Hank Ellis

Not a damn bit funny. At a match a couple of years back I was crouched down behind a wall trying to set a swinger that was giving me problems when I hear "LINE IS HOT". I come to a 4 foot hover and yell back "NO IT'S NOT" and haul it out of there. The look of shock on the RO and shooter told the tale. Both thought the range was clear. I now check every stage myself before LAMR. My gun. My bullets. Everyones safety. LAMR is permission to load, not a command to load. Being an RO is serious business and calling wolf with bogus calls is just plain wrong. Some day, somebody is going to ignore your call as 'he's just trying to hurry us up' and that somebody could get hurt.

Won't win an Oscar but not a bad movie. The Coasties are long overdue for their movie being made. The extras on the DVD were gems. The interview with the swimmer who did her first lift during Katrina brought tears to our eyes. Around here, anyone in a Coast Guard uniform doesn't have to worry about their bar tab.

Follow this link to what this guy did at 1911forum.com as a solution to his brass sorting problem. He never did follow up on making the things. Some enterprising individual could make a few bucks on it. (Paging EricW)

The only thing I've heard is this tidbit on the 1911 forum. Start at post 11. http://forums.1911forum.com/showthread.php?t=166852

http://www.slv.vic.gov.au/pictoria/a/5/0/doc/a50176.shtml A photo of some oversized BBQ grill lid looking things. http://www.optequip.com/products/fiber_opt...pter_A50176.htm A fiber optic cable adapter. http://www.wrapables.com/jsp/ProductDetail...ductCode=C50176 Some goofy bath towel as part of a collection. Let's see. If I wrap a half pound of black powder in the towel then cover it with the lid thing ...

I've been in aviation all my life. Pilot at 17. Mechanic at 20. Parachute rigger at 32. Been skydiving for 20 years. Aircraft mechanic for 29 with 27 in rotorcraft. The list of near incidents I've had can be counted on both hands. Just a few. As a newbie pilot I was making a night run from Columbus, OH to Kansas City, MO. Didn't pay attention to the temp/dew point spread. Fog formed and I was in a bind as I'm not instrument rated. Declared an emergency and landed at the only open airport within fuel range. Learned my lesson. Skydiving from a Cessna 182. Pilot ran out of fuel at 5,000 ft. We jettisoned the aircraft and all landed safely. Pilot said he misjudged the fuel burn. Let it slide. Till he did it again a week later. Kicked his ass. Skydiving from a CASA 212. At 5,500 ft the #2 engine made a very expensive noise. Pilot got us over the DZ and 34 people left the aircraft in short order. Fuel control drive gear had a major come-apart. Pay attention when those chip lights flicker. Autorotation RPM check in a BO-105. Pilot took both engines to idle with the collective up in the cruise position. Rotor RPM bled to 85% and the aircraft quit flying. Pilot went catatonic and got control back using techniques not in the book. The checklists are there for a reason and don't get in an aircraft with a pilot that came to work on the short bus. All in all, I trust the vehicle. The weak point is the meat in the two front seats. However, commercial aircraft today are so advanced they can nearly fly themselves automously. The pilots are trained better today than they ever have. I still don't care for flying commercial but it has nothing to do with the vehicle or the pilots. It's the cattle herding mass-transit mentality that cuts my fuse short.

The jump was made a one of the largest dropzones specializing in tandem skydives. 50 to 100 jumps a day. From my friends at dropzone.com it appears the exit altitude was 15000 ft AGL. Our unfortunate individual was doing camera work shooting the tandem pair. Normal stuff. I'll let the Incident Report from the New Zealand Parachute Association speak for itself. As a parachute rigger, there were some interesting things in the photos and text that raised an eyebrow. You won't get a comment from me as this isn't the forum for it. Considering the impact speed he got away with minimal injuries.

This is one of those incidents where the jumper did everything right and still almost bounced. [When the human body impacts in a high speed vertical descent, you don't splat like a watermelon, you bounce back up to a few feet. In the sport, when someone dies making his last jump we say he 'bounced'.] Sometimes there's no explaning how someone survived a serious incident like this except to say it wasn't his time to go. USPA member 58558, sport parachute license D13011

