Marlin Misfire Managed
"Over the next 30 years, national politics will be about either dramatic reforms to slow the growth of government, or enormous tax increases to pay for it. There is no other choice. Pick your side now." -- Peter Ferrara of the Institute for Policy Innovation
# I had a problem for about a year now where my Marlin 444P sometimes failed to fire. If I cocked it a second time, the second hammer fall set it off. I tried a new spring, which fixed the problem for a little while. I got a one-piece firing pin, which made the problem worse. I thought for the last week or so that it had something to do with my hand-loaded ammo, since a box of commercial ammo worked fine. Last night, I finally fixed it. I loaded 15 primers in a .30-06 case and fired them with my Savage bolt gun. No misfires. I loaded 10 primers from the same box in a .444 Marlin case and fired them with my 444P. Three or four failed to fire on the first hammer fall. It occurred to me that maybe I had installed the hammer spring adjusting plate (#42 in this schematic) backwards. Nope. It doesn't work backwards. But I noticed that by straightening it out a little, I could make it compress the spring a little more. Five minutes later, it was fixed. It fired 10 primers in a row. Range test with fully-loaded ammo sometime this week. I posted a photo of the assembled mainspring and (adjusted) adjusting plate here (57K).
# L. Neil Smith at The Libertarian Enterprise - A Herring of a Different Color - why enforcing a prohibition on abortion or a prohibition on illegal aliens are both far worse than the problem. [tle]
There is nothing--nothing--that illegal immigrants can do to a county like America that is one percent as bad as what legislation persecuting illegal immigrants can do to it. (Exactly the same is true of laws against drugs and guns, but that's an argument for another day.) The only thing that's saving us right now from more damage is that the immigration laws are only spottily enforced by bureacratic drones.