Of course, the first step in reloading ammunition is making empties. I did that yesterday by shooting a hundred rounds of .40 S&W at the Bullet Hole. :) Since the recipe I was trying worked out pretty well, I went ahead and loaded a couple hundred this morning. 6.2 grains of Unique over a CCI small pistol primer, with 155 grain Berry’s plated flat nose bullets. I did get my freebie box of 180 grain Hornady XTP hollow points, so I’ll try those on my next trip too. Continue reading “Did some reloading”
Happy Valentine’s Day.
Isn’t it nice to feel loved?
Is it Spring yet?
I keep waiting for things to warm up. It’s even cold (relatively) in North Carolina; when I went out to get some late dinner last night, I had to break the windshield wipers on the rental car loose. There was actual ice on the windshield; it was 30 or 31 degrees outside.
I’m more than ready to melt off the ice & snow, clean up the yard again, roll out the bike, tune up the air rifle for rabbit season and welcome the warmer weather. I believe our back yard may have become an actual glacier, so that may take a while to slide off into the fjord.
Consistency is the key.
I travel to Charlotte, NC fairly regularly. One thing that has been pretty consistent is the fact that it seems to rain almost every time I go there. This has not gone unnoticed; there was talk of bringing me back on consecutive weeks last summer when there was a drought killing off lawns down here.
Yesterday morning I was on a conference call and mentioned that I was leaving shortly to fly down to Charlotte. One of my teammates there said, “Good, we need the rain”. The weather was fine last night – but this morning, as I was walking from my car to the building… it started raining.
Consistency, that’s the key.
Learning to checker
I’ve started learning to checker stocks. I hadn’t given it much thought before, but in the process of doing the rebuild on the Remington I decided to re-cut the factory checkering. I started out using a single line checkering tool, and have a couple of new cutting heads on the way. The biggest challenge, really, is keeping the lines straight. When I can keep the lines from getting off kilter, the results are really, really nice.
What I Learned About Strippers
I’m using my Remington 700 as kind of a test bed for a larger project, refinishing a desk my father built back in the 1960s. In the process of getting the rifle stock stripped of its old varnish, I tried two different products.
A new project
Like I don’t have enough crap going on… I have started a rebuild of my 1960s vintage Remington 700.
What a difference a day makes!
Wow. Yesterday it was 50 or above, snow melting, got the antenna feedpoint re-connected and actually grilled hamburgers on the gas grill outside! Pete took the dog out to the dog park, which was followed by a bath since he (Buddy, not Pete) came home looking like one giant mudball. What a nice day. Of course we had a small pond forming in the back yard, the joy of living at the bottom of a hill.
Now it’s 10 or below, the pond is now a glacier of solid ice, and it’s snowing. Wind is blowing like mad, it’s just cold as hell.
The antenna work race
Well, the race is on! This is supposed to be our last day of decent weather before we have another week or two of cold & snow. I’ve got some work to do to get my antenna functional again. I had a very temporary lashup with a balun soldered (more or less) on the end of the coax, but without any weather protection. The rain & snow hit a few days sooner than I expected, so right now that balun is in the middle of a block of ice and the wires are disconnected. I have to get it thawed out, the coax patched to the antenna, and the whole mess sealed up against moisture this afternoon or it’s another few weeks of no radio!
It’s a little frustrating to have a nice “new”(er) rig sitting here and not be able to use it. I think I had less than 6 contacts for all of 2007… I’d like to do better this year!
First day on the heat pump
The outside temp is finally over 20 degrees, so the heat pump has been running for the past couple of hours. Not bad… it’s a little odd to have what feels like barely-warm air coming out of the registers, but the noise level in the basement is a little lower (no gas burners or vent blower on), and the temperature is staying just as steady as with the furnace. We’ll see what the gas & electric bills look like.
Overall, the new system works much better than the old one. The temperature is staying much more constant, without the plus/minus couple of degrees we were seeing with the old furnace. I attribute that partly to the thermostat, and partly to the fact that the old furnace seemed to be just too big for the house. The air temp coming out of the old furnace was over 140 degrees F, so it would heat the house up in a BIG hurry. The downside was, it would also bump the thermal limit switch on a regular basis. During the old furnace’s last day or two of life it was cycling on and off every 5-10 minutes and still not keeping the house up to the set temperature.