Better And Better

If you don't draw yours, I won't draw mine. A police officer, working in the small town that he lives in, focusing on family and shooting and coffee, and occasionally putting some people in jail.

Sunday, December 12, 2021

Box-Killing.

 I had bought a finished-out cargo container with windows and door and an air conditioner and insulation, and had it placed in my back yard on a pad that I placed there. I even had electricians pull a permit and run proper electricity out there. It was to be my "man-cave," but really was just a place for me to do some reloading. Dad had said that I could take over his handloading operation. Among gun people, there is often a "gun room." I cleared my father's out, completely, of all reloading stuff. It took me most of a week, and I put it all into cargo container/shed/"mancave." I did some organization, but not enough, really. 

Then my father died in August. 

I had a friend tell me that he wanted to go hog hunting. He didn't have a suitable rifle. I did. I got some .35 Whelen loads ready for him. In the meantime, this meant organizing a lifetime of relatively disorganized reloading detritus, all in loosely-packed boxes. 

I got to where my sport was "box-killing," which I had originally coined when I had helped move my father back in the 1980s and 1990s. Dad would put basically trash, pocket change, loose brass, and maybe a $1000 tool into a loosely-packed box, and mark  it "Misc. Crap." In this case, I had mostly boxes full of old metal coffee cans full of brass, marked "Brass." If I was lucky, it might be marked "sorted brass." (I think that I had ONE of these.) Usually the best that I could hope for was "misc. handgun brass." One box was marked, "Loose, dirty, unsorted brass," onto which I had at some point appended with a marker: "the worst sort of all!"

"Brass" is simply the casing of a metallic cartridge. In reloading, I polish it, size and decap it, prime it, charge it, and seat a bullet to the case, resulting in a complete metallic cartridge. 

To organize the over-full room, I have been consolidating the boxes of components, and throwing out the unnecessary boxes and the trash. I usually transfer the brass to clear giant ziplock bags. The empty boxes get broken down and taken to recycling. I have killed dozens of boxes from my man cave over the past year. Over the past month, I've probably killed a dozen or so. 

I never got a full set of cartridges loaded for my co-worker in time. I found a dozen rounds, and he took my rifle and killed a nice hog with it at 77 yards. 

Once I get the scale up and running, I'll have another 80 rounds of .35 Whelen loaded by the end of the week, and hopefully another dozen boxes reduced. 


Labels: ,

Add to Technorati Favorites
.