Benbrown

I will take them. Any chance of picking them up in Tempe on Sunday? My wife has to deliver her son to Sky Harbor to catch a plane back to Alaska. PM me with your contact info and we'll try to work this out. Ben

Any chance you could post a picture of the tread? Thanks!

The water displacement method was championed by some of the guiding lights in the Texas Trophy Hunters Association years ago. Their rationale was, "If the animal grew it, you should get credit for it." It was briefly popular with hunters who liked to shoot bucks with a lot of "trash" that was difficult to measure using the B&C or the SCI methodology. It never really caught on, and I had not heard anything about it in a long time until this thread popped up. As to as how it's done, the entire rack is submerged to the base of the pedicels. Theoretically, one could get a valid score even if one or both of the antlers became detached from the skull plate somehow.

TTT

I will take this one if it's still available: #2 - Sitka ascent 14 optifade open country - used. $100.

What does it weigh? Thanks!

What a terrible experience! At least she was with you and Paul until the end. Please accept my sincere condolences. Ben

133-5/8"

I agree that they almost always shoot very well. The problems arise when you get one that doesn't. Since Beretta acquired the company and tooling, it looks like the odds of getting one that needs some attention have increased while the odds of getting it made right have decreased. YMMV.

The original Weatherby Fiberguard was simply a blued Vanguard action in a synthetic stock, and it did have the "speed bumps" in the fore end. A more recent version used McMillan stocks but still the same blued Vanguard action. I had one of the originals and it was not as accurate as I would have liked. About a year and a half ago, I bought a Weatherby Back Country in .300 Win Mag, and it has been a delight to carry and shoot. The barreled action is Cerakoted and the barrel is fluted to save a couple of ounces and allegedly provide a bit more stiffness over an unfluted barrel of the same contour. The stock is a special item made by Bell and Carlson for Weatherby and the action is pillar-bedded. So far, it has shot every load that I have tried into less than an inch at 100 yards and a couple of my handloads hover around 0.6 inch. With the Weatherby stock design and the Pachmyer Decelerator Pad, you don't really need a muzzle brake, even with 200-grain Partitions at 3,000 fps. The Browning X-bolt seems to have shed the problems that plagued the A-bolt, but it still has an enclosed trigger with lots of small, flimsy-looking parts. If you like the looks of them, they will probably shoot up to your expectations but won't be as light as the Back Country. I know of several chambered for the WSM cartridges that live with satisfied owners. The Sako A7s are generally a little heavier, even the "Finn-Light" versions. They are very well-made and well-finished, but since the company has been acquired by the Italians, the warranty service has been pretty abysmal. Evidently, the positioning of the ejector will result in failures to eject in about 15 percent of them. Fired cases are ejected straight up and bounce back down into the action as the next round is being chambered. Sako has refused to acknowledge the problem and continues to blame it on low-mounted scopes even though it has been documented in scopes with large objective bells mounted in medium and high rings. The Sakos sold by Cabelas are built according to Cabelas specifications and Sako does not warranty those rifles--you have to persuade Cabelas to have them fixed or replaced. An internet search will turn up quite a few very dissatisfied customers who bought Sakos from Cabelas and had warranty problems. Hope this helps...

They are C-130s, probably from Davis-Monthan. Lots of the out of state National Guard and Reserve units fly out of there in the winter when the weather is too inclement up north and back east. They may or may not have anything to do with border security--a lot of the flying that we see over here seems to be practicing "nape of the earth" flying or simulating search and rescue operations.

If you are selling or shipping it for transfer to someone else, it's a good idea to ask for a copy of the recipient's FFL or, alternately, ask for the first three and the last five numbers of their FFL and use BATF's E-ZChek to confirm that they have a current FFL. FedEx and UPS pretty much require that you ship a firearm from one of their customer terminals. You can no longer ship from your home or a "pickup" site. Most of the "UPS Stores" (which are franchises, not UPS-owned) will no longer ship firearms, either. You have to go to a UPS terminal. A handgun cannot be shipped via ground--it has to go first or second day air. The post office will ship a long gun, usually cheaper than UPS, but handguns have to be mailed FFL to FFL. I always include a short letter to the recipient, a copy of the recipient's FFL (or a screen print from BATF's E-ZChek) and a copy of my driver's license for his/her books. If the address label mysteriously goes missing or is rendered unreadable, the people who look for lost firearms after you submit a claim can figure out who sent it and where it is supposed to go when they open the package. Unfortunately, it seems like UPS and FedEx change their policies every few weeks these days, so a call to customer service may save some time. (Make sure that you get connected with someone who KNOWS the current policies.) FWIW, after my last rodeo with UPS last summer, I no longer ship firearms through them. YMMV.

