Monday, October 19, 2009

Up, Up & Away!

I'm considering leaving competitive shooting, starting to build UFO-shaped balloons in my front yard and take up defrauding the media as a hobby. After all, I live in Colorado, so I'm halfway there! Anyway, I spent yesterday not blogging, and since that gave me some extra time I was able to save more than 30,000 jobs across America. I also was able to once again guarantee that there are no Siberian tigers roaming the Rocky Mountains...okay, so prove me wrong...

Actually, my Sweetie and I took Alf the Wonder Beagle on a long hike up high near an old ghost town and shuttered silver mine. It was snowy and muddy, but amazingly beautiful. After record cold, we got some almost record heat, but with a brisk wind blowing off the Continental Divide. Then I spent the rest of the afternoon in the gun room reloading. I've recently switched to Alliant Red Dot powder for my light cowboy .357 loads, which are hotter than a lot of other cowboy loads...I sort of modeled my load on the old .38 Long Colt loads from the late 1800s. I figure I'm safe as long as I don't have to deal with any fanatical Philippine insurrectionists, in which case I probably ought to change to a 1911.

I never really spent any time with Red Dot before, but some of the more popular powders I usually use — most notably Hodgdon Titegroup and VV 320 — remain in short supply. Red Dot seems to be readily available, and the accuracy with 158-gr LaserCast bullets has been superb. I'm saving my last 4 pounds of Titegroup for my Sweetie's .32 H&R pistols, were it seems very much at home.

While I do note that ammo is generally more available (especially 9mm, 5.56, 7.62), at least on the Internet, primers remain in desperately short supply. Most of the big Internet sellers, including Midway USA, limit purchases, which means that we competition shooters spend time "foraging" for enough primers to feed the machines (I reloaded 1500+ rounds Sunday). I always used to buy primers in 10K lot to get the price discount. If this ever lightens up, I swear I will save my pennies and dimes and buy 100K of small pistol primers!

11 comments:

ericire12 said...

"Up, Up & Away!"


Was that a Superman reference or that crappy song by 5th Dimension?

Secesh said...

I've been using Alliant (Hercules)Red Dot for 30 years and except for being a little "dirty" like all older Alliant powders its been very good. A mild and accurate .357 load.

long762range said...

I have used Red Dot for light 357 and 45 acp for some time. Like Secesh said, a little dirty but good pistol powder.

Steve - The Firearm Blog said...

You can easily combine balloons and competitive shooting :)

Michael Bane said...

What were the lyrics to that song???

"Would you like to ride on my beautiful baboon?
Way up in trees on my beautiful baboon..."

Maybe I got it wrong.

Steve, there was a really lousy mystery novel where the protagonist shot balloons floating over a town hall on 4th of July with a .50 BMG to prove he was a "gun man." He more or less proved he was a moron...

PS: Red Dot is a bit dirty, isn't it? Not as bad as Unique, but dirty enough...

PPS: Maybe I should have made an Underdog reference...

Anonymous said...

Defrauding the media.... Considering most of what they (the mainstream) report is fraudulent. hard to believe they could be upset.

Clark Kent said...

Media upset? Nah, they luuuuv this story, will stick to it like flies on a fresh turd, like they did with the Elian Gonzalez betrayal.

The only "tragedy" they're sniveling over is the Noo Yawk Times laying off 100 newsroom employees. Oh, the horror, the horrrrrror...

Kristophr said...

You should try 10 grains or so of Blue Dot behind a light .45 cal bullet.

ericire12 said...

Haha... you got spammed.

Clark Kent said...

I opened one of the damned links last night, then started worrying that it was some kinda virus.

Anybody know what the hell that is?

North Koreans????

Pawpaw said...

Red Dot is one heck of a powder, useful in many, many loads. The cast bullet shooters say that the magical load for rifle ammo is 11 grains of Red Dot. Not magical because of the accuracy, but because you can use it to make ammo for any rifle caliber, from 30-30 to .458. It's good in shotgun, pistol and rifle cartridges.