ATFE inspector Susan gave me permission to store explosives yesterday. 

Things are coming together.  The rest of the target components arrive in the next few days. 

I'm headed out to the site today to do some electrical work and prepare for building massive amounts of targets.  If the ground is dry enough I will deliver some crates and partially completed targets.

I think I will be able to get rid of the one tree that is in the way today.  This will be a big improvement in the shooting at the more distant targets.

I spent most of the afternoon yesterday gluing the lids on one end of 3” long by 4” (inside) diameter tubes.  These will become targets for Boomershoot 2004.  Daughter Xenia glued a few on too.  We almost have enough of the 4” targets now.  We only need another 65 or so and that diamter will be done.  We still need to put the ends on 380 6” diameter targets and 180 8” targets but neither the tubes nor the ends have arrived yet.  I expect they will arrive this week or next.  I need to buy some more glue too.  We have gone through a lot of it.

I'm looking forward to the magazine inspection by ATFE inspector Sue this week.  Getting that taken care of will be the completion of another essential milestone on the path to a sucessful event.  Sue has always been fun to talk to and had useful suggestions too.

http://www.lewistonpistol.org/2004/ActMar.htm

I did really, really well on one stage and it brought me up to overcome my poorer showing on the other stages.

550 pounds of KClO3 is being delivered today.  They tried to deliver it on Tuesday but Barb was in class instead of home like she usually is on Tuesdays.  Then she misplaced the delivery notification paper.  Didn't find it until last night after I got home.  Anyway, all is well.  This is THE critical item for Boomershoot 2004.  Everything else (except the weather) has back ups if something doesn't come through.  Once I get the KClO3 actually in my hands I'll feel a lot more at ease.

13:00 Update -- it has arrived.

Yesterday I got a call from Mike, an ATFE agent from Spokane.  AGENT, not inspector.

On December 28th of last year I took my cousin Julia on a Boomershoot Adventure at a local gravel pit.  As we were finishing up somebody that lived nearby showed up to complain about the explosions.  Ry and Lyle tried to talk to him but he wasn't interested in listening.  He finally took down my license plate number and left.

The agent wanted to know what was going on.  I asked if he knew that I had a license to manufacture explosives.  He said no and I gave him my ATFE type 20 license to manufacture number and told him Sue (an inspector who works on the Spokane office and he knows) is coming down to inspect my new magazine next week and that she could probably give him more background on me if he wanted it.  He wanted to know what type of explosives we had and if anyone else had explosives.  I said a friend, Ry Jones, helped me mix them on site but we didn't transport anything like that on the road.  He also wanted to know about a "boomer club".  I told him a rough overview of the Boomershoot and directed him to boomershoot.org.  He said that the guy seemed pretty determined to try and "do something" and that we might want to find another place to set things off.  I suspect the neighbor guy didn't get any satisfaction from the local sheriff and so he contacted the ATF.

I told him that we talked to the guy but nothing we could say could make him happy.  I also said we had talked to the owner of the pit and he didn't have problem with it.  He thanked me for answering his questions and I told him to call me anytime something came up because I didn't want to cause any problems and wanted to avoid stepping on people's toes.

I decided the neighbor must be a puritan, a guy who is afraid that someone somewhere is having fun.  The ATFE guy seemed nice enough though.  The phone call was nice, much better than a visit from the SWAT team.

How do you liberate a people when even talk about liberation by the politicians bring demands of their removal?  A politician in the U.K. suggested that kids should be taught safe gun handling and his opponents demand he be sacked.

I don't know of any instance where a country has given up their right to keep and bear arms and then regained it peacefully.

http://www.lewistonpistol.org/2002/NoWayJoe.avi

It's great fun.  Shoot all the “bad guys”, don't hit any of the “good guys”, do it as fast and accurate as you can while still being safe.

When I had the pickup this morning I picked up the last of the crates for storing explosives.  36 of them.  The magazine will hold 72 and I already had the rest. 

