Nostrum Damus SASS #110702

Wildlands Firefighter, VBFD Engine, then Marine Unit, now HAZMAT. And EMT from the beginning. Our sons are amazing.

I'll take the light blue pants and tan striped pants, #s 2 and 5 in the second picture. PM sent. But as I was sending PM I realized that you don't want to ship. Sorry for troubling you and anyone in Arizona.

I leave it to the experts, and stand duly corrected. I hope my firefighter son knows this stuff, too. MAYBE that's why he said they just stood off the 18-wheeler and let it burn itself out, rather than put it out like the FFs in that video did.

JL, no one said you CAN'T make an explosion with smokeless powder -- my point is that you have to TRY -- maybe with a BIC lighter and some duct tape, if you say so. An open plastic bottle of smokeless powder sitting on a table -- and all modern smokeless powder comes in plastic bottles -- simply will not explode if ignited -- it will only burn -- very fast. If you have video or other information showing otherwise, we'd all like to know about it. One of the reasons why smokeless powder was invented 140 or so years ago was to reduce the risk of undesired explosions. And as I said, it may even create a decent pressure wave -- after all, the burning propellant is creating a large volume of hot expanding gas -- which is what builds pressure and drives the projectile down the barrel, as long as the gas has nowhere else to go. But I do not believe that the pressure wave -- even from an 8-lb bottle going up -- will do to a cinder block house what is seen in those Fox News photos. But maybe I'm completely wrong, of course. And Utah Bob, if you don't actually know why there's a bang noise when you pull the trigger, let us know where you shoot ... so we can avoid going there. Seriously, you can put a pallet of jars of smokeless powder over a bonfire and you bet your a$$ there's going to be one helluva flare -- but it isn't going to explode. Unless I'm completely wrong, of course.

Smokeless powder undergoes a process called deflagration -- a type of combustion in which heat caused by one ignited particle ignites the next group of adjacent particles, each of which ignites the next group of adjacent particles, and so on. Black powder undergoes detonation -- a type of combustion in which a supersonic exothermic front is accelerated directly ahead of the combusting particle, and when lots of particles get combusted together, create an explosive shock wave or front. There is no shock wave in deflagration -- which is why the guy's story makes no sense. The destruction of the house seen in the news report would not have been caused by any deflagration event in nearly every conceivable situation. I think the guy is lying about what happened.

Even LOADED ammo doesn't explode in a fire, says my son, as long as we are talking about smokeless powder. It isn't unusual for large amounts of ammunition to be delivered in and around the Norfolk VA area. He attended a burning 18-wheeler carrying ammunition. They set up a safety zone -- and it was something like 50 or 100 yards if I remember correctly -- and let it burn itself out. The unconstrained ammo "fizzes" as the propellants cook off because the expanding gas inside the case has no trouble at all just pushing the projectile out of the case -- at almost no velocity. He said that there were occasional "pops" but nothing more. He said that for the initial part of the fire, before the trailer's sheet metal and plywood walls were burned out, nothing came through them. I was surprised, to be honest. Now if it is black powder, that's a whole different story ...

OK, so my HAZMAT Tech son says no, smokeless powder does not explode; it burns pretty fast, though. He says it is possible that if it all ignited instantaneously, it could create a decent pressure wave, even if not constrained in a pressure vessel, but only "decent" -- likely not strong enough to do the kind of damage seen in the Fox News article. It is certainly possible that his "at least six pounds" was in a single bottle, as we all know that powder is conventionally sold in 8 lb bottles. Maybe the guy lit it off with a static electricity spark. Or an electrical appliance sparked. Or who knows what else. Or maybe he isn't being completely truthful about what he was doing. There are YouTube videos of people trying to ignite significant quantities of smokeless powder to see if it will explode, and it never does. The flare is impressive but extremely short-lived, and produces no explosion of any kind.

One of my sons is a Certified Technician on the VA Beach FD HAZMAT Team. I just asked him if the FOX News story makes any sense. Will report what he says.

My fully vaccinated firefighter son is sick with "the rona" as he calls it, and for a big strong tough guy, he's laid pretty low today. Said he was looking for the train tracks of the locomotive than ran him over while trying to sleep last night -- "the worst head cold you've ever had, some fever, and a migraine just for added fun" is how he describes it. No loss of taste or smell, though, and no fatigue, he says. Still, I spent 4 days with him and his girlfriend last week and neither she nor I (we're all fully vaxxed, she's months away from her USAF honorable discharge after 10 years as a satellite imagery analyst) have even tested positive. We're testing every other day until Saturday, then declaring ourselves totally clear.

My parents always had cats from before I was born until long after I went away to college. And when I was much much younger, like several decades ago, I had cats, too. They were all exclusively "indoor" cats, never bothered anyone, never killed anything except an occasional bug. Some friends still have indoor cats and I must say that the modern technologically advanced cat litter really is something that makes indoor cats much more pleasant to have around the house.

