Via email from Boomershooter Rich. Here is the original link.
This is pretty cool. If someone had been willing to pick up the pieces we could have used Ry’s old Aerostar van at Boomershoot for something like this:
I especially like the enthusiasm the woman has in this video. The absence of eye protection at times—not so much.
A Boomershooter sent me an email with pictures of a target he wanted to bring to Boomershoot 2011. The intent is to give the shooters something more challenging to shoot at. To be specific he wanted a 1.5” reactive target at 700 yards. The concept was a steel plate on the front with a 1.5 hole drilled in it with a open topped steel box on the back to hold a normal Boomerite target right behind the hole. On top of that box he wanted to put a baggie filled with chalk dust. The explosion should then result in a yellow, red, or blue cloud of chalk dust.
I told him I he could bring it but that it would be destroyed by the first or second use. The explosion would rip the box right off of the back. He almost could not be convinced. Here is some of the conversation:
Joe: “I’m fine with your chalk dust dispenser if you don’t mind picking up the pieces if it spontaneously disassembles.”
Boomershooter: “we got it covered . . 1″ plate with 3/8 open topped box . . i will weld it myself so i don’t have to worry about bill’s welds scattered over the hillside…”
Joe: “My guess is that you will be lucky if the welds hold for two successful hits. Just one is my guess.”
Boomershooter: “i challenge you to be the one to break my welds…”
Joe: “My guess is the .250 chamber will be ripped in half after the first or second detonation. You are welcome to try it as long as everyone is at least 300+ yards away from it.”
Boomershooter: “i’m thinking your 4″ 375 yard targets are going to be a walk in the park for this high tech explosive containment device. i’m sure if you packed it solid you might get it to bulge. but enough explosive to send a colored cloud is what we are looking for…”
Ry: “I admire your faith in your product.”
Boomershooter: “been a certified welder for 35 years . . when i see people shooting bowling balls out of a 1/4″ thick argon bottle over a mile, i figure it can’t be bad with no pressure build up at all . . “
Ry: “My experience was this: I put a little boomerite in a mountain dew bottle (call it a half liter), put the bottle on the round. A couple inches behind it, I put a railroad tie plate on edge. The tie plate landed about 75-80 yards away and was bent into an L shape.”
Boomershooter: “oh well . . you will be getting the explosion test dummy in a couple days . . we will find out after that…”
Joe: “There will be a LOT of pressure build up. I’m expecting pressures beyond the tensile strength of steel. The maximum (of course it is confined instead of partially open) of ANFO is about 1,500,000 PSI. Partially confined it can still reach 1/10 that. We are pretty sure our mixture is more powerful than straight ANFO. If we were to fill the box with Boomerite we could see the total force attempting to separate the tube from the plate reach a peak of (4” x 6” x 100,000 PSI) or 2.4 million pounds.You know your steels and welds better than I do, but my bet it is going at least bulge on the first shot if not get ‘opened up’.”
Boomershooter: “well . . one low tech target is on it’s way . . you scared 223 bill with the 2.4 million pounds of pressure fact, so he elected to add a plate to the back of the tube to keep the bullet from penetrating the back of the tube. give it a try and let us know what you think.
The target arrived earlier this week. It is an impressive target. It weights almost 50 pounds:
While out blowing up the snow castle we tested the target as well.
We mounted it on some 3/8” rebar. It was intended to have something much larger and we couldn’t tighten up the bolts properly. Hence it hung really crooked:
We then put a very small charge of Boomerite in it. Just about 1 cup—200 grams. This was in a zip lock bag that was poked through the hole:
On top of this we put another zip lock bag with 600 grams of chalk dust:
We then got back 100 yards (I figured that with such a small charge and part of it even sticking out the front we would be safe) and shot it with a 50 gr VMAX bullet:
We should have used yellow, red, or orange chalk dust to give better contrast with the snow. But you can tell there is definitely a blue cloud in the air.
