Boolits

That's how the serious casting cats spell it on the internet, and now your humble scribe has 168,000 grains of a lead-like boolit material cast into little Lyman ingots and shelved. Not allowing for waste, that's seven hundred and thirty -- 230 grainers for the 1911s with a few ounces left over for crappie jigs.

Before long I'll have a report on the casting, loading, and shooting qualities we can get from modern wheel weights fired as cast with either no lube or a light hand lube. I am not hot to get into the sizing and lubing game. If the as-cast stuff will hit the barn door and not lead the bores too badly, I won't.

The men of the family spent one of the Independence weekend afternoons at Cabela's in the Twin Cities, and I finally just tossed frugality to the winds and bought the Lyman kit with the little "Big Dipper" 10-pound pot. High quality it is not, but it should make all the boolits I care to shoot, swap, or give away.

(If you're out at my local DNR range some weekday afternoon and see a crazy dude raking lead from the berms, don't shoot. That's me.)

EDIT: Heading off an argument, perhaps: By "modern" wheel weights I mean the ones still based on lead. In the 80s when I was last casting, we considered wheel weights to be about 90-95 per cent lead with the balance more or less evenly split between tin and antimony. Serious, or just anal, casters added enough tin to bring it closer to Lyman's No. 2 formula of 90 - 5 - 5 (lead, tin,antimony). I have read that most WW makers have by now cut the tin content to nearly nothing.

Others made the good point that citing precise contents of any home-brew alloy was somewhat silly because we had no idea of what was actually in the lead, the tin, or the antimony we used. And who the heck had a Brinnel tester in his shop? We considered anything that cast smoothly and was hard enough to resist fingernail denting good enough to use.

El Presidente Obama

The Mexican politicians have issued an official statement praising His Obamaness for suing Arizona.  Wouldn't they just.

Obama openly avows his purposes include handcuffing other  states who want to succeed (where Obama has failed) in controlling illegal immigrants. Thus it is fair to say that Barack Obama, in the 18th month of his presidency, celebrated United States Independence Week by suing the citizens of his own Republic, thus earning the approval  of foreign thugs.

Back. Going to rest a bit if I can quit thinkig about the sign in the yard of a group home on Second Street in St Cloud, Minnesota:

"Openings for Geriatric Seniors."
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Idle hands

Serial Number 2. This one is of silver maple with a more aggressive scimitar look to the arms than the earlier model.