Forty years ago, after returning from an Air Force Arc Light rotation, I picked up my wife and month old number one son at the airport. He was a project we started before I left but, unfortunately, I wasn’t around for the work in process or his completion. It was […]

With high interest, and lack of ammo or cases, it is often necessary to make your own cases for some of the oldies. A good example is the Winchester family of self loading rifles that came out about a hundred years ago. None of the ammo or rifles are produced […]

Living in rural Maine, I often find myself in unfamiliar surroundings for a variety of reasons; hunting, fishing and recreational hiking are several that come to mind. There’s a lot of brush, dense tree growth and the topography consists mostly of one mountain beginning where another ends. It’s pretty easy […]

I’ve been too busy at work to replace a column on the front porch of the house. My grown children can’t understand why I fix things myself, always suggesting it would be easier to hire someone to do the work. A new column cost $117 and it would take two […]

The hold ups on accuracy testing of the 6mm Creedmoor and Ruger American Rifle Predator were three fold: awaiting for the arrival of a 0.268″ neck bushing for the Hornady Match die set, taking the time to make an overall length gauge modified case for the 6mm Creedmoor and a […]

You can spend hours shooting at the range. You can study ballistics tables. You can buy the latest electronic gear, but the most important skill is difficult to practice until your proficiency is critical. Your blood trailing skills can mean the difference between a trophy on the wall and an […]

The 7mm-08 Remington is the Rodney Dangerfield of cartridges; modest in appearance, potentially exceptional in performance. Without hyper velocity and eyebrow raising knock down power, the 7mm-08 Remington is easy to overlook on a cartridge comparison chart, but twenty-eight years in production suggests that more than a few shooters have […]

It might be a good idea to begin with Part II of my articles before reading Part I. Part I contains my creative theories and conjecture. Part II contains all of the post live fire corrections. If not outright  corrections, certainly revised opinion. Part I cast aspersions on what I […]

Not too long ago, I began to get the feeling some readers thought I was being a snob and writing mostly about non-mainstream firearms and cartridges. I’m pretty intuitive, so it wasn’t difficult for me to arrive at that conclusion after receiving email from some readers that stated, “Joe, you’re […]

I realize the .500 Jeffery is a major departure from my needs as a hunter, and clearly more than I want to shoot recreationally on a routine basis. It is, however, one of those bigger than life cartridges that got me interested in firearms when I was very young, and […]