Was whittling down the awkward grips on my Chi-Com Tokarev today to make them more comfortable when I got to thinking about some of the bad mistakes I made with firearms. While the grips turned out well, my work-bench is filled with odds and ends of guns that didnt.

Like the time I tried to improve the ergonomics of the HiPoint Carbine I had and ended up with something resembling a retarded hump-back Cobray M11/9....

Or the retractable SKS stock I tried to make out of True-Valu Hardware parts.

Or the concerted effort I made to 'improve' a Universal M1 and ended up with something resembling a Mad Max "Enforcer" pistol.

But the stupidity didn't begin there,

I once was stripping a Lebel and forgot to take the bolt out and check the chamber. I was having an awful time pulling the trigger-guard/assembly off, until with one great yank the room became suddenly silent for me and there was suddenly a multitude of dust in the air. Thank GOD for concrete basements- I put an 8mm hole through a bookcase and into the wall. Pretty impressive too. Still there to this day.

My final bit of stupidity was when I was moving out of my last apartment in college and was emptying the tube-fed magazine on my Mossberg 42B target rifle. I'd adjusted the trigger to less than a pound for accurate shooting, but forgotten to tighten the retaining screw. The last round in the rifle wouldn't slide out so I put the plunger in, worked the bolt, and WHAM. The trigger had loosened up too much and let go right as the bolt locked. Just glad it went laterally and shot out the window facing the hill and not the next door neighbors place.

Of course stupidity hasn't been all my realm,
Once while hunting rabbits a buddy of mine got overzealous tracking one with an SKS and put four rounds with in eight inches of me when the rabbit bolted by me.

Or the final try I made Coyote hunting. We'd made arrangements with the farmer to hunt on his land while he was away. He neglected to tell his 16 year old son (or more than likely his son just forgot) that we'd be out there. Of course it didn't help that we dressed like a bunch of Spetnaz either. But it was all the hunting gear we had at the time. Anyhow, the kid opened up on us with a 10/22 at a few hundred yards and ended up getting me in the leg somehow. Only time I've ever gone under the knife or had stitches.

So how about everyone else? I know the stories are out there...

Reb Gray


Edited for spelling.

When I was 16 I shot at the biggest bear I have ever seen to this day. My Springfield went "CLICK!!!" ...I forgot to chamber a round, and I lost the bear. That's about it for me.
Rebel, you're lucky you're alive, if it wasn't for bad luck, you'd have none at all bud!
_______________________________________________

Got F.A.L.?

What did the 22 lr do to your leg? Did it go clean thru?

RebelGray,

stay away, far away from firearms.

I actually tried to make a gun for a history project. I was doing a report on Davy Crockett. Cool thing was, my history teacher was going to let me actually fire it behind the school. (small rural Christian school) It was supposed to be a .45 caliber muzzleloader. Tried to make it a flint-lock. I was using lead pipe for the barrel. (This was about 6-7 years ago.) I got about half-way through and decided I'd just use his muzzle-loader instead. So I've actually had a working firearm at school, during school. Didn't get to fire it though.

Quoted: Like the time I tried to improve the ergonomics of the HiPoint Carbine I had and ended up with something resembeling a retarded hump-back Cobray M11/9....

DUDE!! How the hell can you improve on the ergonomics of the venerable HiPoint?

Once while hunting rabbits... with an SKS ... Reb Gray

Like I said in another thread--you gotta use enough gun!  I've been known to take the ole .45ACP wabbit hunting now and then...

You're a lucky man Reb--hope it keeps up!

My stupid story is this one:  I was in college and very poor and had sold/hocked most of my guns.  Duck season rolls around and I'm too poor to get the Benelli (ok, ok, it was a mossberg) out of the pawnshop, so I borrow this really nice Browning (I think that was it--those days are kinda fuzzy)semiauto from my boss to go hunting with.  My boss didn't really use it much and it had some surface rust on it, so I decide to tear it down and give it a GOOOOD cleaning the night before we hit the flooded timber.  FF to the next morning and the first flight of teal come zooming by the dekes--I bring up the shotgun and fire off my first round.  My brother says :"WTF was that?" I say, "Whadddaya talkin about?"  He says, "What happened to your...I mean your bosses' gun?"  Apparently, I'd forgotten to screw the endcap down tightly enough when I put the gun together, so that with the first shot, all the "innards" in the tube went flying out 40 feet into the murky water.  I kept on hunting with this really cool single shot for the rest of the day.  

