Darrell

I'm loading for a 338 Lapua. I really like Retumbo for this cartridge, and a second choice is H-1000. I've also used Magpro, which is pretty good powder, too. I've not seen any data for military pull-down (or surplus) powder for the Lapua, but it may be out there, and expect that WC860 would work okay.

It's $50 a pound on the Hodgdon site, but good luck finding it there. And $330 for eight pounds. I'd be pretty pleased to find an 8 pound jug at about $330 right now! Powder Valley lists it (out of stock) at $41 pound and $287 for 8#. So maybe $56 isn't so terrible if, as Quovodus says, "you have to have it,"

No, sorry. I'm not in desperate straights for powder.... yet.... and it appears that primers are tougher to find. Thanks, though!

I need some Retumbo or H1000, but otherwise I feel pretty good about my powder stores. And like you, I would be more comfortable with a few thousand more primers.

I saw that Powder Valley has some Retumbo listed, but by the time I clicked on the "add it to my cart" button it was gone, darn it. So I did a quick internet search and found it for sale at "normal" prices at a couple of sites. I'm pretty sure both are scams. One wants to be payed using Zelle, then email them a copy of the transfer and they will send the powder. Riggghhhht! The other just looked hinky to me. I guess with 8 pounds of powder running over $250 it's worth setting up a scam, but MAN I hate that! OK, vent completed.

I'm retired. Why?

How bout now?

I'm not real sure this is the right place to post, but what the heck..... I need a concrete finisher to install a floor in a new pole-barn garage. 720 square feet, so not a real big job. The building should be done next week, and is located in Hebbertsburg. Thanks!

I had to go to Murfreesboro yesterday, about 110 miles each way, so I rode my BMW and took Hwy 70. The area around Center Hill Lake is a hoot, and I had no traffic in front of me.

Toss them! Toss them my way! Just kidding of course. Garufa is spot on, the whole reason we resize our brass is that it has expanded during firing and the bullet won't be tightly gripped by the case neck. And when you have brass fired in a different rifle, or stuff collected at the range, you can be pretty sure it won't chamber properly. You can resize brass many times before it fails, depending upon a number of factors that you'll figure out as you reload. Just be sure to inspect your brass before reloading. Keep an eye open for cracks in the neck and for signs of overpressure. (You can look that up, others have explained it better than I can.)

Wow! What a generous offer. We have some terrific folks here on TGO, thanks man, you're a real credit to humanity!

NOTHING to do with a Ducati valve train is a treat. By the way, the parts are magnetic.

I don't think there was any kind of fit mismatch, as the part that bolts to the camshaft is undamaged. I think they just didn't have enough meat on that part of the pulley. But you're right that there is no oil on that part of the bike. The strange part is that it didn't fail when running, but when I removed the belt. There's not a lot of tension on it, and with no valve springs there isn't a lot of torque exerted against the cams. Just a freaky thing, I guess. The good news is that a replacement pulley is just $30 or so. Getting it properly degreed will be a PITA.

I defer to your greater knowledge. MIM never occurred to me, but Ducati has had problems with broken parts in the past. I pulled the rest of the pulley this morning. The fracture is pretty clean, and right along the diameter of the extended portion. Seems very likely that the part was defective. Here are the pics of the fracture:

I was driving to the gym on Thursday before the season opened and there was a big ol' boy in the yard of one of my neighbors. He made me do a double-take! I'm a fairly recent immigrant to TN and haven't been turkey hunting yet, but I hear them in the woods behind my house from time to time. I'm going to have to give it a go.

Even though they're expensive, Ducati has a reputation for the odd poor casting. I can think of nothing that would cause this failure apart from a part that is defective from the manufacturer. In this case I think the bike would have had a catastrophic failure had it run for 5 minutes longer. I saw no sign of the crack before removing the belt, but once the belt tension was relieved the outside half just fell off. Whew!

I just pulled the timing belts from my "new" (2004) Ducati 999. Imagine my surprise when half of the horizontal exhaust cam pulley came off with the belt! Fortunately, they're easy to find. I knew going in that there would be surprises....

When I bought my property it looked like it had just been woods forever, probably logged at some point. But after speaking to some old-timer neighbors I learned that this whole area was populated and somewhat developed before the Great Depression. One neighbor showed me where a railroad bed ran through my property, and while clearing some woods I found very old barbed wire fencing. Old enough that there were no barbs left. There's a really old barn a couple miles from here on a property owned by a family. I took some pics of the barn, just because, but there's also a wreck of a house that one can tell was once quite a stately place. That property actually has three barns on it and the house. I didn't actually go on the property, but from the road it looks very interesting. I rented a metal detector to try to find one corner of my property, which has supposedly been pinned. I found plenty of beer bottle caps and other metal trash, but no pin.

Check out the Lyman cast bullet manual. I use it extensively for determining cast bullet loads, including in .308. I really enjoy shooting the 113 g Lee "Soup Can" bullets as plinkers at short range. Virtually no recoil and a very light report, but I wouldn't use them for hunting. There's another website, https://castboolits.gunloads.com/, with tons of information from some serious "boolit" casters.

I brought two large trailers with me when I moved to TN, a flatbed and a dump trailer. The tags were a bargain compared to what I'd been paying in WA, and since the trailers were already mine I didn't have to pay sales tax. It seems a no-brainer to me to have plates, title, and registration for a trailer.

I had never heard of this trigger before I saw it in this thread. I found a few YouTube videos of the trigger in action, and have to say if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck.....

That's EXACTLY what I use mine for.

The deal with this bike is that I found it for sale on CL almost a year ago, made a low offer, and the seller accepted. But the day before I was scheduled to go and get the bike, the seller backed out, claiming that he'd decided to keep it and do the necessary work himself. Fast forward to a week ago and the owner contacted me and offered the bike again, this time promising not to back out. Yesterday I drove to NC to fetch it, four hours each way. The bike is in excellent cosmetic condition, dirt, dust, and the odd spiderweb aside. But mechanically it's a pig in a poke. With no battery I couldn't even verify the claimed miles, but the fact that the previous owner changed his mind on the original deal tells me that he wasn't lying about the bike being a runner. It needs all three calipers and both master cylinders to be rebuilt, a new battery, and full desmo service. But I enjoy tinkering with bikes, and I REALLY needed this one! The last photo is its barn-mate, an 08 1098S. The 999 is a 2005.