But what happened to the chalk dispenser? It wasn’t visible to the naked eye from 100 yards away. We walked up to where it was and found this:
The target had been blow backward until the rebar had bent almost in a U and the target was touching the ground underneath the snow. Notice the rectangular outline on the bottom of the target? That was the bulge from the Boomerite containment box. Do you remember he said, “i’m sure if you packed it solid you might get it to bulge”? This was FAR from packed solid.
Now let’s look at the sides of the containment box:
One dead target.
We intended to make a snowman or three and blow them up with Boomerite today. It turns out the snow was too cold (air temperature was 24 F at Noon) for making a good snowman. But there was enough of a crust and frozen snow that our crew was able to make a pretty nice wall that looked like part of a snow castle. We filled the “window” with four gallons of gasoline, 6.5 pounds of Boomerite, put some road flares out, and set off a Roman Candle.
You can hear the crackling and popping of the Roman Candle in this video (taken with a Windows Phone 7):
We also have about 450 still photos from today’s adventure. I’ll have more up soon.
I got another begging letter from the BC, and in this one Paul Helmke says they have a $250,000 deficit:
Dear (friendly_iconoclast),
I am writing to you today as one of the Brady Campaign’s most loyal friends because we really need your help…
…But the truth is, because we’ve been fighting so hard on so many fronts, we’re facing a serious financial shortfall.
I need to make up a $250,000 budget shortfall before the end of the year….
Maybe they should ask the NRA for a loan. After all, the Brady Campaign has done wonders for their fundraising…
If they were a publically traded company I would consider attempting a hostile takeover (I could get a NRA range grant to build a Brady Campaign Memorial Boomershoot East, couldn’t I?). I would hire Tamara to write all their media releases for month or two as we liquidated every asset and did Boomerite experiments in the ashes.
About a month ago I received an email from Steven Otterbacher at BulkAmmo.com:
Hi Joe,
I really appreciate your posting about our opening a few weeks ago (https://blog.joehuffman.org/2010/08/30/bulk-ammo/) ; things are going well and I appreciate your help!I have an idea I wanted to run past you:
We just started carrying Fiocchi ammo and are trying to get the word out about it. If we shipped you a box, would you be willing to give it a fair try and post a review about it?
As long as you link back to the category page on our website (i.e. http://www.bulkammo.com/handgun/bulk-.40-s-w-ammo – maybe with anchor-text like “Bulk 40 cal ammo” or “bulk 40 S&W ammo”), not the product page, we are 100% fine with a positive or negative review – whatever is truthful based on your experience – we just want you to give it a chance!
If you are interested, which product/caliber do you prefer:• http://www.bulkammo.com/bulk-9mm-ammo-9mm158fmjsubfiocchi-50
• http://www.bulkammo.com/bulk-223-ammo-223rem40hvmaxfiocchi-50
• http://www.bulkammo.com/bulk-40-s-w-ammo-40sw180jhpxtpfiocchi-50If you are interested, just confirm you are on board, let me know which caliber you prefer, and then give me your shipping information (and confirm that you meet are terms of sale – i.e. you are over 21, are legally able to own this ammo, etc, etc) and I will get this ammo shipped out to you ASAP!
If this goes well, we might even be able to do a few more as time goes on!
I appreciate your time and look forward to hearing from you soon!
Thanks,
Steven
I accepted his offer and asked for the .40 S&W 180 grain ammo. I was on vacation at the time and there were various things like blowing up pumpkins that kept me from getting to the ammo testing until today. I don’t have a good place to do this type of testing in the Seattle area and had to wait until I could get out to the Boomershoot site.
Since I was going to have everything set up for group and velocity testing I decided to test some other ammo at the same time.
The ammo I actually received was not the JHPs but FMJ. I didn’t realize that until I got out on the range with all the JHPs I was ready to compare to. I did the comparisons anyway.
Rounds fired: 10
Gun: STI Eagle 5.1 with a KKM Precision barrel.
