Mooresville Rocket

I think that you got womanfied and she made you get rid of all your guns and when you had nothing left of your own, she even made you get rid of the gun cabinet. You better go get your skirt and apron ironed before she gets home. What a woosie.

Nobody uses a gut hook anymore. The knife I use, and it has gutted out more deer then any other knife I have ever seen, is a simple 6 inch blade Sharpe knife I bought at Kmart 25 years ago. I think it is somewhere up around 160 deer gutted and over 60 deer butchered with the same knife. All that matters in a hunting knife is that it holds a decent edge and that it doesn't fall apart with use. Case Knives are of a known quality, made in Pennsylvania - Bradford to be exact and will hold a good edge and last a long time. Plus the manufacturer is not going to go out of business anytime soon. This is the knife I would buy if I needed a replacement - http://www.wrcase.com/knives/fixed_blades/browsefixed2.php?Family=%27Leather%20Handle%27&Fixed=%271%27&Item=%270385%27

The problem with that map is that it is crap! It shows the roads around the woods and it shows the streams and it makes the game lands into a green color, but it does not show terrain, unimproved dirt roads and trails. It is of no use - if you wanted to use it to find a location in the woods. You would be just as well off to use a road map.

I had the phone number, was looking to see if anyone had a email address for them. Sometimes it is easier to get something in writing then to take their word on it. Thanks for the info.

Does anyone know where you can get a new elastic band / string for inside of a set of Stony Point shooting sticks. I bought them about 5 years ago and when I went to use them this year, they refused to snap into each other and actually fell apart when I tried to use them. - I think I paid like $8o for them and I had not used them more then 10 times. I would have been cheaper to just spend the money on ammo and take my chances at having a tree to lean against and not even buying them.

Pennsylvania deer season is not over until the end of Jan, so most stores around here do not put anything on sale until at least Feb or March. I have bought coats, jackets, hats, gloves, boots, camo clothes, and even a one piece insulated hunting suit when it was on sale. Most things they sell is not as good of a quality as what you might buy in a high price store. But if it is on sale and you bought it and then you tore it going across a barb wire fence, then it doesn't matter if it cost $100 or $10.. My opinion is to buy the best you can afford and keep it as nice as you can for as long as you can and when it is no longer any good for hunting, you can use it at work and around the house. When it gets too many holes in it, you can tear it up and use it as a grease rag. Scents do not go bad inside of a bottle and most calls will last one or more years if they are any good. Nothing wrong with buying something on sale as long as it still works.

I don't know if your hunting season is still in or if this advice will work for you, but in my experience, the best advice is not to hunt the bedding area's or the feeding areas. I don't know if your question pertains to bow hunting or rifle hunting or shotgun hunting, so I guess we need a lot more information. Also what would be helpful would be the state and county where you plan to hunt. My experience is that deer mainly moves on their own, early in the morning and late in the evening. Your best results will come from a tree stand blind, where you can sit without being detected. If the owner of the land permit's, you need to install your tree stand now and leave it up all year long. As the deer gets used to seeing that stand in the tree, they will not pay as much attention to the stand as they would if you hang it the day before the season starts. Some of my best experiences comes from having a tree stand where you can sit all day. That means that if you live in a northern part of the country that you need some type of protection from the rain, snow, wind, cold. Permanent stands works the best for that situation. I designed a permanent deer stand where you have a 4' x 4' platform, with walls and a 3' x 3' fireplace that holds a decent sized kerosene heater. With the door closed and the extra pieces of plywood over the window openings in bad weather, you can sit in it all day with not much more then a regular coat and a second pair of pants and work shoes. I don't like windows because they hold too much sound in when you fire your rifle and I lost my hearing once from a tree stand with windows in it. I would suggest putting your stand near a funnel or on the top of a ridge where the deer frequents. Deer will walk over one food source to get to another. My success and my families success was due to the fact that my stand was in a grove of white oak trees and the acorns were plentiful this year. You couldn't take a step without stepping on them at the beginning of the season. Corn is too unpredictable, because as you just said, when they have options as to where they can feed, they will go as they please and they might or might not use the same trail more then once a week unless the trail goes directly from a bedding area to a feeding area. You also need to realize that deer needs a drink of water at least two times a day. So hunting near a water source is a very good way to ensure success. The only hard part about hunting near water is that if it is a babbling brook, the sound of the water might mute out the sound of hoof beats and you won't be able to hear them walking through the woods and in time your ears will ignore sounds and loosing one of your main senses for hunting, is a handicap and not a advantage.