Slim, I don't think that's accurate. Wind turbines kill far more birds in flying flocks than single raptors, and almost exclusively at night. Many smaller and not-so-small songbirds and other non-singing birds migrate at night when they seem to use the stars to navigate (in addition to those that have been shown to have a biomagnetic compass in their brains) and most bird deaths from land-based wind turbines occur during migration seasons. For the same reason, collisions with building architectural glass panels of illuminated (and thus confusing to birds) office buildings, hotels, and other tall structures along coastlines kill almost 600 million migrating birds each year, almost all at night, and there are almost no raptors in that death toll.

Nothing different about pet owners and non-pet owners, fundamentally -- there are responsible ones and irresponsible ones. It doesn't matter whether the pet is a cat or dog; responsible pet owners take reasonable steps to prevent their pets from being disgusting nuisances to others, or agents of death to other critters, and irresponsible pet owners do not. Is anyone shocked by this news? By the way, the Number One cause of wild bird mortality in the United States is -- you guessed it -- cats. And it is not a close call, either. As of 2017, the US Fish & Wildlife Service estimated the annual death toll of birds to be about 3.325 billion birds, and of that total cats were responsible for an estimated 2.4 billion bird deaths -- about 72%. People who get all excited about wind turbines killing birds need to understand that the same USFWS figures estimated that cats annually killed ten thousand two hundred fifty-five times as many birds as all land-based wind turbines. Cats were estimated to annually kill just shy of 3.4 times the total number of birds killed by all industrial causes combined.

I can't help myself. I'll take it. PM sent.

Pards, this is an awesome shotgun with beautiful hard case at a VERY sweet price. If I had even the slightest need for another gun for trap and sporting clays, I'd be all over this.

Contact the NRA Museum or Cody Firearms Museum -- someone at either or both of these places would know, if anyone knows. From WinchesterCollector.org: "Original Winchester factory records are available for this model from the Cody Firearms Museum in Cody, Wyoming, from serial number 1 thru 720496, except 497 thru 610 and 199551 thru 199598."

Pressure cooker, either old-fashioned or InstantPot computerized type that all of my friends seem to own and swear by.

I'm a gonna be sick ....

PM sent

I imagine if you know enough to buy that gun, you probably know all of this already. Make sure you understand all of the proof marks -- they (and the numbers) will tell you the pressure that the barrels were proofed to at the time of manufacture and at any subsequent re-proofing time. They may or may not be usable with modern smokeless powder. Also, the chambers may be 2 3/4" if they have been modified post-original manufacture; otherwise they are almost certainly 2 1/2" chambers. Here's a good start for deciphering the proof marks: http://www.nramuseum.org/media/940944/proofmarks.pdf

Just be very careful to fully mask off anything you do not want to alter. Both FLITZ and BRASSO will remove bluing and may alter the appearance of case-hardening.

Brasso and Flitz contain the same active chemical that converts and allows removal of the surface oxidation. Brasso costs less than a quarter of what you'll pay for Flitz. Neither harms the brass. Just follow directions, keep using fresh areas of the rag, and do small overlapping areas until done, not trying to do the whole thing all at once.

In February 2016, the average price of a gallon of gasoline, all grades, all formulations, was $1.87 according to the US Energy Information Administration. In May 2019, it was $2.94 according to the USEIA, a rise of 57%. What happened from February 2016 to May 2019? (Hypothetical question.) You all need to get a grip on reality, and learn some facts before pointing fingers. In the United States, unlike in Russia, the President has very little real influence over the price of gasoline. What happened since January 2020 is as much Biden's doing as the 57% rise was Trump's, which is to say, not much by either. Moreover, the price was $3.10 a gallon when Obama was elected and on its way to an all-time high of $4.11 a few months later, and was $1.87 when Trump was elected. So, by your logic, you voted Democrat in 2016, right?

Look at the chart of gasoline prices every single year and you will see the very same trend. Lowest prices in the winter, highest prices in the summer. Many factors, not so simple to explain the finer fluctuations. Companies bet billions on it, spend millions on some very fancy economists and computer power to get it right. But fundamentally, American demand for gasoline drives American gasoline price at the pump. It is called capitalism.

Highly taxed, sure, but only 43 cents more than here in Texas, where I paid $2.57 on Wednesday. In California, every single other aspect of distribution also costs more: trucking expenses, regulatory compliance, gas station rent or property taxes, employee wages, state franchise tax, lots of other stuff I can't think of off the top of my head, everything. All of that raises the price per gallon another dollar, at least.

Seriously, raccoons are WILD animals. What about the word "WILD" do people not understand? And among the furry critters we are most likely to come across, raccoons are the second most likely to carry rabies (behind only bats), whether they are actually sick or not. Why would anyone invite a raccoon into the house?