Now for the bad news. My goal this year was to manage at least one blog post every day. This was to hopefully improve my ability and to decrease the amount of time it takes me to make a post; practice that’s how it’s done. However I may end up blogging a little more on home projects or quick links than thought out posts. The reason being is I have a couple projects that I figured would be handy for Oleg that have now been confirmed as being something that would be helpful. Thus for the next many weekends the project for above ground storage in the garage, as well as reorganizing and storage of stuff in the shop. The goal is to have everything in the shop properly stored, and everything in the garage cleared out by end of March. This also includes moving all my shop tools currently living in my garage. Due to conflicting schedules though most of this work is going to be relegated to the weekends. I don’t run power tools at home by myself, it’s a great way to end up dead.
In the mean time here’s a couple pictures that Oleg took last year at Boomershoot. If you think my face looks pink, you should have seen it the next morning. I had second degree burns all over my face.
TMM is the owner, editor, and principal author at The Minuteman, a competitive shooter, and staff member for Boomershoot. Even in his free time he’s merging his love and knowledge of computers and technology with his love of firearms.
Many know his private name and information however due to the current political climate, many are distancing themselves due to the abandonment of Due Process.
In August a family friend got a pistol for her birthday. The only thing was though she had never learned to shoot. Her father is by no means opposed to firearms, however her mother hates them with a passion.
I immediately got back to her, she was extremely busy with work for the next couple weekends but she could make it out to my place for dinner one night. She came over brought her new pistol. Went over the four rules, dos and don’ts, as well how to operate her particular weapon as well as a slew of others.
She finally had a day off so we could take her out. I prefer to avoid ranges I’m unfamiliar with when I have a new shooter. I don’t like having to pay attention to other people around me possibly being unsafe while also watching a new shooter.
After talking to Laurel, Corina, and Dan I found a place that would work really well. Only trick would be finding it, I knew approximately where it was. Rolled in as the sun was getting lower in the sky, perfect photography lighting, nice and warm.
We started her off with the 22 single action revolver. After a few shots and she was getting comfortable since she had never shot before, and hadn’t ever handled a weapon except at my house a week earlier I wanted to make sure it was enjoyable as opposed to painful.
After the 22 Revolver I pulled out the High Standard. It has more mass and is semi automatic.
I spent some more time going over it’s operation again, how to load and release the magazine. How to verify the weapon is clear, as well as how to unload it. She did quite well for her first time shooting.
After this I fired some rounds out of her new pistol. The question of the day is since it’s a small 9mm, very light, how would the recoil feel. For me it was manageable, however thanks to it be double action only the trigger pull is extremely heavy and makes it uncomfortable. We put about about 50 rounds through it, we discovered it was causing her to flinch, we spent time working on that as well as spent some time on her stance. I’ve noticed a lot of new shooters have a tendency to lean back.
Even though that little thing packs a punch for the shooter, she absolutely enjoyed it and had a total blast. After we finished up with the pistol we pulled out my AR and went through some rifle fundamentals. I normally start with the rifle to teach with then move to pistol but I made an exception in this case.
I spent some time covering basics of position and breathing. After which she ripped up the hillside 100 yards away. Accurately I might add. Normally I would have run down and put up targets but we were chasing daylight and we had to get back out of BFE. Someone had left some targets up and she just shot those.
I must say though, the above picture says it all. A big smile, obviously having fun, and enjoying herself. I yet again must ask the question, WTF does VPC or the Brady Campaign have to offer?
TMM is the owner, editor, and principal author at The Minuteman, a competitive shooter, and staff member for Boomershoot. Even in his free time he’s merging his love and knowledge of computers and technology with his love of firearms.
Many know his private name and information however due to the current political climate, many are distancing themselves due to the abandonment of Due Process.
TMM is the owner, editor, and principal author at The Minuteman, a competitive shooter, and staff member for Boomershoot. Even in his free time he’s merging his love and knowledge of computers and technology with his love of firearms.
Many know his private name and information however due to the current political climate, many are distancing themselves due to the abandonment of Due Process.
We did numerous different tests trying to get different information. While we learned a lot, we also discovered that many ideas we had to try and learn the information weren’t going to work as expected. We learned things we weren’t setting out to learn
Here’s the full test video along with pictures and different things we learned.
There were numerous video cameras and stills take by Ry. I had only my single video camera and SLR with me, so I’m sure a video will probably be coming soon from Ry correcting everything I messed up in my video.
Joe was doing all the shooting, for those of you familiar with the area, we were actually shooting from the road into the side of the berm. The snow was too deep to easily do the tests in the field. Ry was out there the day before and got the van momentarily detained for 20 minutes.
We attempted to launch softballs to measure time of flight to estimate launch velocity, however the ball was thrashed beyond maintaining a reasonably consistency for experiments. We attempted to add a buffer to lessen the shock, and initially we thought it worked, till we saw that it was just in a slightly larger piece than before.
We then instead decided to attempt to launch a golf ball. The ones we were using were bright pink. However we think we placed them into LEO to never be seen again. The last launch we did with 3 golf balls was quite impressive with the resulting smoke ring.