When we were kids, mom said that the holidays was usually the time when kids got sick. She didn't say anything about adults. Back in the day when mom was my age, she was not allowed to get sick, because she had 6 kids to take care of, not to mention both her parents were still alive. I was just thinking about them yesterday. Mom would cook Capon's for their Christmas meal and I would take them up for them to eat. They were both in their late 70's and grandma was not in good shape. She had a bad heart on the inside, but a heart of gold on the outside. Now my mom is old and for the first time I can ever remember, she made breaded chicken for Christmas dinner. I had not had her breaded chicken in many years and it was not the same as I had remembered it, but it was still some of the best chicken I have ate in a long time. Just thank god that you are both still alive and that god has blessed you with another year of life. May you have money in every corner and kids in every bed. Amen and god bless.

Just my 10 cents worth here, but that gun appears to have had been made by Mossberg. I just happened to have had a friend that owned on just like it a few years ago and tried to pawn it off on me. I did a lengthy investigation into the origin of the rifle and the value. Several people I know, owns gun stores and is gun smiths and all of them were of the same opinion. The gun is worth on average about $150. The clips are no longer made and no longer available and if you loose one, the gun no longer has any value as anything more then a single shot. In some cases the clip is worth as much as the gun. When manufacturers were to embarrassed to put their own name on the firearm and they made them for such discount stores as Montgomery Wards, Sears, Western Auto, they usually had the poorest in workmanship and materials. There is no real chamber pressure issues with a .222 and you can almost shoot a shell out of a piece of pipe and nothing would happen. The problem is - when people believes that they have a valuable piece of history when in fact all they really have is a old piece of junk, conflicts erupt. In my case, I took the boys word that he was going to come back for his rifle in a couple of days. The other side of the coin was that he had already took it to several gun dealers. Most gun dealers on a trade of pawn will only give you half of what the gun is worth. In that case it would have been $75 for his rifle. I lent him $300 and he had no intention of coming back to get it. In the end, his girlfriend wanted to buy him a birthday present and felt sorry for him and came to my house and bought the gun back for exactly what he had borrowed against it. I was actually out a couple of dollars for the time that I spent removing the rust and corrosion and the time and money I spent trying to have the gun appraised. I have sold guns - way too cheap in the past for ones that I felt was of no value and I tried to get too much money for guns that I felt was valuable, but had no value when other people sell's the same gun for less money. So I cannot call myself a gun expert, only experienced. A few years ago, I sold a Model 88 Winchester .308 rifle with the serial number 3636 in Mint Condition, it was still in the original box and had a 4 power scope mounted to it with original mounts from that era, to a complete stranger for $500, I thought that I had made a good deal since I only paid $250 for that gun. Two years later, the person that bought it sold it for $1000 and thought the same thing. When Winchester went out of business, the value of that gun quadrupled over night. I was not aware of the situation when I sold it. You live and you learn.

I wonder if you tell it to go to your tree stand if the voice of the person talking inside of the Tom Tom would scare all the deer away. :hammer1: Merry Christmas Team Real Tree!

