PVC is Beyond my Comprehension

I am still trying to conquer the garage and some household repairs. I bought myself a cheap toolbox for my reloading junk, which helped me clear off the crap from my .38 Super escapades. And I reinstalled my huge 5″ vise.

My latest problem? A leaking PVC pipe on the exit side of a pump. The 1 1/2″ pipe threads into the pump, and then it goes into an elbow. The leak was at the pump side. I cut the pipe with a hacksaw, unscrewed it from the pump, put it back in with a decent dose of Teflon, and then put a splice in the pipe to rejoin it. But the splice leaks. And it’s glued. Now what do I do?

I have no idea how people fix PVC pipe joints that are held together with cement. Aren’t they unbreakable?

I was going to make a new pipe, but apparently, you have to buy an insanely expensive tool in order to thread PVC. I figured it would be an $8 doodad from Home Depot.

Unrelated: I got crazy and ordered a drill press, but it turns out the web ad was wrong, so I can’t get the price I wanted. I have to pay 50 bucks for freight, plus 30 for a lift truck. Would you pay 30 bucks for a lift, for a product weighing 250 pounds? Seems to me you could lower one end to the ground, stand it up, and put it on a handtruck. If Steel City had a dealer around here, it would be worth it to pay cash and pick it up myself.

Whoops, they do have a dealer. Maybe I can work that out.

If you’ve had your eye on some heavy item that comes with free shipping, you better look again. Free shipping deals are drying up.

Finally a Use for All That Fertilizer

Today Marv ponders the question: would life be easier if he were not so handsome? This is a question I myself often wrestle with.

Shut up.

He also tells us about his secret hobby: gardening.

Alert the Media

I have some beautiful new habanero gold pods, so I picked a big red shiny one and sliced about half of it, very thin, to try with my new hummus recipe. I picked the smallest pod I could find, but it was still big for a habanero. I also sliced three fresh cayennes up. Then I got out the pita and went to town.

I thought I would like the cayennes better. They’re tamer and sweeter, and you can pile more of them on a glob of hummus. But I sort of lean toward the habanero golds. Hummus does an amazing job of modulating the heat, so I was able to put two slices of pepper on each bit of torn-up pita. I ended up eating all three cayennes and half of the habanero. If there are any parasites in my body, for them, this is judgment day.

What a wonderful pepper this is. They’re typically the size of jumbo eggs. Very sweet, and deceptively hot.

Starts Tonight

Here is more proof that I need to find a church. Tonight will be Shavuot, AKA Pentecost, and I didn’t even know it. I forgot all about it. Fortunately, Aaron reminded me.

Catholics believe Pentecost was on May 11. But the correct dates for Jewish holidays are determined by the Jewish calendar, and the Jews say Shavuot starts tonight. It’s the Festival of the First Fruits. In Israel, Jews bring out newly born sheep and calves and also items of produce. Christians believe “first fruits” refers to the mass baptism of the Holy Spirit, which descended on the assembled disciples on this day. If memory serves, the disciples themselves were considered the first fruits of Jesus’s harvest. Which makes sense, since He referred to Himself as a seed that went into the ground in order to produce much grain (John 12:24).

This is arguably a more important day than Easter. Easter brought salvation to the Gentiles, but if I understand scripture correctly, Gentiles ignorant of God’s existence were in no danger of condemnation. Pentecost, however, made it possible for every human being to receive the power of the Holy Spirit, on demand. Something that used to be reserved for people like Jeremiah and Daniel became available to all of us. On this day, God made the existence of a race of prophets possible.

And of course, we’ve forgotten all about it, focusing instead on salvation. Jesus clearly wanted every person to experience the baptism of the Holy Spirit. He told Nicodemus we had to be reborn of water and the spirit, if we wanted to enter the Kingdom of God. In other words, if we wanted to live in, and exert, God’s power here on earth. This is the most hateful thing you can mention to people still ruled by the prince of this world, and it’s the thing misguided church leaders have worked the hardest to conceal. It’s probably the thing which is most likely to get you martyred.

