Month: February 2017

What a difficult thing it is to get hold of a roll of paper!

After some weeks’ wait, I have finally received notification that my patterning paper is to be delivered tomorrow. At last! The company from whom I’d ordered the paper have been very good about sorting out the fact that they’d advertised and sold me a discontinued item and I’m now going to receive a 50m roll of 42″ plotter paper instead of a 39″ roll, which should make very little difference to the overall result. Then again – as a bishop once observed to an actress – one should never underestimate the difference three inches can make.

In the meantime, I’ve been keeping myself busy with various projects and a little shooting. The 12 gauge saw the light of day once again after my previous unsuccessful trip: one of the new(-ish) members of the shooting association I help run joined me on a long but ultimately fruitless walk around six of our farms on Saturday. Three shots between us and a bird lost to the safety catch – bloody thing! – is all I can report from that particular outing. A friend of mine was concurrently busy shooting 116 elsewhere, the report of which I found mildly irritating, but I suppose if the pigeons are not in one place, they’re in another. Nice work if you can get it.

Now I merely have to find a date upon which to do the patterning required and construct a list of patterns worth shooting. I believe the paper will allow for about 45 patterns, so we will – as my intended accomplice has just suggested to me – begin with the half choke at 30 yards with all cartridges and see where the results take us from there.

It’s been a while since I’ve updated this blog (or indeed, anything on this website), so I thought it would be worth putting a short post up to explain my absence, in case any regular readers – if I have any – were wondering where I’d disappeared to.

I’m awaiting the delivery of a number of rolls of plotter paper from a stationary company I’ve discovered online. These are more normally used for architect’s drawings on spectacularly expensive inkjet printers that usually occupy a small room by themselves, but in this case, they’ll do rather well for my purposes and – best of all – at relatively little expense. The paper size is 39″ by 50m (a lovely mix of metric and Imperial measurements), and I’m currently working on a “luggable” container with attachment to store the rolls and transport them, so as to make a portable pattern plate. Watch this space!

Since the patterning experiments cannot progress further and the limited number of cartridges I have available for testing means that I cannot afford to waste any on hunting (in case that brand turns out to be “the one”), I’ve been relying on my other shotguns for hunting.

A short trip out on Saturday with my 12 gauge – seeing the light of day for the first time in nearly 2 years – proved to be an enjoyable “mystery wildlife tour” but failed to provide any opportunities. Whilst the sight of five roe deer, flocks of seagulls, a solitary fox and 37,000,000 peewits made an otherwise quiet walk in the countryside more interesting, I was left wondering where all the wood pigeons had gone. They are, presumably, somewhere.

Whilst I await the paper for patterning, I will be turning my thoughts to what else I can produce for the website. I’ve taken a break from it to concentrate on other projects lately, but there’s a history for the 28 gauge that needs to be written – I may work on that.