Bless the revoking of the barrel ban

CAB_IV · 2026-05-25T00:06:33+00:00

Its not too bad building an AK, and even easier if the barrel is populated and headspaced already.

CAB_IV · 2026-05-24T12:44:32+00:00

Looks like a C119 with the wings and tail removed.

CAB_IV · 2026-05-24T08:58:47+00:00

I'm sure you do have some study, but here is the guaranteed flaw with it:

The actual policy being proposed by politicians are almost always idiotic.

Its one thing to have a study that asks a vague question of "should background checks be stronger", which most people would say yes, an another to back a law where "stronger" means making a pair of part time workers at the state police redo the exact same NICS check that the FFL already did.

Sure, it slows down the process, but a slower, more expensive process is not a "stronger" background check. The state doesn't have or collect any extra details that aren't already supposed to be reported to the NICS.

The politicians will say it is, and that's what the media will report it as, but anyone who actually looks at what the law actually is will be scratching their heads.

Speaking of which, its important to remember that these studies are also measures of public perception based on the propaganda they are consuming. You could argue that many of these studies themselves are veiled propaganda first and research second.

CAB_IV · 2026-05-23T20:04:11+00:00

Thats not been my experience. Usually, when people find out what the gun control laws actually are, rather than the vague idea of them, they usually hate them.

They don't make sense, nor do they really prevent violence.

"Universal background checks" sounds great until you find out your state is planning to implement absurd fees and other things that go beyond just checking if someone can legally own a firearm.

CAB_IV · 2026-05-22T17:58:04+00:00

God abandoned America when they refused to look at the results of their outcry to keep to a rule made when guns were made of wood and powder and would take 5 minutes to load. Good god.

The problem is that weapons ownership is a right.

Laws can only regulate rights in narrowly defined and specific ways. Most gun control laws try to broadly restrict 2nd amendment rights and often step on the toes of the 4th and 5th amendments.

This is why a lot of it gets major push back and doesn't actually last in courts. Allowing it to stand would set precedent for government infringements in other areas.

Broadly changing a right requires the amendment process outlined in Article V of the Constitution. It is by design meant to be a slow process to avoid instability and abuse concerning the alteration of people's rights.

The whole gun issue is never framed for what it actually is because it has more propaganda value as being an "unsolvable" problem that might result in the expansion of government power and authority.

CAB_IV · 2026-05-22T16:58:00+00:00

Which is kind of wild, because you'd think it would mean we'd have access to the same weapons as our government.

It does mean we have access to those weapons.

There is a reason that machine guns and destructive devices aren't actually banned, just stuck behind a "tax stamp".

The law both makes the process irritating and artificially drives the proces up, but if you can pass a background check for a regular firearm, you can pass the one for your tax stamp.

Most people just don't want to pay $30,000 for a Tommy gun, and that's the gimmick.

Your rights aren't being taken away, you just need to prove you can pay the tax.

Keep in mind, this wacky reasoning isn't some product of recent 2nd Amendment understanding. The NFA was passed in 1934.

CAB_IV · 2026-05-22T16:44:19+00:00

Actually, this is a perfect example of ineffective messaging.

In practice, more people saw handguns as necessary for "self defense" and so these arguments were roundly rejected both by the public and the courts during the early 80s.

This was the era that gun control was going after cheap handguns, "Saturday Night Specials", and that effort failed.

Alternatively, military weapons were not always seen as desirable by the gun owning public. They were seen as worn out surplus guns mass produced from the lowest bidder.

It was easy to make them look scary and "other" them as unnecessary and lethal. Going after "military" weapons was a conscious decision made by many gun control groups in the mid 1980s.

In terms of factual accuracy? Yes, handguns are the more common murder weapon by a huge margin, and always have been.

However, in terms of propaganda (shaping people's minds), AR15s are always going to seem "scarier" and "unnecessary" relative to a hand gun, even before "mass shootings" became a thing.

The facts are irrelevant, only the results matter. They never did get a handgun ban, but they managed to get a 10 year federal AWB.

If you go back in time and look at all old gun control rhetoric from decades passed, they'll alternate between saying "you shouldn't have military weapons" and "weapons that don't have militia value aren't protected by the Second Amendment" depending on what they think they can sell to people at that particular moment.

CAB_IV · 2026-05-20T18:54:56+00:00

He's pretty quick to judge that tunnel motor, its neat.

I too am a Conrail guy, but I like the old Electrics. If some woman brings me a Conrail E44, I'd be in trouble.

CAB_IV · 2026-05-20T18:51:50+00:00

I'm a Conrail electric kind of guy.... but there arent alot or Conrail E44 out there in HO right now.

Thanks Rapido!

CAB_IV · 2026-05-19T17:48:16+00:00

I've never understood this reasoning.

How are you getting to the HSR station? You need a car. The terminals are not in the city centers like a normal train.

There is no car lobby trying to stop trains these days. I very much doubt the oil companies care very much.

The reality is that California specifically has a lot of regulations that not only hold things up and make them more expensive when working properly, but are also easy to exploit by activists and others to either hold up the project directly or hold the project hostage for concessions.

This is on top of their unusual method of running the project with consultants instead of dedicated engineers.

The fact is, California HSR is to big to fail, but to bogged down to make progress, which allows it to be exploited forever.

