I spent almost three and a half hours on the firing range at work yesterday. The military carbine group is performing an endurance test on a new sniper rifle and the department was asked to volunteer time to help test them. Each person was assigned one carbine and 1000 rounds of ammunition, we fired one shot every three seconds. After every 100 rounds we reloaded our magazines and cooled the rifle barrel with compressed air then switched between firing with a silencer or unsilenced. Firing 1000 rounds of .308 ammunition is hard on the shoulder and the gripping hand, I had a good-sized bruise on my shoulder when I got home yesterday. The rifle required lubrication every 400 rounds and the cycling of the operating group coated my arms and lap with a fine mist of oil, gunpowder residue, and tiny flakes of brass. The first thing I did when I got home yesterday afternoon was take a nice, hot, relaxing shower!
It’s getting colder here. This morning the temperature was in the mid 40’s Fahrenheit and it’s supposed to be in the mid 30’s tomorrow. I’m very thankful for the seat warmer in the work car on mornings like these!
I’ve been building a model car for one of my co-workers. He owns an ‘80’s Porsche, one of the last of the 911 series. We found a Japanese kit that represented his car exactly so he bought the kit for me to build for him. When I opened the box I found that the quality of the kit wasn’t quite up to the traditional standards for Japanese plastic model car kits. The body was slightly wavy in spots and had some unusually bad mold mismatch that had to be sanded smooth. In addition, the body was molded in bright red! Red plastic is very hard to cover properly, it has a tendency to bleed through everything. I primed it, sprayed it black until it was well covered, and took a look. Everything looked great, so I proceeded. With this paint, the clear coat has to be applied within 45 minutes of the last color coat or you have to wait 30 days for the color coat to fully cure. Obviously I chose to apply within 45 minutes! When the clear melted into the black as it’s designed to do it caused the black to pull away from sharp corners on the body and exposed areas where the red plastic was again visible! I waited a day for the clear to dry then went over the edges with a black Sharpie where I could see red. Then I lightly sanded and re-coated with primer, black paint, and clear. The second time was a charm, I think. I also painted the interior with a custom mix of acrylics to make a sort of semi-gloss charcoal color. I’ll do a thinned wash of slightly darker black to give the black seats and interior some feeling of depth in the engraving and so the interior won’t look like a cave. That’s always an issue when doing a black interior.
No real plans for the weekend. I’ll probably work on model cars and organize the model room a bit. |
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