Almost everything went well today. I got the Wi-Fi and micro-cell working. AT&T says the micro-cell is good for about 40’. That wasn’t really going to meet my needs and I talked to the people at the AT&T store and they said it would be much further if there were no obstructions so I took a chance on it. I still had 3 bars 250 feet away which is good enough for what I need it for.

I got my tent set up and all the bedding in place.

I cleaned up the interior of Mecca a bunch. I made room for and moved a bunch of the empty crates we store the targets in to the Mecca to be filled. After being filled they will be transported to the Taj Mahal for storage.

I had hoped to get all that stuff done yesterday so basically I am taking about twice as long as I had planned to get stuff done.

The really important stuff that I need to get done before tomorrow night (other than do my regular job, “work from home” is actually going to be “work from the middle of a field”) is to get the rest of the chemicals from the Taj Mahal moved to Mecca. The weather has been great with clear skies and the today the temperature was in the low 80’s. This was probably close to a record for this day of the year. But there is a 50% chance of rain tomorrow night and I need to get those chemicals moved before the field gets muddy again.

The solar panel has been doing great. It puts out over 100 Watts (rated at 130 W) during the middle of the day and it has more than kept up with the Internet, cell, and computer power needs.

Boomershoot is looking to be good this year. There is some chance of rain but it doesn’t look nearly as bad has it has some years.

As Sarah notes Paul Barrett will be speaking at the Boomershoot dinner next Saturday.

I am very pleased to have Barrett attend. He and his wife are coming all the way from New York City to attend.

You may purchase a copy of his book at the dinner and there will be a book signing after his speech.

You don’t have to be a Boomershoot participant to listen to the speaker. Speaker only tickets are $10 at the door.

Ry reports his room reservation he made last May at the Best Western in Orofino for Boomershoot 2012 was cancelled exactly 90 days later.

If you think you have a reservation there please check to make sure everything is still in order.

If you have lost your reservation there may be other places in town that still have rooms available. Here is a list of places with phone numbers where you can look.

I ordered a bunch of stuff from Amazon for Boomershoot last night. This included things like foam ear plugs, safety glasses, nitrile gloves, electronic hearing protection, a new flour sifter, and a shooting mat for the media types who show up and take us up on shoot for free offer. The interesting thing was the total price of the order after tax and shipping:

Thanks for your order, Joe Huffman!
Want to manage your order online?
If you need to check the status of your order or make changes, please visit our home page at Amazon.com and click on Your Account at the top of any page.
Purchasing Information:
E-mail Address:  ???@joehuffman.org

Billing Address:
Joe Huffman
8512 122nd Ave NE #6
Kirkland, WA 98033
United States

Order Grand Total: $666.66

For the crazy anti-gun people who believe guns are in hell this probably confirms their belief.

For the rest of the world who are more sane but still a bit superstitious they will probably just take this as a sign that Boomershoot 2012 is going to be a hell of a good time.

This morning I loaded up my Ford Escape with 400 pounds of Potassium Chlorate, boxes of ammo, Cafepress shirts, mugs, and miscellaneous other stuff and drove out to Boomershoot Mecca. I knew the ground would be wet and soft and I knew I might not be able to make it all the way out there but worse case I could leave the stuff at my brother’s place a mile or so away until the ground dried up. The last 150 yards were the only part of concern and I stopped to check it out before attempting to traverse it. I walked about 20 yards into the field and it was surprisingly firm in the track we had packed in the ground on our previous trips last fall and winter. I decided I could make it. I made it across the field and still had a fair amount of velocity when I tried to make a left turn up the hill onto the grass and weeds of the scab patch where the shipping container is. That was an error. I probably should have kept going straight and got onto the firmer ground ahead of me. I immediately lost all velocity and spun down into the mud.

The hybrid drive train is extremely anemic in reverse. It wouldn’t even spin the tires when I tried to back up. Attempts to go forward didn’t accomplish much either. I did manage to slide sidewise a bit into the softer mud of the field.