Next time use a 300 Winchester Magnum, they don't run far when you poke a hole in them big enough to throw a cat through. God must answer deer prayers - because without his help, I never would have been able to shoot my first buck or doe. I prayed and prayed for years that he would send one little old deer my way. I never prayed for a trophy, just some freezer meat. Now here I am 32 years later, a Mean, lean, killing machine!

http://workingperson.com/products/22_98/1/Metatarsal_and_Toe_Guards.html That is called a Metatarsal guard, its only necessary if you work someplace where you carry heavy loads - say with a crane - where you need to protect the small bones on the top of your foot. It is not any good for a walking shoe or a shoe that just needs to protect your toes.

I agree with Double A. The Ballistics chart was made with a special barrel rifle, of a certain length and fired at a certain temperature. Unless you had the exact same rifle and the exact temperature and weather conditions and was firing at the exact same shooting range - your results will vary. Even a rifle that has been sighted in at 500 yards on a 70* day at 1000 feet in elevation, will hit in a different location if fired at a shooting range that is 3000 feet in elevation on a 60* day.

I will make one comment about Browning firearms and that will be it. I was a Remington man through and through. Most of the guns that I bought for the first 20 years were nothing but Remington. One day a gun shop had a sale on some Demo Browning shotguns and I bought a Gold Hunter 3 1/2 inch 12 gauge off the rack. I fell the first time I went hunting with it, because I was disabled at the time and had a hard time walking and fell while traveling over a rock pile and dropped the gun and ruined the stock. I sent a letter to Browning explaining the situation and asked them if there was anything that they could do to help me to put a new stock on the shotgun. They told me that they had to have $500 for a replacement stock. I only paid $650 for the whole shotgun. I spent 3 months and about $100 on furniture refinishing supplies and a Birchwood Casey kit to refinish the stock and forearm. It's not nice, but it will do. I bought a Browning pump rifle in .300 Winchester Magnum. They only made the pump action rifle a couple of years. I treated that rifle as if it was made of gold! One day I was out hunting and it was very cold outside, like -1 degree for the whole day. When I came in that night, the forearm on the rifle had cracked. I sent it back to Browning on the advice of Grice Gun Shop - where I bought the rifle, and Browning looked at it and replaced the original stock with a hand selected stock and matching forearm and it is the nicest rifle I own. To complete my gun collection, I bought a used .270 Winchester Short Magnum A Bolt Medallion on a trade and it is a very nice gun, very well crafted, and deadly accurate with a Bushnell Elite 3200 5 x 15 x 40 scope. So although I have two bad stories about Browning as a corporation, I also have some good stories also. The only complaint about the A Bolt is that it is very hard to put the clip on the trap door. It sometimes takes 5 minutes just to load the rifle. The Short Magnum is very big in diameter and it is hard to get the first shell to go in the chamber without the clip.

A guy at camp had one and he shot a deer almost every year. It was in .308 Winchester. My other opinion is that a neighbor of mine just sold a 7mm08' because the price of the shells has gone through the roof. Another friend of mine is a clerk at a gun shop and he told me a story of a BLR that had a barrel that was improperly reamed. The head stamp of the shells was parting from the cartridge when you shot the shell. The owner had the gun less then 5 years before he brought it back. They sent it back to Browning and Browning said that due to the design of the rifle, it was not possible to re barrel the rifle or that they were unwilling to re barrel it. The sad part about the whole situation is that the owner of the rifle did not have a lot of money to spend on a new rifle - but could not use this one because it was a ticking time bomb. In the end, he bought another BLR rifle and put this one on the gun rack at home, never to be shot again, because in his opinion, it was unsafe and his conscience bothered him that if he was to trade his old rifle at a gun shop to someone else that it might hurt someone and he couldn't live with himself if that happened.

The 7400 and the 7600 is basically the same rifle with the same barrel and almost the same ballistics. Anyone that wants to develop a load that shoots better then those loads - can feel free to do so. All I did was posted ballistics data necessary to understand what kind of accuracy can be expected with either round and either rifle. The Model 740 / 742 Woodsmaster was never know as a jammaster and only a fool would not maintain their rifle, that's the only way you will have problems with it. The 740 and 742 used a clip which was the same identical clip as was used in the 760 Gamemaster and the same clip that is used in the 7600.

