David E. Petzal - The Gun Nut

It’s a well-known and dismal fact that any steel suitable for use in firearms will rust. Since rust is bad, all sorts of solutions to the problem have been tried over the last 400 years. Bluing (which is a form of controlled rusting) is the most popular, but many’s the blued gun that has rusted all to hell.

Plating has been tried. Charlie Askins used to swear by Marker Machine Company’s Black Chrome plating. An acquaintance of mine sent them a Ruger Model 77 .338 and they screwed it up completely.

Parkerizing, a form of metallic coating, was developed just before World War I, and the U.S. military made heavy use of it. It was effective because it was non-reflective, fairly rust-resistant (if you kept it oiled) and wore fairly well. It was, however, exceedingly ugly and has not been used on civilian rifles.

Now, we may be at the dawn of the rustproof rifle. A number of top-drawer custom gunmakers are offering steel finishes that are damn near impervious to everything. These finishes vary in their composition, but all are third- or fourth-generation. Earlier versions were either too thick or too soft, or too prone to cracking.

John Lazzeroni was the first in the pool with a coating called NP-3, which is a mixture of electroless nickel and Teflon. All Lazzguns have been so coated from the beginning, and it is terrific stuff. It even looks nice—sort of a dull pewter color.

Mark Bansner uses K-Kote as his standard finish, Charlie Sisk uses Cera-Kote, and Ed Brown offers Gen. III. All are very thin, very hard, zero maintenance, and durned near indestructible. But they are not cheap. It costs about $250 to $350 to apply them.

Having had more than one rifle rust despite taking all precautions with it, I am a big fan. I dislike most of what passes for progress, but not this.

It occurred to me the other day that the Remington Model 700 is a better rifle than the Winchester Model 70. I haven’t been so upset since I found out the government gave guns to sailors, but anyway, here’s my reasoning:

Remington designed the 700 (originally, the 721 and 722) after World War II when it became apparent that rifles would have to be made cheaply or their makers would go out of business. (Winchester never quite grasped that point and has pretty much gone out of business.) Because of this, the 700 was always the “cheap” gun while the 70 was the “fine” gun. Sticks and stones were hurled at the 700 for its cheesy-looking safety, pot metal trigger guard and floorplate, tiny, non-rotating extractor, and push-feed operation.

Granted, the safety, which requires a gaping slot in the stock, is horrible, as is the pot metal trigger guard. However, the extractor, in my experience, is as good as that of the Model 70 and maybe better. (I’ve seen Model 70 and Mauser extractors fail, but never a 700). As for push feed as opposed to controlled feed, who cares? It works. The rifle I have shot the most, a .30/06 Model 700, has never failed to feed, despite over 3,000 rounds through it.

As for quality, Model 70s have varied wildly. Some of them are great, but there was a period of years prior to 1964 when they were awful, and the ones made in the years prior to the last gasp of the Model 70 were as bad as anything I’ve seen. Remington, however, has always maintained a pretty even keel.

But the deciding factor is this: If you were to test 1,000 Model 70s of all calibers and the same number of 700s, I think the latter would outshoot the former by an embarrassing margin. The 700 is stiffer, and simpler, and easier to make into an accurate rifle. Gunsmiths who go for accuracy above aesthetics go for Remington actions over Winchester just about every time. And accuracy, when all the sentimental b.s. is done with, is what a rifle is about.

A couple of weeks ago I got to handle a rifle that belonged to Colonel Townsend Whelen, which is as close as you get to touching a sacred object in this business. It was a Low-Wall Winchester, a custom-made rifle (as most of Whelen’s were) and it weighed a ton. I don’t think that Whelen owned a rifle that scaled less than 10 pounds or had a barrel less than 26 inches long. Part of this was due to the fact that he was tremendously strong, but his guns were typical of the time.

For much of the 20th century, strength was achieved by weight and mass. I can remember car ads from the 1950s boasting of how much cars weighed. This held true with rifles. If you look at an older Model 70 Winchester you see enough extra steel and wood to lay a railroad line. Same with the Weatherby Mark V action. I wonder if Roy Weatherby, and his designer Fred Jennie, would do it that way today.