Temperature: 30 F
Elevation: 3000 feet
Chronograph: CED Millennium
Distance to Chronograph: 11’ to first screen
Distance between screens: 2’
Distance to target: 25’
Bullet mass: 180 grains (except the Remington Golden Sabers which were 165 grains)
Here is my setup and the ammo used:
The bag of lentils was torn by the muzzle blast on the first shot and I switched to a roll of paper towels to replace the leather sandbag I had left at home.
The handloads were assembled in 1998 for bowling pin shoots. I used Winchester cases with Rainer Restrike JHP bullets over 6.4 grains of VV N350 powder.
The following table describes the velocity performance at 12’ from the muzzle. If you want velocity at the muzzle add about 4.5 fps to the numbers below.
|
Manufacture |
Product |
Mean |
High |
Low |
SDev |
ES |
|
962 |
981 |
948 |
9 |
32 |
||
|
1009 |
1038 |
975 |
15 |
53 |
||
|
1120 |
1138 |
1093 |
15 |
45 |
||
|
988 |
1016 |
961 |
18 |
54 |
||
|
1044 |
1057 |
1030 |
8 |
27 |
||
|
1050 |
1075 |
1033 |
11 |
42 |
||
|
Handloads |
1001 |
1033 |
941 |
24 |
91 |
Feeding was perfect with all ammo types.
Accuracy information can be derived from the picture below (click to enbiggen enough to see the bullet holes and the ammo names on the targets). The target on the top right is the BVAC. I didn’t label that target in the field because I couldn’t remember the name of the ammo. It was a bulk buy and I had transferred it from the original boxes (of 500 each) into ammo cans.
The accuracy was acceptable for everything except my handloads and perhaps the BVAC remanufactured FMJs. The Black Hills and the Fiocchi ammo did the best.
I was aiming at the bottom edge of the black to get the maximum contrast with the sights as that sliver of “white” disappeared into the black. The order in which the targets were shot is as in the table above.
For self-defense ammo I don’t really care much if the group size is one inch or three inches at 25 feet. Nearly all self-defense shootings are at ranges less than that and the nearly all ammo is going to have enough accuracy to hit the target. The shooter is going to be the dominate factor.
What is important is the velocity of the bullet, the expansion diameter, and depth of penetration. The penetration depth is also affected by the covering of the target. Shirts, jackets, windshield glass, etc. all make a difference. I didn’t have the time or enough ammo to do a full scale test of everything but I planned to do an expansion test with water.
I put a concrete paving stone in the bottom of a old diaper container that was laying around in the garage and put five gallons of water on top of it. This gave me about 15 inches of water to shoot into. I put the paving stone in the bottom to make sure the bullet wouldn’t punch a hole in the bottom if the water wasn’t deep enough.
As I prepared to fire into the container I tried to remember what had happened when Myth Busters did similar tests. I remembered that the 9mm FMJ had surprising depth of penetration and that the water splash was impressive. I keep thinking there was something more I should remember… what was it?
I anticipated getting severely splashed with water but that wasn’t the thing I should have worried about. I fired from about four feet above the container and only my hand and the gun got a little wet. After firing I was pretty sure I just relearned with Myth Busters had learned. The outward pressure of the water is quite strong. The pictures below tell the story:
Yes. The container was blown completely in two and split down the side. The bullet fully penetrated the water and impacted the paving stone.
The bullet jacket completely separated from the core. Here are the bullet pictures (click to see higher resolution versions):
If you know your bullets the jacket in the first picture will tell you which bullet it was. If you can’t guess I’ll put the answer in the comments by EOD on Monday.
