Smarties Bar & Grill #76

It doesn't matter what the example is specifically... As long as you make the effort to help those around you, you make the world a better place.

 

Chain fires are said to happen for two reasons. Typically a lead ball that is too small is a big culprit.

This can be prevented primarily by using the proper sized ball and also using a wadding between the powder and ball or using a wax over the top of the ball.

Then you have your percussion cap end which is also a prime suspect in chain fires. Again using the proper size nipples and caps that fit correctly goes a long way towards preventing any such incident.

But I have heard that pioneers and cowboys back in the day would put a drop of candle wax around the percussion cap to seal out the elements and also to hopefully prevent chain fire.

If you need to carry one loaded for a long period of time I hear that a coat of clear nail polish around the percussion cap is the modern and better equivalent

 

I do so miss silver springs and Ocala, my birthplace in 1980.

Silver springs is about 5 mi down the street from where I was raised. It is the largest artesian spring in the world if not the US I do believe.

It has always been illegal to fish there but when I was a boy I used to go there figuring it was my birthright.... Those largemouth bass would bite whatever lure you threw at them.

Almost every time I went there I would catch at least one 10 lb bass which is considered a trophy in mini fisherman's book.

It is truly a magical place. Ross Allen had the reptile institute their long before I was born where he used to milk rattlesnakes and so on.

He was one of my idols as a child. A real life John Wayne and not on the silver screen.

 

As of right now it is 6:43 p.m. an approximately 74°.

 

I have owned both types but I do believe the Remington design is far Superior.

The colt as you probably know..... Requires the entire gun to be damn near disassembled for reloading. Also there is no solid frame above the cylinder and your rear sight is a notch in the hammer.

I wouldn't kick either one out of bed for eating crackers but I prefer the Remington

 

I have probably fired around 300 rounds in my lifetime with a cap and ball. I had one chainfire and it was very unusual because usually it's the neighboring cylinder....

This time it was 12:00 which is the one you want to go off and also the 6:00 cylinder... Completely and directly opposite.

I was completely unharmed but I instantly knew what happened, the excessive recoil and smoke was a dead giveaway.

The ball actually lodged into the frame of the revolver where the loading lever goes.

Regardless of if it is an antique or not, one should make sure they never have their fingers in front of the cylinder when firing a revolver.

Even though that cylinder Gap is probably about as thick as a rolling paper.... That high pressure gas can cut you straight to the Bone

 

Seed saving is an art. Finding the best plant to save the seeds from. My grandparents saved corn seed and pea seeds. Well I should say most of the corn seed was saved for personal use. My grandfather would take the shelled corn to a mill and have it ground. Fresh milled corn is the very best for corn bread or breading. Here in the south we bread our fish with cornmeal before frying and making. hush puppies.

 

Have you been down the Silver River where it flows into the Okalawha River? The two rivers meet, one tannic and the other crystal clear it is amazing.

 

Thank goodness for good friends and neighbors.

We have a lot of controlled burns in this area in the pine forests.

 

A lot of it is down to bad management. Poorly maintained sluice gates, silted up rivers and ditches etc. On top of that there is so much building on floodplains increasing run off.
Plus, of course, increased rainfall due to climate change.

 

Many times as a boy. That is where it actually becomes legal to fish at and the fishing is awesome because the predatory fish will sit right there in that dark water waiting for things to come from the Clearwater.

There's a very distinct wall there where as you said the Black water meets the pure spring water. It is quite a sight to see. You can hike there from the bridge off of State road 40. And right there you are in the Ocala national Forest. I want to go on vacation there this year and take my dirt bike in my minivan and camp for a while. That would be a little drive for me cuz I live 200 mi south of there now

I assume you were there on a boat at some point? There's a boat launch area just off of State road 40 that takes you to the silver River upstream from that confluence maybe a mile or so. That was where I caught my first water moccasin when I was 14. My stepdad came and picked me up and he had no idea what I had in the paper bag that day. Lol.

He was a Canadian so he didn't know much about Florida or snakes, one day he said what kind of snake is that you got out in the shed eh?

I told him it was a banded water snake. He said well it sure looks mean. Some days later he found a field guide in my book and figure out what kind of snake it really was. Then he made me help him kill it.

So I'm holding the snake with this noose like device and he's trying to cut his head off with an ax and he was so scared and shaking that he had to swing the ax about five times.

 

They must have filmed in multiple locations because that waterfall sure isn't located anywhere in Florida.

There are still some statues underwater at the head springs that I remember the tour guide on the glass bottom boat saying that they were used in the filming of the movie.

It used to be a privately owned theme park but now I believe a lot of it is no longer operating and what's left is a state park.

There used to be wild waters right next door which was a water park with lots of slides and such. Spent many days there was a boy but sadly wild Waters has been torn down.

 

Yes it is.

I made a big mistake in my younger days. My uncle by marriage had a brother who was born deaf in the 1920’s. He was taught to read and write and sign language but not to talk or read lips. He never married and lived with my aunt and uncle. They were wheat and beef producers in northeastern Colorado and I lived with them and worked for them summers all through high school and college.