All this came to a throbbing head last week when I visited the shop of ace gunmaker Mark Bansner, who has just come out with his own bolt-action, and makes his own fiberglass stocks. There is not a scintilla of an iota of excess steel or anything else in one of these guns. They are mere skin and bones.

Bansner’s Ultimate rifles are strikingly similar to the Nosler Model 48 bolt-action, which is also boiled down to the nth degree. They are uncannily alike, and it is no accident. Both were designed by people who had done a ton of hunting, much of it in the mountains, and approached rifle design not as engineers, but as people who would have to carry what they built.

In my recent post on Elmer Keith I mentioned that the four major gun writers of the 20th century were Keith himself, Townsend Whelen, Jack O’Connor, and Warren Page. So the next logical step would be to see if one of them stood out over the rest. What the heck? Why not? Their spirits will not be perturbed by anything I say.

The rational way to do this is to create a checklist by which a gun writer can be measured, and see how each one stacks up. Theoretically, at the end, a winner may emerge. So here goes:

Writing: You have to go with O’Connor, who was a highly successful writer before he wrote about guns for a living. Not only he was great in his day, but what he wrote has aged well. Whelen was a good writer, but not a great one, and he is now old-fashioned. Keith could tell a story, and is still fun to read, but no match for O’Connor. Page was competent, and no better.

Experience: In terms of hunting experience, Page in a walk, followed by O’Connor. Keith rarely hunted outside the Rockies, and Whelen was quite limited as a hunter, although he probably had more technical knowledge than anyone except Page.

Influence: Page first, followed by Keith. Page was directly responsible for the .243, the 7mm magnum, and was one of the prime movers behind benchrest shooting, which has been a huge influence on guns. Keith was the daddy of the .44 magnum, and a constant experimenter. Whelen was hugely respect by the gun industry, but I don’t recall that he was an advocate for anything in particular, and O’Connor simply reported on what was there. He made the .270, but he wasn’t responsible for it.

And So? Page should get the nod, but the truth is that O’Connor is the most-remembered, most-quoted, and probably the most-read 30 years after his death. And so, with a heavy heart, I have to give it to him.

But as Jim Carmichel says, “There’s nothing deader than a dead gun writer.”

Two posts ago, on March 20th, a commenter named Lewis informed us all that Hoppe’s, maker of Hoppe’s No. 9 gun solvent, and other stuff, was going out of business in June, due to high operating costs and environmental concerns. He sent along a link to something called usnewswire.com that supposedly carried the story. It all sounded very believable.

But I was puzzled, because an old firm like Hoppe’s going toes up would be big news, and I hadn’t heard a thing. I clicked onto usnewswire and couldn’t find any mention of it. I spoke with a friend who edits a magazine about the shooting industry, and he hadn’t heard diddly. I called Bushnell, which owns Hoppe’s and was assured that Hoppe’s was in fine health, and would be around for some time to come. The only change was that it had been moved from Oregon to Kansas.

In other words, reports of Hoppe’s death were greatly exaggerated, and if you spread them on your garden they will make your roses grow. Never believe anything you hear, especially if it comes from the government or a major corporation or a professional sports team. Never believe anything you read in a magazine.

One of the things I’ve learned in this business is, if you want people to believe your lies, you have to make them whoppers. You want something so outrageous that people could never believe you were making something like that up. So here are a few. Have fun!

Chuck Schumer to shoot at Camp Perry
Hillary Clinton supports “right-to-carry” laws
New York Times admits in editorial, “NRA was right all along”

(Note: A Mr. Sinky O notes in my previous blog that I may be less than inclined to tell the whole truth about guns for fear of losing ad bucks. The fact is that Field & Stream gets no more than a small percentage of its ad revenue from the makers of hunting and fishing equipment, so there is no pressure on me to say only nice things for fear of people pulling ads. Second, we have changed our long-standing policy of not criticizing gear in the magazine and on this website, and have begun hammering what deserves it.
However, kindly remember when reading what follows is that I screwed up, not the Bushnell product.)