Several years ago, the president of the IPC (International Parachuting Commission) got this notion that skydiving should be an Olympic sport. It was a circus. The names of the events was changed. One example was from relative work, which was what it was called from its very beginning, to formation skydiving. Rule proposals were thrown up that would have totally changed competiton as we had known it. All this was to make the sport more appealing to the spectator and be television friendly. The name change stuck but the rules change proposal started a global uproar. The attitude was, it's our sport, either the Olympics take it as it is or we won't play. The Olympic people backed down a bit. We went through the hurdles. Got to the major first step. Remember the skydivers that formed the Olympic rings in freefall at the 1998 Seoul games? This link, 5th photo down. That wasn't some demo that the Olympic organizers paid for to entertain the crowd. It was actually a requirement for the sport to be demonstrated in front of the organizing committee prior to possibly being allowed to become a demonstration sport at a future games. BTW: Each of the participants had to pay for the jumpsuit, canopies, container, airfare, and all other expenses out of their own pockets. Most of the gear hit the used market within 3 months of the games so the participants could recoup some of the expenses. What did all this get us? Sorry but we're not interested. Bottom line is that, and quoting from this FAI press release, "The Olympic Programme Commission pointed out that any changes in the structure of the Olympic Programme should result in increased value and appeal of the Olympic Games, that global public and media interest should be considered as key elements in the analyses of sports, and that sports should give special emphasis to youth and development." With that statement in mind, IPSC will never be an Olympic sport. We're not politically correct enough, and although we enjoy seeing it on the tube, it's not really a spectator sport. So quit worrying.

How can you guys have won the London Lottery when it says right here I've won it? What's sad is that I have an elderly Aunt who got a letter in the mail stating she won some lottery scam. She nearly fell for it but decided to call me before doing anything. The letter is on its way to the state attorney general. She doesn't have internet access so luckily she isn't subjected to daily scamming. Ripping off the elderly. How low can you get? ------------------------------------- Uk National Lottery Headquarter: Customer Service 28 TANFIELD ROAD, CROYDON.LONDON NOTIFICATION (UKON 2007) Ref No: UKON-5464K2/71 Batch Number: AT-040SB06-03 Lucky Numbers: 34.13.26.19.02.12.[08] Bonus Ball 11TH Feb,2007. You have been Selected in the UKON 2007 Lottery Program. Our lottery program selection has finally been performed today which was held at the Marina office. UK Promotion is a joint Euro/America private lottery registered and organized in accordance with the WorldLottery Regulation act. An official notification of winning is hereby issued to you as your email promotion ticket randomly drew for the Lucky Numbers: 34.13.26.19.02.12.[08]Bonus Ball ,which selected your email as the 2ND winner of our lottery program you have consequently won the lottery program in the first batch. Suffice to say here, We have officially approved a sum payout of £500,000.00 GBP to you as the lottery winner. This amount is from total prize cash of £1,500,000.00 GBP randomly distributed among Three (3)international winners selected by our Lottery Random System Selection(LRSS). FIDUCIARY DEPT: NAME: LEWIS MORGAN. (CLAIMS OFFICER) PHONE:+447011120880 Email:claimsofficerdept2007@yahoo.co.uk VERIFICATION AND FUNDS RELEASE FORM FULL NAMES: AGE & SEX: ADDRESS & COUNTRY: MARITAL STATUS: OCCUPATION: PHONE NUMBER & FAX NUMBER: LUCKY NUMBER : REF NUMBER: Congratulations from all our staff for being part of Uk National Lottery 2007 LOTTERY PROGRAM. Sincerely, Traci L. Fuller (Mrs) Zonal Co-ordinator

I shopped around locally and found nothing that suited my purposes. Either the unit was nothing more that a flimsy storage box or it was a multi thousand dollar unit for storing the Crown Jewels. Thought about ordering and having it shipped but the cost of shipment was an issue. Besides I wanted to see the unit prior to forking out the cash. Tripped across this unit at Academy manufactured by Cannon. Reasonable price. Decent fire protection. Heavy enough that it won't be carted away. Rated for 24 long guns if you don't want any shelving. 12 with shelving. It can take 8 or 10 without being too crowded. If you have a more than a couple long barrelled clays guns then you may have to get creative in 'what fits where'. I added a few more shelves and have storage space to spare. Very happy with it. If I had to do it over again I'd get the next size larger just for long gun expansion.

Link to the VV reloading guides.

If I go to another 'group hug' or Kum-Bah-Ya meeting I'm going to puke. When I get an office of my own (rather than share as I do now) these are the posters going on the wall.

Personally, I think a lot of the 'natural herb' remedies on the market are just the 21st century version of the old west snake oil salesmen. Here and there are remedies that do work and I do use them. Enzyte isn't one of them. Don't need it. At $100 a month you better want to turn that putter into a 3 wood pretty badly. But I love the commercials. -> Wood. Big. Large. Smiling Bob isn't Smiling Anymore Why is this man smiling? It's not Viagra

Your mileage may vary, but... I tried VV N320 in a .38spl load and wasn't impressed. Using a 158 lswc of local manufacture and 3.7 of N320 I got 703fps out of a 4" S&W 686. Not bad velocity but the spread wasn't all that great. ES of 110 and a SD of 27. The SD from my starting load to where I quit was always in the 20s. Tried a 125 lrn with N320 and got similiar SD results. It looked like I couldn't get it consistent so I gave up on the powder. Now my WST load of 3.5 and a 158 gives me 738 with an ES of 36 and a SD of 10. WST has given me consistent velocities and a no worse than mid-teens SD from since my starting load. I've got some 3.6 loaded and ready to chrono if the weather ever breaks. I'm also giving Trail Boss a try. The stuff is made for lead bullets in revolvers. Loaded real light it's not so good but as you load it heavier it starts to shine. Still have some work to do with this. For grins I loaded 3.0 of Titegroup and a 158. 691 fps with a ES of 50 and a SD of 12. I'm going to work some more with this when I finish my work with Trail Boss.

