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Nothing says "I Love You, Dear" like screaming lower back pain!

Sometimes Wrong but rarely in doubt!

07 September 2011

Efficient Fast Filing

This post doesn't have anything to do with computers.  Like most of my recent posts it has to do with firearms.

I recently purchased nine hundred #10 CCI primers for my Colt 1860 and I found that I had a very hard time seating the primers on the cylinder nipples as I mentioned in my last post. I had decided to purchase replacement nipples and discovered a dearth of #10 nipples available.  I'm sorry I've overstated the case. No one sells #10 nipples as far as I can tell.  That got me to thinking, perhaps the mushrooming wasn't the problem.  I removed the nipples from the revolver and borrowed a digital micrometer.  I discovered that the revolver was fitted with five #11 nipples and one #10 nipple.

This put me on the horns of a dilemma.  Should I just toss a hundred dollars worth of #10 primers away and replace the sole #10 nipple? My innate Scottish nature prevailed and I decided to file down the five #11 nipples so that I could seat the #10 primers.  I went to my smithy and got my carry-all of files.  Looking at my large collection of  files I realized that I would be removing part of the raised lip that the nipple wrench fits on because the sides of the files weren't smooth.  Removing the lip would be a problem because in cleaning the cylinder I have to remove the nipples and cover them with breach plug grease.  I elected to use some emery cloth rather than the files.

This was a night of painful discovery.  After about twenty minutes of turning the nipple in the emery cloth I was painfully aware that I have arthritis in both hands...very advanced arthritis apparently.  At this rate it was going to take me hours to finish the nipples because I was having to take increasingly frequent breaks to wait for the pain in my hands to ease.  Now I am by nature a lazy bugbear, but not in the way most people think.  My laziness has an odd form as I like to get a great many things done and I like my leisure time. Thus I look for an efficient means of accomplishing tasks making a virtue of a vice.

So how did I quickly file down the nipples?

 I got Mrs. Bugbear's cordless drill and clamped the nipple in the drill's chuck.  I then wrapped the emery cloth around the nipple and spun it at high speed using the drill as an ersatz lathe.  The remaining four nipples took about ten minutes to reduce the diameter enough to fit a #10 percussion cap.  This course of action left me lots of time to clean the kitchen and start Lev Grossman's first book The Magicians.



A Digression

I get my odd form of laziness from Mr Bugbear Sr.  My dad is a very hardworking man he accomplishes a lot and didn't take much leisure when I was growing up.  That drive to get things done comes from Dad.  Once when I was a kid he told me to dig a trench from the back corner of the house to the an old well that we'd filled in with rock.  I was to install a drainage pipe from the downspout to the old filled in well.  About twenty feet of this future trench was very hard packed from 10 years of parking cars there.  Instead of digging by hand as my dad expected I used the farm tractor with the blade attached and dug a single furrow through the driveway thus saving myself hours of swinging a pick.  I installed the drainage pipe and used the blade to fill in the trench and the tractor's rear wheel to pack it down.  When my dad found out how I'd done the task he'd set me the fecal matter hit the rotary impeller.  With that fine sense of tact for which all Bugbears are imbued I interrupted my father's tirade, "Don't be an  idiot Dad, I used my head instead of my hands, this is what you get for constantly harping at me to stay in school"

One of the few times my dad ever admitted that I was right in my teen years.

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