How to Lease a Car

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I have never leased a car for myself, but since interest rates crashed a decade ago I have considered it several times. (I generally prefer to buy new cars, and when you have cash to cover the purchase one drawback to leasing is that you have no choice but to pay interest on the residual value of your lease for the full term of the lease. With lower interest rates that’s a less significant cost.)

I just helped another friend arrange a lease and realized I haven’t published my guidance on this. Since dealers often use the complexity of lease contracts to pad their margins, here’s all you need to know to cut through the charade:

The three numbers that matter in a lease

1. Purchase price. This is pretty much the only thing you can negotiate. Unless the car you want is in extremely high demand, you should demand the dealer set the “sale price” no higher than dealer invoice minus any factory discounts currently applicable. (If you’re a good negotiator, or you hire one, you can often get the dealer to sell below invoice. But invoice is usually considered “fair.”)

While dealers try to mix the two to confuse buyers and increase their profit, the lease agreement is done after you have a purchase agreement. (You can actually shop around for financing, but whenever I have checked I have found the best lease terms come through the manufacturer’s finance arm, which means you’ll probably end up talking to the same dealer about the lease agreement.) This is where the other two numbers that matter come up:

2. Residual value. This is entirely a function of how long you want the lease to run and how many miles you want to be allowed to drive. Usually the best residual values are given for standard leases (e.g., 36- or 39-month with 12k or 15k miles/year.) But sometimes manufacturers want to push other lease terms to control their resale inventory, so if you’re flexible it’s worth asking about those.

3. Money factor. This is the interest rate you are paying (quoted, oddly, as the annual rate divided by 24). This is almost entirely a function of your credit score. But often a higher initial payment can reduce this, so if you have cash available you should look at options to reduce the money factor by increasing your up-front payment. (In the limit you can pay the full cost of the lease up front.)

LED lightbulbs can jam garage door opener RF signals

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This was a strange one to debug: I upgraded the LED bulbs in my garage door openers from 60W to 100W (equivalents). My wife’s garage door uses a track-mounted motor head with a lightbulb on each side. She began reporting that she couldn’t close the garage door after she pulled out. After some investigation using multiple transmitters we confirmed that it would reliably open from up to 100 feet away, but it would only close using the remote transmitters if they were within about 15 feet of the receiver, which is in the motor head … next to the lightbulbs … which are turned on by default when someone is in the garage or crosses the threshold, but usually off when approaching the garage from the outside with the door closed.

Sure enough: some (but not all) LEDs emit RF energy at the same frequency as garage door openers!

So the newer LED bulbs I installed were unintentionally serving as garage door opener jammers!

Summit toggle action 10/22 now manufactured by Volquartsen

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Interesting announcement today: The Summit toggle action 10/22 will now be manufactured by Volquartsen!

From the press release:

Dean Sylvester, PWS President and Summit designer commented “The Summit has been one of our most requested products over the years. We feel combining the unique features of the Summit design with the impeccable manufacturing standards and reputation of Volquartsen Firearms will allow both companies to focus on our core markets and ensure all customers are getting the best product possible.”

Hit by my own bullet!

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Here’s a .22LR bullet that went through my paper target at 50 yards and then somehow ricocheted back to hit me on the forehead. (It then bounced onto the bench in front of me, leaving me scratched and bewildered, but nothing more serious.)

.22LR bullet that hit me

.22LR bullet that hit me

I’m well aware that bullets can do surprising things, and I’ve even researched some of them in depth. I’ve seen videos of people supposedly getting hit by ricochets of their own bullets fired into conventional backstops, but this is the first time I can offer a first-hand account of such an event.

I was doing more precision testing with a rifle in my machine rest, which meant that I was firing tight five-round groups very quickly. The last shot in one group made an unusual impact sound in the earthen berm behind the target, and as I lifted my head from the scope I heard a snap in the trees to my left and then something like a small pebble hit me in the forehead hard.

I was alone on a private range, and as I rubbed my head feeling for blood or a welt (and finding neither), I saw this slug on the bench in front of my machine rest. It was too hot to hold, so I set it aside while I finished shooting my test plan. After photographing it back in my shop I weighed it at 40.7gr, so if it shed any lead during its trip it appears to have made up for it by catching dirt in its crevices.

