Three Foot Johnson

As biden is fond of saying -

When I was quite young, we had an old German couple about a mile from us who still used a big icebox on the porch of their rickety old house. They had no refrigerator, no telephone, and no television. Of course, these things were still relatively uncommon in rural areas. Old Joe had extended one end of their modest cabin/house a few feet so it went over the well, then mounted a cast iron pump jack on the plank kitchen counter. Stella was thrilled - she didn't have to go outside for water anymore! They had an inside toilet, but no water piped to it, so after you flushed, you had to carry a bucket of water from the kitchen to the bathroom to fill the tank back up. I'm pretty sure the waste just dumped into the creek. Bath water was also carried to the tub in buckets. There was very little insulation in the walls, so in the winter, Joe drained the toilet so it wouldn't freeze & break, closed off the back of the house, and they used the outhouse instead. There was a big woodstove sitting on the plank floor in the middle of the single front room, which was a combination kitchen, dining room, and living room, and it kept it cozy in the winter. When the weather started turning, Joe would drag their bedstead out into the living room for the winter, and the bedroom & bathroom would be closed off and mostly not used for four or five months. This would have been in the late-50's. And they somehow managed to raise three kids in this house too. The "kids" would be in their 90's now, so I imagine they're all gone.

"It depends" - my guns vary widely from weekend to weekend. My original large frame Vaqueros are three blue .44-40's, two stainless .44-40's, and three stainless .38-40/.40 S&W convertibles. For some reason, Ruger cut the throats on the .38-40 cylinders @ .396", so I rented a throat reamer and opened all three to either .400" or .401"... probably .401", but I'd have to find my notes. The blued .44-40's might have lighter hammer springs, I don't remember - it would be 25 years ago, or more, when I bought them.

I have a Sightron SI 1X scope brand new in the box. Discontinued now, but they used to sell for $120 - $160ish. $125, shipped. https://chuckhawks.com/sightron_SI_1x20mm.htm

I acquired a free X-ray table from a remodeling job at the local hospital several years ago and welded a wing on each side. As a bonus, there were several pounds of sheet lead counterweights bolted underneath. The target is a ~40" steel plate hanging on chains on an eight foot square backboard 500 yards away. I've got additional plates hanging at 400 and 300. My house is at upper left in the middle picture.

A DC3? I've always read it was a Douglas dive bomber.

I bought a single trigger Tedna coach gun six years ago that was a real bear to get open after firing. Another shooter suggested switching to European 209 primers, like Fiocchi, Nobel Sport, Cheddite, et al, which are flat and not domed like US 209's. I bought 5000 Fiocchi 616's online and 3000 Cheddite CX2000's from Sportsman's Warehouse, and *problem solved*. I suspect the firing pins are not retracting quite quick enough as the action opens. Easy fix, but the primers solved the problem so I'm not going to mess with it. Don't put oil in/on your firing pins, unless you disassemble and clean them regularly. Oil attracts dust, dirt, & crud and will gum up the channel & springs.

The next day...

Starting at the smelting process, about 17:20, I did all those jobs from '78 - '01 at the East Helena ASARCO lead smelter. By '78, it was on a larger scale - the blast furnaces were a little larger, with 21 tuyeres down each side, the dross skimming was done by an overhead crane with the "Bullion Man" positioning the dross into a line in front of a scoop with a wooden paddle as the "Crane Man" pulled it across the kettle. The hundred pound pigs were long gone by '78, and we pumped the finish lead into ten 10 ton molds instead. There were compound angled steel wedges placed on each end of the mold by the Bullion Man, then a mixture of wet talc was troweled around them to prevent the lead from flowing behind them. After drying, the lead was pumped in. When the lead solidified, a different overhead crane lifted the pigs out and into a rail car. Early on in my career, blood lead levels of 60 or more weren't uncommon, and even toward the end when the plant shut down, "in plant" medical removal was something like 27...? I am very susceptible to lead poisoning, and as OSHA mandated lower and lower levels, I was spending more and more time on medical removal, working mainly in our laundry facility, bath house custodian, mowing lawns, or whatever "busy work" they came up with. One time, the manager's wife complained about all the deer crap in the management housing across the creek from the plant, about ten houses for senior management, so a couple of us were sent to report to her one morning, and she had us hand pick deer pellets off the lawns all week. Today, the big slag pile is all that's left. All the housing was torn down, the 4 stacks were demolished, the entire plant was torn down, leveled, covered in several feet of dirt, and is being sold off as industrial park lots. The three concrete/masonry stacks coming down. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pIJb9t9BVY The steel zinc plant stack coming down. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQjyrhnNkq4 The end of an era, 1888-2001.