If you have no idea what I’m talking about, but you’re interested, find yourself a pentecostal or charismatic church and ask about the baptism. I believe the usual procedure is for people who already have it to lay hands on you.

More

Aaron points out that the biggest significance of Shavuot in the Jewish calendar is that it was the date on which the Torah was given to the Jews.

And of course, Christians believe that the baptism of the Holy Spirit is what the Old Testament refers to when it says God will write the Torah on men’s hearts.

Not that I would suggest that there is a connection or anything.

Popular Stuff

I’m getting a lot of input RE hummus.

Once I added the tahini Jonathan recommended, the hummus improved. But I didn’t realize until today how much it had improved. It’s really very good. Better than store hummus. I didn’t expect that.

He says fresh hummus is best. I should email him about that. I’m wondering if he’s talking about the style they serve in kibbutz dining halls. Call me a traitor, but the best food in Israel (unless things have changed) is Arab food. It was worth getting dysentery for; I can tell you from experience. The falafel they sold in Afula was beyond description. I used to look forward to getting off the kibbutz just so I could have food made by Arabs. The hummus they had in our dining hall wasn’t spicy. I can see how a mild hummus like that would be better on the first day, but it seems like my hummus is getting better. And it’s loaded with garlic and cumin and hot sauce. Highly seasoned foods tend to improve in the fridge.

Last year, I located a lady in Trinidad for the purpose of obtaining obscure peppers. I hooked her up with a pepper forum, and she ended up supplying a lot of people in the US with Trinidad Scorpion and 7 Pot pepper seeds. Last week, out of the blue, she sent me seeds for yellow 7 Pot peppers, which I had never heard of. They’re usually red. That was nice of her. I better get them growing.

I’m thinking about peppers because of that and because of the hummus. My habanero gold bush has already produced a second crop of huge peppers, and I need to do something with them. I’m thinking that the next time I make hummus, I should toss a minced habanero in there. Hot peppers are supposed to have health benefits, such as decimating digestive-tract cancers. And this week I learned that hummus can neutralize a tremendous amount of pepper heat. So by eating hummus regularly, it should be possible to get a decent dose of hot peppers without burning holes in my gullet.

Cayennes would surely be better, though. It still irks me to know that peppers from Home Depot taste better than most of my exotics.

People are telling me to add butter beans to make the hummus creamier. As I recall, the better recipes I had in Israel were very creamy, but here in the US, it all seems a little grainy. I’m not sure. I don’t really care, though.

Today is the sabbath, and every week, the sabbath teaches me something new. This week I am coming to appreciate the pleasure of having the sabbath rescue me from something I don’t want to do.

Yesterday I slaved in the garage, trying to organize things and repair my workbench. It was a long, sweaty ordeal. Were today not Sunday, I’d have to go back in there and get back to it. Hey, I’m not lazy. I’m just pious. No, really.

Heh heh. That worked out pretty good.

As good as a kibbutz-style breakfast is with pita, it would be way better with hot naan or poori. But those breads are so greasy it would be like eating a stack of pancakes.

Bench Fixed

I can’t believe it. I fixed my workbench.

A while back, not having a drill press, I decided to try to drill downward through a horizontal two-by-six with a vertical two-by-six under it, and you can imagine how well that worked out. I messed up one of the two-by-sixes supporting the front of my bench. So today I replaced it.

Making the story sadder, I took apart some .38 Super bullets before I started, because I was trying to clear reloading junk off the bench. And it turned out bullets that are a week old are harder to pull than fresh bullets, because I had to beat the daylights out of my bench to get these out. And I noticed I was splintering the top surface. So I had to replace ANOTHER two-by-six. Memo to self: from now, put something on the bench top when using the bullet puller.

It gets worse. When I removed the first two-by-six from the top of the bench, I had to deal with glued dovetails. And the two-by-six behind it split while I was working on it. So I ended up having to replace three two-by-sixes, two of which required a lot of routing.

It took me at least an hour and a half to create two tongues and one groove. I still don’t have my nice new Christmas router set up, so I used my crappy Sears job. But it worked.

I still have to drill a couple of holes, saw off a long two-by-six, and reinstall my vise and reloading press. But that stuff is quick and easy.