I received 1000 plastic disposable aprons via UPS yesterday.  I found two different sources for them.  One source had a minimum quantity of 1000.  The other source I could by in single quantity.  I wanted about 50 or so, but for the price of 100 from the single quantity source I could by 1000 from the other place.  I got the 1000.  When we are mixing the explosives I want to keep certain chemicals off of people's clothes.  The potassium chlorate in partcular is a very strong oxidizer.  If it were to get mixed in the fibers of someone's clothes and they could burn up like a match head, a fire extinguish would be almost useless against such a fire because the potassium chlorage supplies the oxygen.  And with lots of cheap aprons workers shouldn't be too hesitant to throw one away and put on a new one if it gets torn or something.

Boomershoot 2004.  A ton of explosives.  Fun beyond measure.  And most of all I want it to be safe for everyone.

http://www.boomershoot.org/2004/blast.htm

I managed to keep Kim at home long enough to use the pickup for a couple hours.  I drove it about 200 yards when I noticed the oil pressure was zero.  I stopped and checked the oil.  It didn't even touch the dipstick.  I found 1/2 quart under the seat and called Kim to bring the van so we could go get some more oil.  We filled it with oil and I showed her how to check the oil and add oil.  She claimed she didn't know how to read the guages and that she didn't know she needed to.  I'm sure she and I talked about it while she was in drivers ed but, in her mind, it wasn't her fault.  There was no obvious damage done so Kim has her wheels back with instructions to check the oil EVERY time she puts gas in it.

During spring break I will get into a shop to see if they can't get the oil leak fixed.

No surprise with the gun liability protection legislation being shot down today.  It was loaded up with an extension of the ugly gun ban and the gun-show ban legislation.  The sponsors of the gun liability protection bill dropped the whole thing.  It is a stalemate.

At least this is probably the end of the efforts to renew the ugly gun ban that expires in September.  And we have the anti-freedom Senators on record with their votes so they can be targeted for 'unelection' later.

Ry had done some very promising tests with a new explosive mix a week ago Sunday.  It looked like there was probably a way to eliminate the potassium chlorate from our mix.  We went to the range this last Sunday to tweak it a little and improve things just enough to meet our needs.  It was a failure.  We couldn't even reproduce his results from the previous week.  We are 8.5 weeks from the event and we are out of time to experiment.  I decided we needed to order all the materials for the stuff we knew would work and did so this morning.  Containers, chemicals, everything with a lead time associated with it is now on order.

The ATFE inspector is scheduled to come out before the end of March to “bless” the new magazine.  We will be able to store stuff in it immediately after the (successful) inspection. 

I talked to my brother Doug this evening who says a lot of the snow has melted off, so the grass we planted last fall could start growing almost anytime.  If we get some good warm weather between now and the boomershoot (May 6, 7, & 8) then the new grass on the new shooting positions might actually be useable.

Subject: Re: [#7423143] No more Google AdWords for my business.
From: AdWords Support 
Date: Thu, February 26, 2004 0:30  
To: Joe Huffman   
 

Hello Joe,

Thank you for your email. I am sorry to hear that you have decided to
delete your AdWords campaigns.

I understand that you are concerned about Google's policies regarding
sites that sell firearms.

Google believes strongly in freedom of expression and therefore offers
broad access to content across the web without censoring results. At the
same time, we reserve the right to exercise editorial discretion when it
comes to the advertising we accept on our site, as noted in our
advertising terms and conditions. At this time we do not allow ads for
websites that sell guns or related products, nor do we allow these
products as keywords.

You may be aware that a different set of laws and regulations apply to
commercial speech (advertising) than to the search results we show when
you do a Google search. As a business, Google must make decisions about
where we draw the line in regards to the advertising we accept, both from
a legal and company values perspective. Please note that the decisions we
make concerning advertising in no way affect the search results we
deliver. We will continue to show search results for guns and related
products.

We appreciate your comments on this issue, which will help inform our
future policy discussions. Thank you for taking the time to write us.

Please feel free to email us at adwords-support@google.com if you have
additional questions or concerns.

We look forward to providing you with the most effective advertising
available. 

Sincerely,

Loretta
The Google AdWords Team