Firearms

Out of curiosity, as well as to make use of the VAT exemption that lasted until July 2021, I bought a Chinese TLR-8 knock-off for the P-01. My review went as follows:

I can’t imagine any real world situation where this would be useful to a civilian, except to scare off burglars. It sucks for concealed carry because it’s large, you need to manually turn it on, you lose the nice space for your index finger in front of the trigger guard, and finally the laser sits way too low, hence it’s inaccurate by design, and mostly a curiosity.

I’ve had some success with an UpLULA knock-off (it has since disappeared from AliExpress). While it is a bit tricky to use—​partly due to being a loose fit—​and it will damage the curved plastic bottom of CZ 75 P-01 double-stack magazines if you try to use it for the first round (I’ve managed to sandpaper the groove away), your thumb will thank you. I’ve also tried several 3D-printed designs I could find on the Internet, mostly resembling the Glock speed loader, and all of them have failed me completely.

The ETS loader seems like it might employ the right kind of mechanism, it’s just a bit too large.

I might want to try designing my own model, though this is guaranteed to cost me a huge amount of time. And hand loading isn’t that bad, anyway.

When I bought the rifle, I was offered a 4M sling to go with it. Only later did I figure out how utterly shitty it is. First, the metal spring hooks: they’re hard to put on or off, and they’ll happily leave marks on their mounts (I tried to fix this with heat shrink tubes, but they add a rather thick layer and don’t hold well anyway). Following that, look at all the buckles and other random shit in there. It’s so fucking long and rigid that it’s all but impossible to go quickly from carrying the rifle to aiming, as you need to get that fucking thing out of your face.

So I went shopping for something that doesn’t suck. The various circular holes turned out to be so-called QD sockets (the frontmost one is different, though). A cheap MS4 knock-off, which has also disappeared from AliExpress, was the solution.

Somewhat annoyingly, the clasp to convert it to a 1-point sling is fairly light grey, making it stand out, but that’s just a nitpick. The more important issue was that the front QD socket is just a hole, and the metal QD swivel would, as with the clasps before, scrape a circle around it. I’ve managed to fix this by making an appropriately sized ring out of a random piece of plastic packaging (most likely PET, which can theoretically be 3D printed in a thin layer), and pushing it over the pin.

Later I instead installed a proper QD mount in one of the M-LOK slots in front of that bare hole. Note that the nearby panels are there to hold the barrel in place, and aren’t intended to be used for mounting.

For the other side, I’ve tried to use polyurethane varnish, though that inconveniently glued the little balls to their housing, and it isn’t all that resilient anyway.

I’ve been talked into getting one, so I 3D-printed two, in ‘galaxy black’ PLA průšament, 0.6 mm nozzle at 0.15 mm layer height:

I hope they won’t melt themselves into the gun, but I don’t remember ever getting it too hot to touch. PLA prints accurately, which makes the result nice to look at.

Here, it’s relatively easy to find a good one. My favourite model just had issues with printing the curved ram part in PETG, as thin floating layers like to warp upwards, so I just reused a blocky one from another model that couldn’t load rounds properly. The 1.1 version is better, as the locking tab has shown itself difficult to clean up after printing, and completely unnecessary.

I’ve seen an interesting failure mode here: several rounds loading up vertically on each other in a double-stacked magazine. Imagine emptying a full magazine, reloading it back, and having leftover pieces.

The rifle can be assembled wrong in at least two ways that will cause a problem: if you forget to reinsert the pin into the bolt carrier, the assembly may refuse to come out; and the buffer spring can be inserted in the wrong orientation, requiring something like a flat-head screwdriver to get it out.

The manual doesn’t mention that you’ll want to push the hammer down before reattaching the lower receiver, because it otherwise stands in the way.

Blindly trusting the manufacturer’s cleaning set to come with appropriate patches turned out to be a big mistake. The included rags must actually be cut to about 3×3 cm if you want to use them as cleaning patches, because if you otherwise try to pull them through the barrel by force, you’ll irreversibly dismantle the pressure-fit cable:

Second, thinking that the fancy-looking Breakthrough Clean Techologies' Vision Series Rifle Cleaning Kit for .223 (what a mouthful) would necessarily be any better was also dumb:

At least both of these sets seem to use the 8/32" UNC thread, so they can complement each other to some extent.

In the end, I bought the .22/30" version of Bore Stix, and if I manage to scratch it, I’ll try Tipton DeLuxe—​I’m a bit apprehensive of breaking carbon fibre rods, and it doesn’t come in a particularly suitable length.