FireSpark Ferro Rod Review

I do like a ferro rod; if I didn't keep losing them I would say that they provide a lifetime of sparks, and of course give you a nice bushcrafty feeling when you spark your fire or stove to life with it.

Ferrocerium rods 'can' knock out sparks of up to 3,000c, where they're not all born equal is the size of the burning flakes of metal we see as sparks. More than one of the famous outdoor brands, endorsed by celebrities who should know better, produce rather pathetic little dots of spark. I've had a few over the years: from an awesome one made in some dude's shed that produced its own weld-splatter, to the really rather pathetic one made by the famous Swedish brand. This one came from Poland,  and as usual with Helikon: heroes of Polish Bushcraft was a bit cheaper than the others and it turns out a bit more thoughtfully designed.


Size-wise its probably overkill, being about twice the thickness of the well known brand, it's going to last several lifetimes. I was a bit unsure about the smaller handle to start with, but once I realised it unscrews to give you a place to stash some vaseline soaked cotton wool or a splodge of Bushcraft Napalm  I was a believer. Fire steels are awesome ,especialy if you've got flammable kindling to catch the spark.



At some point I'm going to make a sheath for my Fallkniven F1 with a loop for the Firespark. Overly robust knife and bike axle ferro rod make a nice pair. The tinder/ napalm holder really makes it. Handy bit of kit. Would buy again.

More foraging, Lightweight Sporting rifle, a new and very exciting wood work project, and some actual bushcraft / wild food hunting coming soon

Your pal
SBW

Bushcraft Napalm And How To Make It

Quite a few of you probably pride yourselves on your skills with fire by friction, and I salute you for you dedication. This stuff is for the times when you actually need a fire blazing NOW!

Perfect Example: When Mr Grendel and myself were dropped off by The Ghillie at the lodge and told "there's a wee stove make yerselfs a fierr" sure there was stacks of wood, in the kind of sizes you'd use as props to hold a mineshaft up, but no axe and we only had skinning knives with us. It was snowing, we were soaked from hats to gaiters. Without any kindling to speak of we had to rummage about a bit to get a blaze on.  A few bits of cardboard from the bin and a couple of candles from a kitchen drawer, and we were soon drying out. As we were huffing and puffing the fire into life I'd remarked "I wish we had some Bushcraft Napalm this would be a piece of piss". 

Mr Grendel enquired "WTF is Bushcraft Napalm?"

I've not made any Bushcraft Napalm in ages, but as I promised him I'd do a How To [about eighteen months ago], here it is. 

Bushcraft Napalm is cheap soap and petrol, mixed into a paste, and here's the clever bit, stored in an old toothpaste tube.

You need a bowl you can heat up, without causing an outburst of rage to intrude on the peace of your dwelling.

 You need the cheapest soap you can get - this was three bars for one Great British Pound

 Chop the soap up a bit

 Chop the soap up a bit a bit more. It would be even better to use a cheese grater.

Soften it it in the microwave - our microwave has lost the facility of the number one button, two mins and twenty two seconds was way too long, twenty two seconds not long enough. Your mileage may vary.

As the soap softens its time to start adding petrol, the great thing about using the microwave is its much less likely to burst into flames than using the stove top. Don't ask.

In preparation you'll have carefully sliced off the sealed end of your old toothpaste tubes, soaked and washed them until clear and clean, then left them to dry out.

 When you can let the mix cool but still remain a paste, you'll know you've got the soap to petrol/gas mix right. Milage will vary. Spoon the gloop into the tubes, trying to keep the cut edge gloop free.

It helps to use a bit of brown paper to stop molten plastic from ruining the iron. Don't ask.
I've also had good results using a old pair of pilers heated in a gas flame.

 Heat seal the cut end of the tube, with an iron. Pretty soon you'll have sealed the end of the tube, thus.

Probably a good idea to label the tubes to avoid accidents.

