Three Foot Johnson

On this day in 1876, Lt. Colonel George Armstrong Custer led ~255 troopers of the 7th Cavalry in an attack against the largest known gathering of the northern plains Indians ever assembled. It did not end well.

None. I don't know anywhere Plainsman is shot on a regular basis. I know of one club in Montana that puts on a combination Cowboy/Plainsman match once a year at a regular monthly shoot. The pistol targets are the same for Cowboy/Plainsman, but the Plainsman rifle targets are set at about 75 yards or so.

Why not the super cool stripper clips? I have a #1 Mk 3 for BAMM matches and use stripper clips to reload. I remember reading somewhere that troops were instructed not to remove the magazine unless it was damaged, and to reload with stripper clips. Mine all needed a little polishing so the rounds stripped smoothly into the action.

First, polish the chambers. After sizing/depriming, I run all my hulls through a MEC Supersizer set as tight as it will go, then I wash 'em all in hot water with Dawn dish soap. Even after three rinses, the Dawn seems to slick the hulls up somehow, and with the Supersizer treatment, they fall right out.

Originals or modern production?

It wouldn't do me any good, as I've got maybe three phone numbers committed to memory, and one of them is 911. I don't even know my two daughter's numbers - I tell my phone to call them, and it does.

Good Lord, that 250 count lot of NOS Starline I messaged you about went for $515.00 + $20 shipping.

Simple, easy to learn game - I could play it for the rest of my life.

There's a bunch on Gunbroker right now - 750 NOS RP in lots of 50, $100 "Buy it Now" per lot. Another seller has 95 once-fired RP with no reserve.

Heather Locklear, hands down.

"He posed for pictures, signed autographs for anyone who wanted one, and collected phone numbers and messages from kids who knew their moms would be thrilled to hear Robert Mitchum telling them their boys were okay. He got back from Vietnam with ninety million tiny scraps of paper. Just about every boy he met over there gave him a message to take back. Pieces of paper with phone numbers, names. And Robert Mitchum sat down for days and called every number." Uh... no. Even if each "scrap of paper" were only the size of a Post-it note, that would be 39,000 pounds of paper. A quick Google search says there were 385,000 US servicemen in country in 1966, and an additional 60,000 sailors and Marines off shore. If he spent only one minute each, 24/7/365 calling ninety million numbers, it would take more than 171 years.

I've got a couple different ones with a screw, but that slide on one looks pretty dang slick, and it's a little less expensive.

Here's a bit of an enigma. These are not ejectors, but rather full-length extractors. The Darne was also made with ejectors in the form of spring loaded pins in the breech face that throw the empties off to each side as they clear the chambers.

That makes much better sense.

The Cap-Chur rifle says, "Rifle is effective from approximately 5­25 yards"... ... using .22 blank power loads...? A few years ago, I had neighbor's crazed bull running around the place with a brain tumor it turned out, that would have killed someone who got too close. He came in with a half dozen riders and a dart rifle and they finally put him down, but the range was point blank, not several hundred yards.

Mine 8 pounder is due to be delivered Friday, and I have a good amount of my last 8 pounder left, so I'll be set for a long time on Red Dot, AND I just scored 3 unopened 1 lb cans of Accurate #2 locally, plus a partial that looks to be about 3/4 full, for a hundred bucks. Now, if Midsouth only had an 8 pounder of Unique for the same deal as the Red Dot...

As above, Starline brass is in stock. RCBS makes a 350 grain mold (50-350-CM) that works OK for me, although a little short of ideal length and slightly undersized. A lot of us use a modified 500 grain .50-70 Lee mold (515-500-F) with the bottom couple grease grooves turned off. It weighs in at about 325 grains, and has no crimp groove, so it's better suited to black powder loads, and feeds slightly better than the RCBS. Modified Lee on the left, Ten-X pulled factory bullet in the middle, RCBS on the right. Buffalo Arms has a very similar mold to the Lee, but it's listed at $205 and currently out of stock. The Lee mold is under $40 from Amazon and Midway, but if you don't have a buddy with a lathe, you'll probably have to fork over another $50 or whatever to have someone it cut down. Dakota Widowmaker on the Spencer Shooting Society link above used to cut these down and sell them for a very reasonable price. He might still be doing it. IMR-4227 works well, as per Sedalia Dave above, but dang... why in the world would you want to shoot smokeless in a .56-50?