When you work in a machine shop and walk around in steel chips all day, the shoes with the least amount of tread and the thickest soles lasts the longest. You get what you pay for. You buy cheap boots - they aren't going to last very long. Most shoes today are not made in the USA anymore and most soles on the bottom of the shoes has at least part plastic and not rubber soled anymore. Rocky boots are made for hunting and not for working and they do not last very long and half of them have the plastic sole and the ones that has the rubber sole, the rubber falls apart after a couple of seasons. The best Bang for the Buck is Carolina boots - but you are not going to get them for under $100 I just bought a set of Irish Setter 882 Elk Tracker boots for hunting with 1000 grams of thinsulate and I spent over $200 for them. I could have bought them cheaper in a different store, but I had a pair of Rocky boots that fell apart and took them back and got a second pair of Rocky boots that leaked and took them back and I was willing to pay what ever it took to get a pair of boots that fit that did not leak and guess what - they leak! If I would have water proofed them I guess they probably would be ok, but if they have Thinsulate with a oil impregnated leather, you shouldn't have to water proof them yourself until the original coating wears out. Depending on where you live, you will pay more or less for what I bought. There was a guy that came around to the machine shops and sold a shoe that lasted a long time, but I cannot remember the name of the shoe he sold. Red Wing or Danner or one of the other high end companies is always a good choice. http://www.carolinashoe.com/ http://www.danner.com/ You don't want your shoes to last a long time, the reason being that you want your shoes to wear out so that it absorbs the shock of your foot hitting the ground when you walk and you want it to cushion your foot when you stand for long periods of time and you want them to grip the surface you are walking on. If they have no traction, they are no good on wet surfaces or slippery surfaces. Once they start to wear on the bottom to one side or the other, they will make your back hurt or make you walk funny which will wear out your joints.

Accuracy load for a Remington Gamemaster 30/06 is 58 grains of IMR 4350, Sierra or Hornady 150 gr. PSP Boattail bullets, CCI 200 primers and a light crimp. Full length resized and trimmed to minimum length. You should just see the cannelure when you seat your bullet. Military brass holds less powder then does standard rifle casings so you have to watch your chamber pressures when you switch between the two. .270 Winchester - shoots best with a 130 gr. Hornady, Winchester, or Sierra PSP Boattail, 55.5 gr. of IMR 4350 and CCI 200 primers and a light crimp. That should be a factory duplicate load. All bullets of the same weight will hit the target in the same place with the same load of powder behind it at 100 yards. I do have one Gamemaster 760 BDL Deluxe .270 Winchester, that is set up to shoot 140 gr Hornady / Sierra bullets and is sighted in to hit a 1 inch bulls-eye 5 times at 200 yards and has a group of .45 at that range. It will put the first two bullets in the same hole at 200 yards and the worst it ever shot was a figure 8 with the first two shots at that range. I actually gave that gun to my dad a couple of years ago. He fell out of a tree-stand onto his rifle and bent the barrel on his .270 Gamemaster. When I showed him what it would do at 200 yards, he put my rifle back in the gun cabinet - because he refused to use 140 gr bullets to kill a deer. Not many rifles can sit in a gun cabinet for 5 years and be pulled out and still hit the same place they did 5 years before no matter if it is 70* outside or zero. Factory ammo for the 30/06 is not as powerful as .270 ammo due to the fact that factory ammo has to be loaded below maximum pressure for the 30/06 due to the fact that the factory has to take into consideration the round has been around since 1906 and not all metals used in the manufacture of the guns that shoots caliber of rifle is strong enough to be able to handle a maximum amount of chamber pressure. The .270 Winchester first came out in 1925 and all the rifles made since that time were of a high quality, and is strong enough to handle a maximum chamber pressure load. Once you understand the basic's of ballistics's and rifle design and shoot thousands of rounds, as I have, you don't even have to think before you reach into your gun cabinet to choose which gun you are going to hunt with that day. I already know what my guns are capable of doing and I can just grab a box of shells out of the cabinet that it is sighted in for and go hunting without having to worry if the gun will hit where I aim or not. When people shoot's hundreds of rounds a year, all they are doing is wearing out the barrel.