Ed, the deaf guy was really into gardening. He grew pretty much everything the family ate. And saved all his own seed. There was a bedroom in their house they referred to as the “seed room”. It had built in shelves filling one whole wall full of tins and jars of seeds. Ed didn’t like people messing with his garden stuff so we pretty much left him alone about it. When I was in college I finally pushed him a little to communicate more. We wrote notes back and forth because I didn’t learn sign language and the form he knew was very different than modern sign language anyway.

The long and short of it is a lifetime of his knowledge and seed saving pretty much died with him. It’s one of my greatest regrets not spending more time picking his brain. He actually is the only person I’ve ever known with a photographic memory. You could ask him what their wheat yields were in 1962 and he could tell you. As well as the date and amount of every rain, snow, hail event that year. And the dates he planted each garden plant that year. It was insane.

I agree with you on the cornmeal. Fresh is best. And old corn varieties before hybridization taste better. Same with flour. I need to get back into milling corn and wheat. I used to some but it’s time consuming and I kind of just quit.

 

Controlled burns are getting more common here as a way to keep invasive eastern red cedar out of pastures. I would like to observe a controlled burn in a pine forest. Sounds interesting. I’ve seen a couple “uncontrolled burns” in pine forests as a kid and it freaked me out. LOL.

 

Thanks. I assumed that played a role. It’s a pattern I’ve found in every area of the world I’ve researched. Humans monkey with natural waterways and end up with flooding and land use issues down the line over time. Some places like Pakistan had their water systems that long term favor damaging floods built by British colonials in the 1800’s. I assumed some of the same infrastructure types exist still in the UK.

Hopefully your area can figure out how to benefit from the wonderful natural resource of ample precipitation. Flat, high precipitation areas in the US use tiling to deal with excess moisture but I’m not sure if that’s an option there. There has to be somewhere to move water to.

 

So you're 5 hours earlier than me.
Just wondered.

 

The stupidest thing mankind ever did to Florida was monkey around with the Everglades.

All of Florida from lake Okeechobee South used to be a floodplain. Of course man had to come in and start putting up Dykes and canals and all of that sort of thing and now we have red tide almost every year on the Gulf Coast.

 

Yep. Kind of like bypassing the fuel filter on your vehicle and then acting surprised when your injectors clog and your rings and cylinders are scored!

 

I'm building a steel building home. I'm hoping I'll catch a break on my insurance or at least have some fire resistance. I've trimmed all of my trees of all limbs below about 8 feet. I'll keep my land mowed pretty short, but we average 44 inches of rain/year where I'm building. We haven't had too many problems with fires in East Texas.

I'm thinking about volunteering with a group that deals with emergency preparedness for the local area. They provide emergency communications by radio and are training local storm spotters. It'll be a good way to meet decent people. I wouldn't mind learning to be a storm spotter and I have room to erect a GMRS radio repeater tower. I already have my GMRS license.

https://vzcares.org/

 

Well it was supposed to be Brazil where the boat chase was.
Bet you'd like one of those mortars on your kayak.

 

Wish you could have seen the place back in the day. A truly incredible place. One of the real Florida theme parks that's disappearing much like weeki wachee.

 

You may have heard of the Norfolk Broads. A system of waterways created by medieval peat digging. Well they built a new bridge in Gt Yarmouth which is where the Broads eventually drain into the North Sea.
When they built this new bridge they went for the cheap option of building pillars which go out into the river in order to have a shorter span. This ended up making the river narrower at that point (from 270 feet to 180 feet) and restricted the flow downstream causing severe flooding upstream when a rainstorm hit last year.
I don't hold much hope that they will figure anything out.
It's always just take the cheapest option.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/ar...ive-class-action-lawsuit-against-council.html

 

Hmmm. That does sound like it wasn’t well thought out.

We have a 100 yard long stretch of highway we have to take to the north entrance to one of our pastures that is like moguls on a ski slope. Since the highway was re-routed about 12 years ago they average digging the whole stretch up about every two years. They dig around in the road base for a month or so, put it all back together and resurface it. The first semi load of fat cattle that crosses the “fix” re-creates the whoop de doo moguls. When it gets so bad you can see daylight under all eight wheels of a semi trailer bouncing over them they dig it up again.

Stupidity in infrastructure knows no bounds and respects no country’s borders apparently.

How cheap will the bridge be after the class action lawsuit…..

 

@JohnHamilton
A full set of reproduction Confederate paper money that I found online when purchasing something else, it was only $3 and came in a nice envelope with historical facts and labeling of who is on each bill.

 

For $3 you did okay. The trouble is too many people pay for these thinking they are genuine. These are reproductions of the 1864 Confederate notes which are the most common. By this time, the North was squeezing the South hard with the shipping blockade and crop destruction. Prices for everything were gong up, and the Confederate money supply was out of control. Shortages of ink forced the printers to add water to the ink, which made some notes pink.

I will post examples of the real items later when my desktop is up.