 A little squidge is all you need

Spark it up with your ferro rod, and it smells like VICTORY

More Soon
Your pal
SBW

PS My favourite Spark Stick/Ferro Rod reviewed HERE

Dan Price's Bushcraft Hobbit Home

I spend a lot of time daydreaming about living off grid, in the kind of camps I built as a kid. Dan Price author of 'Radical Simplicity: Creating an Authentic Life'  has been living in this cluster of hobbit houses for over twenty years. Katie Felber's film is a charming glimpse into the lifestyle of someone who actually did pair it all back to reveal the simple life.

your pal

SBW

Bushcraft Architecture And Construction

Neat huh?
SBW

Unboxing: Biolite Camp Stove Review

I've wanted one of these ever since I saw them as vapourware a few years ago. One thing lead to another and I've not ended up pressing Buy Now. But in a unprecedented turn up of events The Northern Monkey found himself inspired and ordered one. I think it was the offer of free electricity.

TNM had, in a stroke of genius, actually read the instructions before leaving the house so the Biolite had had its preliminary charge and was all ready to go. I was really exited to get this unboxing underway as my phone had already run out of juice, TNM clipped the parts together, filled it with very small sticks and sparked it up.
Once the smoke has finally cleared and its up to operating temperature the Biolite produces no smoke at all and roars with a beautiful spiral of flame which is a bugger to photograph. Phone charging was a little stop-start but did work. Next time I'd plug the stove into a battery pack which might work a bit better.

Following on from the good reception the camp stove has received  Biolite have brought out a 'Basecamp' which you feed from the bottom and takes much bigger bits of wood, this baby size suffers terribly from its small combustion chamber needing constant attention and feeding.  We were in deciduous woodland with an unlimited supply of dry-isn little-finger sized fuel, on a beach where the small bits of driftwood are often the dampest, or in a sparse-fuel environment where you'd have to cut fuel to size, the small chamber would be a major pain. We tried to burn thumb diameter pieces but the stoves efficiency was massively compromised. I hope to do some tests with dried dung [horse poop since you ask] which I have high hopes for as the stove's ideal fuel.

They say:
"Burning only wood, the CampStove creates a smokeless campfire that can cook meals and boil water in minutes. Setup is easy, fuel is free, and flames are hyperefficient with performance on par with white gas stoves."

SBW says:
Burning very small pieces of wood, the camp stove creates unbelievable amounts of smoke until it gets going when it burns very well, defiantly an outdoor gizmo [you would seriously regret lighting this puppy up in a tent], set up is indeed easy, fuel is free if you're in a woodland, anywhere else it'll be a lot of work to cut the pieces up small enough. "On par with white gas stoves" is pushing it.

The two must have accessories would be - bushcraft napalm [which I'll show you how to make in another post] and a pair of secateurs which would be the perfect way to keep it topped up with its preferred stick size of 6mm x 50mm aka quarter of. by two inches.

Redemption:
On the way home we have a 'petrol in a diesel' mishap and ended up by the side of the road with no phone charge, TNM fired up the stove while I walked to the nearest garage and got his phone working again, which was nice.

More soon
Your pal
SBW  

Titanium Pots For Bushcraft Camping

With the season rapidly approaching, its time to visit with mother nature and stay the night. Obs this is an anti-materialist impulse that can be accomplished with little or no expense, or the enterprise can be conducted as a test lab for the latest in space-age materials.
When hunting, fishing or bushcrafting we seek to reinvent ourselves as we were; full of wonder at the natural world, eyes bright with the first sights of its unknown details. From our desks somehow the ingenuity that once tied a pin to a strand of bootlace, or saw the whole world in a jam jar full of muddy water, is now spent looking for 30 bucks off a $100 cooking pot that saves half an ounce on the one we already have.

That having been said here's a round-up for those of you who, on revisiting their gear-pile, find themselves feeling a little under titanium-ised.

The absolute classic of titanium pots is the MSR kettle: very popular - so easier to find second hand, at one time the only option.

EverNew from Japan have the biggest selection of any titanium pot maker with a massive range of sizes; from espresso cup right up to 5.8l (12.25 US Pints) presumably for cooking shellfish while coastal foraging. They make a 'me too' of the MSR kettle and their own rather sweet design of  'tea kettle' in two sizes, which being wider at the base is more stable - so good for in-tents cooking.

Vargo have some new ideas - the BOT is both bottle and pot, which is both way-cool and annoyingly handle-less. But looks just the thing to eat nuts out of at your desk to remind yourself you really are an adventure dude rather than a slave in a cube farm as the evidence suggests. Proper want one!

