Clovis Chitwood Heavy Industries

I helped Billy do some upper assembly work on some of his AR’s this Sunday. Besides not being able to drive some pins out of a front sight base and chasing little steel balls all over a linoleum floor it was remarkably anticlimactic. All of the work I’ve ever done to AR’s has been anticlimactic. Everything has been so easy. Everything just goes together so well. I expected to have to fit pats and do machining and lapp things, but besides fiddling with taunt little springs and chasing even smaller detents there’s nothing to it.

Usually when your messing around with guns you have to be very careful with one critical measurement. Headspace. Too much and everything goes boom. Too little and the round won’t chamber. Or do I have it backwards. With the AR it doesn’t matter, unless your actually installing barrel extensions to the barrel and if your doing that then your hardcore. You do have to worry a little about keeping the bolt with the barrel and a cautious person will at least check things out with a field gauge but if it’s a new barrel and new bolt it’s not really necessary. On most guns the barrel fits into the receiver and then the bolt slides back and forth in and locks to the receiver. So you’ve got to be really careful how the barrel attaches to the receiver and how the bolt locks in the reciever. All of this is going to affect headspace. With the AR the barrel fits into a barrel extension. The barrel extsion has lugs that mesh with the lugs on the bolt. The upper receiver basically just clamps to the barrel extension. The fit of the barrel and barrell extension it the real critical determinant of headspace on the AR. The bolt and the barrel extension will wear together so you kind of want to keep them matched. Really the whole gun just kind of hangs off the barrel extension.

We did get to do a bit of machining yesterday though. One of Billy’s uppers had the M4 feed ramps machined into it but the barrell he was wanting to use did not have the enlarged notches to match. So out comes the dremel tool to touch up the barrel extension. Even doing this operation there was no real change of doing something that would make the gun dangerous, just hard to feed. Which I guess could be dangerous if you were actually having to use the thing in anger, but that’s why you go to the range and the test the things. Well that and the fact that they’re just fun to shoot.

I finally got to see his CAV-AID lower It’s basically a plastic lower. I liked it a lot. It is light. We slapped a twenty inch barrel on it and I swear I’ve held toy guns that weighed more. Of course with a loaded mag it would weigh a bit more but It was just unbelievably light. I want one I want one. I want one.

If i was any good at this I would back up and tell you how wonderful the last couple of weeks have been. They literally have just seemed to slip through my fingers. Of course if I’m being honest the bad weeks seem to go by at a pretty good clip as well. Hypericon was a blast and the weekend before it was as well, though the details are a little fuzzy, but for different reasons than Sunday morning at Hypericon. So I’ll just leave it at that except to say a late happy birthday to Stephen Zimmer and Roblyn.

This last weekend was pretty good as well. More time with family would have been nice but that was my own fault. Saw Mongol and the Animation Show on Saturday. Mongol was beautiful but flat, the Animation Show was as great as it always is. When we left the Belcourt people were lined up down to 21st waiting to see the midnight showing of Rocky Horror. I was glad to see it was going to be packed. I would have liked to see it but I was going over to Billy’s on Sunday to help him assemble some ARs.

The Belcourt finally announced what the16mm outdoor film for July was going to be. Which is good because I think it’s this weekend. I hope it is, because if it’s the weekend after next is RollerGirls. Anyway it’s Stagecoach the movie that made John Wayne a star. Okay that’s probably overstating it but it’s a wonderful John Ford movie. A Western in the old fashioned Western style. I really want to see it and watching it outside stitting in a lawn chair should be a blast, even if I’m by my self. I doubt I’ll get anybody else interested in going to see it with me, but ‘m going to try.

Anyway that’s all the catching up I’m going to do. I’ll see you later.