All in all pretty lame in relation to other years. This year didn't hold a candle to the ones during the dot-com boom. But there were a few standouts. Budweiser: Rock, Paper, Scissors Blockbuster: Total Access GM: Robot Career Builder: Office Jungle Here's a link to most of the ads. http://www.sportsline.com/nfl/postseason/superads. Oh, and hit the 'Boss Button' in the lower L/H corner of the video screen. Skipped Prince (or whatever he's called this week) but at least it was a better choice than the boy band of a couple years ago. The pre-game show by Cirque du Soleil was a jaw dropper.

Last October the wife and I went to Belize for R&R, scuba diving, and like we always do wherever we go, talk to the local folk away from the tourist area. One of our water taxi pilots and I started talking and I soon found out he was a firearm owner. The procedure to obtain a firearm involved filling out a bunch of paperwork, paying a fee, getting a background check, and getting a personal interview with the Belizean equavalent of the FBI. If all goes well then you are issued a permit and then you can buy your gun. Oh, no caliber larger than 9mm and be sure to register it when you get it. But you can conceal carry all you want. He has made a trip to the USA and spent some time at ranges shooting rented guns. He told me he shot big bore guns as he wouldn't ever get a chance to do it back home. Just had to shoot a .44mag after watching Dirty Harry. He was proud of his Beretta and should be after what he went though to obtain it. His parting words struck a nerve. "You have a good thing going there. Don't screw it up."

Tell me where to find the lot # on the jug and I will be happy to tell ya. I don't see any lot #'s Look for a pale yellow sticker with a 10 digit number somewhere on the container. My Clays stickers were on the sides while a 1lb can of TG had it on the bottom.I have a 4lb and a 8lb container. My lot numbers are 40504044150 (4lb) and 80621064397 (8lb). FWIW: The 4lb jug I keep for metallic reloading while the 8lb keg is segregated for shotshell reloading. At 17 or 18 grains a pop, it doesn't take long to go through 8lbs when you're reloading 12ga.

I too have been following this thread for a while. I've been using Clays with lead and Precision Moly bullets with great success in .45 major and .40 minor. Decided to try Precision Delta bullets for a .40 minor load. I'm not happy with the early results. Granted I'm still working up the load and have got it to 120pf so more work is needed. I've put two loads together and the SD is an unacceptable low 30s in both. Still have more work to do before I give up on it and go to TG for the jacketed loads. ZHunter. What is the lot number of your jug of Clays?

My first clean match was so weird. My gun broke. I spent the whole match trying to get old reliable to go bang when I hit the switch. And I didn't know what was wrong with it. Fought it through 5 stages. Found multiple parts broken when I got home. Details of the match and the gun teardown here. Congrats on the clean match. For me it was a barrier I needed to break through and couldn't figure out how to do it. Now that I've done it, I know how to do it. And I've done it again.

It's been a few months since my broken gun=clean match incident. Thought I'd give a little update. I've since shot another clean local club match. I shot the Gator Classic and was very pleased with the results. One stage in particular was one of those alcholic moment of clarity things. I was the only guy in my squad with a 10 round mag limit so I was on my own in trying to figure out my strategy for the stage. It was a move left to right engaging targets through ports and doorways with a few other targets thrown in here and there. The monkey move was grabbing a ammo can at the midway point and dropping it in a bucket at the R/H end. It was toward the end of the match and all I wanted to do was shoot it reasonably well. I'm tired, hot, and just wanting to finish the grind of twelve high round count stages in two days. Stage description here. Buzzer goes off and something strange happened. Time slowed to a crawl. Bang. Slide goes back then forward, sights align, bang. Repeat. Finished the stage. Picked up my mags. (As an L-10 or Production shooter you'll never get lost. Just follow your trail of mags back home.) I'm thinking to myself. "Well I could have done better here or possibly there but all in all I did OK" A shooter in my squad shooting Open, and I think in A or better class made it point to come up to me and said "Well done". Huh? In my mind it was nothing special. Just another so-so run by another so-so shooter. Yet when the score sheet was posted I dropped 14 pts on a 170 pt stage and did it around 20% faster than the average. Placed 4th out of 15. I'm still soaking in what made the performance in me come out on this stage. What moons aligned for me to go to this level? I think I've got it figured out. I didn't give a damn. All I wanted to do is finish in a somewhat reasonable fashion. The hell with time. Get an A. Let the gun cycle. Get another A. Repeat. Between this stage and the broken gun match I have a new mindset. It's hard to put into words but I know now what I must do the next match.

