Author: Jay Andrew

Good Monday Morning!

This week is the kick off for 2020 SHOT Show. This is a yearly industry Show held by the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF). It is closed to public, you have to have a media pass, or be a company that is involved in firearm industry to be able to attend. Having been to SHOT, I can tell you it is huge, and it is very busy.

Many companies wait until SHOT show to announce new products. We are of course excited to see what new cartridges, bullets and powder are announced. We’ll be paying attention this week and hope to give information to you on these new products. If you want to learn more about SHOT Show click here.

This past week has been busy working on various projects. We did take some time to put together a write up on a Basic IFAK kit. This was done at a request of a reader, wanting to know what to carry that goes beyond just a basic First Aid Kit. As a EMT, I offered my thoughts on what I think should be included in a IFAK to treat incidents that may happen at the range.

Individual First Aid Kits (IFAK)

Measuring pressure, and velocity are two of the core metrics that ballisticians use to determine the viability of a cartridge. The equipment to do this is fairly expensive. Someday I hope to make that investment. Over the Christmas break I brainstormed ways to do present the concepts of pressure and velocity on my shoe string budget. The solution I came up with brought me back to my roots and what got me started in this field. Potato Cannons.

What Started It All: Spud Guns

I debated about kicking that project off with everything else I got going on, but when I looked at my project planning, I realized most of my time is spent ordering parts and getting the money together to get these projects in motion. This is a small project that is budget friendly that I can work on while I’m waiting to move the other projects forward. I realize people may discount the idea of using a Spud Gun as a firearm analog, but when you get into the details, all of the basics are there. The pressures and velocities are lower, but the mechanics are near identical.

That is all for the update this week. We’ll have a few new articles drop this week, so stay tuned. If you have questions, suggestions or comments email me at jayandrew338@gmail.com, or check us out on Facebook.

Have a Good Week!

The Ballistic Assistant

Good Monday Morning! This past week has been quite busy catching up from the long break. As such there I was only able to finish and publish one write up to the site.

I hope this write up serves as a good introduction to the ins and outs of the modern metallic cartridge case.

The Modern Cartridge Case

Next week is 2020 SHOT Show! I’m excited to read the press releases and see what’s new in the industry, specifically new reloading equipment, and reloading powders! Any new powders announce will be added to the Burn Rate Chart. So expect to see an updated chart in the coming weeks. If there is any powders that you would like information on, or need to be added to the Burn Rate Chart please reach out to me. I’ll do the research and get them added in the appropriate spot.

Thanks for subscribing, and as always, if you have any questions, comments or suggestions feel free to email me at jayandrew338@gmail.com or check us out on Facebook.

Have an Awesome Week!

The Ballistic Assistant.

Happy New Year! This is the first update of 2020!

I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday break. I certainly did. I took the time to work on some planning for the website, project planning, and visiting with family. Hopefully there will be some new and exciting content for this upcoming year.

2020 SHOT Show is right around the corner and there has already been some interesting new developments with new cartridges being rumored. As details emerge we will be sure to take a closer look.

In the meantime we did do a few site updates prior to leaving for the break. Most of the work has been centered on the Photogrammetry Drone. We worked through the initial CAD modeling of the Drone and then started using some basic Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), offered by Solidworks to begin to see how the drone will glide through the air. You can read the write up on this at the link below.

Photogrammetry Drone: CAD Modeling

We also go the official go ahead to do an initial parts order for the drone. So here is the parts we’re going with and an explanation as to why I decided to go with these parts. The write up can be found at the link below.

Photogrammetry Drone: Initial Parts Ordering

In the next few weeks we will have several write ups on more fundamentals of cartridges, their design and their manufacture. With Sig Sauers announcement of the 277 Sig Fury, it will be important to understand the strengths and weakness of existing cartridge technology before we can appreciate what Sig is trying to accomplish here. Hopefully it will be adopted by SAAMI soon so we can have an industry standard spec, if not we may need to go to CIP.