A couple of weeks ago I got one of the first laser-ranging, range-compensating-reticle scopes from Bushnell. There are a few similar scopes on the market, but they are either huge, heavy, expensive, horrifically complicated, or all of these. This one is not, so with a high heart, I mounted it on a .30/06 to try it out.

The bottom of this scope forms a rail, and near the front of the rail is a series of grooves. The rear “ring” for this scope clamps onto the rail by screw pressure alone, but the front one has a lug that engages whichever of the grooves you find convenient. It is this lug that takes up the recoil and prevents the scope from sliding. The directions that came with the scope stressed this: the lug has to engage a groove.

The two rings I was sent both looked like rear rings as neither had a lug, but I thought “What the hell, would Bushnell packers screw up that badly?” and mounted the scope anyway. Then I drove 80 miles (one way) to a private range where the friend of a friend had allowed me in for the afternoon to shoot at 500 yards. I couldn’t hit a thing. I mean, I couldn’t have hit a tent if I was inside it. And after maybe 10 rounds, the reason why was apparent. The scope had slipped forward along my rifle’s Picatinny rail by about 6 inches and was barely hanging on. End of shooting session. I drove 80 miles home and sent the scope back to Bushnell with a stern note about packing the correct rings. Quicker than you can say “wailing and gnashing of teeth,” they sent me another with all the right parts.

There are two morals to this story:

First, no matter how experienced you are, or how much you think you know, you are going to do dumb s**t.

Second, if something seems wrong, it probably is. Do not go blindly ahead on trust alone.

Both of these morals come with lifetime guarantees.

One of the things I’m called on to do in this curious line of work is try out various items of gear for their manufacturers before they hit the market. These devices are usually given to me with a request to “use it and tell us what you really think.” I learned long ago that if I do, the response I get is often the same as if I'd told someone that their kid looks like a young wildebeest or maybe a manatee.

No, what they want to hear is, “It’s perfect, wonderful, and I shall give it reams and reams of publicity.” As an example, a couple of decades ago a major scope maker came up with a scope with a graphite tube. They claimed, correctly, that it was lighter and stronger than aluminum, wouldn’t scratch, and on, and on.

I put it on a rifle, fired a couple of shots,  and found that I could get the crosshairs in focus or I could get the image in focus but I couldn’t get both in focus at the same time. Not trusting my own senses, I invited a couple of sharp-eyed friends to try and they had no more luck than I did.

I sent the thing back with a letter explaining what had happened, and received an infuriated call from one of the company execs asking who the hell did I think I was and what was this b.s. about their scope? And then silence. The graphite scope disappeared without a trace. The problem was that graphite is light, and strong, and very slippery, and none of the scope’s little innards would stay anchored, and so it came unglued with the first shot.

Other gun writers have had these experiences. In 1987, a bunch of us were herded off to the premiere of a new hunting bullet, and the instant a cross-sectional diagram of it was flashed on the screen the whole room started to cough and snort and fart. The new bullet had a paper-thin jacket and nothing much to hold it together, and it was obvious to us what was going to happen when people started using it on game. And we were right.

And that is why most of us are social outcasts. There are other reasons of course, but that’s the main one.

Like many people, I’m hopelessly addicted to the History Channel. Barring the occasional hour on the story of tapioca, or putty, they do lots of interesting stuff, and last night it was ancient Chinese weaponry. Everything was going swimmingly until the program reached the invention of gunpowder. It showed a fellow mixing the stuff in a solid-silver (!) bowl, and we were informed that charcoal is the main ingredient, and there are two others.

 “Huh?”, thinks I. “Why are they being coy about the other two ingredients?” And then it came to me. They are doing it for the same reason that the TSA does most of their  stupid stuff—security. I can think of no other reason for omitting two thirds of the recipe than the fear that a viewer might rush right out, mix up a batch of black powder, and explode something he shouldn’t.

This is absurd for many, many reasons, the most prominent of which is the ease with which you can get this information. Working against a watch, I went on line this morning and got the answer in 11 seconds. As a security measure, the History Channel’s one-ingredient ploy ranks with the airlines refusing to hand out plastic knives so passengers can slice their tiny, rock-hard, airline-issue bagels.

The truth is, anyone can find out just about anything if they want to. Some years ago I had lunch with the president of a knife-sharpener company, and he told me the following story:

“During World War II I was a professor of metallurgy at the University of Chicago, which was one of the centers of development for the atom bomb. One of my jobs was recruiting graduate students to work on the Manhattan Project. I was interviewing a young man and told him what he would be doing, but that I couldn’t tell him why he would be doing it.

“He said, ‘You’re working on an atom bomb.’”

“I nearly passed out. This was one of the most closely guarded secrets in World War II.

“How in God’s name did you know?” I asked him.

“It wasn’t hard,” he said. “We just keep track of who’s disappearing, and what they do, and we put two and two together.”

So much for secrecy.

And if there is no History Channel gunpowder plot I apologize to all the appropriate people.

Not Elmer Fudd, Elmer Keith--one of the four pre-eminent gun writers of the 20th century (the other three being O’Connor, Whelen, and Page). In 1974, while at the National Sporting Goods Association show, Winchester Press gave me a book titled Keith—an Autobiography. (Snappy title, huh? No wonder they’re long out of business). I wasn’t a fan of Keith’s, but I started to read it on the flight home and I was hooked for fair. The plane could have crashed and I wouldn’t have stopped reading.

Elmer Keith in his 20s or early 30s. The photo is from the Field & Stream archive.

Elmer Keith was born in 1899, and spent much of his early life in Montana, which at that time was still the Wild West. When he was 11, he was terribly burned in an arson fire, and by all rights should not have survived. Reading about his suffering makes your skin crawl. But survive he did, and he later became a cowboy, hunting guide, competitive shooter and, in the late 1930s, a highly successful gun writer.

Keith became famous as the father of the .44 Magnum, and as the Exalted High Poobah of big-bore rifles. He staged a legendary and long-lived feud with Jack O’Connor, who often ridiculed him in print, but to thousands and thousands of shooters, Keith’s writings were the Revealed Word.

Keith was a rarity in that he was an expert with rifle, revolver (he was no fan of automatics), and shotgun, and wrote influential books about all three. I never saw him shoot, but I knew people who did, and they said it was like watching a snake strike. His most famous single shot was at a mule deer at 600 yards with an iron-sighted (no scopes on handguns then) revolver. He said he killed it, and he probably did.

There are lots of Keith books around, but the place to start is with his full autobiography (the Winchester book is considerably shortened) Hell, I Was There. If you become a fan, I also recommend Sixguns and Guns and Ammo for Hunting Big Game.

Keith died an especially cruel death. In 1979 he suffered a stroke, and spent the next five years in a nursing home until he passed away. They are not making gun writers like Ol’ Elmer any more.

I’m talking about rifle barrels. What the hell did you think I was talking about? Back when men smelled bad and carried Kentucky rifles, long barrels were just the ticket—44 inches was about standard. They decreased aiming error and having all that weight out there in front made offhand shooting that much easier.

This lasted until the Mountain Men (who smelled even worse) took over, and the Hawken rifle evolved. The Hawken brothers used the Kentucky as a model for their guns, but the barrels were much shorter (26 to 38 inches), because their users had discovered that a long-barreled rifle, regardless of its advantages, was a damned unhandy thing to hunt with from horseback.

It is a damned unhandy thing to hunt with in a lot of other situations, too. That’s why I think the most practical length for a big-game rifle barrel is 22 inches. If you have a magnum, 24 is the most you want, and you can get away with 23 inches unless you’re shooting something like a 7mm STW.

I’ve found that whatever small ballistic advantage you gain with a long (anything over 24 inches) barrel is more than offset by the added weight and length, and that 22 inches is just about ideal. About a year ago, I grew fed up with the 26-inch barrel on a .338 RUM Remington Model 700, and had it cut back to 23 1/2 inches. Despite the huge charge of slow powder that this cartridge uses, I lost only 38 fps, and the accuracy improved dramatically (which often happens, but not always, when you chop a barrel).

I have only two rifles with 26-inch barrels. One is a .220 Swift, where I want all the velocity I can get and other considerations come second, and the other is a .300 Weatherby, which I reserve for situations where I know I’m going to take long shots or none at all, and I won’t have to carry the thing around very much.