Rebel, you're lucky you're alive, if it wasn't for bad luck, you'd have none at all bud!

You've no idea. Forgot to add my first Comission Rifle (German Gew88). Some enterprising individual had completely refinished a Gew88 to look like one of the WWI models with a box magazine instead of a mannlicher type, and marked it with German markings and everything.

The base rifle underneith was actually a Chinese "Hangyang 88" copy, of Khyber Pass quality. The bore was also a .318 instead of a .323, however the dipshit gunsmith I had given it to to measure said "oh, yes, its an 8mm". I didnt trust it anyhow and decided to shoot it 'hugging a tree'. The entire thing blew appart like a pipe bomb and burned and cut my hands pretty good.

Note to add though- I admit every situation here was exceedingly stupid and could have been avoided had I been a little less eager and a little smarter.

The .22 was slow enough at that point that it only went in a quarter inch. To this day I figure it was a ricochet. None the less it hurt like hell.

....Decided I'd see how 'bad' the 405 gr. bullets of my brand new 45/70 were and figured they'd "really tear up that piece of 1/2" steel".......at 20 yds.

I knelt down to get a good shot, and no sooner than I had pulled the trigger, I jumped up in pain as my arm was REALLY burning.

I had to dig a large piece of copper jacket out of my arm (still have the scar).  I was freaked when I realized that a 6" difference could have been my eye.  Needless to say, I'm extremely conscience of ricocheting lead/copper now.

J

I had just gotten my brand new Armalite AR-180B, and wanted to know everything about the rifle before I took it out.

So, I'm sitting on the floor and I can't get the damn thing to come apart. Pushing on the back plate as hard as I can, nothing.

So, I post about it on ArmaLite's website, and get no response for a day or so.

So I shoot a couple boxes, no problems, and decided to try to break it down again.

I push down with a cleaning rod, it comes open, and the back plate just kinds sits there. So I grab it and it comes flying out and hits me in the chest right between the ribs. Hurt like hell.

I go on Armalite's website, and sure enough, there's a reply from them telling me it's probably tight, and be careful that the spring assembly doesn't fly out and hit me.


Story Two:

My dad and I are cleaning my Model 70 .30-06 after it had been in storage while I was away at school.

My dad is messing with the bolt, says "Somehow this comes apart" and he twists it. It won't go in the gun, and we can't get it back to proper allignment. Two hours of fiddiling and internet searches

Naturally, I get to take it to the gunshop and ask the stupid question even though I wasn't the one messing with the bolt.

Walk in, find the guy, say, "I don't know what my dad did." Guys takes my bolt, gives it a firm twist, and it's done. Hands it back to me.
God, I felt like a moron.

Spade, story #2 made me remember a similar incident...funny how that works.
Dad buys me my first deer gun--a Marlin 336 .30/30.  I tear it apart as far as it goes--pretty simple, take out the lever, pull the bolt out.  The bitch is that when I put the bolt back in and try to get the lever in the proper place--it CANT be done.  I fiddle with it.  Dad fiddles with it.  Great!  I have the rifle for 3 hours and already it's inoperable.
We go to the gunsmith down the road and he puts the lever in, slides the bolt and it's done.  He's a very kind older gentleman and all he says is, "It's just one of those things...you got to hold your tongue juuuust right..." while smiling his ass off  and doesnt charge me anything.  I know that everytime he sees me he thinks of that day when this dumbass neighbor kid came in with this ridiculous problem...