As always if you have questions, concerns or general feedback you are more then welcome to reach out to me directly at jayandrew338@gmail.com or to check out our Facebook page, The Ballistic Assistant.

Thanks for being a subscriber!

The Ballistic Assistant

Another Monday, the last Monday before Christmas. Have you got your holiday shopping done yet? Me neither.

This past week was quite busy, but we still managed to get a few write ups done, and cross a few things off the ToDo list. We received the wrecked Ebee from the repair shop, in pieces, and we did a quick look at the parts that go into the Ebee and see if there’s anything that would be hard to replicate in our own drone.

Photogrammetry Drone: Examining Wreckage

We also finished putting together the airframe for our own drone. There is much to be done with this drone, but this is a good first step.

Photogrammetry Drone: Airframe

Turning back to the reason for the website, we were able to process some scrap lead into ingots. Unless you’re starting with clean lead, this is usually the first step in casting your own bullets. Here’s how we do it.

Turning Scrap Lead Into a Resource

That’s been our week. I’ll be taking a holiday break for 2 weeks, so there will be no new updates during that time. I’ll expect to have new updates by the second or third week of the new year. Thanks again for being a subscriber, and we hope to continue to bring you interesting content through 2020!

As always if you have any comments, questions or concerns, please email me at jayandrew338@gmail.com, or reach out to us on Facebook.

Happy Holidays!

The Ballistic Assistant

There’s only a few more weeks left to the year. The website has been live for a little 3 months and has garnered 4,000+ views. Thanks to everyone who had taken a moment to check out the site, and hopefully you’ve enjoyed the content so far.

These next few weeks will be busy for me. Many of you know I have been working on getting my EMS Basic license, well the testing for that will be this weekend. If all goes well I’ll start running with the local volunteer ambulance service. Couple that with holiday preparations and my time is becoming extremely limited. There will likely be only a few updates between now and the end of the year.

Last week we did make some time to take a deep dive into some of the popular new cartridges on the market. What they are, why they exist, and a deep look as to whether or not they really are any better than what already exists. You can read that write up here:

Why a New Cartridge?

As I mentioned at the end of the write up, this was a fun article to write and I may do similar write ups in the future. Sometimes it can be hard to cut through the marketing hype to understand what a new cartridge does, we’ll try to make sense of it in these write ups.

As always, if you have comments, questions, or suggestions feel free to email me at Jayandrew338@gmail.com or check us out on Facebook. Thanks for being a subscriber!

The Ballistic Assistant

Happy Cyber Monday! We don’t sell anything here at The Ballistic Assistant, but we know there’s some pretty awesome deals to be had, don’t forget to check out Brownells, Midway USA, JD Guns N’ Gear and others.

This past week we released a few write ups, mostly dealing with our Pawn Shop 30-06. We were able to mount the scope base and take it out for some range time.

Pawn Shop 30-06: Scope Base

Before we can start to improve accuracy we need to establish a baseline, something to work from. Here’s how we go about doing that.

Pawn Shop 30-06: Accuracy Testing – Baseline

We used Remington Hog Hammer loaded with Barnes 168gr TSX bullets. Having done plenty of testing with Barnes bullets, I know that the bullets can perform. So how did the rest of the load do?

Pawn Shop 30-06: Ammo Eval – Remington Hog Hammer

We continue to work on the 3D Printer. Progress is likely going to slow down over the holidays, but we are working to get this thing built. Here we did the machining on the Y and Z Axis Lead Screws.

3D Printer: Y and Z Axis Drives

We’ve has a few pretty decent snow events over the last few days and it’s been fairly cold. As weather allows will be a few more trips to the range in the coming weeks as we need to sight in the VZ-58 and do some trigger work on the Pawn Shop 30-06.

We hope everyone is enjoying the holiday season so far, as always, if there’s questions or comments you can email me directly at jayandrew338@gmail.com or check us out on Facebook.

Thanks for Subscribing!

The Ballistic Assistant

Good Monday Morning! This past week went by fast for us. As a consequence we did not get as much done as we would have liked. In the United States this week is Thanksgiving, which shortens the work week from 5 days to about 3, (Except those working in Retail. Been there done that, sorry guys).