They've recently brought out the Fire Box Grill - halfway between a stove and a grill. It's never going to be as fuel efficient as those little stoves that recapture woodgas, but they are not much fun to sit around, I can see it being pretty handy.

This 750ml pot from Dave Canterbury's Pathfinder School, with its hanging handle, is probably the most versatile choice if you want to heat more than water. The hanging handle could be replaced with a length of brake cable making the pot slightly more packable. Lets hope he brings out some more sizes. This would be my choice.

When as mother nature's ambassador/marketing director you need to entice people outside, it may serve you well to be able to offer refreshments to the requisite standard. With this in mind Snow-Peak have added a Cafetiere and milk frother to their titanium kitchenware line-up. I know Glamping is the devils work, but just think of the Brownie-Points these puppys'll get you.

Alpkit's cookware is worth a mention as their gear is very good value, in a way they are the UK's equivalent of an online-only REI. Their eating utensils are literally half the price of most brands. When its in stock buy one, or face a long wait for the next batch. Cheapest on this list.

For true Vagabond-ness this canteen, lid and cup set from Heavy Cover has to be the main contender. They even do a titanium screwcap for an extra $10.
There are a couple of companies that make little fire-box stands for this size of canteen, and dozens who make pouches that would fit the whole kit and kaboodle, which would then be colour-matched to the rest of your kit. ;-)

For the super inventive [or even pious], you could always make your own stove and pot rig with the stainless steel storage pots from IKEA for a fraction of the cost. But that's a different kind of fun for another day.

Be good to yourselves out there, take your rubbish home with you, and please grab and bag a couple of bits of other people's crap while you're passing.

More soon
SBW

And Thoreau's Mum Did His Laundry Every Week

Paleo-Survival TV has been on my mind this week and while I would happily sell what few scraps of dignity I have left, and appear on pretty much any one of them for a sandwich and a glass of tap water I've got to say I just don't get it. Sure they are entertaining, I love watching the hippy and the butch military guy bicker like a pair of fishwives and I could watch the posh boy eating rotting meat for hours. The whole genre poses one question, why the pretend adversity? There are lots of things I've learned from the idiots lantern, TV can educate and entertain at the same time, so why is the bar set so low?

The legendary Tim Smith of Jack Mountain must have been musing on the same thing as he posted a link to this article in Mother Jones.

Like any TV genre-of-the-moment, the roster of primitive-skills programming represents a series of variations on a theme. The ur-example is arguably Man vs. Wild, which premiered in the US on Discovery Channel in March 2006. In each episode, the buff and charismatic Grylls is dropped into an isolated and menacing location, then forced to find shelter, improvise tools, and eat carcass scraps, all the while offering lessons on how intrepid pioneers might have handled the situation. The show is phenomenally entertaining, owing largely to the schoolboy enthusiasm of the former British Special Forces host, who manages to sound exuberant even when delivering schlocky, back-from-commercial bumper lines like, "I've just dragged a dead sheep out of an Irish bog."

The TV executives that I've met are very very good at talking up 'cross platform' broadcasting, but when's it going to arrive? There's a HOOJ audience of people like me, and probably you, who want to learn more and are deeply cynical of the pretend urgency of these guys and the fake way in which they offer the irresponsible illusion of preparedness. By faking their way out of another supposedly life threatening situation they are telling a generation of viewers, for example, that its pretty easy to climb back out of the freezing waters and onto the ice. Bullshit.

How would you like to see it done differently?

Your pal
SBW

PS To who ever left the title of this post on the comments on the Mother Jones site, Genius!

Picture credit

The Most Massively Useful Thing A Bushcrafter Can Have?

A micro fibre travel towel: 
shown in the traditional outdoor blog style, 
with brass and blade [for no discernible reason]

The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy has a few things to say on the subject of towels...

"A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value - you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand-to- hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you - daft as a bush, but very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.

More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have "lost". What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with."

The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams www.douglasadams.com

All true, great advice, and well worth keeping an eye out for in the sale bin of your local outdoor store.

More soon

SBW

Bushcraft? That's So last Year Darling!

This one needs to be read in the voice of Elisabeth Hurley

Well darlings what can I say?  Dear SBW has finally seen a glimpse of the error of his ways and sent a long overdue request for some fashion advice from yours truly. The poor foolish man has committed some terrible fashion faux-pas; the silly boy really does have the fashion sense of a cockney builder. That terrible hat, shocking!

