Month: December 2019

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