Posted on 05/08/2008 7:58:35 PM PDT by Redcitizen
Our favorite general purpose plinking round is the 125 gr 38SPL or 148 gr DEWC 38SPL. We each have the S&W 686+ with 4" barrel. It's a great general purpose revolver. Plenty accurate for competing in center fire handgun target competition. Cheap to shoot for an afternoon with spinners. We "launder" the fired brass in a Dillon vibratory cleaner overnight, then make 250 to 500 rounds to replace what was consumed. Boxes of bullets are sold in 250/500 sizes for that kind of bulk reloading. The fine quality hunting bullets come in boxes of 50 or 100 at a much higher price.
Do you have a hardness tester for your lead to ensure it meets some minimum standard before casting your own bullets?
My wife is a falconer along with enjoying shooting. Her Red Tail hawk was very capable of taking multiple rabbits each afternoon. Her Jack Russel Terrier would help flush the bunnies as the hawk followed behind my wife moving from bush to bush. That's all history now. The dog ate a rat poisoned by the neighbor. He was healthy at noon and laying bloated in the backyard at 4 PM with flies in his mouth. The Red Tail hawk was given to her apprentice in advance of our move from San Diego to Idaho. Her favorite hunting grounds are now covered with a theater, Barnes&Noble and Home Depot. Nothing lasts forever.
As far as the lead casting, with the cowboy stuff we don't bother with a hardness test, because the velocities are so slow and the charges so light that wheelweights have more than adequate hardness (97% lead, 3% antimony).
We have a friend who's a charter subscriber to The Fouling Shot and a serious competitive shooter, so we conferred with him before we set up our little factory.
We use jacketed on anything with speed behind it because I hate cleaning lead out of the rifling. And for my 1911A1 there's always the feeding issue.
We have an old Thumler tumbler with walnut hulls and rouge for the brass. We've had it for 40 years and it still works fine.
We have a Red Tail Hawk who lives in our yard. He is absolutely fearless, he'll snatch a chipmunk or squirrel and just sit in our cherry tree 5 feet from the driveway and eat it while we stand there and watch him. He doesn't like the dogs much, but he knows they can't climb trees!
That's a shame about your Jack. All the horsey people here have them - wish they'd train them though! We use spring traps, glue boards, and Hav-A-Harts for the rats for precisely that reason. So does everyone else around here (they all have dogs too). I also pay my son a bounty for every rat he bags with his air rifle. They cleared some old derelict houses up the hill from us, and all the rats moved down here.
We currently have 3 Rat Terriers. The two boys are tree climbers. They can get about 6 feet up in to the branches of our two Black Austrian pines. It gets them high enough to peek over the fence at the neighbors. They occasionally catch and eat a squirrel. We keep them fit and fast by running them with a laser pointer.
My wife generally prefers broad winged hawks with enough heft to bash through heavy brush in search of a rabbit. The big female Red Tail is just the ticket. We traveled to Sacramento and paid $850 for a Harris Hawk. That didn't turn out well. The breeder lived in a area with a small creek. His birds had been bitten by mosquitos and all of them had malaria. He refunded the $850, but we still had a big vet bill and a dead bird. Henceforth, we only fly birds that my wife traps in the wild. She's very good at that, so it works out fine. Her falconry has been on hiatus since moving to Idaho. Being the lead dispatcher at the local police dept doesn't leave sufficient free time to care for a hawk. It is a time intensive task that must be done every day.
Thumler has been around a while. They also make nice rock polishing tumblers. I've been considering getting one of those for my oldest son. He's a geology major with lots of nice rock samples that would look very fine if properly cut and polished.
Guess we're fortunate to have nice sensible people living all around us. Hope we're as lucky when we sell this old barrack of a house and move once the last kid is out of high school.
I could see how raptors could be a high-maintenance item. Even my dogs keep me pretty busy -- of course they are princesses and expect to be treated as such. And of course the horse thinks she's a princess . . . and the cat KNOWS she is The Queen . . . . the lady who bred my oldest Lab says if there's reincarnation she wants to come back as one of my animals.
We have lots of pets around the house too. 3 Rat Terriers, 2 Maine Coon cats, 1 tuxedo cat, 1 cockatiel, 1 rosy boa and a pair of tortoises. The aquariums are dry for the moment. I once had lots of African cichlids, plecostomus catfish, red devils and tiger oscars. We also flirted with a salt water aquarium for a while. The aquariums and water quality were my problem. As with the raptors, I simply don't have time right now.
Fascinating to get some insight into hawking. You run into it when reading medieval literature, but they didn't say anything about the basics because in those days, everybody knew all about it!
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