If you show this image around the world…

…of the “Avtomat Kalashnikov” model 1947 assault rifle, people think “marxism”, “revolution”…

…or “gangs of teenage thug “militiamen” here for your stuff”.

The AK47 is one of the iconic images of the past 100 years. More than 100 million AK-series rifles have been built – the vast majority of them serving the militaries of totalitarian dictatorships, he private guards of warlords and thugs, and “revolutionary” groups around the Second and Third Worlds from the 1950s to today. It’s the AK-series (colloquialized as the “AK-47” in the US, although it covers the vastly more-numerous AKM, the more modern AK-74 and others) that served everyone from the guards at Red Square to the Viet Cong to the militias of Mogadishu. The AK was romanticized by the American left (Che uses ’em!) and then, as the Cold War wound down, demonized (so do the Crips!).

It developed a substantial mythology that largely obscures the political and social aspects of its design; designed to be rugged and easily maintained by illiterate peasants, it is not an accurate rifle; it’s designed for badly-trained people to spray automatic fire in your general direction, to scare you away, or to keep your head down long enough for someone to throw a grenade at you. It is the very antithesis of the American tradition of marksmanship.
But I’m not going to write about the AK.

The west never developed a counter-icon with the counter-culture romance of the AK – indeed, since so much of the survival of the west involved refuting the idea of the romantic totalitarian hero, that’s completely appropriate.

But if the west did have a counter-icon, it’d likely be the FN-FAL:

D

Designed and built at Belgium’s Fabrique Nationale (FN), the Fusil Automatique Leger (“Light Automatic Rifle”), or “FAL” served the west from the mid-fifties until the present – although it’s been falling out of front-line service with the west’s militaries for the past 15 years or so. It’s big. It’s powerful – unlike the AK with its short 7.62x39mm “intermediate” round, it fires a full-powered 7.62x51mm round (known as “.308 Winchester” in the US).

The big difference? It’s accurate in a way the AK never could be. It’s a marksman’s rifle; while it could spray automatic fire (at least in its Belgian version; the British and Canadians adopted a semi-automatic only version, the “SLR”, from 1957 through the mid-eighties), it was way too light to use as a machine gun. It’s rugged like the AK, but it wasn’ “simple”; where the AK was a cheap specimen that could be manufactured in any third-world machine shop, the FAL was the product of old-world European craftsmanship, painstakingly machined to fairly tight tolerances.

And yet, in battle after battle around the world for fifty years, when the forces of “revolution” and thuggery took to the field with their AK47s, they were as often as not faced with troops with the FAL. As the USSR and NATO stared each other down from the fifties through the ’80s, many of the NATO troops that stared back across the border – the Dutch, the Belgians, the British and Canadians and many others – carried the FAL.
As did the US – almost:

[In US trials to replace the M1 Garand in the ’50s, the FAL prototype that the American procurement establishment called the “T48”] competed against the T44 rifle. The T44 was a heavily modified version of the earlier M1 Garand. Testing proved the T48 and the T44 comparable in performance, with no clear winner. However, the supposed ease of production of the T44 upon machinery already in place for the M1 Garand and the similarity in the manual of arms for the T44 and M1 ultimately swayed the decision in the direction of the T44, which was adopted as the M14 rifle.

The various civilianized semi-auto versions of the FAL are a joy to shoot, although they buck like mules, firing the full-power .308 cartridge from a frame that weighs only about eight or nine pounds.  Compared to heavier weapons firing the same cartridge (the similar German G-3, in its civilian incarnation as the HK91, which’ll be featured in an upcoming episode of HGF), or even the M-1 Garand with the slightly more powerful old American 30.06 round, the FAL series is a handful.

The FAL is falling out of front-line service with the world’s marquee armies; the Brits traded the SLR in for the space-age looking IW; the Dutch, Belgians and Canadians traded theirs in for more modern weapons using the lighter 5.56x45mm round developed for the American M16; the Australians, the Austrians and even the Irish traded theirs in for  the space-age looking 5.56mm Steyr AUG.  And yet the FAL soldiers on around the world, in places like India and Brazil and South Africa and, in places like Zimbabwe and Venezuela, alongside its old nemesis, the AK.
One of the great regrets of my life; at a gun show in Saint Paul in the late eighties, I found a guy unloading a British SLR semi-auto version, in the case with all the original parts, for $595. I thought about it – hard – but took a pass. I figured “I need the money for other things – and hey, there’ll be other gun shows”.