Does this story come with a lesson? Well, for one thing, wear eye protection! If this had hit me in an eye it would have produced a serious ocular injury. Another: Unlikely things can happen! I would still say it’s extremely unlikely for an unjacketed, subsonic bullet fired into an earthen berm to ricochet a full 180 degrees and cover another 50+ yards. (And, in that rare event, the bullet would not have enough energy to cause serious injury, unless it hit someone in the eye.) But however unlikely something may seem, just realize there’s probably somebody who’s going to have an astonished look on his face when it eventually does happen. Do what you reasonably can to make that the worst consequence!

Buckmark .22LR Pistol Accuracy, continued

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Following some review of the recent Buckmark accuracy test, some readers wondered if the suppressor was hurting precision. Others, noting that Buckmark barrels are well known for their accuracy, wondered how the stock 5.5″ barrel would fare.

Buckmark pistol with Tactical Solutions 4

I ran the standard barrel through the same procedure as before. The aggregated data and analysis are in this Excel workbook, and the summary results with links to the 50-yard targets are here:

Ammunition CEP Radius (MOA) Average fps fps Standard Deviation
CCI SV 0.9 930fps   17.1  
Eley Contact 1.0 973fps   17.8  
Eley Club 1.0 958fps   13.5  
Gemtech 42gr 1.0 941fps   13.8  
Federal AutoMatch 1.2 1053fps   19.0  
Federal Champion HV 2.1 1073fps   20.5  

This pistol shot everything well. In fact, the best four loads tested would all be expected to hit inside a Bullseye 10-ring virtually 100% of the time.

Running the Tactical Solutions barrel without the suppressor seemed likely to help its score also, at least with some loads. At 4″, it gives up 40-50fps vs. even the 5.5″ barrel. But the accuracy of CCI SV went from CEP of 2.0 MOA to 1.3 MOA. Groups of Eley Club (essentially the same performance as Eley Target) showed CEP under 1.4 MOA. However, it was not able to tighten performance of the Gemtech load. (Detailed data were added to the spreadsheet from the previous test.)

Buckmark .22LR Pistol Accuracy

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How accurate is a typical rimfire pistol? Out of curiosity I mounted my Buckmark, with its 4″ Tactical Solutions barrel and 5″ AAC Element II suppressor, on my test stand and recorded shots simultaneously at 25 and 50 yards.

Buckmark pistol with suppressor in test stand

As usual, I digitized the paper targets using OnTarget TDS, and followed the statistical analysis outlined at ballisticaccuracy.com. The aggregated data and analysis are in this Excel workbook.

Ammunition CEP Radius (MOA) Average fps fps Standard Deviation
SK Plus 2.0 904fps   20.0  
Eley Target 2.0 952fps   11.9  
Gemtech 42gr 2.0 910fps   15.0  
CCI SV 3.1 914fps   16.2  
Federal Champion HV 4.7 1037fps   14.6  

I was surprised at how much more dispersion this gun shows than the 10/22 rifles I have tested. It’s certainly nothing to brag about: The 10-ring on NRA Bullseye Pistol targets (shot competitively with autoloading rimfire pistols) typically has a radius of 3MOA, and even with zero shooter error the good ammo here would only hit that 80% of the time.

How to hold a small pistol with large hands

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I was training a woman for precision rifle shooting when she showed me her defensive handgun: a S&W M&P Bodyguard 380. This is a very small pistol: 5.25″ long, 4″ high, and just 0.75″ thick! Its dimensions make it easy to carry concealed, but can make it tricky to shoot.

This woman’s hands are almost as large as mine (which are 8″ long and 3.5″ wide mid palm), so I asked to see how she was able to handle such a small gun. Through practice on her own, she had concluded that even though she is both left-handed and left-eye dominant she shot it better with her right hand. Since it’s a double-action-only gun with a long, heavy trigger, she had resorted to pulling the trigger using the second knuckle. She noted that doing this she would often hit the magazine release with the tip of her trigger finger, but she didn’t know how else to run the gun. She also couldn’t figure out how to get her support hand on the gun, and so she presented it with the largely ineffective “teacup” hold.