I gave up and bought a standing drill press. I couldn’t take it any more. About twice a week I get hit in the face with a job that a drill press would do in about two minutes, yet which is nearly impossible with any other tool and my limited skills.

The garage is still a nightmare. I had to quit before I dropped in a pool of sweat and sawdust.

I love having stationary power tools and a bench and a handy-dandy Workmate. I had to cut two-by-sixes to length, and with my ever-ready miter saw, it was a cinch. The little square Og recommended also helps. And what a joy the impact driver is. I had to remove 3″ number 14 screws from wood that was wet when I put them in. And they backed right out without stripping. The screws I put in to take their places went right in. Drills are crap; impact drivers rule.

Too bad tomorrow is Sunday. Otherwise I’d fire up the table saw and make a platform for the HAMMR.

The Usual

Someone asked me for my hummus recipe. I’ll tell you what I’ve got so far.

Yesterday I glanced at some online recipes. You can probably guess how much I trust them. I did my own thing. I wrote about the results, and I inquired about tahini, which I had not yet added to the recipe. Johnathan said tahini was essential, so this morning I added some, and it did the trick. It adds a peculiar bitterness you can’t get from lemon juice or vinegar. He was absolutely right.

The results are good enough to post, but you may be able to do a lot better. I think I’m going to add more garlic next time. The reason this is worth posting isn’t that the recipe is so great. It’s that prepared hummus is obscenely expensive, and this stuff is nearly free.

INGREDIENTS

2 (around 14 oz. each, I guess) cans garbanzo beans, drained
juice of 2 lemons–buy 3 just in case
1 tsp. cumin
4 cloves garlic
3 tbsp. olive oil
1/4 tsp. salt
2 tbsp. tahini (not prepared sauce)
1/2 tsp. paprika

I also added a ton of Crystal hot sauce, which I can still barely taste. I’ll bet I added a quarter of a cup.

Toss this stuff into a food processor and blend until it looks like hummus. Save the water from the canned beans until the end, and add it judiciously if you have to. The mixture may be dry. I’ll bet cooking your own beans would make it better.

If I had it to do over again, I think I’d omit the Crystal and toss in part of a habanero, or maybe–better–three or four fresh cayennes. I don’t know if the paprika serves any purpose. It’s just ground-up red peppers. It’s a nice thing to dust on the top of a mound of hummus, with a little olive oil and a couple of black olives, before you serve it.

Johnathan says hummus should be fresh. He knows more about it than I do. My plan is to make it once a week and eat it for five days. If it’s not as good as fresh, I’ll survive. It sure beats oatmeal. I think he also said the cumin was not standard, but I like it.

Here is what I had for breakfast today. I cut a quarter of a big sweet red pepper in strips. Did the same with an entire carrot and a quarter of a big cucumber. Meant to add a tomato, but I forgot. I put three globs on my plate: sour cream, cottage cheese, and hummus. Added two boiled eggs. I tossed a big whole-wheat pita on it and made myself an iced tea. This is pretty much what I used to eat for breakfast and dinner on the kibbutz, except that they served white toast. I think it’s better than oatmeal, which is carb soup. And it’s better than the five eggs I used to eat, because it’s lower in cholesterol, for which my gall bladder will hopefully thank me. You don’t really need a fork. That’s what the pita is for.

I find that if I eat too much pita with the meal, I feel bad afterward. Damn carbs.

I’m thinking I should slice up carrots, cucumbers, and peppers every Sunday night and cram them in spoilage-resistant containers for the rest of the week. That will give me a good head start and make breakfast easier. They have new chemical-impregnated containers you can buy, which are supposed to keep vegetables fresher.

I don’t use low-fat dairy stuff. It’s disgusting.

It may sound crazy, me eating vegetables. A lot of people don’t know how much Southerners love vegetables, whether cooked or fresh. My mother used to make forty-mile round trips to Homestead, Florida, just to get tomatoes and onions and corn. I remember watching a prosecuting attorney up in Kentucky, telling my grandfather about his home-canned collard greens. You would have thought he was talking about canned diamonds. Southerners get as excited about good vegetables as Yankees do about great desserts. Very strange.