As, indeed, there were. But in the intervening time, the Stockton Massacre – where an insane man shot up a California playground with, what else, an AK) led to talk of draconian restrictions on “assault weapons”, which led the price of most such weapons to nearly triple overnight.

One of these days.

Car and Driver tests several Bond cars and is left underwhelmed. It turns out they may have actually used special effects in the production of these films! 

There are two ways James Bond’s cars are portrayed in film: seductively sitting still (often draped with beautiful women) or blazing across the screen in some of the most exciting car-chase sequences ever made for the big screen. But in many cases, there’s got to be some serious lens trickery going on: upon reviewing our test data for some of James Bond’s coolest cars, we found that not only are Bond’s rides seldom the fastest cars of their time, some of them couldn’t catch a bad guy on a bicycle. This could explain why some of those chase scenes take so long.

In any case, enjoy some of my favorites. The rest can be found here.

Aston Martin DB5 – Goldfinger (1964)

• 4.0-liter inline-6 (282 hp, 288 lb-ft)
• 0–60 mph: 8.1 seconds
• Quarter-mile: N/A

BMW 750iL – Tomorrow Never Dies (1997)

• 5.4-liter V-12 (322 hp, 361 lb-ft)
• 0–60 mph: 6.3 seconds
• Quarter-mile: 14.8 @ 98 mph

BMW Z8 – The World is Not Enough (1999)

• 4.9-liter V-8 (394 hp, 369 lb-ft)
• 0–60 mph: 4.5 seconds
• Quarter-mile: 13.0 @ 111 mph

Aston Martin Vanquish – Die Another Day (2002)

• 5.9-liter V-12 (460 hp, 400 lb-ft)
• 0–60 mph: 4.4 seconds
• Quarter-mile: 12.9 @ 115 mph

Financial system events of late provide only a glimpse of the worldwide economic collapse that will be brought on by a capitulation of global equity markets if Barack Obama realizes a successful Presidential bid and unleashes the full faith and credit of the Socialist Party. In anticipation, American automotive enthusiasts are encouraged to recalibrate their choice of daily conveyance.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you the Citroen 2CV.

The 2CV celebrates its 60th birthday during the Paris Motor Show, on 7 October 2008. To celebrate the event, Hermes has designed a made-to-measure outfit that highlights the vehicle’s ever-friendly and generous forms.

The 1989 2CV 6 Spécial, repainted in brown, gains a natural leather trim on the door facings, interior rearview mirror, gear knob, steering wheel and driver’s sun visor. For an even more elegant finish, the two seats are upholstered in Hermès grey-beige cotton canvas and natural leather. As a finishing touch, the bonnet and interior trim at the rear of the vehicle also feature Hermès cotton canvas.

Like the Automobile that marked the other end of America’s industrial and economic world dominance, Henry Ford’s Model T, the 2CV is available in any color you like. As long as, in this case, it is brown.

Exhilarating is one word that one might imagine could possibly come to mind considering the power under the bonnet. The little engine that could, a SOHC 602cc Twin, breathes easy through a twin-choke carburetor and churns out an adequate 29 horsepower at 6,750 rpm. The 2CV’s 5.3 Gallon gas tank allows for a full week’s ration!

Need to put on the binders? Sturdy drum brakes in the rear, and in a generous government factory upgrade since 1981, you’ll enjoy disc brakes in the front.

A comfortable but durable rear bench will allow for catnaps between your day job, wherewith you feed your children and pay the rent on your government-owned town home and your night job wherewith you pay your United Nations Income Tax, Grocery Loans and Global Warming Assessment.

Savor the nostalgia of a vehicle introduced to the world in 1948; your very own piece of history! Enroll now for subsidized 96-month financing offers and neighborhood Carshare Agreements via government lottery selection.

Citroen. The Car The People have been Waiting For^®

In the Flesh… 

Dodge Challenger

6.1 Liter Hemi V8

425HP

…this one’s for you Kermit.

Continue reading →

Honda’s version of Toyota’s Prius (Obama Bumper Sticker also Standard?)