The same guidance for holding guns that fit can be applied to holding undersized guns. Of course, the first order of business was to nix the idea of pulling the trigger with anything other than the center of the first joint of the strong hand’s index finger. (With large hands it can often be necessary to arch the trigger finger outward, but you never compromise on this point.) Then I showed her how to follow the usual steps of establishing a proper handgun grip:

  1. Push the firing hand web between the thumb and trigger finger as high on the grip as possible.
  2. Find a “home” position for the trigger finger outside the trigger guard, and then close the remaining fingers and palm snugly around the grip.
  3. Now snug the support hand up and around the gun and trigger hand in order to maximize contact with its palm and fingers.
  4. Ensure that the support thumb and index finger don’t interfere with the gun’s controls or the trigger pull. (Typically the support thumb will rest parallel and ahead of the trigger hand’s thumb. The support index finger needs to find a home too, and while that is often atop the knuckle of the trigger hand’s middle finger, on some guns it can instead find a consistent grip on the front of the trigger guard.)
One-handed grip on M&P Bodyguard 380, large right-handed shooter, support side.
Proper two-handed grip on M&P Bodyguard 380, large right-handed shooter, support side.
Proper two-handed grip on M&P Bodyguard 380, large left-handed shooter, firing side.
Proper two-handed grip on M&P Bodyguard 380, large left-handed shooter, support side.

Chronos High Speed Video Camera for Shooter Diagnostics

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Today I’m going to show a project that exploited the Chronos 1.4 at high image resolutions and at the lower end of its temporal resolution (i.e., frame-rate): What does handgun recoil look like, and how can a shooter control it?

I took a rusty shooter to the range with his Sig P239 chambered in .357SIG. This is an excellent concealed carry gun shooting arguably the ideal cartridge for defensive handguns. However, since the fully-loaded gun weighs only two pounds it has somewhat snappy recoil which requires training and practice to handle well.

Stepping through the video frames we can see that this pistol’s “lock time” (the delay from when the trigger is pulled until the hammer hits the primer) is 5ms. Also, from the moment the trigger is pulled, it takes 18ms for the slide to cycle to the rear, and 63ms to return to battery.

We filmed the shooter’s first few shots. He had forgotten some pistol fundamentals, including: proper grip, not anticipating the recoil, and following through each shot. (Granted, most of these problems can be detected or assumed even without high-speed video.) After retraining we filmed a few more shots. The improvement was remarkable. Beginning the refresher the shooter experienced muzzle flip of 40 degrees and consistently took over 60ms to halt the recoil of the gun. This composite overlaying the moment of discharge with peak recoil shows the slide already returned to battery by the time the shooter has stopped the recoil:

Recoil composite before retraining

After retraining, the shooter was able to keep muzzle flip under 20 degrees and stop the recoil in under 40ms. (This was accompanied, of course, by faster and more accurate shooting.)

Recoil composite after retraining

Chronos High Speed Video Camera for Shooting Analysis

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Frequent readers know that I have been looking for high-speed video to go mainstream for years – ever since Casio dipped its foot into the consumer market with its F1 camera in 2008.

The sort of bullet-freezing high-speed video that has become familiar to YouTube audiences still requires a Phantom or Photron camera that runs well into five figures. However, there is finally a “pro-sumer” level high-speed video camera that fills the niche between 3-figure “action cameras” and those 5-figure professional cameras: The self-contained Chronos 1.4 is launching at $3,000 and offers 1.4Gpx/s throughput on a rolling 4-second buffer, which ranges from 1280×1024 @ 1,057fps to 640×96 @ 21,649fps! Aimed Research recently gave me an opportunity to test the beta version of this camera. I’ll show some of the cool things this camera can do over the next few posts.

Note that this was a beta device, and I didn’t have enough time to learn to optimize the camera at its limits. For example, here’s a 60gr .22 bullet leaving a barrel recorded at 9,000fps. With some more tweaking I expect I could have gotten the shutter speed low enough to show the bullet as a solid in each frame instead of a blur:

Subsonic 22 leaving barrel recorded at 8923fps

With time resolution in the thousands of frames per second we can see a lot of hidden phenomena. The following video of the same 10/22 rifle shooting the same 60gr .22LR bullet was recorded at 2,356fps. One surprising thing we can clearly see here is that the bolt bounces off of the breech when returning to battery.

Another thing we can see is something we heard during recent sound level testing: The unusual 60gr .22LR load is 50% heavier than the bullets for which this action was designed, and the case is 0.2″ shorter. As a result, the case clears the chamber less than 1ms after the bullet leaves the barrel, which causes a significant amount of pressure (and sound) to vent out the breech of the barrel. (A standard 40gr round doesn’t open the breech until 3ms after the bullet leaves the barrel.) If we wanted to tune this gun for this unusual cartridge, video like this would really help us confirm how changing bolt mass and spring rates affects the action.