The sun was out and things were drying up so I figured I would have a better chance of getting out if I waited a few hours. My brother Doug showed up a little later. He was clearing out the drain tiles in the nearby fields. He came over to see what I was doing. He said the forecast was for 90% chance of rain after 11:00 AM. That made it an imperative to get the vehicle out almost immediately. He didn’t think the tractors would be able to get in any better than a pickup and another pickup out there probably would mean another stuck vehicle.

I already had everything else out of the vehicle and he helped me get the Potassium Chlorate out and the rest of the way up the hill and into the shipping container.

We both had shovels and starting digging the mud out from behind the tires. After we had three or four feet of soft mud removed from all the tires he pushed on the front and I drove. I flipped the back end around and up the hill to get close to a straight shot at the “road” back out of the field. The drive out threw a lot of mud in the air but I made it back to the road without problems.

The Internet provider guy showed up shortly thereafter and he took a look at Teakean Butte from the shipping container and said it shouldn’t be a problem. He would schedule someone to come out and install the service in a week or 10 days. I was annoyed. I understood they were going to install the equipment today. I could have sent them a picture of Teakean Butte from the shipping container if that is all they were going to do. Now one of my brothers will have to come out again and open up the shipping container for them to install the equipment. Nearly every contact I have had with these people has been unsatisfactory.

I had lunch with my parents and brothers. Dad made a really nice lentil soup.

Doug and I both went back out in the afternoon and I did some cleanup and arranging of things and he rerouted some cables and oiled the squeaking (almost crunchy) things on the doors. Other than getting stuck it was a pretty productive day.

Boomershoot 2012 still has openings available. The following positions are available:

• Position 5 in the .50 Caliber Ghetto
• Positions 8 and 13 in the Lowlands
• Position 38 in Main (a shooting bench is strongly recommended)
• Positions 48, 49, 51, 55, 57, and 58 in Berm (shooting benches discouraged)

Author Paul Barrett will be our dinner speaker on Saturday night plus there will be a dozen gun bloggers attending:

• antitango
• Barron and Janelle Barnett
• Brian
• Chris and Melody Byrne
• Lyle @ UltiMAK
• Me
• Oleg Volk
• Phil and David
• Ry Jones

There will be over 1000 exploding targets available. Each detonation will pack enough of a “punch” for you to feel it hundreds of yards away.

Have a blast by getting your share of those targets and make anti-gun people cry by signing up here and attending Boomershoot 2012.

Barron and I went out to the Boomershoot site today. Barron has the full report, with video but the bottom line is that Boomerite stored via a new packaging technique appears work well even after being stored for 13 days.

We put the Boomerite directly in the cardboard boxes then wrapped the cardboard boxes with plastic wrap. They way we have done it for years was to put the Boomerite in zip lock bags and put the bags in the cardboard boxes. This new method is faster, cheaper, allows us to put more Boomerite in each box, and it fills the box all the way to three edges. There is still a bit of a gap at the top edge but less so that before.

I’m very pleased to report that after running a sample of our existing stock of potassium chlorate through a blender the problems appear to be solved:

Barron has his own report of our tests.

Also of interest is that I talked to our supplier on Friday and discovered that we can order whatever grade and class of potassium chlorate we want. That probably means we won’t have this problem again and can use our existing stock for private parties and miscellaneous testing when we have the more time to run it through a blender.

Barron and I drove out to the Boomershoot site today for some more testing of the potassium chlorate. There was a large snow berm blocking the road out to Mecca and the snow was too deep to drive across anyway. We parked at my cousin Dennis’ place, packed up our stuff and started to walk. It is only 789 yards (I wrote an app for that!) but the crust on the snow was weak enough that I broke through about every other step and Barron broke through almost up to his knees with each step.

The wind was coming up and it was starting to snow and I decided (after getting confirmation from Barron) that this wasn’t a good idea. It was going to be a lot of work getting out there and back. So much work that it was bordering stupid to even try. We drove back to Moscow without doing the testing.

