It’s been a busy week. One of the clubs I shoot at had a monster-sized bull’s-eye match. It’s called a 2700, which means you shoot 270 rounds each with a maximum value of 10 points. The targets are concentric circles on paper and you plink away at 50 and 25 yards. One handed, please, with no external support the way Roy Rogers and Tom Mix did it.
How big? Very big! So big the Army, Marine and All-National Guard shooting teams bring their armorers in semi-trailers. We even had four people from Australia come shoot with us.
Each day starts with a bang, provided by a black powder brass cannon the English captured during the Crimean war, which is immediately followed by raising the flag and the National Anthem. It’s a heck of great way to start each day!
On Sunday, some of the shooters, having way too much fun the night before, wadded the cannon with their undies. I’ve never seen a bra fly that far before!
Me? No, I didn’t shoot. I displayed knives, yakked with the shooters about life, liberty, safety and self–reliance. The topics seem to roll around to knives quite often.
KNIVES
I’ve been working on a knife a friend gave me. He started making knives by stock removal and it was one of his early tries. It’s very nice and I’ll make a Kydex sheath for it. (I just purchased almost a FULL sheet of 0.048inch thick midnight blue Kydex to work with!!!)
The finished edge on its future sheath
I didn’t care for the knife’s edge angle, so I got out my Lansky sharpener and three sessions later I had a nice 20 degree edge. From there it only took an hour to sharpen it down to the fine stone.
Everyone should at sometime in their life; preferably earlier than later; change the edge of a medium size knife by hand. It’s good for your character. It’s not the work, even though that’s a good thing. It’s not the new appreciation of a well turned edge, and that’s a better thing in itself. No, it’s the sense of accomplishment you get from finishing what you start.
That’s one of the reasons I’m interested in sheaths.
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