I get the most unusual email:
From: timi top [mailto:timitop_007@yahoo.com]
Sent: Sunday, November 14, 2010 9:12 AM
To: joeh@boomershoot.org
Subject: how can i build a bomb!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Hello sir,
My name is temitope and I recite in Nigerian, it’s being a long time have been searching in other to know about how I can build bomb, it not just for fun, but for people in my area to know me that am one of the researcher, I will like you to put me through so people in my area will be doing that in my memory when I grow old and die, and I will be able to generate money from there, please sir I love it if you can help me through and also help me to buy some materials that can be use for it because am not in usa and I will need someone to help me in other to purchase this items and send it to Nigerian, you can reach me by my mobile number or my e-mail address, am on timitop_007@yahoo.com or call me on +2348169640844 I will be looking for to read from you soon bye and do have a lovely weekend aheard
TEMITOPE
I’m not sure I could find law enforcement in Nigeria but I may not need to because all the IP addresses in the email header are from New York. So I might as well play the fish for a while:
From: Joe Huffman [mailto:joeh@boomershoot.org]
Sent: Sunday, November 14, 2010 10:21 AM
To: ‘timi top’
Subject: RE: how can i build a bomb!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
What do you want to do with the bomb? What does it need to be able to destroy? How big does it need to be?
-joe-
Update (11/15/2010 05:16): I received a response.
From: timi top [mailto:timitop_007@yahoo.com]
Sent: Monday, November 15, 2010 5:09 AM
To: Joe Huffman
Subject: RE: thanks for your reply sir
hello sir
thanks for your respond , i want to generate money from there, by selling to my country military people, not that i want to use it for harm or for any dirty game, is just to know know that am one of the people that develop technology in Nigerian please help me out sir, cos we have already have people that is building guns and bullet, but i want to be first person in Nigerian to build bomb and one of the people that develop Nigerian technology…… i will be looking forward to read from you again bye
TEMITOPE
I replied:
From: Joe Huffman [mailto:joeh@boomershoot.org]
Sent: Monday, November 15, 2010 5:16 AM
To: ‘timi top’
Subject: RE: thanks for your reply sir
I am sorry but I don’t have any experience in building those types of bombs. The difficulties are as much or more about the accurate delivery of the bomb than about the explosives which is where I have a little bit of expertise.
-joe-
That was the best thing about turning 16 years old. I could drive a car by myself and buy dynamite without my parents knowing about it.
Ry Jones
November 6, 2010
[A bunch of us were talking about how things used to be back when our country was a little freer. The quote above was one of Ry’s contribution to the conversation. This was said while making explosives to blow up some pumpkins.—Joe]
I’m trying to come up with a slogan for the Boomershoot 2011 t-shirts, hats, etc..
My current list of possibilities are:
I’m open to suggestions and voting in the comments. If someone suggests one that I really like and end up using I’ll send them a free Boomershoot 2011 t-shirt, hat, or (or even thong) with the winning slogan on it.
When they left this afternoon, Randy said Dan insisted on being the last one out out of the house. He locked the door behind him ending 62 years of residence on the place.
Doug Huffman
October 30, 2010
[In the spring of 1927 our Dad was not quite four years old but he remembers coming back to Idaho with his Aunt Pet and Uncle Walt. His mother had died two years earlier from T.B. and his aunt and uncle took him to California for the winter while his Dad, Cecil, stayed in Idaho to complete the purchase of a new home and farm land. When they drove by his Uncle Frank’s home he asked why they didn’t stop because that was where they had lived before they went to California. His Aunt, Frank’s and his mother’s sister, told him they had a new home. They drove on for almost another mile and as they went around a bend in the road his aunt pointed out a house on the hill above them. “That’s our new home”, she told him. Although none of the original buildings from 1927 are still standing there are newer building visible in the map image below. On the left side of the image is the location of my Great Uncle Frank’s home. On the right side of the image there is sort of a ghost road that makes a bend through some trees to the east of some buildings. That bend in the road was the site of the county road until the early 1970’s and is the bend in the road where Dad first saw the place that was to be his home for 18 years when he was growing up.