When you can hit a dime at 200 yards, you don't need to waste rounds shooting at a target. All of my rifles with the exception of the Model 6 Remington 270 are tack drivers. The Model 6 has a Leupold 3 x 9 scope and is probably the worst scope ever made - I think they call it the Rifleman. I am probably the only person you will ever meet that rebarreled a Remington Gamemaster 760. The gun safe probably has 60 boxes of rifle ammo and there is several 50 caliber ammo cans full of .22 shells. I do most of my fancy shooting with a Browning Gold Hunter or a Remington 870 Super Magnum, and I reload shotgun shells 10 boxes at a time. If you hunt small game as much as I do and you use the same style of gun for both, after a while it just becomes second nature that you pull up the gun, cheek the stock, push the safety in and squeeze the trigger. The Browning A Bolt Medallion that I have has a Bushnell Elite 3200 scope on it and can hit a 3 inch bullseye at 500 yards and I can put 5 rounds inside of a 50 cent piece at that range. Anything further then 500 yards and it isn't hunting in my book it is just sniping.. I would need a good 45 power scope on my .300 Winchester Magnum to shoot further then 500 yards. My eye's are not as good as they were 20 years ago.

Look, I am 45 years old and I have been disabled since I was 33 years old and I hunt everyday I can. I will quit a job to go hunting if I have to. I think that someone is pulling my leg here on this one. My neighbor Johnny, who died in a automobile accident - when he had a epileptic seizure while driving a car, was a straight A student in school, was a 3 letter athlete in high school and was a straight A student in College. His family was a bunch of outlaws and he never had a nice gun or anything, yet they shot dozens of deer per a year in their crew. In some situations, where someone does not have a place of their own to go hunting and is too lazy to go out and actually find a place of their own on State Lands, then yes, you can have people who can go for years without getting a deer. But there is no reason for that , because with the media today, television, magazines and all the other outlets for information such as the internet - you can learn to do just about anything by yourself. When I started hunting, I was 13 years old. I had been in the woods since I was 6 by myself, but daddy didn't want to take me hunting with him and so he didn't take me when I turned 12. My grandpa stood up for me and told dad that if I didn't go the next year that he wasn't going either. The sad ending to the story was that my grandpa died picking potato's the next year in September when it was over 90* outside at my uncles house who was a school teacher and made good money. My first year hunting was a real disaster. My dad and his family was really tight. I used my grandpa's old bolt action .410 shotgun for small game and it was wore out and dangerous - because it would fire when you took the safety off if you pulled the trigger first. So I didn't get anything more then squirrels hunting small game. Hunting small game such as squirrels teaches you to sit and be patient and to spend long hours in the woods, paying your dues. It also teaches you how to shoot accurately and when you do get game, you learn how to field dress and how to skin and clean game. When big game season rolled around, my dad had to take me with him because it is illegal to hunt by yourself until you are like 15 years old in Pennsylvania at that time. A heard of deer came along and dad and I shot a nice 12 point buck and we were fighting in the middle of the woods - who was going to tag it. Most people would be fighting - that it was there deer and wanted to use their own tag. Dad and I was fighting because neither one of us wanted to tag it because I knew that if I tagged it, I could not go hunting anymore. You were only allowed to shoot one deer a year and I did not have a doe tag, yet I wanted to hunt deer as much as possible. Dad wanted me to tag it so he didn't have to take me hunting anymore. He wanted to go with his brother or by himself and not be saddled with a kid. Hunting was not then what it is today. I had no hunting clothes or warm gloves or boots to wear. Not even a warm hat to put on my head. Dad's family was tight and he had too many kids at home and was not willing to spend his money on me. I had a old plastic blaze orange hunting hat, a 30/30 rifle with open sights I borrowed off the school teacher uncle. A box of shells with one shell missing because I stood at camp all day while everyone else sighted in their rifles and when it got to be my turn, they let me shoot one shell and then told me that it was good enough. I cannot tell you if I even hit the target at 100 yards. I had a pair of steel toe shoes, dad got a new pair from work every year and I took his new shoes and they were not insulated. There was no Thinsulate at that time. For gloves, I had a pair of brown jersey gloves that he got from work - along with a pair of Burley Bear gloves over top of the brown gloves