My Grandfather bought an old Russian Moison Nagant M44 Carbine at a flea market for my younger brother for about $45. The guy had fought in Vietnam, and got it off a dead gook. The stock had been cut down, and the whole thing was loose and rusted. We didn't want it to blow up when my little brother shot it, so we tied it to a hay bale, stuck the bayonet into the dirt, put on safety goggles and steel pot helmets, tied a string to the trigger, and sat WAY back. Then we jerked the string, gun goes BOOM and the recoil not only pulled the bayonet out of the ground, it rolled the hay bale around so that the muzzle was pointed right at us.
So we figured it wasn't going to blow up. I took it apart and cleaned the internals really good, and most of the problems dissapeared.

2nd story. The first gun my same brother got was a cheap Marlin semi-auto .22. They bought it at a gunshow for $50. The stock was warped and cracked, the sights were missing, the scope was a POS, but hey, it's a semi-auto rifle. So I'm standing there, trying to teach him how to shoot better, as he unloads into a stump. I was standing off to the right of the gun. All of a sudden there's this really loud bang and the gun jams. And the gravel in front of my feet gets sprayed up. See, what happened was it fed a .22 LR shell in sideways, and the bolt crushed the primer, causing the shell to go off. We cleaned that one real good too.

My father in-law gave me a semi auto pistol for my birthday.  My first pistol ever.  So I took it over to the family farm, set up a steel tractor trailer rim and started blasting away at the rim.  Was having a real blast, loved the ring the rim made every time I hit it.  The very last shot, I suddenly felt pain in my stomach.  At first I thought maybe somebody had thrown something at me but nobody was around.  I thought maybe I had shot myself, so I pull my shirt up and while there was a red mark, there wasn't a hole in me.  I thought maybe I had just dreamed it, I then looked down on the ground and at my feet was a nice mushroomed out 9mm FMJ.  It then occured to me what had happened.  

Another time I was sitting under a hedgeapple tree hunting doves, I hit one of those hedge apples by accident, I was suddenly drenched and covered in hedgeapple juice.  

A friend of mine, who has a habit of trying to out do anybody and everybody including ultra dumb things.  Bought a franken piece mealed AK-47.  We were trying to cross a creek, and the end of the barrel got mud in it, he racks the slide, pulls the trigger, I was standing the side.  Mudd, went everywhere!  His response was "try that with with your AR-15 and you will blow your fingers off"! I just shook my head.

Same friend, invites me fishing.  We are walking through the woods to the lake when we discover a dead deer.  So we take a look at it and it is obvious in the July heat that it is quite ripe.  The belly of this deer is swollen to about 4 times its normal size the skin is very tight.  So my friend sharpens a stick and fashions a speer and proceeds to try and pop the deer belly to see what is inside.  He throws it several times but the skin is too tight and when it hits the hair it glances off.  So I tell my friend to give the the speer and I will pop the belly, I run towards the deer's belly like a knight with a jousting rod.  I ram it deep into the belly, thus releiving all that tension on skin, maggots flew everywhere.  At first it was like "hey something hit me", then I looked down at my arms, and saw maggots crawling all over me, they were on my face, in my shoes, pockets, mouth, in my hair, all over my friend.  Needless to say we ran to the lake screaming all the way trying to get all those maggots off of our bodies.  

I think that sums up top 3 or 4 dumb things I have done.  

Quoted: Same friend, invites me fishing.  We are walking through the woods to the lake when we discover a dead deer.  So we take a look at it and it is obvious in the July heat that it is quite ripe.  The belly of this deer is swollen to about 4 times its normal size the skin is very tight.  So my friend sharpens a stick and fashions a speer and proceeds to try and pop the deer belly to see what is inside.  He throws it several times but the skin is too tight and when it hits the hair it glances off.  So I tell my friend to give the the speer and I will pop the belly, I run towards the deer's belly like a knight with a jousting rod.  I ram it deep into the belly, thus releiving all that tension on skin, maggots flew everywhere.  At first it was like "hey something hit me", then I looked down at my arms, and saw maggots crawling all over me, they were on my face, in my shoes, pockets, mouth, in my hair, all over my friend.  Needless to say we ran to the lake screaming all the way trying to get all those maggots off of our bodies.   I think that sums up top 3 or 4 dumb things I have done.

Sounds like a movie  "Red sky at morning" (I think thats the name)  where they run up and touch the dead cow,   the last guy trips and dives head first into the stomach of the dead rotting bloated cow.