I mean culottes! Really! And after dear Hubert pleaded with him to dress in a more appropriate way, one just never knows whom one may meet on Hackney Marshes.

It’s not as though he is without the improving influence of AIR. Here seen stylishly foraging in a charming linen suit. Quite the artist-afield.

But enough of others failed attempts to sartorialise SBW: I thought if I were to spell out the horrible truth in words even a chubby plumber could understand I simply must start with the basics:

BUSHCRAFT is just SO last year, darling! 

This year it’s all about Tactical!

Fortunately I do have certain contacts in the world of men’s haberdashery, so my first call was to that complete darling Alber[t], the visionary behind that well-known emporium of manly style Albertus Afganus.

Always the hero of the hour he’s currently embarked on a daring fashion rescue in Afghanistan – wonderfully sense of colour those people, but the women’s wear! Dreadful! Just dreadful, the poor dears look like they’re wearing tents! The men! Dont get me started, Kyber Pass AK47's [tsk] I ask you? Not an accessory rail in sight, dont they read `Vogue or Guns and Ammo?

Being a card carrying sweetie Albert dropped everything and rushed to my aid. We asked poor SBW what size he takes and he replied,  “I’m so fat the only thing that still fits me is the sofa”.

Sofa King Tacti-cool

Fortunately he is now in the hands of the professionals and Albert was of course able to size accordingly; kiting SBW out with a technical rain jacket, shirt and pants, all perfectly colour co-ordinated for whatever it is SBW does in that field or by that dreary canal. Now that we've modernised him I must drop a few hints about accessories. This season I suggest accessorising with that perennial classic (the Little Black Dress of Tacticool) an AR15, or if the event is 'dress-to-impress' the Stealth Recon Scout in .308 is this season's 'must have'.

Albert immediately popped an aid parcel in the post, and due to the wonders of a modern international postal service SBW was soon kitted out in the latest trends, and to be fair, looking rather dashing.

Now if only we could only do something about that dreadful hat.........

Cheerio dah-lings

In The Woods Pt1 Escape Velocity

'First thing you learn is you always gotta wait' Lou Reed

I was to be snaring Rabbits with another blogger over the weekend. But as is so often the lot of the self employed, one thing leads to another, a client sets a meeting back and a Friday departure disappears over the horizon. 

Seeing as I already had the weekend booked, I roused The Northern Monkey and we resolved to visit the permission in the forest. 

Saturday: one thing leads to another and we finally leave at the end of the afternoon. The drive out of town is uneventful, and we're making good pace, too good to be true. We spend an hour or so sitting in the car, gridlocked, with the engine off. By the time we're finally back on the move it's getting dark. 

Then follows a hilarious [you had to be there] interlude where we drive round a village trying to find an unmarked turning before we get to the wood. Then, for shits & giggles, we repeated the process on foot in the wood itself.

SBW [on phone]: So we're in the wood, where's the hut?
R [on phone, losing patience with SBW]: If you're in the wood, you're standing next to it
R [talking to E] They're in the wood they can't find the hut
The sound of splashing bath water and laughter
R [on phone, laughing]: Good luck, call me in the morning. CLICK

Now we'd scared off any inhabitants the wood may have had, we spend a relaxing evening in the hut eating our bean stew and bickering.

SBW: the deal was I cook and you pump up the rifle
TNM: I'll do it in the morning
SBW: I bet you if you don't do it they'll be Squirrels outside first thing
TNM: What! After a night of us two snoring like a pair of chain-saws they'll be long gone

I don't remember the highlights of the next argument, which was about who sleeps where on the sleeping platform, but I remember that it revolved around who was more likely to want to go for a piss in the night. TNM's getting on a bit so I let him have the easier route to the door.

Sunday-first light

SBW: Are you awake?

TNM: Yeah man

SBW [fighting his way out of a hooj duvet and now straddling TNM on his way to the door]:
Good, I just wanted you to know I'm not trying to mount you

Of course there was a Squirrel perfectly poised on a tree not ten yards away.