You know what I miss? Falafel. The falafel they make in Afula, Israel is worth handing the country over to the Arabs for. Nearly. But it’s a huge pain to make. I think I made it too hard by using way too much oil. I’ll bet I could come up with a recipe that would stomp restaurant falafel, but I’d still be unable to duplicate the giant assortment of condiments falafel joints in Israel use. Oh, man. Falafel with ground-up habaneros in it? Are you kidding me? That would rock.

In other news, I got my Caldwell HAMMR machine rest put together. Sort of. This is like a Ransom rest, only cheaper. It must be fairly good; some magazine writers admit they use it. It turns out you have to attach a piece of wood to the bottom of it, and then you clamp the wood to your shooting bench. Oh, no. Oh, woe is me. Work. The thing I dread. Oh, well. I get a chance to fire up the table saw. I have an old piece of plywood (sign from my realtor days) that I plan to use. What’s the best way to seal up the edges of a piece of 3/4″ plywood so splinters don’t shed?

I don’t know yet whether Trail Glades will let me use this thing. I plan to set it up and start shooting, and they can raise hell if they want.

In addition to gluttony, I am trying to get a grip on laziness these days. I feel like it’s sneaking up on me. I should be somewhat more active than I am. There are things I’ve been putting off. I used to have this idea that refraining from sinning all that much was all I had to do to be a good Christian, but now I realize you have to be conscious of all of your weaknesses, and you have to try to overcome them

I read from the book of Luke last night, in The Complete Jewish Bible. The editor says the Acts of the Apostles follows from Luke as though it were a second volume. I didn’t know that.

One of the interesting ideas in the commentary is that we are too hard on the Pharisees. The editor, David Stern, believes that scriptural criticisms leveled at the Pharisees are aimed at specific groups and individuals, not the Pharisees as a whole. And that makes sense, because the Bible says some of them supported Jesus. One of them gave Jesus his own tomb. And supposedly, they were reformers, and Jesus may have been associated with them. I think things like this concern Stern, because Jewish behavior in the New Testament has been used as an excuse for anti-Semitism and the ridiculous “replacement theology.”

I don’t really worry about it, because I don’t think I was put here to punish people who offend God.

Hope I remember how to use that saw.

No Pork Involved

Anyone got a good recipe for hummus?

I have been trying to eat healthier stuff in the middle of the day. My dream is to return to the kibbutz plan. Breakfast and dinner light but similar. Midday meal bigger, with meat.

Here is a horrible admission. I don’t really endorse total gluttony. When you want really good food, you should use good, unhealthy ingredients. But you can’t eat that crap all the time or in unlimited amounts. Sadly. And gluttony is a sin. Or close to it. And just about every health problem I have is fat-related.

So I would like to reform the one daily meal which gives me real problems. Breakfast and dinner I can control. Lunch gets crazy, because I forget to eat, and then my blood sugar drops, and then I find myself chugging from the honey jar and following up with a bowl of Sour Patch Kids.

When I was a kibbutz volunteer, we started the day with a big dish of nothing, at 5 a.m. Then at 8, we had breakfast. In fact, that was the end of my workday. Pick a cubic yard of grapefruit per day, and you’re free, regardless of the hour. At breakfast time on the kibbutz, they had big carts loaded with fresh vegetables and dairy stuff, as well as hummus, eggs, and porridge. Which is thick Cream of Wheat. I think.

It was a good deal. I would eat a couple of steamed eggs (seriously), with cottage cheese, sour cream, toast, and vegetables. At night, we got the same thing, so we didn’t go to bed stuffed. And fiber was not a problem. Especially since I ate a grapefruit every day on the job.

Those steamed eggs were the weak link in the chain. I have no idea where they got the idea of steaming eggs, but the machine that did it turned out some very strange items. Sometimes you’d peel an egg and find a burned place inside it. And the yolks were green. Perhaps out of respect for the prophet Samuel I Am.

Lunch was usually a bit lame, but healthy.