I’ll be back in town in two weeks. Maybe the weather will be more cooperative and if not we’ll bring snowshoes and we will win the battle with the snow.

As Ry reported yesterday we verified the KClO₃ we currently have in Boomershoot storage has much larger particle size than what we know has worked in the past. I purchased a cheap blender and tested a sample of KClO₃ to see if we could reduce the particle size.

I’m happy to report that it appears “blending” it did reduce the particle size significantly. Looking at it under the microscope shows there are still some particles that are larger than the “old stuff” but most of the particles are more like powdered sugar than granulated sugar.

Further evidence that we are on the right track is the dust generated. Even after a minute or two of waiting for the dust to settle in the blender just gently taking the lid off the blender gets a cloud of dust flowing through the air from the blender to the air cleaner:

Another interesting thing is that the volume increased significantly. My guess is that it about occupies about 40% more volume than previously. The container on the left had about 1.5 inches of air above the KClO₃ before blending. After blending it would not fit and I had to put some of the material in a different container.

It blends, but will it detonate? We have more tests to run the next time I visit Idaho.

Yesterday Barron and I went out to do more tests on our Boomerite mixture and packaging. It failed the last time we tried it and we want to get the problem solved.

We tried both the new packaging and the old from about 20 yards with .223 Wolf hollow points. All were complete duds. There was not even a hint of reactivity.

We were quite perplexed. What could have changed? Thinking that maybe some water had gotten into the old stuff we mixed up a new batch with some fresh ethylene glycol. Still absolutely nothing.

Barron was measuring the KClO3 and reported the powder didn’t seem quite right to him. There was no dust! I had three air cleaners in the shipping container because we knew the KClO3 generated a lot of dust and it wasn’t healthy to breath it. But there was no dust. Something was wrong. Could it have gotten wet? Maybe it could have drawn moisture from the air.

We took a couple of pounds to my parents house and dried it in the kitchen oven. Still no dust when handling it.

We ground some in the mortar and pestle. There was a little bit of dust but I could tell it still wasn’t as fine as what we usually have. Usually it it is so fine you cannot feel any grittiness. With this you could.

The Boomerite we made with the dried and ground KClO3 didn’t go boom with Wolf 60 grain .223 HP’s from Barron’s rifle. I had him try some 50 grain VMAX that I had. With the non-dried (or ground) we got a little bit of detonation but still not normal. With the ground and dried it went boom.

I put some of the KClO3 under the microscope. The crystals are average about 1/3 as large as granulated sugar. It should be much smaller than that.

It turns out there even though I was getting “MIL-SPEC” KClO3 “just like” always before there are various “Classes” within that spec. I strongly suspect we got a different class with this drum of KClO3. That could explain, rather than the plastic deli containers, why we had problems with a lot of the targets at Boomershoot. At the private party we had last summer it didn’t detonate very well either. We used the 50 grain VMAX bullets from fairly close and about 20% did not detonate properly.

Barron has more details on our experiments.

My blogging activity has been pretty meager the last few days. First it was the guests we had for the holidays then I spent a lot of time on Boomershoot stuff. This is a post about some of the Boomershoot stuff.

I purchased an ATT Microcell to put on site so that I could have cell service at Boomershoot without switching carriers. It requires a solid high speed Internet connection with low latency. The existing connection was via satellite and it wasn’t even close to good enough. My brother Gary has a good connection a mile or so away and while I didn’t have line of sight to his place from Boomershoot I did have the ability to pick up the Wi-Fi signal from the T.V. antenna mast of the neighbors house. I spent all day Wednesday (December 28^th) in the rain climbing up and down the roof of my brother’s house putting up a Nanostation 2. This was more challenging that most roofs because it was very steep and made of slick steel. Smooth steel in the cold rain. That little exercise involved parking my vehicle on the other side of the house to attach a rope to, using two ladders, and laying face down on the wet roof. I got soaking wet. In North Central Idaho. In late December. But it was going to be worth it. Right?

