Repairing a Shurefire 6P tail cap switch

Repairing a Surefire 6P tail cap switch:

A few years ago when my daughter was about 2, she managed to get a hold of my Surefire 6P and pulled the rubber cover off of the tail cap switch, here’s how I repaired it:

If you look down inside the battery spring of the tail cap switch you will see a small dome shaped rivet, this is what holds the tail cap switch together.

If the rubber cover is off of the switch, you can pull the spring out of the socket, and then use a small punch and hammer to drive the rivet back out of the switch, there is a hole thru the pushbutton to drive the rivet back out.  The rivet has threads on it but not like a screw, it only makes about a quarter of a turn as it’s being driven back in.

Once you have the rivet out, you can disassemble the switch, put the rubber cover back into it’s hole from the inside, reassemble the switch components minus the spring, drive the rivet back in gently, (you will have to place the button against a firm surface) and reinstall the spring.

Your switch should now be back in operation.

Zone Breakfast Burrito

I have a new Zone diet breakfast:

Zone Breakfast Burrito

1/2 cup of Egg Beaters
2 strips of turkey bacon
1 slice of cheese
1 tortilla

Cook the bacon and the egg beaters, put the tortilla in the microwave for a few seconds to soften it up,
wrap the bacon, cheese and eggs in the tortilla.

I make mine up the night before and wrap in a paper towel in the refrigerator.  reheat in the microwave at work for about 45 seconds and it's good to go.

Making the AA Arms AP-9 reliable

Making the AA Arms AP-9 reliable:

Back in the mid 90's I purchased a AA Arms AP-9 from a local pawn shop, it's the same basic design as the Intertec Tec-9 but made by a different manufacturer.

When I purchased it, it was missing the extractor, it still had the set screw in the bolt to retain it, just didn't have the extractor.  I test fired it without the extractor and suprisingly, it would fire and eject the cases, just not reliably.  I ordered a replacement extractor and installed it which cured the extracton problem, but it still had a problem ejecting the empty cases.

What I found was that this gun has a stamped steel ejector that is retained by a pin in the trigger housing, the way it was formed, it had a lot of slack and could flop around causing inconsistant contact with the case to be ejected.  I fashioned a shim to place under the extractor from a piece of brass from a bad shell casing.  After that, it cycled 100% and is fairly accurate for what it is.

Troubleshooting the Dillon 550 priming system

Troubleshooting the Dillon 550 priming system:

If you have been using your 550B for some time and all of a sudden you're not getting primers to feed consistantly, and the primer slide and bearing are both clean, check to see if the primer feed stop pin is being pushed out all the way.  If the stop spring on the back of the housing is not pushing back about a quarter inch at the bottom, it's not feeding.

From my experience, the operating rod gets a little bent out of shape and won't push the primer slide out all the way to pick up a primer out of the stack.  The good news is that it's a quick and easy fix, just remove the operating rod from the press and bend the lower end back slightly to put more pressure on the primer slide's roller and reinstall.  This should fix the problem in short order.