My step dad used to sell medicine for bed-sores for a pharmaceutical company. One of their biggest competitors was the medical use of maggots to eat the necrotic flesh off of the patients.

<shudders>

I wanna die a young, good looking corpse. Them critters can have my body after I've vacated it.

Remember an article in a local, small town newspaper a couple of years ago about a man accidently shooting his mother.  Seems there was a nail sticking out of the baseboard and being the "good son", he decided to nail it in for her.  The mother stood behind the son as he kneeled on the floor and proceeded to tap the nail back in place using the butt of a 25 caliber handgun......duh!!!!

Man you guys do some "dumbass" stuff!

If I had to tell something I guess I'd could tell "When I was a kid at my Grandparents farm the first thing I did when I went into their house was run to the closet and grab a gun to shoot or play with. Well I was walking in the pasture one day (thank goodness the cows were gone) when I spied a fresh cow turd. I took aim on that sucker and "blam" I fired off a .22 round into the cowpile and soon after I was also covered with turd. Splatered from head to toe. Glad I can laugh about it now!

i havent done any unsafe dumb stuff, just stupid stuff in general(shooting funny targets and such)

A friend of mine has one of the Traditions blackpowder/38 Spl conversion pistols.  His 15 year old son was shooting it and obviously not paying attention.  On the third round in the cylinder, a round stuck in the barrel.  He then proceeded to shoot the fourth, fifth, and sixth round behind that.

He couldn't tell where his rounds were hitting, so with 4 38 Spl 158gr bullets lodged in the barrel, he proceeded to reload and lodge the fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, and finally the tenth round in the barrel, which, by this time was completely filled.  The last round bridged the gap between the cylinder and the barrel and locked the action up.  He nor his dad couldn't figure out what happened so they brought it to me.  

I was amazed as I literally dug all 10 rounds out of the barrel, which only showed about 6 distinctive humps where some of the rounds were stopped by others.

Luckily, no one was hurt.  This by far is the most amazing thing I have ever seen concerning a firearm and speaks volumes about the quality of that particular piece.

J

dumbest was  shooting a A FA krinkov in 7.62x39 with a 75 round drum and while doing so trying to hold the handguards. first couple of rounds ok kidna warm. then after about 10 or so OUCH! hand goes on the mag. damn that was really hot.

I was shooting my Bushmaster AK Shorty on my friends ranch in Nebraska. We rode out to a shooting spot on his Honda ATC. After I emptied about three mags through my Bushmaster I cleared it and set the hot barrel against the black plastic rear fender of the ATC and it melted clean through it. It took a month to get all that plastic off the barrel. When I first went duck hunting I shot and wounded a mallard and he was flopping around the water. Instead of ringing his neck, I pointed my shotgun right at his breast from  about 6 feet and pulled the trigger, it sent the plastic wad right through the duck ruining the meat. That duck had a ragged 12 gauge hole clean through him.

The story about the dead animals brought back to me an unpleasent experience. My uncle owns a farm and I have always hunted there. Well, I was walking in the woods and come across a dead cow. All four feet were sticking straight out and not touching the ground so you know that this thing was really bloated. It was September and the days were still quite warm so the smell was terrible(even upwind that smell seemed to just hang there). I decided I was going to shoot the cow in the head to see what my new  9mm would do. (I was 23 years old and should have known better)I'm standing about eight feet away from the cow and as I pull the trigger I see this blob flying in slow motionback at me. In a second the blob hit me square between the eyes. I managed to turn around to run and just lost it. I dropped to the ground and proceeded to puke my guts out.
Moral to the story... Don't mess with dead animals. Yuck.

Many many years ago...

I once was running towards a target board while firing intending to do a bayonet charge.

It so happened that in the shrubbery behind the target was a brake drum...

I didn't know I had been hit until I turned facing the wind an felt a spray of blood on my white shirt. It took a while to locate the 3/8" long fragment of bullet jacket that was protruding from the back of my ear. (it had almost made it clean through)

BTW - I wear glasses, and several years ago a friend of mine died when a brazed carbide cutter let go in a router and in went through his neck, he was dead in 20 seconds.  Ever since then I have had special "Explosion Proof" lenses specified for all my "working" glasses.  When this incident occurred it was shortly after I had gotten my first pair. I still tell the man, don't tell me what it costs, just get it.