I first measured the signal strength with the unit attached to the top of a ladder. It was good, about -55 dBm. I need at least -75 dBm to get a semi-reliable connection. After I had it all mounted and powered it up again the signal strength was about -82 dBm. What? How could that be? It was higher than on the ladder and even though it still wasn’t high enough to get line of site to the neighbor’s house it should have been better.

I moved the vehicle back around to the other side of the house did the thing with the rope and two ladders and getting soaking wet again to tweak the position. I turned the antenna a little bit and the signal strength looked great again. I came back down. Still good. Nice.

I came back the next day (Thursday) to finish up on the inside of the house with putting an end on the Ethernet cable I pushed through the wall and routing the cable on the inside in a neat and tidy manner. I connected it all up and tried connecting to the Wi-Fi access point at Mecca two hops away. Pings were erratic. Sometimes they were 4 mS and sometimes they would time out. I measured the signal strength again. It was bouncing all over. -85 sometimes and the mid -60s at others. I rebooted units, changed antenna polarizations, and all kinds of things on both units involved. Nothing helped. The signal strength was just not dependable.

Friday (yesterday) morning I visited the only non-satellite high speed Internet provider office for that location (their office is in Moscow, where I live) to talk to them about getting a direct connection. They wanted an address.

It’s in the middle of a field:

View Larger Map

There is no “address”.

This seemed to be a bit of a problem for them. I told them it was a shipping container where I had solar charged batteries for electricity. I finally allowed them to believe it was a construction site (we construct targets there, right?). Then they wanted to know how long construction would be going on. “Several years” seemed to suck the brains right out of them because they stood there with slack faces without saying a word. I finally explained that I hold a shooting event there every year and we construct the targets for the event there. I run the event with web based software, I need a good Internet connection to run the AT&T Microcell so I could make emergency services calls if needed, and a large number of bloggers attend and they appreciate having free Wi-Fi. I go out there several times a year to check on things and do tests. I use the Internet a lot and will continue to do so.

The blank stares slowly faded and they started talking again. After about 20 minutes they agreed to send someone out “sometime soon” to do a “site survey”. I had requested one back in August or September without them following through so I wasn’t exactly convinced they were wanting my business so I pushed them pretty hard for a firm date. They told me I was about number 94 on their list and it would be a while.

It was now my turn to be speechless for a few seconds.

I then told them the site had a great view of the mountain top where their access point is and it is closer than my brother Gary who subscribes to their service. The site survey really isn’t necessary. Could they just send someone out right now, while I was going to be there, and connect me up? And I’m almost never around on weekdays since I work in Seattle… Nope. That was impossible.

More pushing for a date and they said maybe in a couple weeks. And they might even be able to do it on a weekend when I was there. They took my number and promised to get back in touch when they had a firm date.

I then went back to Mecca and confirmed my connection was flakey. From Mecca to the neighbors house I had about 15 to 20 Mbs transfer rates. From Mecca to the outside world it was about 15 Kbs—when it was connected at all. Good enough to sometimes get email to come through and some web pages to eventually load but the satellite connection was actually better.

I spent the rest of the day tidying up Mecca. I put in the RIGrunner and routed wires a little neater and more permanently (still much to be done). I unpacked all the mixing table stuff and spread it out on the tables to see how it might work with the new layout. This was potentially important to get done yesterday because Ry thought he might be bringing over a new shooter today. I wanted the place ready to produce targets with minimal time spent unpacking and getting ready to actually make targets. It turns out the new shooter backed out so it didn’t matter that much.

Here are some pictures:

The boxes would normally be folded and ready to be filled but the layout was good enough to see that it should work out.

We will probably go back out with a small crew sometime in the next couple of months and do some testing just to make sure but so far, except for the Internet connection, I’m very pleased with the new explosives production facility.