Sunday, November 14, 2010

Dinner's cooking and I feel like writing

before my eyes close, so: if you're not familiar with the Wanenmacher show, here's their website. It's frikkin' enormous, and if it has something to do with firearms(guns, parts, accessories, tools, materials plus knives, survival gear, etc.) it'll either be there, or somebody there can find it for you. Among other things drooled over until they made me moveseen and admired were
General rifles
General pistols
Enough ammo to equip a battalion(at least)
A Boys Rifle(rebarreled to .50BMG)
A British #4Mk1 training rifle in .22lr with match sights
A snaphaunce pistol with an axehead butt
Books. Lots of books
A guy with a #1MkIII Enfield that still had the volley sights and magazine cutoff
Truly old flintlock pistols and muskets
Truly new AR variants
Did I mention pistols?
Handloading gear
And so on.
One place had some Dillon RL550 presses for a good price but no cartridge conversions, and while it was tempting I didn't want to lay out that much for a press and then have to order more stuff before I could use it.
I saw a display case with THREE Webley-Fosbery revolvers, one a target model.
Looked over a truly odd .22 revolver; more detail on that later.
I think I walked enough to take care of my exercise for the next few days.
All in all, a fine weekend spent around shooty goodness.

There were fewer people there than last fall, noticeably so. It also seemed- to me- that the prices some people were asking for things were flat-out rediculous(even without that, do you realize how fast you could go through a medium-size lottery prize in that place?) Still, it's a bleeping big show with lots to see. You may be proud of me, I was quite restrained on the spending and came back with most of what I left with; my big buy was this
S&W .32 Hand Ejector. I've wanted one of these or a K32 for a long time, this is the first time I found one A: in good shape and B: affordable. I plan to feed it well.

So that was the weekend. Assuming dinner does not put me to sleep your regularly scheduled ranting about the news will resume later this evening.

4 comments:

tkdkerry said...

Ah, the Wanenmacher show, where twice yearly the Tulsa fairgrounds becomes home to the Cathedral of John Moses Browning. Spent Saturday there, and would have died if I'd stumbled onto the #4Mk1 trainer. As it was, I was spotting-scope shopping, and was surprised that I didn't find a single vendor with a decent selection of spotters. There seems to be more knife-makers every time, though, and they're putting out a prety good product. Restraint was difficult.

I thought the attendance was down a little, too. I've never been able to canvas the entire show in a single day before, what with crowded aisles slowing me down.

Firehand said...

I noticed a couple of big optics vendors missing this year.

I almost missed the #4, it was in a vertical rack; I happened to see the front sight and looked down. And nearly crapped when I read the tag.

Tam said...

Little .32 HEs are lovely guns.

My 4" Model 31 is just the most fun centerfire handgun in the world to shoot...

Firehand said...

It's just so darn cute! And I should get a bleepload of bullets from a pound of lead, and(let's see, manual says average around 2 grains...)- DAMN that's a lot of loads from one pound of powder!