Cecil, Walt, Pet, and Ollie (first a hired assistant and later Cecil’s wife), dad and his three cousins lived there from 1927 until 1945. The land was in another family’s hands until 1949 when Dan (Randy’s father—see the quote above) bought the land.
It’s bit off topic for this post, but Dan was a Jeep driver for General George Patten during much of WW II. I sometimes wanted to ask him about that but it always seems like there wasn’t the time to do that.
My brothers and I heard stories of the dogs, cats, cows, horses, pigs, crops, trucks, cars, and tractors of when Dad grew up on the farm. We lived about two miles west on another piece of property that Mom and Dad bought when I was five years old. A few times Dan asked Dad to come over and help fix or inspect the windmill or ask a question about the granary or another of the original structures that my grandfather and great uncle built.
In the late 1960’s Mom and Dad bought the land to the north of Great Uncle Frank’s place. It is on the northern end of this land that I build the Taj Mahal to manufacture and store the explosives for Boomershoot. The participants at Boomershoot park their vehicles and set up their shelters and shooting positions on the land adjoining the NE corner. This piece of land was given to my Grandmother Huffman, Aunt Pet, and Aunt Ada (sisters) by their father (and my Great Grandfather Carey) in about 1916.
In the map image below the shooters berm for Boomershoot is just under the “ce’ in “Nez Perce”. Shooters face almost directly south and shoot into a hillside that isn’t clearly a hillside in this image:
The pictures below are from about two weeks ago when my brothers and I walked around the farm where my Dad grew up:
This windmill was assembled and erected by my grandfather Huffman and Great Uncle Walt in 1940. It supplied the water to the farm until about 1972. Dad plans to restore it to functional condition.
This is part of the concrete foundation for the windmill.
This is the grain elevator Dad, Grandpa, and Uncle Walt built in the granary which they also built.
We found old books in the original carpenter shop which had copyright dates in the 1930’s. One book that I opened had the names of my Dad’s cousins in it. Dad frequently told us stories of some of the things his Dad and Uncle Walt built in the shop. Things like Christmas gifts and a bobsled. Dad built a carpenter shop on our farm and when I climbed the ladder for the first time, a little over two weeks ago, into the shop my grandfather built, I knew my Dad had modeled his carpenter shop on the older one. And I recalled the bobsled Dad had built for my brothers and I.
Grandpa Huffman and Uncle Walt sold the farm because my Grandpa had heart problems caused by Scarlet Fever from much earlier and he wasn’t able to do the work the farm required. Grandpa spent the remainder of his life in California working as a carpenter, in a furniture store owned by one of his brothers, and was retired for several years before dying of a heart attack when I was about 8 years old.
Last Friday brother Doug and his wife Julie purchased the land with the buildings from Dan and his wife. The land on the south side of the road, also belonging to Dan and his wife, was purchased by my other brother Gary. This morning wife Barbara and I purchased the land from on the NW corner of South Road and Meridian Road from Randy and his wife. This land is directly south of the Boomershoot site and is part of the potential impact zone if stray bullets go over the hillside we shoot into.
This land deal is another reason for the light blog posting the last month or so.
It actually makes me as much sad as it does happy to have the land back in the family again. As Dan, Randy, and the rest of their family cleaned out the buildings and auctioned off the belongings they wouldn’t have a place to keep in their homes in town I imagined what it would feel like to do the same to the farm where I grew up. I could imagine what it would feel like to have Dad walk through the house we built when I was growing up. To have him lock the door and give the keys to someone else would be very, very painful. I know it was painful for Dan, Randy and their families. They put a lot of thought into it and rationally it was the proper decision to sell the place—Dan and his wife are at an age they can’t maintain the place anymore and have lived in town for the last few years.
They said it made it a little easier for them that it was a farm family and neighbors they had known for many decades but it was still a very hard and sad decision. They plan to come back in the spring and take pictures of the crops growing and I expect they will come back near harvest time to see that too. I know I would. And they will be welcome anytime.—Joe]
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia took fellow Justice Elena Kagan out for a lesson in skeet shooting at his shooting club in Virginia last week.