My dad and his best childhood friend, Jim Duffy, enlisted in the Army together in 1954. Neither were college-educated, just a couple of farm-fresh country bumkins. Dad got out in '56, and came back to the ranch, while Jim made a career out of the Army. He retired in '89, as a Major General. I've always been curious how that came to be, but have never asked him about it. How does a farm kid with a high school education go from Private to a two star Major General? It can't be a very common thing.

I have a neighbor who lives with his wife in a 50 year old double-wide trailer. He's 73 and long medically retired, she's 68, cooks at a bar & grill fifteen miles away back up in the mountains, and never will be able to afford to retire. Both of them smoke a pack & a half of Marlboros a day @ about $8/pack - eight or nine grand a year. They like to visit the local pub, drink beer, and play keno or poker machines for hours. They carry THOUSANDS of dollars month to month on their credit cards because "We don't have any money". He was over here some time back while I was working on something, and was admiring a Makita or Milwaukee VSR drill I was using, and said, "I'm going down to the credit union tomorrow and borrow some money to buy one of these"... he was seriously going to finance a $90 drill... maybe he did, I don't know.

SASS Vaqueros were/are sold as a consecutive matching set, the .44 Specials weren't. Of course with only 503 .44's made in stainless with a 4 5/8" barrel, I suppose randomly coming across a consecutive numbered mate to it on Gunbroker years after I bought the other one wouldn't be THAT uncommon, but still...

Today I've had rain, 3/4" hail, wind (only about 375 mph), and heavy wet snow, which is still coming down.

NIB with a "Buy it Now" price of only $700, AND consecutive to one I already had? Hell yeah, I would have jumped right on that! For some reason, I never got a notification email from my Saved Searches though.

Just one - the other one is already mine.

I don't know why I didn't get a notification... maybe sold before the system could react or something. Great price, and it would have been nice to have another consecutive set of .44 Specials. Missed it by ten days...

Maybe it wasn't fiction...

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Light snow this morning, more predicted late tonight for a couple hours, light rain tomorrow, light snow Saturday & Sunday. Of course, I'm a couple miles north of you.

I have a perforated septum from long-term exposure to heavy metal fume at a plant I worked at from '78-'01. I've had a little fun with it. One of my daughters has "facial jewelry", so I was at the mall with her one day, bought a pair of cheap hoop earrings, and slipped one through my nose... she didn't think much of ol' dad trying to bond with her.

12-13 Unique, 3/4-7/8 oz shot.

Smokestack's record 1.55 second, 10 round rifle run calculates to a cyclic rate of just a hair under 513 rounds per minute from round one to round ten, or 8 1/2 rounds per second. (1.17 seconds/10 shots discounting buzzer to shot one split)

It ain't rocket surgery. Here's another idea - cut the shaft of an old pair of boots at an angle, and hammer half a dozen copper rivets into 'em. Or stitch 'em up with a piece of cord. I had a pair of kid's cowboy boots from Goodwill on one of my carts for awhile - already small enough to not have to cut 'em, just a screw through the pull loop to hold 'em on the cart, and that was it.

Before I could afford RC, I built a free flight plane with a Cox .049. I put a little fuel in, cranked it up, and launched it. It went straight up, ran out of fuel a few hundred feet up, and glided back to Earth, just as it was supposed to. So I filled the tank up and tried it again - it went up... and up... and up... and up... and up... and up... in short order, I couldn't see or hear it anymore, and never did find it.

I built this tiny RC Sperry Messenger 50+ years ago - I'm kind of surprised it's still more or less still in one piece, complete with 24 years of dust. I've still got the rudder, but the left side elevator is long gone. It had a Cox .010 and a single channel pulse radio that controlled the rudder only. You experimented with warping/bending the elevator so it flew with a slight climb, then to lose altitude you used the rudder. The radio was unreliable as all get out and the thing was about impossible to fly. It was like a bumblebee on speed, and the few times I flew it was over a field of tall grass because it was impossible to land.