The first were built in 1907. The last were manufactured in the late thirties. They were among the British Commonwealth’s standard rifles until the late fifties,

In the hands of the “Old Contemptibles” – Britain’s tiny force of regulars in 1914 – they held off massed waves of Germans during the original blitz through Belgium. They fought at The Somme, Passchendaele, Second Marne, Dunkirk, Narvik, El Alamein, the Bramaputra and Cassino, Sword and Gold and Juno beaches, all the way across France and Belgium and Holland and Korea and the Suez.

A refinement of an 1888 design that had been tried and found wanting during the Boer War, Irish and Indian and South African reservists carried them well into the seventies and early eighties. After the AK47, they were the most common weapon in the hands of the mujahedin in Afghanistan early in their jihad against the Soviets. It’s still seen in the hands of reservists and policemen throughout south asia.

The SMLE reminded me of Winston Churchill; pug-nosed, but a smooth operator. I fired one at a range in 1988 (and a few more times thereafter). It was the rifle equivalent of an aged single-malt on a mahogany table; old-school in that way that all the great antiques are. The short-throw bolt action, worn down after goodness-knows how many people cranked it over the years (its receiver was stamped sometime in the late twenties, as I recall) was the fastest, smoothest turnbolt I personally have ever fired.

(Note: No, this is not the one I shot. I just pulled it off the net).

There were 14 million of them made (possibly including the “modernized” versions, the Mark IV and Mark V, from the forties and fifties).  Back in ’88, they were running for under $100. Yet another deep lifelong regret.

In the world of gear, there are toys – things that’ll give you that little burst of pleasure instantly – and then there’s machinery, the things you have to work to get what you want with.

A fuzz box?  It’s a toy.

I don’t mean, by the way, to disparage toys.  Toys have their place, and it can be an important one.  They give adults, like kids, something they need; a learning experience, something to enjoy, something that ties learning to fun, or just that little jolt of fun you need.

The Fender Deluxe?  It’s machinery.

I bought my Fender in 1978, for $100 worth of paper route money.  It was 50 watts of power through a 10 inch speaker, the bare-bones two-knob tone controls, a simple spring reverb tank and a tremolo unit.

That’s it.  No overdrive circuit.  No power soaker.  No EQ.

The basic tone, after you got done cranking on the tone controls, was basically…clean.  You had to crank it to get overdrive distortion – and 50 watts cranked was very, very loud.

But this was the fun part; after a while of noodling around with it, you found (or I found, anyway) a combination of things that made it, with all its faults, mine.  My sound. In my case, sometime after I moved to the Cities and after maybe seven years of playing the thing, I cracked the code:  My guitars (a Fender Jazz and an Ibanez SG), into a cheapo preamp stompbox, thence into a DOD rackmount delay line (that I left sitting on my amp, since, sheesh, who’s gonna buy a rack?), and then into a switch pedal (to jump between the Fender and my Peavey Bandit, when I wanted a wash of cheap, overdriven fuzz.  The preamp gave the Fender a little film of crunchy distorition, while the DOD could be tweaked to give just the right amount of slapback to fill things out, making the Fender sound…

…damn good.

It, and the DOD, got stolen probably in 1989.  That thief, unfortunately, I don’t know.  Hope you enjoy it, douchebag, whoever you are.
Anyway – one of these next tax refunds…

It’s Memorial Day Weekend – so today, I’m highlighting the “hot gear” most familiar to “the greatest generation”.

It’s the M1 Garand, America’s standard infantry rifle from the mid-thirties until the late fifties.

A rugged, solid, deceptively compact rifle in .30-06, with a simple gas action, it was the rifle the US military carried in World War II and Korea; indeed, the first men to use it in combat were the North Dakota National Guardsmen of the 164th Infantry Regiment on Guadalcanal about whom I wrote last year for Memorial Day; fighting at the Matanikau River and Bloody Nose Ridge in 1942 (the Marines, being far down the supply chain as they were, still carried World War I-vintage M1903 Springfields, of which more in a later installment).

I’ve shot a few Garands – indeed, I’ve come || <---this close to buying Garands a couple of times.  They’re sweet, accurate rifles; the only problems are the peep sights, which I can’t stand,  and the top-loading, eight-shot, “all-or-nothing” block clip magazine.

