It was annoying that many older threads had no pictures. There were dead links to Photobucket and Snapfish and other picture hosting services. Googling for the picture name usually didn't turn up anything. And some of those threads weren't so old - a few were less than six months old, and without the pictures, the threads were little better than useless.
And then... whole forums started going 404. Shooters.com went away, gunsgutsandgod.com, and then gunsnet, with all of its archives. Then thehighroad.com. Gunsnet eventually came back, sort of, and finally thehighroad sorted out its problems, but it was a wake-up call.
The internet is ephemeral.
Only what's on my hard disk, with offsite backup, is real.
Sure, you can always ask a question and start a new thread, but I didn't want to lose the old stuff, some of it going back into the 20th century. So I started archiving as much as I could.
While I was doing so, I realized the archive might be useful to other people. So here you are.
Each of the pages here has a link at the top showing where the information came from. This can be a private web site, a commercial web site, or a web forum. Some even comes from mailing lists and usenet newgroups.
The pages here are abridged; that is, I've deleted things I considered irrelevant. I've extensively reformatted them; at this point, just under a thousand pages, by hand with a text editor. What you're seeing is my interpretation of the source material, filtered through whatever opinions I held at the time. They've also had some spelling and grammar corrections, and I've probably introduced mistakes some of my own. If you want the real thing, or want to ask a question, or contact the original author(s), click out to the source page. This is just a static snapshot, like archive.org or a Google cached page. Except edited, of course.
As I said on the main page, the threads are grouped by content, not necessarily thread name. Sometimes threads wander a bit, so it's a crapshoot as to where to put them. Yeah, I could have more than one link to the same thread, but that's on the round tuit list at the moment.
There's a LOT of information here. Some threads are very similar; either I forgot I'd archived something similar before, or I felt there was enough of a different viewpoint to merit including the new thread. There's only so much to say about grip bushings, but ejection problems and barrel fitting are always popular subjects...
I'd like to point out that all I've done is abridge and archive the content here. I haven't created anything, just taken away fluff and arranged things where they're (hopefully) easy to find. If you see a post from someone that gets you out of a bind, do the right thing, click through to the original thread, and PM the poster and tell him "thanks!" Some of these people spend hours every day giving strangers the benefit of man-centuries of experience and insight; for all the good it does them, they might as well not even plug the damned keyboard in.
And check out the forums the threads came from. In the end, it costs someone cold, hard cash to keep those things up, and the purpose of this archive isn't to take away their traffic. And remember that "abridged" part above...
With all that said, I hope you find this site useful.
If a some of the links here go 404, don't panic. The URL may have changed. The subject name at the top of each page here is the original cut-and-pasted subject name of every thread. Just cut and paste it into your favorite search engine and tell it to go fetch. If the forum or website hasn't vanished completely it'll turn up.