that he also got from work. http://www.brookvilleglove.com/Burleybear.htm For a coat - I had a WW 1 GI green coat with no liner and a tee shirt and a flanel shirt and a sweat shirt. For pants, I had two pairs of blue jeans on and maybe a pair of GI surplus long johns that my one uncle brought home from the airforce - out of the garbage bin. I wore two pairs of tube socks inside of my shoes and I might or might not have had a pair of artic boots to pull over my shoes. http://www.redhillgeneralstore.com/articboot.htm There was no luxuries back then. Hunting involved me sitting in the freezing cold from 6 am to 5 pm and not saying a word about how cold it was or that I wanted to go home, because we walked 3 miles back into the State Game Lands at 5 am and he was not going to go out until we got our deer or the sun went down. You were not allowed to build a fire back then in the Game Lands and there was no boot warmers or hand warmers like there is today. I was 15 before I got my first buck and I was 20 before I shot my first doe. So I paid my dues for many years before I became the hunter ( lean, mean, killing machine ) I am today. If the first time it got hard, I were to give up, I would not be a hunter today. It is easy to sit in the camp and look out the window, or go back to camp to eat lunch or go to the restroom. But I can remember times where everyone else got a deer but me and even when my uncle asked my dad if they should put a drive on for me to try to help me to get a deer or take me someplace else where there was deer to try to get me a opportunity to shoot one, dad would just say screw him, either he gets a deer or else he doesn't. All I can say is that it is a cruel world out there and if either of my grandfathers had lived long enough to take me hunting maybe things would have been different. But handing you a opportunity to just go out someplace and have someone hand you a deer doesn't teach you much. Along with the fact that I think that you had arterial motives when you made this post and maybe you thought that if you got people to feel sorry for you that they would offer you something - like a tv deal where you would get to go hunting with them and become a big shot. The first buck I shot was with a Remington model 721 30/06 rifle with a Weaver 4x scope and military sling. It was running so fast that I aimed for the front and hit it in the hind quarters. I can show you the exact spot where the deer was running through the woods to this very day. It was a spot I found on my own and I hunted in the same vicinity for many years after that and was very successful. One funny part to the whole story was when I graduated from high school in 1982 and was hunting on a Wednesday in the same place with my dad and uncle on a warm afternoon. It must have been 70* outside. I bought a Orange hunting suit with my graduation money and my dad and I shot a nice 10 point buck. Someone else was chasing that deer and it ran into a place where they had just logged it out and my dad was getting a drink at the spring and a person yelled down to him that it was coming his way and he stated shooting and it came up to me and I shot a couple of times and hit it and it went down. When we found it in a pile of tree tops, dad said it was his deer and took it off me. Boy how things changed in 5 years! Dad won the buck pool at camp ($160) and used the money from the pool to buy himself a new orange hunting suit just like mine. In the end, it doesn't matter how many deer you get or how many points it has on it's antlers or if it is a trophy or not. All that matters is the stories you make - because when you get sick or old all you are going to have left is the stories anyways - just like my poor old crippled grandfather who was told by my mean old dad and uncle that he was not welcome to stay at the camp anymore - because he got drunk and told his stories to everyone - weather they wanted to hear them or not. Only now that he is gone, they wish that they had a movie camera and preserved all his stories. What you wouldn't give to hear them one more time. If you want to become a real hunter, you need to forget about all those gimmick's you see on television. Those things only works because those people using those products are being paid to use those products and most of those deer are being shot inside of a pen someplace and that isn't real hunting in my book. Real hunting to me is when you are on public land and you shot a deer because you were a better hunter then everyone else and not because you were sitting behind a posted sign and had all the deer to yourself. Canned hunts teaches you nothing about sportsmanship and the true meaning of hunting. I can't tell you how many times I dragged deer for other hunters that were old or sick and I was a young pup and just wanted to help a guy out. Or the time when I shot a doe way back in the Indian Caves and gave it away because it was too far to drag back to the camp. I was 3 miles away and the snow was up to your doupah. That is what real hunting is all about!

