Another evening of beer, guns & sinful pizza ( *sigh * I’m never gonna lose this excess weight am I Happily enough however, for the time being it doesn’t matter, so until it does I can safely gorge myself and drink until I pass out every night ).

Mmmm sinful pizza, `sacrelicious`….. http://evilpundit.com/archives/012021.html

Incidentally, that article provoked a big debate over e-mail between my friends today, one of whom finished it with the rather excellent;

“It's time we stopped giving these idiots a platform. It's time everyone accepted the 'you don't like it? then *fruitcage* off' school of thought.

NOONE IS FORCING THIS PR*CK TO SUBJECT HIMSELF TO THE HORRORS OF GOING TO BURGER KING AND TURNING HIS ICE CREAM TO THE RIGHT.

I am so sick of stuff like this.... grrrr..... Burger King should ban all Muslims from eating and working in their stores because it offends them so much."

But anyway; after this evening of sin and pizza I’ve sort-of got some conclusions about the Marushin M1 Garand, mainly along the lines of “WHHHYYYYYY GOD, WHY DO YOU MOCK ME SO?????????” and other screams of pseudo-Catholic anguish. This is a seriously beautiful gun, it really is, its superbly finished and detailed everywhere and in every way I can see so far, and just the sound of it being racked is like a crisp, sharp mechanised report from the battlefields of wartime Europe (possibly). The mechanism that ejects the clips is brilliant, I may be forced to find the inventor and marry him/her out of sheer awe for it, the wood is nice quality and the weight overall is just right - well balanced and satisfyingly tiring to hold in a firing position for more than a couple of minutes, and to top it all off the damn thing doesn’t bloody well work any more. Sad face.

The bolt won’t return unless, get this, the rifle is held vertically and gently shaken; it seems there is a guide rod or somesuch thing that is loose in the foreend and it needs to seat itself rearwards by being pointed towards the heavens and oscillated until it falls into place.

Not exactly combat-efficient, is it?

Bloody thing. Its another one for the repair-shack down at GZ I’m afraid, and with 4 guns to collect from there already next week it ain’t gonna be a cheap skirmish for Mr. ‘hippy!!!

Ho-hum.

On the outside the Garand is excellent, it's pretty weighty as said before but feels strangely light in the foregrip/forearm (where, perhaps not coincidentally, the loose arrangement of guide rods etc. seems to be….) yet overall it feels fantastic; like a rifle of truly superb quality. Shame about the finicky mechanisms but some do work admirably (clip eject ) and the trigger disassembly is easy - even I, the Baron Klutzendidgitz, figured it out on only the second attempt after a glancing look at a picture in the manual, and it in itself is handy and easy to perform, feels solid and safe and doesn’t make the gun seem any less cool or realistic – the takedown of the trigger unit is apparently identical to the real thing, even down to the arrangement of basic component parts i.e. the springs are in the right place, and the trigger sears seem to approximate the original pretty well.

Although, and of course its tragic that I have to say this, it could never, ever be used to shoot real bullets. Even if the laws of physics were to look the other way long enough to allow the build materials to defy the energies involved in firing live ammunition, then there’s no actual space for them in this gun, which leads me to the inside of the breech area where, because the airsoft Garand clips are tiny in comparison to real ones (they are just the `clip`; there is no allowance for anything that might go where the bullets would in a real Garand because the nozzle and loading ramp [thingy] occupy the centre of the breech) there is a pretty comprehensive set of fiddly mechanisms, including the metal latch that must be manually pushed forwards to hold the bolt back and load a clip, all of which fills the whole breech except for a U-shaped channel at the rear end where the petite little 8-shot clip must be inserted which is, unsurprisingly, an occasionally irritating trick at first – therefore the most unrealistic thing about the Marushin Garand (apart from filling it with gas and plastic BBs ) is that when you load a clip you have to push the clip itself into the mechanism and not on the absent bullets.

Its really hard to get excited over the Garand now however because of its faulty operation – I tried it with the 134a I had specifically bought for it one Sunday and it didn’t work after that skirmish whereas it had done before, and then I checked it with some Abbey Ultra gas and it worked perfectly for about 60 shots then something just came loose, and now its totally unfunctional. Big f**king boo to that!!

Its been quiet for me on here lately and its because of the time of year and my increasing awareness of the world around me, and how little of it I'm taking advantage of, so the time spent behind a computer is decreasing and the time spent doing real things seems to be getting more generous in size. I'm taking up rock climbing for instance, and cutting back on the beer.

Small steps guys, `a walk of a thousand miles begins with just one step` etc etc

Worth looking at: http://www.break.com/index/sanddune1.html awesome dune, nice judgement.

http://www.hedonistica.com/media.php?path=...g-explosion.wmv that’s a chunky old fireball there guys…