Getting a start on Christmas shopping suggestions

Thanksgiving Day is this Thursday. Many families gather to enjoy the holiday over a turkey or ham dinner and catch up on their respective families’ activities over the past year. Folks will travel a long way, often across the country, to take part in these family reunions and holiday feasts. Talk will, inevitably, turn to politics and religion, but if everyone keeps things civil, there just might be a good exchange of ideas and nobody will get crossed off the Christmas gift exchange list!

We’re a month away from Christmas and thoughts are turning to those mentioned gift exchanges. What do you get for your favorite outdoors person? First, it’s always a promising idea to ask the person what they might like or could use. Some people start hinting about their hoped-for gift by leaving outdoor equipment catalogs open to the page containing their dreamed of, and often circled in red, gift and these catalogs are often strategically scattered about the house where the potential gift buyer will notice them.

We abandoned that approach years ago at our house because both my wife and I already have more stuff than we’ll ever use. Most of what we get ourselves or each other are upgrades of existing items or replacements for something which has been broken in use or storage.

For instance, my wife likes to make chicken jerky for our three little dogs. The dehydrator she has been using suffered a broken base when it was moved to create countertop space. I found a larger and better-quality unit than my wife normally uses on an internet marketplace site and decided to buy it for her. This is a heavier duty unit than what she has normally used, so, hopefully, it will last longer and make better quality jerky. Oh, I like to sample the jerky now and again as well!

I can be a hard person to buy gifts for, or so my wife tells me. Over the years, she has renewed subscriptions to blackpowder magazines I particularly enjoy reading and, every year for the past several, she has bought me the current volume of “Gun Digest,” a 400-page book about guns with sections on new firearms which debuted during the previous year.

We also buy stuff for ourselves, simply because who knows better than me what I would like? I’ve been doing a lot of reloading recently, both for the monthly Bang ‘n Clang matches at Birchwood and for a new rifle I recently purchased. I already have almost all the necessary tooling to make the reloads, but finding powder, primers, cases, and bullets can be a chore in these tight economic times.

I’m slowing locating the powders I tend to use and both bullets and cases are starting to reappear in the sporting goods supply pipeline. Primers can be a little tricky, but I have a good supply and, when I find a brick available for sale, I’ll buy it if it is reasonably priced.

The tooling I’ve been adding involves what the Lyman Company calls an “M” die. This is a cartridge case die designed to slightly expand the case mouth after the case has been full-length resized. These dies are caliber specific, and I learned about them by reading some of the blackpowder magazines. Blackpowder cartridge shooters tend to shoot lead bullets. Trying to seat a lead bullet in a properly resized cartridge case without the case mouth being slightly expanded can be a nightmare! These dies also make seating jacketed bullets easier as well.

A couple of years ago, I discovered a cartridge case repriming tool which I like better than any other repriming tool I have ever used. I upgraded to it and sold my old hand-priming tool at the most recent Big Lake gun show. I also recently bought a rock tumbling unit so I could “dimple” the round balls (like a golf ball) I shoot in a couple of muzzleloading smoothbores I use in shooting matches.

I haven’t tried shooting these dimpled balls yet, but “they” say this dimpling is supposed to improve the accuracy of a smoothbore shooting round balls. I guess we’ll find out this coming shooting season!

Now that I can walk again, I’m planning to get a custom bracket for the back of my six-wheeler made to hold surf fishing rods when I go fishing on the Kenai Peninsula. I need to visit with Gary Feaster at Greatland Welding in Palmer before too long to get this project going.