Sorry guys (and gal) a bit off topic but hear me out. My wife is in the hospital at this moment recovering from a spontaneous pneumothorax. In English a collapsed lung for no freaking reason (no trauma). She was filling a pet food bowl when the lung collapsed. For further info: WebMD, and Divers Alert Network. Yes, thank you she is doing as well as you can expect with a garden hose stuck in your chest wall attached to a vacuum pump. Full recovery expected and the chest tube should be out tomorrow. Home in another day or two. Two weeks off work. When we got the diagnosis we were shocked as we had never heard of such a thing. Then major bummed as everything we heard in the diving community about a pneumothorax and from the ER doc was that her diving days are over. However one of the other docs in the pulmonary practice is a diver and is very aware of the mechanics of hyperbarics as related to scuba. He took over her case. Short story she had to have surgery to close the hole in her lung caused by the bleb. Having this surgery reduces the chance of reoccurrence to nearly zero. Once this lung is a go for diving in about 3 or 4 months then its off for a high res 64 slice CT scan (don't know what it means but it sounds expensive) and a trip to one of the few certified dive medicine docs in the country. It just so happens he's 6 blocks away. This CT scan is to ensure that the damaged lung is in good shape and that there isn't something in the other lung that may cause a problem. If all is a go, she will be one the very few to beat the odds and be able to scuba dive after a pneumothorax. It's funny though. In the ER the doc asked what sports we do. Skydive and scuba dive. The gun thing is strictly mine. He drop kicked the scuba but stated that there was absolutely no reason not to skydive again. ??? As for me I'm looking at rotator cuff surgery in the semi-near future. Tore it up in 1999 chunking beads at a Mardi Gras parade. Come on. It was a pair of DDs and had to chunk the beads clear to the back row. Rotator cuff and neck injuries are common to skydivers who have been in the sport a while. Especially once you hit the 2000 jump number or so. The shoulder is starting to bother me more and more. Shot 175 rounds of 12ga on Sunday and I'm still feeling the hurt on Wednesday. If you really want to know the limits of what modern Western medicine can do, please go to www.deadmike.com. Mike is an old skydiving buddy of mine and I was there when he bounced. His site chronicles his life changing event and in a very black humor sort of way. Warning, don't surf there if you have a weak stomach.

Precision Moly bullets need to be loaded short due to bullets profile. More info from this thread.It appears your testing is spot on. I use the same load and the 3.8 and 3.9 results are nearly exact to mine. I use the 3.9 which gives a bit of wiggle room at the match chrono. 3.8 once got me 165.4pf at a major match. Too close for comfort. My last 3.9 match chrono netted me 172pf.

Although I'm not an RO I do have some comments. Pats' post #53 above is spot on. We have to work with the new shooters to get them to come back. Last thing we need is a come out once and get busted to Open guy who tells 3 of his buddies how hard assed we are. When it comes to safety issues we are hard assed. But 11 in the mag. Give it some slack at the local match level to the new shooter. Just recently I had new shooter in my squad who was in Production. I mentioned the 10 round rule and his eyes went as big as saucers. He didn't know. He thought that he could load what his mags could hold. Did he fire more than 10 before reloading? Not that I could tell. Did he gain an advantage? Probably not. He quickly fixed his problem and went on to have a blast. No harm. No foul. Recently I was trying my hand at Skeet. With shotgun I'm 90% a Trap shooter and tinker around with Skeet and Sporting Clays. The Clays Yoda came up and said I'd be DQ'd for a serious safety violation if it had been a match. He explained a quirk in the rules about station 8 and I dug into it further. Yup. I'd be DQ'd. Not as bad as a 180 violation in USPSA but a DQ none the less. I learned. I know now. It won't happen again. Now me. If I had 11 in the mag at the beep. Shove me to Open with great prejudice. I know better and I screwed up.

Since LSU tickets are more expensive and harder to get than New Orleans Saints tickets we don't go very often. Missed this season altogether due to lack of available tickets. So we improvise. My house is just a few miles from LSU Tiger stadium. Over two levees, the Mississippi river, some light wooded area, then my crib. On more than one Saturday night the wife and I have brought a cooler and a radio to the front yard. We've sat and listened to game on the Marconi while watching the glow from the stadium on the horizon and hearing the roar of 92,400 fans cheer on the purple and gold. Saturday night in Death Valley is an experience not to be missed. Geaux Tigers.