Usher. He's a pop R&B singer who has done some nice stuff. A few of his tunes are staples in heavy dance clubs & you can't listen to pop radio for long without coming across some of his tunes. Can I Get A Witness is a cover of an old Marvin Gaye tune. It's a cute little doo-wop style rock'n'roll tune & of course it's about a relationship that isn't going well, but the guy seems determined to stick around cause he loves her. Still he wants to know someone understands.
Here's a vid of Usher covering the tune, though the only one I could find seems to be a clip from a movie. Here's a vid of Marvin Gaye doing the tune. As per custom here are the lyrics.
The first post titled Can I Get A Witness was about the specs & pics of my new 10mm. This one will be about the first range trip.
Mu.nu is being difficult about uploading pics so here's a post I did on my old blospot site that has a few pics of the targets.
I went up to my favorite shooting area up in St Vrain's Canyon (which is a bit NW of Boulder). It was snowing very lightly & sporadically when I arrived but by the time i set up my gear it had stopped. My intention was to chronograph some loads I had assembled for the 10mm so the targets I have were all shot at around 30 feet or so.
I started off using some factory ammo to make sure the sights were close to the point of impact. It was American Eagle 180 grain FMJ's that had an advertised velocity of 1050 fps. For a 10mm this is a very light load & recoil was not an issue at all. The chrono showed them to be reaching around 1025 fps or so. & accuracy was surprisingly good.
I've never claimed to be a decent shot with a pistol. I'm much more into rifles & admittedly I don't practice with handguns as much as I should, but even at 30 feet I was impressed by the targets. In a decent shooter's hands I'm sure this would be an accurate little hogleg.
In any case my books show a 10mm being able to reach 1287 fps with 180 grain bullets. The powder I was using was Longshot & it's a most impressive little pusher indeed. It'll take a 135 grain JHP in a .40 S&W & push it to nearly 1500 fps while staying under the SAAMI pressure maximum for the .40 S&W. I had confidence that this powder would give me what I wanted in the 10mm.
The starting load had a listed velocity of 1221 fps. Over my chronograph it fell short of this. But then again I was using a different primer & case than Longshot listed so there's always going to be some variation. & this is also why it's important to start with the starting load. I was showing 1180 fps or so for a Speer 180 grain TMJ bullet.
By the time I reached the mid-range load in the book (8.9 grains) I was hitting 1240 fps & decided to stop. I could have went a little further but I felt that 1240 fps was plenty fast enough for what I'd use the 10mm for & I was running out of light anyway. Gaining 40 fps isn't that big of a deal to me. I should be getting about 614 foot-pounds of energy with the load I settled on & that should be ample enough for any two or four legged predator that I run into.
The accuracy was not bad with the handloads either. It was only 30 feet but considering that I'm not a great pistol shot I thought it was mighty impressive for an out of the box pistol. There were no feeding or ejection problems at all, but then again I was using FMJ's which usually are easy on a pistol's digestive tract.
The ejection though; I had laid out a tarp to catch the brass & realized pretty quickly that I didn't have it placed right. The brass was going to 4 O'clock but around 12 feet from the pistol. The ejector is so strong that if I'm clearing the chamber it'll lob a loaded cartridge a foot away from the ejection port.
The controls are a bit more manageable than I thought they would be. I had some reservations about the over-sized safety getting in the way of the slide release but it caused no problems while I was shooting.
Recoil was a non-issue for me. The weight of the gun & the shape of the grip made this as mild as my .40 S&W even with the stoutest handloads I tried.
All in all I'm pretty happy with the pistol. Course I still want to throw on some wood grips & replace the barrel with something conventionally rifled. I'm still planning on coating it with some Teflon-moly paint to make it a nice uniform matte black but for now I think I can make do with it as is. I won't make any promises but as I work up new loads & put the pistol through its paces I'll try to post more about it, but I don't expect any range trips real soon (barring some bonnie lass wanting to get a range trip in of course).
& since someone asked in the comments to the first post I've found that an Uncle Mike's thumbreak holster I was using for a Taurus Pt-100 works fine for the Witness.
Posted by Publicola at December 8, 2006 12:59 PM | TrackBackI recently picked up a 10mm myself, a Kimber Stainless Target II. Most of what I've put through it so far has been the Federal AE, but I've been saving my brass for when I get into handloading. The hottest ammo that's been through it so far is the Winchester Silvertip 175-grain hollowpoint, which I think goes out of the 5" barrel at about 1240 fps. I was thinking the recoil would be a lot worse than it was, based on the horror stories I've heard about the 10mm in its proper configuration. Of course, no doubt the Buffalo Bore and Double Tap ammo would kick harder, but then, I wouldn't have bought the 10mm if I was afraid of it.
Posted by: the pistolero at December 8, 2006 05:18 PM