In our mountains here in the Boot Heel, whitetails move back and forth between the mountains and the higher valley bottoms (4,800-5,000 ft in elevation) a couple of times a year. They generally winter in the mountains, come down lower in the spring when the first forbs green up then head back up to the mountains when the summer monsoons start. They will be back down in August and September, but by early October they will be back up in the mountains. When I lived down on the ranch, my house was at about 5,000 ft. For most of the time I lived there, three whitetail does lived in the cienega out in front of the house. They were there year round, and raised two to five fawns each year between the three of them. We never saw a buck, but obviously they must have been around. The San SImon Valley to the west and the Playas Valley to the east are about 1,000 ft lower and it is rare to see whitetails in the valley bottoms at any time of the year. Obviously, there are populations of whitetails in Arizona that live most of their lives at lower elevations, so I suspect that availability of favored food plants and water are the determining factors.

Kind of a weird coincidence, but I was visiting with some old friends in Las Cruces today while I was there attending an outdoor show. They have a cousin who lives up in Coal Creek near Golden, Colorado in the foothills just west of Denver. The cousin had sent them pictures of a wolverine taken by a game camera on a neighbor's place. Apparently, the wolverine has been hanging around for a week or so, showing up on the game camera every day or two. That is nearly all the way down close to the bottom of the list of places that I would expect to find a wolverine in Colorado, but it sort of reinforces the point I made in my post above about some wolverines being great travelers.

Recent wolverine studies using animals fitted with GPS collars have demonstrated that some individuals are great travelers. One, tagged in Yellowstone/Grand Teton wandered as far west as Boise, ID, crossing Interstate 90 several times and venturing south into Utah to the Cache Valley. Having one turn up in the northern Sierras in California, especially during the winter, wouldn't surprise me a bit.

What reticle? Thanks!

Answered your PM tonight--sorry for the delay in responding. It's the holidays.

I buy, sell and trade a few firearms each year, culled from probably hundreds advertised on web sites. I have an on-line subscription to the Blue Book of Gun Values. They update their information as it becomes available. They also have an app for cell phones and tablets, although I don't have one since I rarely buy guns at gun shows or from retail outlets anymore. If you're just selling or buying one or two a year, it's probably not worth the cost of a subscription unless you are into arcane or unusual variations. With respect to reloading stuff, I am willing to pay up to 60-70 percent of new for items that are lightly used or like new. Items that have had lots of use, but which are still serviceable go for about half of new. Of course, if you want a set of dies for a .223 Minotaur or a .480 Tyranosuarus, you are probably at the mercy of the seller...

Go to the mall, sit on a bench and see how many "subspecies" of human beings you can identify based on body size and subtle differences in hair color and skin pigmentation.

Worse things could happen to you (and to him). Reloading is a relaxing, enjoyable and productive hobby!

It's basically worth whatever you are willing to pay for it. As the previous poster said, without pictures any estimate is a WAG. At a minimum, you should have it checked by a competent gunsmith and, if you buy it, have an aftermarket safety installed. I suspect that the original safety wouldn't clear a scope and the owner decided against the added expense of doing it right. That, alone, would definitely prod me to have a gunsmith look at it before you commit, as there may have been other "money-saving" shortcuts by the builder that aren't readily apparent. I have had a couple of custom rifles built on Springfield '03 actions with Douglas barrels and they were very nice rifles. However, they were a little bigger and heavier than I would have used to start either of my daughters or any of my grand kids. JMHO.

"Old Man's Beard" was the name that my grandmother called it, but years of working with botanists caused me to switch to "virgin's Bower". In Texas, it is (naturally) called "Texas virgin's bower".

The plant's common name is Virgin's Bower, Clematis is the genus, and that could be either C. neomexicana or C. drummondi (or perhaps another lower elevation species with which I am not familiar).

What size are they? Which model Firestone tire are they? Thanks!

Only trouble I have is posting photos, but that's more a matter of never having bothered to look for the "how to" instructions. I use both Firefox and Safari on my iMac, and just Safari on my laptop. Both seem to work equally well.