More Soon
Your Pal

SBW

Bushcraft Icons: Kuksa

Traditionally carved from the burl growth of a Birch tree, these wooden cups known as Kuksa or Guksi are as Scandaweegen as anything. In the cold of the Sammi peoples arctic homeland a metal cup would be a one way ticket to a stuck lip. So the insulating properties, and light weight of wood make this a perfectly adapted tool for the region. They also look totally cool in the suburbs, and clearly designate their owner as 'more bushcraft than thou' around any campfire. So there.

More soon
Your Pal
SBW

I want One - A Not So Occasional Series Pt11

How bushcraft is this!

The site is well worth having a look at, lots of cool ideas.

Your pal

The bushwacker

On The Beach At Hastings

Lately i've changed the signature i use on web forums to 

Tolerable Craftsman, Terrible Fisherman and Wannabe hunter

It's a raised a smile, and a couple of chaps have 'fessed up 'I'm a terrible fisherman too'  but in all honesty however bad you think you are, I'm worse, I suck at fishing. really I do. 

On the other hand - Buying fishing equipment I excel at. Really, I'm gods gift to anyone who owns a fishing store. There's no recession if I'm in your shop. It is my heartfelt belief that under no circumstances should i ever knowingly pass a fishing shop without popping in and dropping a tenner. Minimum.

In order to convince myself that I'm more than a collector of fishing equipment and to appease the fishing gods this weekend I went back to my roots. Fishing in hastings, with crap gear. The best catch i ever had was off the boat landing beach in Hastings with a rod, reel and line set up that cost £30. Since then i've spent 100's and caught the sum total of not-a-lot. Maybe the gods don't take offerings made over the internet via fishing shops in Japan and I'd actually have to get my butt down to the water, in time for the tide, and throw some bait out there.

As usual Johna is my fishing buddy of choice, and his pal Steve was roped in for the trip.

Johna "There's a beach it's been cut off by a landslide but I know we can get down there'

SBW " Real adventure fishing! Bring it on!"

We took the unprecedented step of leaving in plenty of time, and turned that into a double whammy by going to the bait shop while the bait was fresh - I know most unlike us - but as the man said

 'doing what you've always done an expecting different results is THE definition of madness'

£11 lighter and with the most promising bag of bait i've seen in years we made our way up on to the cliffs in the country park and set about the scrabble down to the water. Expectation pays a large part in perception and of course perception is the local reality. We walked in a downward direction untill a fork in the road. 

SBW ' looks like its this way'

Johna ' no it's this way'

SBW 'well OK. errr if you say so'

To say the going was rough an muddy would be an understatement, like a recreation of the Somme on a 60 degree slope.

Man Down - Johna takes a tumble

Watching Johna struggle to his feet whilst trying to get the camera out nearly had me on my arse too. Fortunately he quickly fell again so i was able to add a photographic record. By the time we made it to the waters edge we we all covered in mud. But the sun shone, I lit a driftwood fire, and and all was right with the world. 

I set up with a Paternoster rig. Usually i think of the paternoster as a pier fishing rig, they don't cast so far but seeing as we had a decent stash of likely looking bait I was hoping two hooks would equal two chances.

Today's lesson:

I'm an advocate of circle hooks wherever possible as the research suggests that they are much less likely to be 'deep swallowed' resulting in a positive hooking through the fishes lip giving you a choice of 'catch and release' or 'catch and eat'. As i mentioned at the start it's been a while since i've landed anything at all and as a result my fishing confidence had been at an all time low. I'd started fishing with 1/O (the smallest size of sea fishing hook) having convinced myself that I was getting nibbles but not bites due to too larger hook sizes. 

The whole point of circle hooks is that the little fella's can't bite down on them and live to grow to a better size.  This was made true for me with the only catch of the day. I landed a Huss which would have gone straight back if he hadn't swallowed the hook so deeply that it made release impossible. Point taken 3/O and 5/O from now on.

 Mr Huss received his invitation to lunch by way of a rock to the back of the head.

I wrapped him up in the fronds of a fern (any bushcrafters out there care to let me know which one it is?)

I popped him on a flat rock i'd pre heated in the fire, stuck another rock on top.....................

And scared the daylights out of my self when rock one exploded launching rock two into the air!

A quick rebuild of the fire later and Mr Huss cooked gently while we amused ourselves casting rigs costing £3.50 a time out to the rocky bottom of the english channel. Where they stayed, fishless.

