Dusty Devil Dale

The energy for discouraging various medical testing in older individuals flows from the federal government agencies and insurance companies who want to duck the higher cost of older patient medicine by advocating the Sweedish model = zero medical care after age 55 unless patient pays for it directly. I will gladly pay the small cost for my annual PSA test, 5-year colonoscopy and any other diagnostics needed, if either Medicare or my secondary insurance deny them. Sadly, I remember a previous President who also subscribed to the Scandanavian model and said, "just give grandma a pain shot". He could say that knowing he and his family would get the best care available at Bethesda. Good for thee, but not for me.

Yep. Confidence comes from knowing what to do and how AND when to do it.

A bunch of men talking about which style guns are best for women ---LOL. Where are the woman participants, and what do THEY say they prefer? Their answers might surprise us. Most men can't comprehend the physical problems a fragile or small frame woman (especially one with arthritis) has in trying to rack most semi-autos, or even reach the mag release. My wife cannot begin to rack even a small .22 caliber semi. So I once bought her a Ruger Tomcat to try. She could not operate the barrel-break cocking mechanism, so the Tomcat became another safe queen. She carries and shoots a 5-shot Ladysmith .38sp revolver that we bought for her in the 70s. Seeing her shoot rapid 1.5 inch 5-shot groups at 10 yards with 158 gn ammo has impressed more than one CCW instructor over the years. I have no worries about her needing more ammo capacity. Her being able to place a round accurately on a target (and off their body armor) is IMO more important than we like to give credit. I have confidence she would not require more than one round per target to neutralize an attack.

You might check the hammer plunger to be sure its spring is not weak or broken. The plunger pushes down on the rear of cylinder stop, forcing the front end upward to index the cylinder. But a weak plunger should affect all of the cylinders intermittently. So if it is always the same cylinder out of time, as others have asked, then the problem is likely not the plunger. I worked on a Vaquero recently that had .030 runout in the base pin boring, due to wear from years of not being cleaned. That caused one cylinder to intermittantly index off center just enough to interfere with primer detonation. A replacement cylinder fixed it.

The commercial aerosol wasp sprays have a lot of pressure and not very much pesticide, so they have a nasty habit of running out just as you get the hive riled up. What commercial guys use is a weed sprayer full of thin Dawn Soap solution. Just a small amount of soap drops them right to the ground. They are dead within just a few seconds. A coarse spray will soak the nest and kill everybody that is at home. I have also stood there and fogged the nest with finer spray as they came out. It works, but you need to watch out for the individuals returning behind you from the fields. They come in HOT! It's best to spray the nest at night when more wasps are at home.

V. good that you asked. Hopefully nobody would just have tried it. The splatter from buckshot off of steel plates at our close ranges would probably be quite a safety hazard, even if the targets are knockdown. Not all of the shot cloud hits the moving plate. Some shot usually splashes off of stands or other hardware. Buckshot might (not sure) also cup target plates worse because of the individual pellet mass.

That is right. Who knows if they used nautical or land measure to measure a lake, in those expeditions. And considering what they were doing, I doubt it really matters very much.

You're correct. Somebody needs to go back to math class. A league is 3.452 miles. x 15 leagues is 51.78 miles.

I should mention that when I found it, I had just read about Estudillo's expedition about a week earlier in researching for a historical fisheries manuscript I was working on. When I turned the ball over, wiped away the mud, and saw a Franciscan Cross, the hair literally stood up on the back of my neck. I realized I was holding a piece of California history in my muddy hand.