The other day I bought hummus and pita and vegetables. And as you probably can guess, a tiny container of hummus cost around forty thousand dollars. Okay, maybe a little less. But it was a lot. Today I made my own, and I got a pint for maybe a buck.

I was worried that the online recipes I had found were no good, so I used my own judgment. Two cans of garbanzo beans, juice of two lemons, four cloves garlic, teaspoon cumin, quarter-teaspoon salt, two tablespoons olive oil, and roughly a quarter of a cup of Crystal hot sauce. Which was not nearly enough. I didn’t put tahini in it, because I wasn’t sure tahini was standard.

Figured out a couple of things. First of all, lemon juice is stupid. I seem to recall this from making my own tahini in the past. It’s just not acidic enough. Next time, vinegar. Second, don’t add any liquid until you have all the ingredients in there, because it’s real easy to make it too wet.

It was okay, but I think tahini is needed. I can’t believe how much hot sauce it soaked up. Next time, I think I’ll blend a couple of fresh cayennes into it. I think that with a little effort, I should be able to blow away the store stuff for maybe an eighth of the cost.

Too Much Tofu?

Before you run off and enjoy your weekend, let me inform you: Val Prieto has gout. So say a prayer for him.

It’s a total mystery, how this could happen to a guy who cooks entire pigs.

I say it’s time to sue Anheuser-Busch.

Pay no Attention to the Posing Brats

Here’s a great D-Day read. You would expect nothing less from Mrs. K.

Dad’s Day Looms

I’m flipping out. Father’s Day is next week, and I am still lost.

I considered trying to find an M1 for my dad. He keeps telling me how much he liked those rifles. But they are not all that cheap. I love my dad, but a grand for Father’s Day? I dunno. And it would also look a little bit like buying your grandmother a Harley. “Don’t worry; I’ll make sure it gets ridden once in a while.”

I can’t believe these rifles are that expensive. How many did they make? About a billion, right?

I’m afraid I’ll end up getting him cigars again.

I got him a weird bike last year. It’s a Specialized Crossroads Sport, which has a very odd frame. The seatpost hole is very low. I’d like to get him a rack and panniers, but I have no idea whether a normal rack will fit this bike.

Remember Those who Suffered

Reader Pam reminded me via email that today is D-Day. It’s odd that I wasn’t thinking about it already, because Marv, Maynard and I watched a couple of documentaries about it last night, and they made a deep impression on me.

It’s peculiar; the farther you are from God, the more cable and the Internet seem to be tools of the enemy. The closer you get, the more they become assets that help you grow. I tend to think of the web as a devastating, unstoppable, pervasive tidal wave of porn, sexual perversion, cruelty, youth worship, and arrogance. But it’s also making the word of God available to more people than were ever reached by other means. Similarly, cable TV is full of good things, if you can figure out how to work a DVR.

What I’m leading up to here is the Military Channel. I believe the greatest thing a person can do is to give his life for God, but after that comes giving your life–or the integrity of your body–for your others. And that’s what soldiers do as a condition of their employment. They are the finest, most worthy people among us, which is why it makes my blood boil when I see pampered, ignorant, rebellious, immature people insult them. But like most people, I don’t do much of anything for the military, and I don’t think about their sacrifices nearly as often as I should. And the Military Channel is a great tool for refreshing your gratitude and restoring your perspective.

I’ve reached the point where I now longer watch any network TV. I can’t name a sitcom currently in production. I have never seen more than one or two minutes of American Idol. Thank God, literally, I have managed to find better things to allow to enter my mind. It’s not that I have discipline; that ought to be obvious to anyone who reads this blog. It just happened. If you’re still watching the video equivalent of Skittles and Froot Loops, you might consider making an effort to root through your schedule for improving things to record.

If what I have learned about D-Day is correct, many of the troops who made the initial landings suffered for days even before the attack. They were seasick and miserable. Surely they lost sleep. And their accommodations were pretty bad to begin with. After days of nausea and fatigue, they were ordered onto the beaches, where they were chewed to pieces.