We’ll be posting a few articles this week. We went to the shooting range to sight in the Pawn Shop 30-06 Mauser. Some exciting results there, so look for an article on that this week.

In the meantime here’s what we published over the past week.

Along with the theme of the Pawn Shop 30-06 we are taking another scrap Mauser Action and turning it into something of a scout rifle. This is along the lines of Jeff Cooper’s vision of the ideal rifle. Compact, lightweight, and capable of taking game up to 1,000lbs.

Junk Mauser to 308 Scout Rifle: Introduction

This next project is a complete departure from the theme of the site. However I thought it was too cool of a project not to write about. This is something I am doing for work. We have been using an eBee drone for all of our aerial surveying needs at the mine, but due to the high operating cost we are looking at a self built option. I’ll be doing all the Research, Construction and testing of this new bird. If you’re interested here’s the introduction article.

Photogrammetry Drone: Introduction

We have continued to make progress on the 3D Printer. The frame is all but complete, and we’re moving on to building the Y and Z Axis drive train. The frame is probably the most involved subassembly of this build. To see the detailed write up, check out the link below.

3D Printer: Framing

As you can tell I have several irons in the fire, working on a few different projects. This keeps me busy, as I wait for parts to arrive for other projects. Hopefully there is a little something for everyone.

As always, if you have any comments, questions or suggestions feel free to comment, shoot me an email (jayandrew338@gmail.com) or check us out on Facebook. Thanks for subscribing!

The Ballistic Assitant

This week has been a busy week for me, and while I was able to make some progress on the projects, I haven’t been able to do a whole lot else. So if there doesn’t seem to be as much of a variety of posts, this would be why.

Fair warning, we in the United States are moving into the Holiday Season. All sorts of chaos ensues during this time of year, and that usually makes money tight, and time short. As a result many of the projects I am working on will slow down. We will be rolling out several new project pages over the next few weeks, some of these will be related to shooting/gun smithing, others will be unrelated to the hobby, but are projects that I am undertaking for work.

Given that the projects maybe slow, I’ll be working on more articles that focus on the manufacturing side of ammunition development and production.

This past week we made some more progress on getting the gremlins out of the VZ-58. Here’s a few write ups on what we did, and how it improved things.

VZ-58: Feed Ramp Addition

VZ-58: Anti-Walk Pins

VZ-58: Steel Case Ammo Issues

A new project that I’ll be working on is getting a old commercial Mauser shooting like it should. We’ll be doing some work on that this week.

Pawn Shop 30-06: Introduction

We introduced the project page for the Junk Mauser to 308 Scout Rifle, but I have yet to provide a formal introduction to that. We’ll be working through that this week. This should be an interesting project.

Do you have suggestions, comments or concerns? Shoot me an email at jayandrew338@gmail.com or check us out on Facebook!

Thanks for subscribing!

The Ballistic Assistant

I hope everyone has a chance to thank a Veteran today. They are truly special people who do not always receive the recognition they deserve. To those that served, thank you!

This past we were able to get out an test fire the VZ-58. Learned a few things in the process. We’re still working through some bugs with this rifle build, so expect o see a few more articles before we can call this project complete.

VZ-58: Test Firing & Installing the Ejector

We continued our discussion on Variation. This time how to visualize it using simple control charts. Hopefully this article will prove beneficial in helping to understand what normal and abnormal process variation looks like.

Visualizing Variation using Control Charts

We continue to make progress with the 3D Printer. There is still some design work left to do, but for the most part the major components have been modeled. I’ve started putting together the pieces for the frame, and we are well on our way to getting something going!

3D Printer: Cutting out the Wood Components

3D Printer: Cooling System First Concept

With everything we do, let us know what you think. If you have questions, comments or concerns, email me at jayandrew338@gmail.com. If you’d like to be an active member of the community head over to Facebook and like our page. Thanks for stopping by and have a good rest of the week!

Thanks,

The Ballistic Assistant