The rifle was such a solid, reliable concept that when the world started changing to high-capacity magazines in the late ’50s, the Army simply rechambered it for the shorter .308 Winchester round, tacked on a 20-round box magazine, made a few mechanical changes (including “selective fire”, the ability to fire in full automatic, like a machine gun), and called it the M14 – which still serves today, and is reportedly especially favored in the desert for its long range, accuracy and hitting power compared to the relatively lightweight M16/M4.

And since it’s Memorial Day, I’d be remiss if I didn’t highlight some more gear; the M1911A1 pistol…:

…which was designed almost 100 years ago during America’s last insurgency against a seemingly-intractable Moslem insurgency, in the Philippines.  Designed to knock a charging, drug-crazed attacker down with no questions asked using a big, bulbous .45 round that was designed for relatively minimal efficiency (so as to leave its kinetic energy in the first thing it hit), it’s mechanically simple but metaphorically rich; “everyone speaks Colt”, it’s said, since the sound of that big metal slide racking a round is reportedly usually enough to scare burglars into the next zip code.  It’s on my agenda for one of these next tax refunds – along with a nice jacket.

And no Hot Gear “Greatest Generation” edition would be complete without the red-headed stepchildred of the bunch – the Browning Automatic Rifle…:

…which was what they’d call a “squad automatic weapon” today – designed to put a hail of lead over your target so they’d keep their heads down so the guys with the Garands could close in and lob grenades at them. I’ve never shot a BAR, although I met a guy at a re-enactor show who owned one, and took it apart for me.  It was big, heavy, and used a sliding-block bolt that wasn’t at all unfamiliar to me, shooting my Ljungman at the time.  My overriding impression – having been on a brief jag of learning about machine-tooling metal at the time – was “this receiver is one big beautiful piece of metal”.  Which was true, although in wartime not necessarily a good thing.

Quite the opposite of today’s final Hot Gear submission, the M3 Grease Gun:

Designed in the middle of World War II to be cheap, simple and easy to manufacture, it was almost entirely built of stampings; only the barrel and bolt were actually machined.  So bone-simple was it that it didn’t even have a cocking handle;  you stuck your finger in the ejection port into a hole in the bolt and hauled it directly back yourself.  I’d read about this for years, of course; but when I actually got a chance to shoot an M3 back in 2000, it actually wasn’t as weird as I’d thought it would be.  And – for the record – there are few things as cool as firing something on full-automatic; (I fired ten shots.  In three bursts.  Booyah).

So – thanks, veterans!

Today’s gear isn’t “hot” in the sense of “really really great”.  Indeed, in the great continuum of electronics, especially electronics available today, it’s a comical throwback.

But 20-odd years ago, it was the stuff of dreams.

Not long after I started playing guitar, I started having delusions of grandeur.  The delusions were not unlike the ones I got shortly after starting this blog, things like “getting back into talk radio…” – well, you get the picture.  My delusions back then centered around “being able to dub multiple instruments onto the same piece of tape, so I could make records without needing a whole band”.

Sort of like “Multi track tape” – reel to reel tapes with many “tracks”, each with its own record and play heads, so you could record and synch many instruments and vocal tracks – without having to spend what it took for a multi-track tape recorder back then.
Which was a lot.  A four-track recorder was usually well over $1,000; eight-tracks were pushing $2K, as  recall, and 16, 24 and more tracks were the province of recording studios that cost more than most houses I grew up around.

So money was an obstacle.  So was my own lack of technical ingenuity; my first attempt at recording more than one instrument involved playing a guitar track into a cassette recorder, then replaying it as I played along and recorded the whole thing onto another cassette recorder.  It worked, except that the first track was buried in playback noise from the first cassette player; by the third “track”, the background noise from the multiple layers of cassette players made the whole production sound like “guitars playing in a gale”.

In college, I experimented with “bouncing” tracks back and forth on a reel-to-reel player, which had two tracks (known to most stereo-listening laypeople as “left” and “right”.).  It worked, sort of – I got four instruments down, once – before the overlaid layers of track noise overwhelmed the instruments.

There had to be a better way.

And in 1984, it came along.

Now, there’d been cassette-based four-tracks since the early ’80s; Bruce Springsteen recorded his Nebraska album on the first of them, a Teac “Tascam” four-track cassette; the unit cost about $1,000, which was still a little lot too spendy for me.