Alexis Levinson
October 25, 2010
Scalia takes Kagan to gun range, sources say
[As Say Uncle said, “Awesome”.
I wonder how I would go about inviting the entire Supreme Court to Boomershoot. Of course the end of April is a very busy time for them. Maybe I would need to do a private party sometime during the summer.
The ideal would be to follow up the next week with the Brady Campaign Board of directors and tell them all the stories of the great fun the SC had.
Hmmm… I just realized I know someone who could get the attention of and invite the SC. I’ll have to run this idea past him sometime…—Joe]
Two weeks ago some friends and I moved some dirt to improve the shooting berm and cleared some brush to make room for more parking near the Taj Mahal. Today I went back out and with the help of my two brothers planted the torn up dirt to grass.
I have now successfully completed all the Boomershoot tasks required before winter. I’ll probably go back out at least one more time to blow up some pumpkins after Halloween. If things go really well I’ll have some chemicals and target boxes to deliver to the site at the same time but that may have to wait until next spring.
It’s a happy day for the Windows Phone 7 team.
I should go celebrate or something but my chemistry set is frowned upon in Redmond.
I’ll probably get some iPhones and Androids to dispose of in Idaho after the carriers start selling in the U.S.
Alan blasphemies by questioning the word of Jeff Cooper. Sebastian follows up with similar thoughts.
The NRA put some thought into this topic many, many years ago and came up with three fundamental rules instead of Coopers four:
Notice the rules are all expressed as things you must do.
The Cooper rules are a mixture of things that must and must not be done. This is not good. If you were told to not imagine pink elephants what is the first thing that enters your mind? Yeah, images of pink elephants.
The most frequent questions people have above rules are:
The answer is the gun is “in use” when you put it in the holster on your hip or in the nightstand. Hence, the gun may be loaded while you are carrying it.
I hate to be divisive but I’ve long been of the belief that the NRA rules are much better than the Cooper set. It is because of this I have used them as the basis for the Boomershoot rules for many years.
This day is supposed to be some sort of special environmental day. But “no pressure”. They will just blow you up and splatter your body parts all over the room if you don’t go along with their agenda.
As the UK’s Telegraph says, “The environmental movement has revealed the snarling, wicked, homicidal misanthropy beneath its cloak of gentle, bunny-hugging righteousness.”
I see.
I would like for the environmental movement to know that they aren’t the only ones with explosives. And guns. Don’t forget the guns. And also, I have earth moving equipment. If needed I can bury bodies very, very deep.
So, with that in mind some friends and I went out and did a little practicing.
First we dug up the dirt. This was the first time Barron had driven a bulldozer. Here he porpoises through the dirt but later he was doing fine.
Here is the end result (after I smoothed things out):
As you can see there is room for lots of bodies should the environmentalist get as aggressive as they are threatening to do. And not only can we dig up the earth to dispose of their bodies but we could use the mounds of dirt over their bodies to use as shooting positions when we release more CO2 into the air when invite lots of people to shoot at explosives.
Here we set off some explosives, releasing CO2 into the air, with guns which also release CO2:
And we smiled as we did it (and don’t fail to notice the big, fuel guzzling, pickup):
how funny, two $6k rifles, two $2k rifles, $1k ammo, $1.5k worth of travel expenses going to the boomershoot, a week off work, lost $800 in winnemucca on the way up . . so about $500.00 worth of targets ??? . . i’ll get back to you and let you know how many we can make out of a sheet . . and those are my expenses, there are four of us in my truck…
Ray Ash
Via email on October 4, 2010
[Ray offered to make some steel targets for Boomershoot at no charge and asked how many I wanted. I said:
Free wouldn’t be right.
An equal quantity of Pepper Poppers and Mini-Poppers coming to a total of ~$500.
