Lions and tigers and badgers...

I dreamed that Bobbi and I had moved to a '70s-vintage contemporary ranch in a subdivision in the Colorado mountains.

I was out in the glassed-in sun porch when I noticed that there was a bear rolling around just on the other side of the low chain-link fence surrounding the back yard, using the fence as a back-scratcher. I checked to make sure the cats were inside and went to go fetch Bobbi, so she could take a picture of it for her Facebook page.

As I headed down the hall to fetch her, I glanced out another window into the back yard and noticed that right outside the window, in the yard, was a leopard eating a freshly-killed pronghorn. The leopard looked up from its meal and right into my eyes, which was pretty creepy.

Yes, I know that leopards aren't exactly endemic to Colorado, and have I mentioned that the bear in question wasn't a black bear or a grizzly, but rather a polar bear? Clearly my dream zoologist was taking the night off.

Anyway, I return to the glassed-in sun porch with Bobbi to find that the polar bear and the leopard are now sitting cheek-by-jowl in front of the sliding glass door, where they have been joined by a badger for some reason I can't possibly fathom. All three are staring intently into the sun porch at the cats therein, and the bear has started idly pawing at the sliding glass door, which is unlocked.

So now I'm holding the door shut and asking Bobbi to please latch the little latch on the handle and hustle the cats into the house. When she does, I let go of the half-latched door and rush to follow her. The problem is that the doors that divide the porch from the rest of the house are flimsy-ass accordion doors like you'd find on a closet, with little siding bolts at the top for privacy locks, but hanging free at the bottom. If a bear hit that, it'd hinge open like a giant cat door.

So Bobbi helped me slide a small bookcase in front of the doors and then while she was on the phone with Animal Control ("Yes, a polar bear and a leopard. No, I'm not kidding. Please don't hang up!") I ran and grabbed my carbine and, because it finally had a purpose in life, my .405 Win T/C Encore...

Then I woke up.
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Mmmm... Express sights...

Og has photos of an Arisaka project nearing completion; specifically, photos of the three-leaf express sights on a quarter rib he fabricated himself.

The action had already been re-barreled to .30-'06 when he got it, but those express sights kinda make me wish it was chambered in, say, .35 Whelen or some classic mid-bore metric cartridge like 9.3x62 to go with them.

Safari dreams... The same reason I own a .405 Winchester barrel for my Encore. I may never get to Africa's golden joys, but if a lion gets out of the zoo, I'm ready.

.405 Winchester vs. .45-70 Government

This was an interesting question that popped up in search terms, and I thought it was worth discussion.

The .405 Winchester is a pretty serious big game cartridge, intended for Winchester's Model 1895 lever-action rifle. Designed from the ground up as a smokeless powder round, it is just short of being considered a real dangerous game cartridge by virtue of the fact that all commercial loadings for it use a 300-grain .412" bullet, which is a little lacking in weight and sectional density for stopping the charge of the largest African game (although T.R. laid out lion with the round...) It should be more than adequate for anything that walks, crawls, or flies on the North American continent, although I wonder why a caliber deemed insufficient for dispatching dangerous game in Africa is considered okey-dokey for the minivan-with-fangs that is the Alaskan brown bear...

The .45-70 is hampered by the fact that the first rifle chambered for the loading was the Trapdoor Springfield. As a result, anything you buy from the Big Three (Remington, Winchester, and Federal) is going to be throttled back so as not to turn Paw-paw's floptop into a pipe bomb. The stuff I keep around the house as fodder for my M1873 Springfield offers a 300gr unjacketed bullet meandering out the muzzle at something less than 1400fps, for less muzzle energy than today's most adventurous handgun loadings. In a modern rifle, such as a Marlin 1895, however, truly vigorous ammunition from Buffalo Bore is available, and in a Ruger No.1, you are free to handload items that will kill on one end and maim on the other.

If you have to pick just one of the two to sledge down really big critters, I'd go for the .45-70 and a modern rifle, to take advantage of the really scary stuff available from the boutique ammo companies.

You get a lot more style points for a .405 Winchester, though...

"Safari on the Cheap", a re-run.

A re-run from May of '06:

I'm getting a barrel for my Encore chambered in .405 Winchester so I can have lion-hunting fantasies. Not, of course, that I will ever have the money or leisure time to go on safari for the King of the Beasts, but one can daydream. Or maybe organize a cheap substitute here in town...