Mr Huss turned out to be a most agreeable luncheon companion. 

If mother nature had not provided a bounty, she had at least laid on an appetizer. 

Despite the agreeable nature of the morning, I would hesitate to recommend the beach as a fishing venue for two reasons.

Firstly it has been described to us as a nudist beach - yet it was devoid of hot swedish naturalists and seemed instead to be a meeting point for gentlemen of certain 'interests'. Also when the tide was fully out it became apparent that the beach fails miserably to provide any reason for fish to be there. We saw one, yes ONE, limpet on the whole beach. 

No food = No fish. 

It was too nicer day to be rushing back and we stayed to the bottom of the tide. A most unusual thing happened as the tide went out - we got nearly all our broken off and snagged rigs back! 

The journey back wasn't without its moments of high comedy. Of  all the 'other users' of the beach who'd passed by during the day not one of them was covered in mud, and there was a reason for that. Expectation = perception and perception is the local reality. Where we had gone looking for a landslide that lead to the beach they had looked for a flight of steps that led to the beach.
As we struggled, puffing and wheezing, up the steps, we passed the very point where Johna had insisted that we go by the road less traveled. As we stood catching our breath with Johna lamenting his poor choice Steve's voice drifted up from the lower slope

"Is this not where the bushwacker said to go, Johna?"

So my faith, having been sincerely tested, was renewed by the days events. I did catch and eat a fish. After all this time!

Just When I Thought I Was Out, They Brought Me back In

Your pal
The Bushwacker.

Wildlife At Birthday Party

Still feeling pretty rough after the celebrations, so I was pleased to be able to recycle this post out of one I started a while back.

I only own one hand axe, and frankly can’t see myself needing another one, but if I did get another I’d be sorely temped by the output of Gransfors Bruks.
In a world where ‘not my job’ is the cry and ‘arse covering’ the modus operandi, it’s great to hear that a company gives its people the authority to work on a piece until they are happy to put their name to it. Literally. Each axe bears the initials of the person who made it, one person. A person who actually gave a monkeys, worked on it to their satisfaction, before putting their name on it and sending it out of the factory gate.

Look on any bushcraft site and there'll be pictures of them, look on any bushcraft forum and there'll be people (OK it's mainly guys) waxing lyrical about how much they love them and the things they've made using nothing but. Other brands have spent fortunes trying to get this level of authority in their marketplace. For once 'simple things done well' have won the day. How could we make more of life like that?

So I was totally effing delighted when R&E bought me a Wildlife Hatchet for my birthday!

Here at the time of Un-Boxing are a few observations.
1. They come WAY SHARP, actually a fair bit sharper than some knives
2. They do have magic powers - there's 'just' something about them
3. The shaft-to-head fit aint perfect, but looks adequate to last the first five or ten years.
4. There's a more in depth review here
5. Mine was made by MM
6. Pablo has the next sizes up and down in his 'family' of tools
7. The Backyard Bushman has a great review here
8. The sheath is more of a guard - but making one with a belt loop will be fun

Now I will have to succumb to Kit Tarts Rule 2

"For every 'must have' piece of kit there is a 'must have accessory' to accompany it"
And buy myself a special stone to sharpen it..

The only 'pimping' I can see being necessary will be dyeing the shaft 'ah that's where it is orange'.

Thanks for reading
SBW

Birthday Post

My trip to the West London Shooting School was fantastic, a really great day out. But that story'll have to wait for another day.

In the meantime, through meeting a couple of his friends, I've been able to pierce the veil of James's characteristically english understatement; as the guys would have it James has a long reputation as a bunny slayer of some repute. So I was delighted when he gave me a copy of his latest DVD on hunting rabbits with air rifles for my birthday.

To many of you not living in old blighty, rabbits are hunted with .22 and shotguns. Here every country lad (and a few city ones too) starts out with an over-the-counter air rifle (legally limited to 12lb and good for a range of about 120 feet) and has to learn to get into range.

Here's a taster


If you'd like to learn how he gets so close, are wondering what the english equivalent of David E Petzal is like, or are just looking for a crimbo prezzie for the foodie who has everything, you can buy a copy here.

Must dash, birthdays don't celebrate themselves you know!
SBW