5000 pounds of fun

As I said yesterday I was at the Boomershoot site this last weekend.

The main objective was to take delivery on ammonium nitrate for future Boomershoots. Last time (see also here) I ordered 3000 pounds of AN and they brought a semi-truck and trailer. It was difficult to get it into a position close to the entrance of my shipping container production facility. So in the two days before the delivery I rearranged the dirt and rocks in front of the facility to make it easier to get into position.

This time I ordered two thirds more and they put it in something resembling a horse trailer pulled by a large pickup instead of the larger semi. Oh well, I like the changes I made and it was still easier for them than it would have been had I not moved the dirt and rocks.

At first we put down some rollers to unload the material. I’m sorry for the atrocious picture. The lens of my cell phone camera was dirty and I didn’t want to waste time cleaning it to get a good picture when the delivery guy was waiting on me:

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After maybe five bags with me carrying them 30+ feet to the rear of the shipping container and the delivery guy mostly waiting for my return he put the rollers away and moved the pallet to the rear of the trailer. Then we both pulled the 50 pound bags off the back of the trailer and carried them to the far end of the container and stacked them.

From the time he was backing the trailer up to the container until they were all neatly stacked at the opposite end of the container was only 28 minutes.

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I did a lot of puttering around after he left. I removed bunch of old cardboard boxes for disposal at a recycling center. I had moved a lot of things out of the way to have a clear path to the rear and I put those back where I wanted them. I put the AN from two years ago on top of the latest delivery. An interesting thing I noted when I did this was that the date on the new bags AN was September 4, 2014 and the date on the old bags was September 4, 2012.

I tucked the tarp in around the AN and put a plastic sheet over the top to keep the condensation and occasional snow (that sometimes blows in through the ceiling vent) off the chemicals:

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The ceiling of the container is not really sloped. It’s just the distortion from the wide angle lens on the phone camera.

We now have 5000+ pounds of fun ready for use in Boomerite at Boomershoots 2015, 2016, and beyond.

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12 thoughts on “5000 pounds of fun

  1. Eventually you’ll need your own railroad spur, a switch yard and several storage silos. Better to plan ahead. May as well get started.

  2. You may have mentioned this before, but do you have to be on some ATF (or other alphabet agency) list when you make these purchases?

    • I have an ATF license to manufacture high explosives. They visit every three years when my license is up for renewal. This is what a typical visit is like.

      It used to be I could get all the ingredients without the license. And I still could get small quantities without a license but with the current quantities the hassle of the license is worth it the ability to buy in bulk.

      • Good…would hate to lose you because of some bureaucratic shinola. Interesting read on the visit.

  3. Just curious, is this AN a finer granule size than the last so no grinding is required?

    • We haven’t ground the AN in many years. Grinding it dramatically decreases the detonation sensitivity to bullets.

  4. Pingback: Rearranging dirt and rocks | The View From North Central Idaho

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