But in ’84, along came the answer, the vehicle to my megalomaniac recording dreams:

The Fostex X15 was the first “inexpensive” ($400) cassette recorder.  It let you record on two tracks at a time, mix down four tracks into a stereo two track mix…

…and, since it had an internal monitor circuit, allowed you to record tracks to other tracks.  Which meant you could “bounce” mix two or three tracks onto one, to clear a track or two for more recording.  This was a common technique in high-end studios in the sixties, when the four-track reel-to-reel was high technology (Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was recorded on four-track decks, although “decks” is plural).

And so in January of 1985, I sat down in the pump room at my college chapel with a drum kit, a 1916 Steinway, and my guitars and bass and a Farfisa organ I’d found under a stack of old programs, and started recording entire band arrangements of songs.

My pride and joy?  One song where I…:

1. laid down a metronome track
2. played the rhythm guitar part to guide the whole song
3. Laid down a drum track
4. Cut a bass track
5. Bounced the bass and drums over the metronome on track one
6. Played a big, broad piano part
7. Bouned the piano and rhytm guitar together
8. Played an organ part
9. Did a last with the vocals (with the lead guitar fitting in where I wasn’t singing).

I think I worked on it until 5 one morning.  And listened to it  the whole next day.  It sounded…

…cool.  LIke I could actually do this recording thing.

I went on to work wtih much bigger, better recording gear later on.  And of course, today you can record on your computer across dozens of tracks (with the aid of a decent sound card, at least) for a fraction of the price of an old reel to reel player.

But the Fostx made it all possible for me.

I still have it, somewhere…

What was that term we used to use to refer to nebbishy guys who’d suddenly get all ten-foot-tall-and-armor-plated when they’d get a couple of Sex On The Beaches down the hatch?

Oh, yeah – “Liquid Courage”; the phenomenon whereby someone with no aptitude at something becomes an expert, maven or badass after marinading their brain in ethanol for a bit.  It has analogues in the worlds of philosophy, sex, music and so on (Liquid Intellect, Confidence and Talent, respectively).

The kicker is, “Liquid” attributes aren’t all bad.  How many of the world’s great works of art have been created by people who were more bombed than Atomizer on a Saturday morning at Byerly’s?  How much of the world’s great music was created by people who washed their great ideas down a chaser?  Not just booze, of course; drugs and mental illness have both helped artists, thinkers, creators of all stripes to unlock their inner genius.  Or at least swing for the fence.
Of course, anything the human mind and body can do on ethanol, it can do with technology.  Photoshop has given almost anyone the ability to alter photographs in a way that used to take LSD or spyrochaetal paresis.  The reversible turntable allowed people who can’t play music to…play music.

And in the days before the Line Six computer-based modeling preamp, there were two ways to sound like Jimi Hendrix or Jimi Page: great drugs, or the Big Muff.

The Muff was a “fuzz box”; it introduced distortion into the signal chain between the guitar and the amp, making an amp at normal indoor-level volume sound like it was being overdriving until the speaker cones were red-hot. The three knobs controlled the tone, volume and…er, flatulency of the “fuzz” effect, while the big stomp-switch allowed you to turn the effect on and off with your foot.

It didn’t put out the really nice, high-quality harmonic and overdrive distortion that you got from cranking a Marshall stack to 11.  It was more the kind of farty-sounding “fuzz” you heard on songs like “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction”, George Harrison’s “What Is Love”, and a zillion other sixties and seventies songs. Which wasn’t a bad thing in its own right; psychedelic, gassy fuzz has its place.

But here was the cool part; if you turned the “fuzz” off, but cranked the output volume on the unit anyway, it would make your clean amp (me: a 1960-ish Fender Deluxe) sound just a tad dirty; the difference between sounding like George Benson and George Thorogood.  It’d add that little edge of drive that’d put just a sweet little tinge of distortion around the edge of you “clean” tone.

In other words, there were the Two Stages of Big Muff:

1. the Psychedelic Hummingbird phase – where you wallow in fuzzy pseudodistorition because it makes your notes bleed together enough to make you sound really cooo, maaaan, and…
2. The Preamp phase – when you realize that the Muff sounds best when it’s “off”, yet still “on”.

Mine got stolen in high school, by the way.  I know who did it.  And I know where you live, and I’m just biding my time.