Three Foot Johnson

I'm pretty sure what's happened is folks have pulled over on the highway and shot at it with their .30-06's and whatnot, or maybe even a club member who came out to sight something in and didn't realize they weren't supposed to use jacketed bullets. Several years ago, there were three managers from Sportsman's Warehouse where I worked who asked to come out and use my personal range. I was working the day they came out, but made it very clear my Cowboy Action plates were for low velocity lead bullets only... they couldn't resist, and guess what? A 7mm Remington mag will punch a hole clear through a 1/2" steel plate at thirty yards. Several holes, actually. And blast an impressive crater in 5/8" plates with cracks in the craters you can see daylight through. Now that's bad enough, but these three knotheads also set a bunch of glass beer bottles in the weeds at the edge of my lawn, shot them, and made no attempt to hide what they did or clean up the broken glass. That was the beginning of the end of my SW job. It's the only job I've ever been fired from.

It's not an external mod, so a Model 97 thusly modified is legal in both Cowboy Action and Wild Bunch, while the Model 12 is only legal in Wild Bunch. I think any main match Cowboy Action shotgun is now legal in Wild Bunch, plus the Model 12 and IAC 93/97. Main match .38/.357 rifles are now legal in WB too, but the .25-20, .32-20, .32 H&R mag, .327 Federal mag, and .56-.50 are still Cowboy Action only. (edit) PWB beat me out by two seconds.

How did they decide who made the sammiches, draw straws or something?

Our 500 yard buffalo, with the shooting position marked by the red star. This is shot with Single Shot/Buffalo Single Shot, as outlined in the Shooter's Handbook. I've walked up to it several times scrounging lead, but never measured it. It's probably about half size, depending on what you call half size... if it's half as tall and half as long as a real buffalo, that's actually one quarter size... let's compromise and call it one third size. Side match "long range" targets are going to be closer and larger than long range targets in a dedicated long range match, like the Quigley shoot here in Montana. The reason being it's the main match at those shoots, and they put a lot more time, effort, money, and dedication into it, while to most of us Cowboy Action shooters it's just, well, a casual side match - we need bigger targets, lol. I see lots of side match shooters who have only the vaguest idea where their bullet is going to impact, and only land two or three on this buffalo target, sometimes not even that. I think a 2' plate at 250 yards wouldn't be overly large or overly far for lever action rifle cal. But, as you pointed out, distance and target size can vary greatly from club to club. Some clubs, with limited distance for their long range targets, will put up progressively smaller plates all at the same distance. Most folks can put their first three rounds on the big plate, then three rounds at the medium plate weeds a few of them out, then four rounds at the smallest plate. Ties are broken by a sudden death shoot off, time, or longest string of consecutive hits. One shooter at a time on the line is very time consuming, so it's common to see four to six shooters lined up, maybe more as at the Quigley shoot. Shooter 1 shoots, the spotters call it, Shooter 2 shoots, the spotters call it, and so on. By the time it gets back to Shooter 1, they've had sufficient time to use their blow tube, make a sight setting, whatever, and they're ready to touch off their next shot.

Mine did not group well with 150's, but I had some Hornady 168 grain HPBT's on the shelf, so I tried them over 47.0 grains of IMR-4895/CCI-200 and they performed wonderfully. I think the load data came from a Garand page in a Hornady manual.

CMP, service grade Springfield, May 1945, 1+/1+ Cute little things.

I did a quick Google search, and it looks like he still lives here in the Helena area. I was just discussing this with another former manager who worked there at the time and asked if he remembered what the signing bonus was - I just tossed $10,000 out there - he's pretty sure it was $25,000.

There's your answer right there.

I worked at a lead smelter for 23 years, and a small-statured younger man got an office job there toward the end. He put up with a lot of little guy jokes, but took it all good naturedly. After the plant shut down in 2001, someone asked the plant manager whatever happened to Adam. The PM said, "Did you know he was Navy SEAL before he came here? The Navy offered him a $10,000 $25,000 bonus to come back and go to Afghanistan." So, I'm guessing he had a knack for infiltrating and "neutralizing with extreme prejudice" in his prior career.

I acquired it in December, I think, and this being Montana, it was cold out and snow on the ground, so I have yet to step outside and try it out. This morning, it was about 28 with an inch of fresh snow, but winter's got to be about over with.

If you reload, make up some 2 1/2"ers and stuff one or two of those in.

I've got a neighbor I grew up with here who went to Vietnam as a 19 year old Navy corpsman in '67. He doesn't mind talking about it, and some of the stories are pretty harrowing.