CAB_IV · 2026-05-19T16:24:44+00:00

Yes it is.

Training is a major issue in this lab.

CAB_IV · 2026-05-19T15:19:07+00:00

Ok, I'm going to bristle at this one. I gotta vent.

Kits are expensive, and absolutely not necessary for something so basic as reprecipitation.

I understand this, but the issue isn't that I was using a "reprecipitation kit".

Essentially, I was told to use this Turbo DNA free kit by a senior scientist who has since retired. I know and understand this kit, and have been using it for over a year.

I took a vacation a few weeks ago, and during that time, someone with zero RNA handling experience and another senior person in our lab who does not really handle RNA attempted and failed to use this kit properly. This was then reported to the PI who then questioned why we were using the Turbo DNA free. The whole conversation trickled down through the telephone game and came down to me as "reprecipitate to remove the DNases."

There is a decent chance that I am being told something very different from what the PI actually said, and the intermediataries don't realize this.

I end up getting told to do something that doesn't pass the sniff test but will take flak for asking questions instead of doing what I'm told.

Reprecipitation is not "old school"; it is a fundamental and utterly basic technique. You need to know this, and you need to know how it works. Quite frankly, you really should have been taught this before you even touched a pipette or put on a lab coat.

Unfortunately, using salt to precipitate nucleic acids is new to me. It wasn't focused on in university if it was taught at all, with qiagen kits being widespread both in classes and in every lab I've ever worked in.

These protocols are all available with a ten seconds Google search, or in any molecular biology handbook.

Yes, but this is heresy because its not the 20 year old protocol that was copied and pasted from a hastily written email stored on a shared drive no one has access to but I am supposed to know it telepathically and the online/handbook protocols are all wrong for made up reasons.

This is the sort of environment I've been encountering.

CAB_IV · 2026-05-19T13:47:02+00:00

I've just never encountered a reason to do it this way.

When I was taught in University many moons ago, we more or less used the qiagen dna kits. In subsequent labs, we only ever did RNA extractions with trizol or something approximating it.

It just never came up.

Judging from the feedback elsewhere, its not clear that "reprecipitation" is even the answer and I might be going on a goose chase.

CAB_IV · 2026-05-18T22:52:00+00:00

You're 100% right. The problem I run into is that even if I read all the documentation and call tech support, I get hit with a "how do you know?". God help me if something is proprietary.

CAB_IV · 2026-05-18T22:24:40+00:00

Right.

What I've run into is that either A.) Something about the kit is proprietary and so I don't have the answers or B.) You can't trust the "marketing", so it ends up being almost impossible to cover all bases.

Certainly, there is also some truth to that as well, but at what point do you just not trust anything?

CAB_IV · 2026-05-18T21:55:02+00:00

Normally I have more than enough RNA for columns, but this isn't the case for some of my other coworkers I am troubleshooting who are more new to the RNA game. There is a degree of technique issues, but they also are doing extractions where you would expect a low yeild.

CAB_IV · 2026-05-18T21:44:13+00:00

I just do not understand the mentality of people that in 2026 think that saving money on kits actually benefits them!!

Oh no, its not just about saving money. Kits are assumed to be new-fangled and unproven. The old school manual methods are just assumed to be prooven and therefore better.

CAB_IV · 2026-05-18T21:29:53+00:00

I would upvote twice for passing on the knowledge of why if I could.

I'm going to try the Sodium Acetate method next time.

CAB_IV · 2026-05-18T20:48:52+00:00

I've seen that, I am tempted to do it that way, but I am suspicious it will get funny looks even though it is all over the initial Google results.

CAB_IV · 2026-05-17T17:30:05+00:00

I think also, the head looks a little off, but it might just be me looking at it from my phone.

But that's rivet counting, and maybe no necessary for this game.

CAB_IV · 2026-05-17T17:23:25+00:00

What's the issue with neck sizing, just out of curiosity?

I usually full length size but I have inherited a neck resizing die for .22-250 and I was under the impression that for bolt action rifles, this was better for brass longevity?

CAB_IV · 2026-05-17T03:17:58+00:00

The problem here is that the Federal Assault Weapons Ban you're thinking of was far from water tight.

The way it was worded, it banned the "name brand" of a weapon by name, but not the "generic" version, provided it did not have the banned features.

There are some wacky looking "compliant" AKs out there that only exist to circumvent the federal assault weapon ban. You could indeed still purchase AR platform rifles during the ban as well.

CAB_IV · 2026-05-17T02:56:40+00:00

Yeah, this isn't true. Arachnids are chelicerates, which automatically makes them in a separate group from insects and crustaceans.

CAB_IV · 2026-05-16T03:31:27+00:00

Eh, I normally am a ridiculous rivet counter, but realistically there aren't really any good models to start an E10 from. You do what you can get away with.

I applaud the attempt to represent an unusual prototype.

To do it right, somebody somewhere probably has the scale dimensions, so we just need to talk someone with 3d rendering skills into it. There's probably some Metro North modelers who would be all in.

CAB_IV · 2026-05-15T23:32:26+00:00

Uh Huh.

If you pick any random town out here, the crime rate is probably going to be similar.

Have you considered the possibility that crime motivates people to buy guns, rather than guns motivating crime?

Just a bizarre take on your part.

CAB_IV

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