Related Item of possible interest. In 1818, Lieutenant José María Estudillo led a Spanish expedition into Central California, looking for locations to site missions. In the spring of that year, his diary records the soldiers entering the San Joaquin Valley. He crossed southward and westward across the San Gabriel River and San Pedro River (Kawea and Tule Rivers, respectively) where he encountered the huge Tasche Lake (Tulare Lake- Buenavista Lake complex). This is an interior, terminal lake that historically gathered the undiverted flows from the Kern, Tule, Kaweah and Kings Rivers from the east, and from numerous smaller warersheds draining from the east side of the Coast Range Mountains. Estudillo, in his letters, describes his attempt to estimate the lake's expansive width by firing a series of four gunshots across the water. He estimated the width to be "about 13 leagues" (45 miles). The actual width at that location would have been about 28-33 miles. That was a fair estimate, considering the technique! The photo is a 2-1/4" hammered bronze cannonball, marked with two deeply hand-graved Franciscan Crosses (one is visible). I recovered it out of a freshly disced field, while working near the present-day town of Allensworth, in 1998. The State Historic Preservation Office catalogued and analyzed the artifact at the time, but they declined to take posession, leaving it in my private collection. Upon analysis, they agreed wit me that the ball "has high liklihood" of resulting from one of those four 1818 Estudillo gunshots.

SHB is clear enough. But doesn't a Stage Instruction take priority within a particular stage (obvious exception would be safety issues). In the end it boils down to writing Stage Instructions competently, so there are not conflicts with SHB rules or conventions.

Agree. The "shoot until down" instruction can conflict with the stage round count direction, unless the (rounds)+ notation is used -- it usually is for KD targets.

It might have been a target failure-- most probably was. The wheel settled to a slow pendulum with one plate at the bottom. The shooter's hits simply tilted the plate back against the frame. But in a shoot-off situation, with two shooters in direct competition, how do you do a fair re-shoot. The point is that the shooter was prevented from moving on to other targets by the shoot until down Stage Instruction.

Have you seen this verbiage in Stage Instructions? I see it often. So what does it really say? On its face, it says the shooter MUST re-engage the target until it falls down. Because it is a "Stage Instruction", it technically overrides the permissive language in SHB and in other places, saying knockdown shotgun targets 'MAY' be re-engaged. By this Stage Instruction, dropping the plate is REQUIRED. So shooters technically cannot just accept a miss and stop the re-engagement. I guess if/ when they eventually run out of ammo, they get the miss -- or is it also a Procedural (failing to follow stage instructions)? It isnt just an inconsequential piece of rhetoric. I recently watched a shooter fire 8 extra shotgun rounds, trying to drop a single target. They consistently shot over the top. They stopped when their ammo was exhausted. Several years ago, I also watched a very good shooter competing for fun in the day-after shoot-offs of a Western Regional SASS Match (that he had won the previous day). He engaged and hit the last plate on a T-Star repeatedly, but it did not detach. He exhausted his ammo. That brought loud laughter from the crowd, but the shooter didn't enjoy it as much. So with the above instruction, was dropping the plates actually required? Just reading the instruction, I would say yes, it was. A better-written Stage Instruction might be: "Engage the Shotgun targets. Targets left standing are misses. Any shotgun target may be re-engaged" Comon sense is that nobody intends for shooters to have run the clock out or to exhaust ammunition, rather than just accept a miss. But shouldn't we we say what we mean in writing our common-usage Stage Instructions? Just my thoughts. (Others' mileage may vary)

Just a word on "bonuses". They have always been unpopular here on the wire and generally are not used in the bigger matches. But most shooters do enjoy earning them in annual or monthly matches. They represent opportunity for a lesser penalty for a miss on a difficult target. The target is designated "no-miss-counted" and If nobody hits it, the bonus is moot. If only one person hits it, then everyone else has a penalty. But if the bonus is 1 second, the miss differential costs the shooters only 1 second instead of 5. That can be a useful tool for including some fun, more difficult targets without them being major game changers. Another place they are useful is where a target like a T-Star is placed in a 10-round shooting string. A following bonus dump (say 1 second per hit) for any left over rounds can offer a reward to the shooter who drops all of the T-Star plates with fewer rounds. Otherwise, a shooter who misses five shots dropping the plates has no miss penalty. But I do agree that bonuses invite scorekeeping complexity errors. That problem is pretty unavoidable and very significant, and that issue alone might exclude them from major matches.