Oddly, yesterday the pre-attack misery made a bigger impression on me than the slaughter. Maybe that’s because I’ve heard about the landing itself all my life, or because it’s easier for me to understand the things that happened outside of battle. Thinking about these boys confined on rocking ships, with only machine gun fire and mines to look forward to upon release, I realized how spoiled we are. Or at least how spoiled I am. If I miss an hour of sleep, I feel cheated. If I spend half a day without air conditioning, it’s a catastrophe. I have to wonder how a person like me would hold up in the belly of a ship waiting to sail for Normandy. To some people, the scary thing about war is the possibility of physical harm. To me, the scariest thing is the possibility that I would let everyone else down. I am impressed beyond words by the courage and toughness of men who slogged out of landing craft and planes and gliders, into the face of Germany’s deadliest fortifications.

Excessive violence in the media is generally a bad thing. But I believe we should be more honest in our depictions and coverage of war. Because until we see what it’s really like, we don’t appreciate the sacrifice. It’s odd; when you see footage of Iwo Jima and the Normandy invasion, you see bodies, but you don’t see the horrors veterans talk about. You never see a severed head or a set of intestines stretched out on the ground, far from a body. Maybe censors withheld the most frightening footage in order to avoid harming public morale. Our soldiers saw things like that, and they still had to plod forward and fight. And we paid them very little, and when they came home, we forgot they existed, and we didn’t even set up decent hospitals for them.

They went through that so people like me could live in a country where life is so good, it seems to make sense to complain about things like four-dollar gasoline.

The sad thing is, instead of remaining grateful and humble, we have become degenerate and proud. We don’t respect the people who bought us our freedom. We don’t respect the moral principles laid down by the God who established this country and gave us prosperity. If we keep sliding downward, we are eventually going to pay. Four-dollar gas, expensive food, a weak dollar, and foreign wars are almost certainly just the warning shots.

Here is something I came across yesterday, from The Complete Jewish Bible:

Be careful not to forget Adonai your God by not obeying his mitzvot, rulings and regulations that I am giving you today. Otherwise, after you have eaten and are satisfied, built fine houses and lived in them, and increased your herds, flocks, silver, gold, and everything else you own, you will become proud-hearted. Forgetting Adonai your God–who brought you out of the land of Egypt, where you lived as slaves; who led you through the vast and fearsome desert, with its poisonous snakes, scorpions and waterless, thirsty ground; who brought water out of flint rock for you; who fed you in the desert with man, unknown to your ancestors; all the while humbling and testing you in order to do you good in the end–you will think to yourself, ‘My own power and the strength of my own hand have gotten me this wealth.’ No, you are to remember Adonai your God, because it is he who is giving you the power to get wealth, in order to confirm his covenant, which he swore to your ancestors, as is happening even today. If you forget Adonai your God, follow other gods and serve and worship them, I am warning you in advance today that you will certainly perish. You will perish just like the nations that Adonai is causing to perish ahead of you, because you will not have heeded the voice of Adonai your God.

That was directed to Israel (Deuteronomy 8:11-20), but the same principles apply to everyone. One of the worst things that can happen to you is to succeed in life without realizing you owe it to God.

In the past, when I wondered why other nations were so poor and weak compared to America, I used to put too much emphasis on our work ethic and our dedication to education. And our capitalist system. The truth is, there are countries where people work and study harder than we do, and where capitalism exists (or used to exist), yet which have historically fared very badly. The real difference between us and them is that we have been blessed. And no matter how smart we are or how hard we work, that blessing can be revoked. Right now, we are probably seeing the beginning of that revocation, or at least the threat of it. It happened to England, and it can happen to us. If we continue insulting the power that put us at the forefront of the world’s nations, we are going to sink back into the pack and lose the things that make us special. Once that happens, you might as well move to Mexico or India.

The same arrogance and selfishness that make us forget God make us forget the sacrifices of others who have established us. Like our parents. And like the men who fought for us on D-Day and in a thousand other battles. That is what I have gleaned from thinking about this. I am trying to do better, and I hope that if you have been as remiss as I have, you will try, too.

At Least He Won’t Bomb Our Allies

Some truly non-progressive individuals have put up a borderline blasphemous website slandering the secular Messiah, B. Hussein Obama. I wonder whether Pope Prius I has seen this on his giant carbon-offset plasma TV at Vatican West, over in Tennessee. You’ve seen the place. It’s sort of like the other Vatican, only it has a higher electric bill.