Nobody's had any for months, if not a couple years. Occasionally someone will put one on eBay for a ridiculously low price, not knowing what they have, but like Waco Jim said, a hundred bucks is about the median price right now, and it will undoubtedly be a used part. You could buy a new stainless Super Blackhawk, swap hammers with your revolver, then sell the SBH as "customized". There was a NIB SBH that sold on Gunbroker only five days ago for $556/$24.95 shipping, and a used one in April for $466/$35 shipping. You have to be watching GB constantly for these deals though.

I bought a pair of "slicked up" Uberti .44-40's here several years ago at a pretty good price - "slicked up" by the seller. When I brought them home, I found one of them had a trigger pull of about 4 ounces, and the other one about 8 ounces. I literally couldn't feel the trigger before the hammer fell. A good bump on the butt or side of the gun would drop the hammer. Both hammers could be made to fall with moderately light pressure on the hammer spur. He was pretty proud of his "action jobs". I never did fix them, and sold both of them, at cost, to another Cowboy shooter buddy of mine in Billings, with full disclosure that they needed new hammers and/or triggers to be safe. He fixed them and still uses them.

I cringe when I see some variation of "action job" or "slicked up" in a gun ad. The seller invariably thinks those phrases automatically add a hundred or two to the asking price. Anymore, I see it as reducing the value, so we're already two or three hundred dollars apart before negotiations even start. More often than not, when I see "slicked up" in the description, unless it's cheap or a particularly unique or intriguing gun, that's as far as I need to read - it's pretty much an automatic deal breaker.

I shot a six stage match in 2013 using not only 24 different guns, but each one chambered for a different cartridge or gauge. With the consent of the posse, I added .410 and 28 ga to get six different shotguns. All of the pistols & rifles were shot with their respective "dedicated cartridges", meaning I didn't shoot .38 specials in .357 magnums or .44 specials in a .44 magnum. My '82 Honda Civic hatchback served as my gun cart that day.

Trail Boss was discontinued June 1st, 2018. I've seen it sell (not just the "asking price") for as much $427.50 for a 9 oz can, PLUS shipping & hazmat. There have been rumors ever since that it's coming back "this fall" or "next year", but after six years and being such a niche powder, along with the current shortage of nitrocellulose, I doubt we'll ever see it again. There is a five pounder on Gunbroker right now for $1849.99 shipped, and a completed auction for a five pounder that sold for $1350, shipped via "Buy it Now" five weeks ago.

I went to visit an old neighbor several years ago who has since passed on, and when I walked in, he was sitting in his recliner darning his socks. I said, "Hey Dewey, whatcha doin'?" "Darning my socks." "What?? You know you can go to the store and get a half dozen for $8.99?" "Oh no, have you priced good wool socks lately?" "Well, no, but... wait a minute, those aren't wool socks." "Nope, but they will be when I'm through."

Trail Boss, along with about twenty others, was discontinued June 1st, 2018 due to loss of the CE certificate - "Conformite Europeene". It was supposed to be temporary, pending some reformulation of the recipe, and every year since, there have been rumors that "it's coming back this fall" or "next year", but with the current shortage of nitrocellulose, the odds of it coming back now are exactly zero.

I think I've got SBH hammers in sixteen of my Vaqueros/New Vaqueros, and they've all been 100% plug & play. I put a couple in a pair of .44-40's last week and shot them this weekend - it didn't help my scores any, but easier to shoot them one handed now.