One shot

You begin with a  $30 junker, sound but showing the scud of a half-century living on spikes driven into the barn beams and rattling around in trunks.  Who knows what meals it put on a plank table? What thugs it deterred? It has earned its makeover.

Just a couple of hours later you have a nice, clean handigun with an ideal barrel -- just long enough to be legal, plenty short enough to annoy  Senator Harkin. The stock finish is Johnson's Paste Wax over the steel-wooled original. The metal  is tacticool, smoothed with  100 emery and coated with flat black Krylon. Okay, it is still a $30 gun, but it's a non-ugly $30 gun of greater usefulness than before. It will probably live semi-permanently in the F150, along with the Cattaraugus 2250, a handful of 00 buck, and a box of No. 4s.