate loads and it turns out that Accurate No.5 is a very nice powder for 45 ACP.

Corbin liked my 1911 and these loads quite a lot.

We shot a few more pistols and then headed to the rifle range.

As for my new 300 Blackout AR, the results were somewhat mixed.

First, the Aimpoint needed a lot of adjustment to get zeroed.

It started off low and left by about 4 feet in each axis at 75 yards, so I had to bring the target in closer and start adjusting. After some judicious cranking, its now perfectly zeroed for 100 yards and I can easily hit steel plates on the 100 yard line with no problems.

The Core 15 Upper was quite superb with no feeding issues and very tight accuracy - groups were amazingly tight (though very low and left until the Aimpoint was zeroed, but the groups were pretty impressive even so.

The 300 Blackout cartridge was great - very low recoil impulse, soft shooting and accurate.

On the downside, one of the pins in the receiver decided to go for a walk, rendering it rather unusable as it moved out of its hole. I've bought some anti-walk pins and will install them to correct the issue.

ML also brought along his Ruger Mini 14 and his Bushmaster AR with the AK-style muzzle break from hell. The concussion from that thing is deafening even as it reduces felt recoil from the 5.56 to .22LR levels.

Here's ML with the far more pleasant Mini-14 in action.

We then shot my S&W M&P15-22, which ML and Corbin both loved and I'm liking it a lot too. I fired the full 25 round magazine and repeatedly hit the 100 yard steel so easily it was almost boring how repetitive the "ting" sound came back after every shot.

So it was a great time at the range.

But the day wasn't done yet.

Abby and Leah had been invited to a birthday party for a friend that was being held at the Campus Martius Ice Skating Rink in downtown Detroit of all places.

Of course, luck would have it that the rink wasn't quite right. Apparently on Friday during some electrical test it had been overloaded and the compressors had been burned out, leaving a massive layer of water on the rink and it wasn't scheduled to be fixed until Monday. This led to some very wet clothing on the kids, but they had a good time. Lots of security and police were around so aside from a few pan handlers it was pretty uneventful.

We then walked over to American Coney Island, a Detroit landmark, for hot dogs and birthday cake. I had a coney dog and it was quite delicious.

On the way to the American Coney Island we passed by the Michigan Iron Brigade memorial marker.

Then after coneys and cake we headed home.

Amazing how much potential and how great Detroit could be if they could just get themselves together and got rid of the idiots busy running it into the ground.

So it was a very full weekend.