"Dear Diary: Day three of the safari. After a quick breakfast of Tabasco Slim Jims and Diet Mountain Dew, my trusty native guide, Fred, has maneuvered me into an excellent position for the culmination of my trip, the confrontation with Simba. Careful not to spook the skittish herds of preschoolers, which would alert the lion to my presence, I ease around the concession stand. The cloying stench of cotton candy fills my nostrils..."

Like I said, one can daydream... :)

Boomsticks: Bad Idea #352,179

I love my .405 Win rifle. I like the round. Factory loads toss a 300 grainer at 2200fps; more than enough wallop for anything in the Lower 48 and most African game, too. It has that cool Teddy Roosevelt panache about it.

Using it to go after an elephant, however, is a splendid way to wind up as pachyderm toejam.

Video from the Alaska Chamber Of Commerce.

Wow.

And here you though you were seeing nature red in tooth and claw when the neighbor's cat took down a chipmunk in your tomato patch.

Having recently started toying with the idea of a move to Alaska, I suddenly find that my .405 Winchester Encore shoots bullets too small, and doesn't hold anywhere near enough of them.

Boomsticks: You know you're a gun nut when...

1) Ammunition you keep on hand includes calibers like .22 Remington Jet, .455 Webley Automatic, .405 Winchester, and .577-450 Martini.

2) Someone asks you how many guns you own and you truthfully answer "I don't know."

3) When visiting south Texas and contemplating a daytrip to Mexico, your local guide reminds you to clean any ammunition out of your purse, as possession of just one round there could be a felony. Dumping your purse out reveals the following objects rolling about in the detritus of pens, mascara tubes, and dead batteries at the bottom: a speedloader for your carry revolver, two loose rounds of the same caliber, a sandwich baggie with eight .22 shells, a loose .22 shell, an unidentified antique rimfire cartridge of about .40 caliber that someone must have given you at a gun show once, and a single loose round of 5.7x28 that you have no recollection of ever receiving, especially since you haven't even seen a gun in the caliber yet.

Blog Stuff: Yesterday I saw...

1) ...a homemade butane-powered cannon shoot a saboted blueberry muffin across my lawn.

2) ...a bazillion rounds of ammunition go downrange out of everything from a .357 Magnum revolver to a tricked-out AR-15. Smallest caliber used: .22LR. Largest caliber used: .405 Winchester.

3) ...a cute rifle being shot by an even cuter kid.

4) ...the sky light up from horizon to horizon (including directly overhead) with the results of thousands of people turning hundreds of thousands of dollars into noise and light.


What a country. :)


(One of the fountains we touched off last night was called "Desert At Night", but for some reason the picture on the label was the silhouette of a Saguaro cactus, rather than the Baghdad skyline. Odd.)

Boomsticks: My first big bore rifle.

Well, that's not strictly true; I have a couple of rifles with 11mm bores, a 10.4mm, and a .577-450, but those are all black powder cartridge guns. The .405 Winchester T/C Encore is, however, my first big-bore smokeless cartridge rifle.

First released in 1904, the .405 Winchester was designed for, and remains romantically tied to, the Winchester Model 1895 lever-action rifle. Despite a moment of glory in Teddy Roosevelt's African adventures, the cartridge never really caught on with American shooters. Punishing recoil in the old-fashioned '95 with its crescent butt plate, plus a rainbow trajectory, meant that it just wasn't the gun for North American big game hunting.

With the re-introduction of the 1895, the .405 Win came back in a wave of nostalgia, currently being loaded by Hornady in both a 300gr softpoint and a 300gr Interlock spire-point (shown at right with a .223, a .308, and a .30-'06 for scale.) The Hornady load throws the 300gr .411" bullet at 2200 feet per second, which gives a satifying 3,220 ft-lb thump. Though a little short on sectional density for elephants, rhinos, and Cape Buff, it's still an ideal stopper on hogs and black bear, which I'm far more likely to have the chance to actually get to hunt here in Tennessee. If Jumbo escapes from the zoo, I'll just need to get a .416 Rigby barrel for the Encore. :)

Blog Stuff: Safari on the cheap.

I'm getting a barrel for my Encore chambered in .405 Winchester so I can have lion-hunting fantasies. Not, of course, that I will ever have the money or leisure time to go on safari for the King of the Beasts, but one can daydream. Or maybe organize a cheap substitute here in town...

"Dear Diary: Day three of the safari. After a quick breakfast of Tabasco Slim Jims and Diet Mountain Dew my native guide, Fred, has maneuvered me into an excellent position for the culmination of my trip, the confrontation with Simba. Careful not to spook the skittish herds of preschoolers, which would alert the lion to my presence, I ease around the concession stand. The cloying stench of cotton candy fills my nostrils..."

Like I said, one can daydream... :)