1911

(Pictured: Jim Henderson and myself)

Tony has a provocative idea. In his Harmonic Functions on Manifolds blog, he suggests pulling out your best scores from the record book – you all write down your scores, don’t you? – and tally them up to discover your true potential.

If you reload 45 ACP for automatics (but not necessarily for revolvers), you need one of Bruce Martindale’s gauges.

On a recent business trip to the Washington DC area, I had a couple of spare hours to visit the National Firearms Museum. It’s in the NRA headquarters building in Virginia, just west of Washington DC. For those with street mapping GPSs, a good map or who are familiar with the area, the street address is 11250 Waples Mill Road, Fairfax, VA.

I absolutely love central Pennsylvania, from the southern border with Maryland all the way up to New York state. Every bit of it is gorgeous and the people are warm and friendly.

I met Bob Brown once while on a business trip to San Diego. I stopped by his home a few days after he had offered to fix a nagging reliability problem with my 1911 wad gun. As I sat in his garage that day and watched him gently turn the chamber reamer and then witnessed the impossibly tiny metal shavings that resulted, we chatted.

Primers and powder need to be stored in their original containers, but locked well away from grasping and naive hands. If you have the space and a place to get them from, many reloaders use lockers harvested from a local school. These are about a foot wide and five feet tall, and can be had as singles, pairs and so forth up to just about any width you might want. Each “locker” can be padlocked – and MasterLocks, probably among others, sells them in pairs set to a common key. (Try WalMart, for example.)

I’m cheap.

The less I spend on other things, the more I have for bullets. And as any Bullseye shooter will tell you, to get good, you have to push a lot of lead downrange and, as most of you know, lead is not cheap anymore. Gone are the days of three or four cent heads. Today, you’re probably looking at eight to nine cents for a 200 grain LSWC, and if you buy in 5000 unit quantities, that’s not small change.