Technology …

Some esoteric gun stuff:

Back in the day, I had a revolver tricked out out for use on the combat range at the club.

The piece was a short-barreled S&W .357 Magnum K-frame revolver. I had my gunsmith tune the action, smoothing it, new springs to lighten the pull. He removed the iron sights, glass-bead blasted the finish to satin, and mounted a Picatinny rail, upon which I installed a red-dot sight.

This resulted in a smooth and light DA pull, and the ability to knock bowling pins hither and yon, ring steel, and fill the A-zone of a combat silhouette with almost-boring regularity.

 

Shooter had to do hir part, but if you missed, it wasn’t the gun’s fault.

The scope was an early version, they make ‘em with bigger cans and brighter dots now, but the process was simple: you dialed the zero-mag scope in to your desired range — twenty-five yards, say — and when you lifted the revolver up and looked through the scope, both eyes open, what you saw was a target with a red dot floating over it. Wherever the dot was, that’s where the bullet went, if you held the gun still.

Works fine with one eye, too.

No laser beam, only the shooter can see the dot.

It was not a tackdriver at long range, but at combat distance out to fifteen or twenty yards, you had to work to miss a target the size of your hand.

A fun piece to shoot.

Now the point of this essay is not about the gun, but about the battery that ran the scope. It was (and is) a 3 volt single-unit about the size of three stacked button batteries.

I picked up the piece recently, and the battery was long-dead, so I got online to get a replacement.

You can buy ten of these, with a five-year guarantee, for what two of them cost ten years ago.