We are going to buy a Kel-Tec PF9 at retail, and then all we’re going to do with it is shoot it. We are constantly getting emails from readers and fans about how Kel-Tec’s are reliable, and I don’t believe them because I’ve seen multiple examples of the PF9 fail, some in fairly spectacular fashion.
Eagerly awaiting those results. With pictures, hopefully. Maybe I should start a betting pool on the first major failure…
For some reason, people were actually looking forward to Kel-Tec’s PMR-30 .22 Magnum handgun. I say “for some reason” because I find pretty much every firearm that Kel-Tec has ever made to be one step above Hi-Point in terms of finish and function. I guess bullets leaving the muzzle of PMRs have a tendency to tumble in flight ’cause Kel-Tec put the wrong rifling twist in their barrels:
As time has progressed, so has the PMR-30. Since the start of the year the PMR-30 has been shipping in full quantities to all of our distributors on a rotating basis (to make it fair for all distributors). Recently we have been made aware of a potential issue that we feel our customers should definitely be made aware of. We are in the middle of a re-design to our barrel due to key-holing concerns. For those unfamiliar with key-holing, basically it is when the bullet tumbles end over end rather than travelling stable with a solid spiral. It seems as though the 1:16 twist ratio of our barrels isn’t quite preventing these issues from occurring. We are currently testing new twist ratios for the PMR-30 so that these issues no longer occur (1:9 and 1:12).
No word as of yet on whether or not they’ll update the overall design of the pistol to actually be somewhat aesthetically pleasing.
Hat tip to Caleb at Gun Nuts for pointing out a great reminder to anyone looking for a good defensive pistol: your gun (or any gear for that matter) can’t fight for you. To quote the article at Insight Training:
Personal safety is not a hardware issue. No amount of guns, pepper spray, knives, or other weapons will make you safe. Your personal safety is a software issue first and foremost, and buying the latest “self-defense” gear and gadgetry is not a proper substitute for training, mindset, and preparation.
I cannot agree with this more. I consider myself good with a gun, not great. I consider myself as invested in thinking a lot about why I carry one and why I might use one for any variety of reasons. I see people buying lasers for their carry guns and cringe… really? Another mechanical device, usually a lot less robust than the gun it’s strapped to, that can fail at a really bad time? Burn the ability to gain a good sight picture into your muscle memory instead. Read the rest of this entry »
Shelley Rae over at Gun Nuts put up her $0.02 about the Ruger LC9, and I’m not coming away from reading that convinced that Ruger has been able to take a proven Kel-Tec design in the PF9 and make it $110 better. And here I was, thinking that this gun was on the table for a compact 9mm carry piece… By the way, is it really possible to take a Kel-Tec design (which this obviously is, would be interested to see WTF Ruger is doing as far as licensing/copying Kel-Tec guns) and actually make it worse? And I really wanted to like it, especially after my mild disappointment with handling an SR9c vs. a Glock 19.
By the way, if I want to punish the crap out of my hand I’ll just put 100rds down the barrel of my PM9. Yay.
I just got back from (as the title says) a 4-day rifle course at Front Sight in Nevada. I’m a lifetime member from something like 6 years ago but I’ve only attended, and greatly enjoyed, one pistol class there. While I like to keep the focus of my training on skills with little focus on social or political discourse, I just like good training for a reasonable price. Front Sight most definitely has that good training at a good price.
Homebuilt AR15, 16″ gov’t profile 1/7 twist flat top upper, backup sights with a quick-release-mounted Aimpoint CompML2. Stock trigger, collapsible stock with a Magpul AFG
Shooter’s pouch, or something akin to a small shotshell pouch to mount on my belt for spare .223 rounds, also might consider one large enough to drop a mag into
5.11 or BDU-esque pants with large cargo pockets that stay open easily
COMFORTABLE knee and elbow pads. I had some $20 knee pads that I never really tried out, and would pinch me on every prone shot so I discarded them. I bought some volleyball elbow pads at Walmart after day one that helped. THICK tacticool pants with reinforced knees work. But those mats chew you up fast.
What I did before traveling out to NV:
Sighted in iron and red dot at 50 yards
Function tested the hell out of my gun. You’d be surprised at how many people wasted the course or went to rentals due to malfunctions.
What I did every day:
Skipped almost every lunch lecture (1 on Front Sight memberships, 1 on situatoinal awareness/conditions, some basic tactics, some legal/moral stuff, and equipment selection)
Cleaned and lubed my AR each night with M-Pro solvent and Pro Shot oil, which is my definitive favorite combo
Bought my lunch the night before at Albertson’s or Walmart in Pahrump and brought Gatorade packets to mix with their water
…but PowerGUI has the exact same functionality, with the ability to tie in all your other (Exchange, Active Directory, etc) PowerPacks.
The VMware PowerPack has now come back under the PowerGUI installation wizard and is part of PowerGUI 2.3 which can be downloaded from the PowerGUI site here.
Lest I start in again on how much I love PowerGUI and PowerCLI for managing your VMware environment, let’s just revisit the topic here.
Pre-migration PowerShell lifesaving tip of the day: get a listing of all your VMs and the datastores they’re living on (’cause we all know your VM names don’t match their storage names, right?) in case you need to re-register your VMs from storage. We’re heading into another datacenter move, and I’ve learned that it’s nice to know exactly where everything lives rather than try to find it that day when all you might have is your storage available. Kudos to Scott March for his script to do the heavy lifting:
This little tidbit saved me a ton of time and right-click pain today. We’re moving a datacenter overseas and I needed to add a ton of datastores to a bunch of hosts, as well as set their multipathing policy for each LUN. Trying to do this by hand? Teh suck. Trying to do this by host profiles? I banged my head against that wall for an hour before realizing that host profiles don’t handle this. But lo and behold, it’s pretty simple using my new best friend, the PowerCLI. Read on for the latest installing in how much I love admin’ing vSphere via PowerCLI…
If you’re running a home lab, you kind of owe it to yourself to get a simple install of their products up and running. Diving more and more into their monitoring tools, as well as having Replication save my butt on a remote office move recently, I’ve got nothing but high regard for what Veeam offers to the virtualization community – and today? What it offers the virtualization community for free. Props to virtualization.info for the heads up!
Hats off to Luc at www.virtu-al.net for this incredibly useful PowerShell script to identify the display names of VMs and any that don’t match their folder structure. If you’ve ever unregistered a virtual machine in vCenter and sort of spaced where it lived on your datastores, trying to find a VM’s hostname in a bunch of folders that don’t match that display name can be an utter pain. Oftentimes, I’ve had to do this under pressure. Like during an outage. Fun.