Hillary turned us all into newts. But thanks to Obama, we will all get better. Then we won’t have to go on the cart, and we think we’ll go for a walk.

In other news, Brak has his own show. When did that happen?

I guess switching to tea in the morning has rendered me even less coherent than before.

Cheaper, Faster, Better-Smelling

As reported some time ago, I ordered two cleaning products so I could compare them to the magnificent but expensive Hornady One Shot lube and cleaner. They arrived this week, and I just tried them. The products? Break-Free Powder Blast and Sharp Shoot R Flush Out.

Powder Blast appears to be a petroleum product similar to brake cleaner or Gun Scrubber. I don’t think it has any lubricant in it, although I am too lazy to go look. Flush Out is citrus-based. It is supposed to be a degreaser, but it claims to leave a lubricant film behind. I usually think of degreasers as products that leave absolutely nothing behind, but I guess it’s possible to degrease while leaving oil behind. I didn’t see anything on the Flush Out label about removing powder residue, but I thought I’d give it a try anyway.

The verdict? I am not positive, but I think Powder Blast worked a little better. They both worked very well. Definitely a better choice than spending three times as much on Hornady. On the whole, I prefer Flush Out, because it’s made from citrus. The other stuff is a little scary, and you can’t clean a gun without getting it all over your hands. Some of it hit a plastic vegetable container in the garbage, and the container melted. I used the sprays and the Boresnake, and then I followed with Liquid Wrench spray dry lube, and I was done. Except for cleaning off the excess with alcohol.

I think from now on, it’s Flush Out and Liquid Wrench for me.

Sins Become Apparent With Distance

It looks like shooting at 50 feet instead of 7 yards is a good idea. I learned from it. I learned that I have no idea how to pull a trigger.

I shot 150 rounds. Fifty from the .45, fifty from the .38 Super, and another fifty from the .45. Unfortunately I forgot my cell phone, so I couldn’t take photos. So I took the last target home and took a photo.

This is a second-quality Caldwell target I got from Midway for about half price. I could not find any defects. Sweet buy.

I’m very happy with that. There are flyers, but the core seems tighter than what I’ve been doing. I experimented with different trigger pulls today, and it seems like it helped.

I was trying to get away from a ridiculously gradual pull which caused the gun to go off completely unexpectedly. But the results were spotty. You can see some wild .38 shots off the orange in this photo, which probably demonstrate my point. Going back the gradual pull sucked things into a smaller area. I think. If I’m right, I should be able to repeat this performance next week without nearly as many flyers.

I believe it may be time to spend a little cash and get some instruction. I may check out that school in Frostproof.

Last week I had problems with .38 Super rounds failing to chamber, so this week I took the remaining ammunition out, cycled every round to see if it chambered, and got rid of the duds. Then I made new cartridges to replace them. I still had a few failures toward the end of the shoot. I suspect this is caused by one of two things. Either heat makes the chamber tighter, or debris does.

This taught me something new about reloading. The sizing die has to come down until it touches the shell plate, so as much of the case as possible is resized. I believe my problem was caused by cases that had bulgy lower ends because the sizing die didn’t go down all the way.

I had adjusted the sizing die to leave maybe 3/16 of an inch alone, because I had had a bad experience with the seating die mashing the case-eject wire. The seating die had been too low, so I somehow got the idea that the casing die AND the sizing die had to be kept up off the plate. And that was wrong.

The .38 Super scared me to death today. The first five rounds went through three holes. That thing may be super accurate. If I can learn how to pull a trigger, maybe I’ll find out.

My dad got me a Caldwell HAMMR machine rest for my birthday. If the range people will allow it, I want to test my 1911s with it. I suspect that the .38 is more accurate than the .45. Proof would give the Colt worshipers a big thrill.

I am so tempted to buy that used Special Combat carry model. If I get into combat shooting, that would be a super cheap gun to fix up. Although I guess .45 is not the optimal caliber.

That’s today’s big news.