The things I saw and the stories I heard while behind the gun counter at Sportsman's Warehouse... One of our regulars open-carried a single shot percussion pistol. He rode an adult tricycle around town with all kinds of goofy hippy crap adorning it. One customer wanted his rifle bore sighted because, "It shoots pretty good right now, but I think I can get it even better with bore-sighting". "I want to get my barrel carbon fiber wrapped - do you have a kit for that?" A customer bought a Walther G22 .22 rimfire semi-auto rifle. The next day, he was back saying it was broke. "OK, what's the problem?" "I pull the trigger and it only shoots once" "Then... jams up, or something?" "No, I have to keep pulling the trigger" "OK... I'm still not understanding the problem..." "When I bought it yesterday, that tall guy told me it was an automatic" A customer called asking about 7mm ammo one time... "Ok, what kind of 7mm ammo, sir?" "Just the regular stuff" "Sir, we carry probably ten different kinds of 7mm ammo... 7mm Mauser, 7mm Remington mag, 7mm Weatherby, 7mm Winchester Short mag, 7mm-08, and others. What does it say on the barrel?" "I don't know, it's at my brother's house - don't you just have regular 7mm ammo?" "Yeah, we've got that, come on in" I had one guy come in who wanted to buy a certain make of AR-15's to convert to full-auto or select fire M16's, and surprisingly he was actually legitimate. He was from Fort Harrison and purchasing them for the Army. IIRC, he bought ten or twelve total - I had to get some transferred from other stores. And about every fourth guy who walked up to the counter was a former sniper of some sort - Vietnam, Afghanistan, SWAT, whatever.

There are a lot of long range side matches. For single shot, the 1874 .45-70 Sharps is probably the most popular, but High Walls, Remingtons, and others make a good showing. I use a Pedersoli .45-70 with Lee Shaver sights front & rear, Hadley eye cup, and we shoot out to 500 yards. A couple of the clubs here have a single shot .22 rimfire category - no modern bolt actions allowed. I use either a Chiappa Little Sharps or a Miroku Winchester Low Wall, both with MVA sights - targets are set out to 150 yards or so. Plainsman, maybe...? The one club that shoots it here sets the rifle targets at around 80 yards, so I guess that could qualify as long-range. One club started a Trapdoor category a few years ago - pretty fun to get the old Springfields out and ring the steel at 150-250 yards with the original "minute of Indian" sights. Long range pistol cal lever is normally close enough to just use your main match rifle - no need for fancy sights at only 50 yards or whatever. For long range lever action rifle cal, the Winchester M94 has to be very near the top. The Marlin 336CB is also quite popular. I sold my 336CB because my 1894 Legendary Frontiersman 38-55 was consistently much more accurate. A few years ago, I set up a Marlin 1895CB 45-70 with a Soule rear, Hadley eyecup, and bubble level front globe from MVA. A light load of Unique under a standard 405 grain cast bullet bucks the wind well and dings the targets 'most every time. We used to shoot this out to 400 yards years ago, but 150 - 250 is the norm today. We shoot pistol cal lever, and Plainsman offhand, but the rest of them can be offhand, sitting on the ground, or off cross sticks either sitting on a stool or the ground - no shooting off a bench. There are other long range side matches, but you don't see them as often - Tom Horn, Cody Dixon, Quigley bucket, Bolt Action Military... a few others that don't come to mind at the moment.

My dad bought one of those back in the late 70's. I inherited it when he passed and it was my first Cowboy Action shotgun. I've also got a 28"er I bought from Deuce Stevens fifteen years ago.

Undoubtedly a lot fewer of them made. The ROA w/adj sights was made for 36 years with the fixed sight version only made for 13 or 14 years, and most folks outside of the Cowboy Action niche market probably bought the adj sight version. I've had as many as eleven at once, but am now down to four. A lot of money to have tied up in nine backups.

I have ONE 7 1/2", blue, fixed sight I might let go, so I checked completed GB auctions to see what they're going for nowadays... Five pages of listings and only 4 were fixed sight versions.

Both of these drew no bids and have been relisted. The convertible Vaquero is now starting @ $1549. Rene's Reference Guide says only 230 of these 5 1/2"ers were made, plus a smaller handful of 4 5/8"ers, maybe 50 to 70. A very rare gun, and not a bad price.

I think Bruce Willis did that in one of his movies...

I have six Jager revolvers, five .38-40's and one .357. The only problem I've ever had is all six will over-rotate when trying to run them fast. The easy fix is to use a thick grease on the basepin.

There's a used one on Gunbroker, starting bid $850, no bids yet, 21 hours left. There's also an extremely rare Vaquero .32-20/.32 H&R mag convertible, starting bid $1599, three days left.

The only time I ever had free lead was when I worked at a lead smelter for 23 years. I had a pretty good score in 2021 when I was able to buy 2000 pounds for fifty cents a pound from a heavy equipment yard. The catch was it was in pretty big chunks, some of them well over a hundred pounds. Another source I had for awhile was scraps of mostly H section pure lead wire used by a local artist to make stained glass art. She just wanted to get rid of it and sold it to me for twenty cents a pound or somesuch - whatever the local recycling yard was paying, and she didn't have to load it up and haul it to them.

Accurate #2 works as well as W231, Bullseye, or Titegroup, and is often on the shelf.

That I don't know. They'll do the 38-40's for free because it was their mistake, whatever the reason was. If it's a chronic problem among all revolvers of whatever caliber it might be, or a one-off manufacturing defect, probably, but if it's "within factory specs" and someone is just trying to get custom work for free, probably not. Give them a call or send an email, discuss the problem and see what they say.