Ok, I haven't posted in months, but here's my addition to the ND Brigade:

1. Standing next to my buddy as he fired a 92FS into a Master lock at the  distance of, oh, point blank.
2. Lying on the sofa with my "unloaded" P220 and *Blammo*!...a Black Talon through the ceiling.
3. While shooting in the desert with the same buddy, we inspected a target with my P220 at my side, and *Blammo*!...a Black Talon into the dirt at my foot.
4. Showing another buddy my shotty, and *HUGE BLAMMO*!...a Brenneke slug through the wall parallel to us.
All of this was long ago, and now I just point my finger and shout *BLAMMO*!
I still feel very stupid. Thank you for reading.

Note to self: Don't go around Buddha when he has a gun.

Quoted: Ok, I haven't posted in months, but here's my addition to the ND Brigade: 1. Standing next to my buddy as he fired a 92FS into a Master lock at the  distance of, oh, point blank. 2. Lying on the sofa with my "unloaded" P220 and *Blammo*!...a Black Talon through the ceiling. 3. While shooting in the desert with the same buddy, we inspected a target with my P220 at my side, and *Blammo*!...a Black Talon into the dirt at my foot. 4. Showing another buddy my shotty, and *HUGE BLAMMO*!...a Brenneke slug through the wall parallel to us. All of this was long ago, and now I just point my finger and shout *BLAMMO*! I still feel very stupid. Thank you for reading.

1. "buddy" involved.......

2.  ......................

3. "buddy" involved.......

4. "buddy" involved.......

 Hmmmmmm......is there something you want to tell us ?.......come on....your "buddy" was with you on the couch wasn't he?..............



 I had a only a couple stupid events involving firearms that I can remember......

 Once when I was young, (ok maybe a couple of times) I had my 10/22 out and about and was tinkering with making it 'quieter', soooo I took off my sweatshirt and wrapped it aroound the barrel till it was just a big wad of clothing on the end. I didn't bother making a 'hole' for the bullet to pass through as I presumed that would be a natural side effect....wellll needless to say with the first shot the sweatshirt came flying off and landed a few feet away. I had the 10/22 in a bullpup stock at the time so the barrel only stuck out about 4-5 inches. I decided to take advantage of this and 'hold' the clothing on there with my hand, well I about took my finger off that way so I decided to wrap it in such a way that I would have a "sleave" to use a "vertical grip" and thus be able to hold it on there at the same time....pretty freaking dumb......althoughhh all I could hear was the slide recipricating...I thought I was coooollesstt at that age

The only other time I can remember was when I shot a cast iron bath tub with that same 10/22...fortunately all I got, was to hear what a .22 sounds like whizzing pass your head....it just chipped the porcelain off the tub, no dent or nothing...


007

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I don't have a liscense to kill, but I got a learners permit.

Another time I was sitting under a hedgeapple tree hunting doves, I hit one of those hedge apples by accident, I was suddenly drenched and covered in hedgeapple juice.

They're called bois d'arc trees AKA Osage Orange.

Having always appreciated the lethality and expense of firearms, my stupidity has been confined to the use of ill-fitting screwdrivers. However, I do have a good story passed on to me by Tim Lewis of Accuracy Rifle Systems. Seems Tim sold this guy a Mini-14 Ranch Rifle. The guy commences to mount a scope and wants to get the integral rings TIGHT. I mean REALLY TIGHT. This results in bowing the base of the rings giving the entire setup a nice, loose, wobbly fit.

The story doesn't end there. Oh no. The guy is a welder, or at least he thinks he's savvy about metallurgy. He figures the way to cure the loose fit problem would be to break out the arc welder and run a bead on those rings where they mount to the receiver. As you may have by now assumed, this really does a number on the receiver's heat treating and finish.

The story STILL doesn't end there. The guy realizes that the gun is now AFU and starts raising hell with Tim for a refund!!!!

That's a pretty stupid story.