He thought what I said was funny. He could be right about that even though I didn’t intend it to be.—Joe]
Most of the jet formed moves at hypersonic speed. The tip moves at 7 to 14 km/s, the jet tail at a lower velocity (1 to 3 km/s), and the slug at a still lower velocity (less than 1 km/s). The exact velocities are dependent on the charge’s configuration and confinement, explosive type, materials used, and the explosive-initiation mode. At typical velocities, the penetration process generates such enormous pressures that it may be considered hydrodynamic; to a good approximation, the jet and armor may be treated as incompressible fluids, with their material strengths ignored.
Wikipedia, Shaped charge
Emphasis added.
Found while Wikiwandering from a link at Roberta’s.
[“… may be treated as incompressible fluids, with their material strengths ignored”! That statement makes me light-headed and weak at the knees. The “7 to 14 km/s” doesn’t hurt either.
7 km/s is about 23,000 feet per second. Your .220 Swift is considered a very zippy cartridge but it only gives you about 4,100 feet per second at the muzzle. Hence a shaped charge gives you velocities 5 to 10 times that of a .220 Swift at the muzzle. This is considered high-hypersonic to re-entry speeds.
I have books on computer simulation of shaped charges. I really need to write the software then do some field testing. Supposedly it is pretty easy to punch through three feet of reinforced concrete. I have some large rocks out in the middle of some fields I’d like to experiment with.—Joe]
I was considering competing in the contest (via Say Uncle) but then I saw the Judging Criteria included this:
Externalities (such as noise pollution, public relations, etc.) imposed onto other businesses which may locate aboard the same seastead and to the overall seasteading movement.
What I had in mind might have “rocked the boat” a little bit.
Now if Microsoft would set up shop offshore someplace where we wouldn’t have to pay such high taxes I’d be near the front of the line to volunteer for the transfer.
Via Mad Rocket Scientist I found some pictures of much more awesome fireballs than what we do at Boomershoot.
Although we have no plans for anything like that in the immediate future I really haven’t looked into it that much. There are certain regulatory hurdles that appear to be sufficiently high that it makes compliance unlikely in the near future.
We would need to use a different range and I suspect the entry fee would have to be prohibitively high too. All and all it just doesn’t seem like its going to happen any time soon no matter how cool it would be.
Via an email from Ry I just watched a video made up of clips from a farm on the Palouse (this particular farm was near Colton Washington) in the late 1940s.
I grew up about 40 miles directly east of there. Many of the pieces of equipment were very similar to what we had on the farm about 10 years later. We still have the old pull type combine parked behind the barn. Ours was a John-Deere model 35 instead of the one with the red paint on it. I still remember riding on it. And the D-4 Caterpillar tractor we used to pull it is still in use today. It was nearly identical to the one shown in the video at the time of the pull combine days. It the mid 1960s Dad put on a bigger fuel tank, a wider seat, and the dozer blade. We still use it several times a year even though it is coming up on 70 years old. I use it to move dirt for the Boomershoot site and my brothers use it for other things as well such as clearing snow out of the driveway during the winter. During harvest the tracks would become so clean and polished by the grain stubble that you could barely look at them if the sun was shining.
We even had an old Willy’s Jeep similar to the one in the video.
Mom and Dad have some old video of some of their farming too. We used to watch the videos once or twice a year when we were growing up. I should get that digitized before it falls apart.
I kiss the ground you walk on.
Steve Ballmer
September 10, 2010
Windows Phone 7 Ship Party 
[Click the pictures to see a higher resolution version.
He also said his trademark, “I love this company.” at the top of his lungs:
He also talked about how important Window Phone 7 is to the company and how much he appreciated all the hard work and how much he really loves his Windows Phone 7 phone.
It is a really nice phone. I took three of them to the Boomershoot site this weekend and did some tests. With one of them I was able to pick up a Wi-Fi signal from an ordinary Linksys router from 1090 meters away. The other two were picking up signal from over 600 meters away. Try that with your iPhone.—Joe]