A Boomershoot couple requested a gender reveal event with a explosion.
The first idea was a colored fireball but I pushed in the direction of a
bag of colored powder. They agreed this would be acceptable and shipped me
five pounds of pink and five pounds of blue cornstarch powder to test. With both bags
in the box I put it on top of two exploding targets. This is the result.

The test was considered a success.

In addition to attending the USPSA match in Idaho last weekend I did some maintenance on the Taj Mahal. When I was there on July 1^st and 2^nd there was a mouse nest inside the storage magazine:

I removed it and cleaned the rest of the shed so when the ATF inspector arrived four weeks later it was clean and tidy:

The inspection went fine even though there are a lot of Yellow Jackets and nests inside the shed.

The mice have a been a problem for years and have done a lot of damage. A couple weeks ago when I was walking through Home Depot with Barb I saw the spray foam insulation. I bought three cans and figured this will keep the mice out. I probably should have bought the version with a bitter additive which is specifically intended to keep pests out. But I didn’t know it existed and didn’t find out about it until I went looking on Amazon when writing this blog post.

So…. Saturday morning I moved almost everything out of the shed to get better access. As I removed stuff we had stored there I got better and better access to all the Yellow Jacket nests. I also had a spray which is supposed to kill flying insects and is non-toxic to humans and pets. I didn’t read the fine print before buying it and found out that for large stinging insects to use something a little different and still have the non-toxic feature. The spray I used would kill maybe one out of 20 Yellow Jackets. Maybe a third would go down it they were hit hard enough but then they would appear to rub it off for a minute or so then fly away. The rest just flew away with no apparent ill effects. But at least as I sprayed the nests and the area they left. I removed something like seven to ten nests and swept the floor and the area of the shed where the cracks were.

Before:

After clean up:

After applying the expanding foam insulation:

It’s not the neatest job, by far, but it is functional. The splatters on the roof are from when the spray foam insulation guys insulated the magazine two years ago.

At the base of the door to the magazine I put down a bead of the insulation, put a plastic garbage bag over it, then closed the door on it such that it would expand to fill the gap at the bottom of the door where the mice had to be getting in.

After it dried I opened the door, removed the plastic bag and we now have a near perfect seal at the bottom of the door.

I’m certain this will block the mice from the magazine and I think I have them blocked from the shed as well. The Yellow Jackets can probably still find a way in around the shed door but their access is severely limited compared to what it was.

I threw away some stuff and rearranged the remainder for access in the order we remove it for Boomershoot:

I also ran across this in the updated ATF bulletin, Safety and Security Information for Federal Explosives Licensees and Permittees:

Please Note: An employee possessor must be an employee of the licensee or permittee.  Volunteers are not employees.

I need to look into this some more to verify. It sounds as if the ATF doesn’t have a requirement for Boomershoot volunteer staff to do the paperwork to be an “Employee Possessor”.

That would be really nice.

Every few days I do a quick scan through all the images from the Boomershoot Live web cams. I’ve see quite a few deer (or the same deer many times) a coyote or two, a few birds (most notable this one), insects, etc. But the flock of birds that showed up a few days ago was unusual.

One minute there are none:

The next minute there is a big flock which stays for a couple minutes:

Then they are gone:

Via email from Sean who says

How Not To Do Boomershoot

Huffman’s first rule of recreational explosives:

Never put anything between you and explosives which a surgeon might be required to remove from your body.

Note that this guy didn’t move out of the way until after the debris hit the tree. This is typical. Even from very small charges, unless you are hundreds of yards away you won’t have time to move before impact.

Also from Sean is another example.

Boomershoot prep and maintenance is essentially a year around job. Adding the weather station added to the maintenance part more than I expected. I did original power consumption calculations without the webcam. I purchased a cheap (but very low power consumption) webcam and it looked like the solar power system was marginal but should be good in the summer. At Boomershoot this year I swapped out the cheap webcam which was having problems for a better one which used more power. My spreadsheet said it should be okay during the summer but winter was going to be a problem.

Well… I was pushing the envelope too far and the system went down May 6^th about 05:15. On May 7^th my brothers helped diagnose the problem, gave the battery a little bit of a charge with jumper cables from their vehicle battery which got it back online about 16:51, and it ran until 18:35.

I purchased another solar panel and showed up onsite Saturday morning. I stopped at Boomershoot Mecca, picked up tools, and looked for a spare, very cheap, low power charge controller I purchased several years ago. I couldn’t find the charge controller and finally went over to the shooting line and the weather station.

I put the site on a temporary power supply and had it up about by about 11:15. I poked around with my meter and discovered the charge controller had power coming in from the solar panel but nothing was getting through to the battery. I concluded the charge controller was bad. I connected the solar panel directly to the battery, which was discharged down to 4.5 volts, and went looking for the charge controller again. It wasn’t at the Taj Mahal and I went back to Mecca and did a very deep search. I finally found it and went back to the weather station. The battery was up to about 10.4 V and I decided to try the existing charge controller again. This time it worked. It appears the charge controller runs on power from the battery. If the battery gets too low then it stops working and the battery will never get charged up even though there is plenty of solar power available. This seems to be a serious and easily fixed design flaw in the charge controller.

Installed the second solar panel and made sure everything was working as expected:

I left the temporary power installed in the hopes the battery would get enough charge by morning that I could switch over to the permanent supply without it getting into another death spiral.

I then went back to Mecca, straightened things up, moved some things to the Taj Mahal which had been left at Mecca, and did an inventory of target materials so I know how much to purchase for next years event (sign up here!).

About 02:00 on Sunday the site went down again because the temporary supply ran out of power. I arrived onsite about 07:15, found the battery was about 11.5 volts and slowing rising. I still had some time available onsite and decided to start charging the temporary supply from the inverter in my vehicle and run the station from it while the solar panel continued to charge the battery. The cables were too short to connect while the vehicle was parked on level ground so I tried to get closer:

I actually was a couple feet closer but slide sideways down the hill. The cables were just barely long enough. Another inch away and they would not have reached. But even after a couple minutes of charging my temporary power supply was still too low to run the Internet connection, weather station, and the webcam. I connected things to the permanent, solar powered, power supply, got it up and running about 07:25, and went about the other chores I had to do.

The original solar panel had a bunch of bird droppings so I cleaned it.

I moved the yellow fiberglass stakes we used to mark the parking area to a spot less likely to get lost in the grass. Then I picked up a garbage sack full of milk jugs ripped apart by explosives in the attempted fireball:

The webcam caught me doing various things

• Moving the stakes:
  
• Cleaning the solar panel:
  
• Picking up milk jug pieces: