And in just breaking news, John made a tiny little micro cannon for the boat and called me downstairs to watch him fire it.

He milled it out of a section of brass rod, and yes, it really fires.  You put a little wick in the hole near the closed end, pour in a little bit of black powder (triple-7, actually), tamp it in with a little brass rod, put in a bebe, tamp that in, and then balance it on the back step and touch a grill lighter to the wick.  POP!  We think that the bebes were at least clearing the patio, though we couldn’t tell if we were actually hitting anything other then the ground.  There is really no good way of actually aiming the micro cannon.

Now we just need a swivel mount, and a boat to mount it to.

Heh.

John comes up with the coolest things sometimes….

Since Saturday was actually a nice, sunny day (a nice break from the unrelentingly overcast weather that we have had for the past week) we went to the range so that I could break in my new 22.

I have shot before.  Usually I shoot John’s 22, which he has pimped out with a tripod and a scope.  My 22 has niether, so I had to figure out the iron sights, and how to hold it so that I could sight properly using the iron sights.

For the iron sights on my 22, I needed figure out how to hold it so that the brass bead on the front right rested just over the diamond shape in the notch in the rear sight.  John said that sometimes you have to adjust the sights, but it turned out that the sights on my 22 were pretty accurate, so no further adjustment was needed.

I started out doing just “okay” with targeting, but was happy that I improved noticeably from when we started shooting to when we decided to wrap it up for the day.

Note: if you (like me) wear glasses, consider getting safety glasses that are made to fit over regular glasses.  Because layering normal safety glasses over regular glasses is not terribly comfortable and also looks (according to John) pretty silly.