We learned a lot yesterday and the three of us had a long discussion trying to figure out what we learned, as well as how to deal with the newest piece of information we discovered. While searching for the initial golf ball Ry saw a small hole that looked as if it was from the golf ball. He reaches in, has to punch through snow to get it and then pulls it out. While I did not get a picture of that exact extraction, I did get pictures of a extraction Joe did to a similar hole.
Initially that chalk was a powder when placed on the dispenser. The explosion however compacted it back into a block, and you can even make out the grooves from the plastic baggie. When Joe first picked the piece up there was still plastic embedded in it, but it fell off.
The compaction of the chalk results in there not being as much color, further all you get is raining chunks. I ended up staying over at his place chatting… MUCH longer than initially expected, however the wife did have an idea to add to the conversation worth experimenting with. Instead of chalk, what about colored glitter? As Joe said, that’s only something a Woman would think of.
Another interesting discovery is the fact that each time we would set of the target, it would pound the stakes about another 3/4 of an inch to an inch into the ground. When we noticed this and measured the target top to the ground below the snow.
In this picture the top of the target is about 32 inches off the ground, note this is when we first started measuring, we have already set off a couple boomers. At the end of the day this is what it was at:
The chalk dispenser appeared to survive this test with nothing more than flaking paint. Between the design changes and operating only using 100 grams of Boomerite (half charge relative to the previous test) it appeared to function quite well. Also with the addition of the 1/4 in AR500 on the front Ry is reasonably sure the front plate can be made thinner which would help shed some weight. For more details on the AR500 testing see here, here and here.
Overall though it was an absolutely beautiful day out there yesterday.
TMM is the owner, editor, and principal author at The Minuteman, a competitive shooter, and staff member for Boomershoot. Even in his free time he’s merging his love and knowledge of computers and technology with his love of firearms.
Many know his private name and information however due to the current political climate, many are distancing themselves due to the abandonment of Due Process.
I have been meaning for a while to put up this post but never had the time to get around to it until today. Instead of cleaning the shop I wasted my time editing pictures, writing this post and working on some others, and chatting on GBC.
TMM is the owner, editor, and principal author at The Minuteman, a competitive shooter, and staff member for Boomershoot. Even in his free time he’s merging his love and knowledge of computers and technology with his love of firearms.
Many know his private name and information however due to the current political climate, many are distancing themselves due to the abandonment of Due Process.
Sorry for the light blogging lately, I’ve been taking care of another project for some friends. Joe asked last week if we could help out with a private party. More specifically he said he should be able to handle it on his own, however I know the help makes it much easier. Here’s a video of the day’s events followed by a detailed description and pictures.
So we showed up at the Breakfast Club Saturday morning and carpooled out to the Boomershoot site.
The site looks completely different when there is tall grass growing everywhere.
This is from on top of the berm at the 700 yard line. You can see the trees for the 380 yard line are in the middle on the left.
Joe gave a site tour to his guests, providing the history of Boomershoot and how it has grown over the years. From there we moved on to the Taj, and proceeded to provide them with another important life skill.
We had numerous long discussions about different things that have happened at Boomershoot, interesting occurrences, as well as the endless entertainment that is known as Ry. After mixing up the explosives (staff), guests only measured due to their lack of proper documentation, we ate lunch and continued the story telling.
After lunch came the setup for the main attraction.
We had some special setup due to some “Idaho Stress Tests” that were going to be conducted.
We sandwiched the drive between 2, 7 inch targets giving a total yield of around 4 lbs of Boomerite. The catch however was that the second target used was actually a left over from Boomershoot in April. The targets lose their sensitivity over time, most would complain, however like Joe, I prefer that to becoming more sensitive!
Note the circular object flying out to the Left, that’s a platter. Here’s what it looks like up close. Normally they are perfectly smooth and mirror quality. The blast changed that irreversibly.
The second stress test was a little more unusual; at first I thought it was a lie!
However it was obliterated into a cloud of dust to never be seen again.
Lastly at the end of the day, Joe and I finished off the last two Boomers. For some reason I was off my game and missed, first time in a LONG time. I must say though, it was much better to happen then instead of during Boomershoot with a TV crew behind me.
TMM is the owner, editor, and principal author at The Minuteman, a competitive shooter, and staff member for Boomershoot. Even in his free time he’s merging his love and knowledge of computers and technology with his love of firearms.
Many know his private name and information however due to the current political climate, many are distancing themselves due to the abandonment of Due Process.
TMM is the owner, editor, and principal author at The Minuteman, a competitive shooter, and staff member for Boomershoot. Even in his free time he’s merging his love and knowledge of computers and technology with his love of firearms.
Many know his private name and information however due to the current political climate, many are distancing themselves due to the abandonment of Due Process.
I just finished uploading the 2010 Boomershoot staff cleanup video. It provides a few chuckles with different quips.
I didn’t get any video of the shoot down on the berm. We were in a rush because we did a special mini high-intensity event for Michael Bain and his film crew for The Shooting Gallery . I figured since they were filming it they’d probably get better footage anyway.
TMM is the owner, editor, and principal author at The Minuteman, a competitive shooter, and staff member for Boomershoot. Even in his free time he’s merging his love and knowledge of computers and technology with his love of firearms.
Many know his private name and information however due to the current political climate, many are distancing themselves due to the abandonment of Due Process.
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