The old Remington Game Master 760 was actually a very reliable and accurate rifle for it's time. It's free float barrel design was more accurate and more reliable per a caliber of manufacturer - then most bolt action rifles of it's time. The 7600 - was a cheaply made, inferior reproduction of the old and reliable 760. The 7600 first came out as the Model 6, only hunters did not like the name Model 6 and refused to buy it, so Remington changed the name and it will be there until the company goes out of business. The Semi Automatic rifle was a lesser model of the same gun with a semi automatic action - and poorer ballistics. For the most part, most Semi Automatic rifles groups best when kept below maximum chamber pressures. The 30 - 06 Govt, which was first designed in the early part of the 1900's and first adopted by the military in 1903, which was then improved in 1906 - hence the name thirty ought six, was first designed to shoot 220 grain bullets. The people who were on the board for the military were often times veterans of the great Civil War and thought that bigger was better. It was later found that the best accuracy was achieved using 150 grain bullets. Shooting a 180 grain bullet - heavy load, in a gun designed with a accuracy of about 3 to 4 inches for the pattern or group as you would call it - is like trying to hunt rabbits with snow balls. Unless you get really close, I wouldn't expect too much out of that gun and I do not believe that reloading will improve accuracy very much either. Two things to remember is that when the first round is chambered by hand and not by firing, the gun will shoot the first round in a different place then all the other rounds which were fed by the action of the gun being shot. The other thing to remember is that a clean barrel will not hit the target in the same place as a barrel that has the residue of several other rounds shot through it. The outside temperature also plays a part in accuracy. A gun shoots differently at 70* then it does at 0* outside. If I were you, I would find which round shot the best and then buy 10 or more boxes of shells - from the same manufacturer of the same lot. That way you would know what the gun was going to do for the next 10 years or so. I would not buy one box per a year and try to sight it in from year to year, hoping that the manufacturer holds the same tolerances and standards from one year to the next.

How did you earn them? If you want a model for a self made man, you can look at me. I practically came from nothing. My parents didn't even have indoor plumbing until I was 6 years old. I didn't get my first job until I was 20 years old. I walked to work every day - 3 miles each way and my occupation was a delivery driver. I managed to save $1000 in 4 months making $3 a hour at my job, and that was how I earned the money to buy my first vehicle and be able to go out further into the world and find better employment. I also used that vehicle as a home when I was homeless for a year! My guess is your mom and dad was rich and gave you everything. Your first job was due to having connections, a good family name and mom and dad giving you the family vehicle to get to and from work, and you might even have a education which your parents or the government sponsored you. You didn't earn it - it was given to you and you are too blind to realize that without god on your side and the luck of the Irish that you were born to your family and not mine - you could very well be in my situation. When you loose your house, your car, your girlfriend, your 6 year old daughter and your job and your health and your savings, your dog's - all in a span of 10 years, then you will know what suffering is all about. I quite literally have nothing and yet there are people who would like to be like me and other people who has more then me, that blows all their money and then comes to me for a loan when times gets tough. What I am telling you is from years of experience, and for some reason - you just don't see the big picture. I had 4 dogs stole out of my yard. They were all hunting dogs, two Beagles and two Springer Spaniels. People knew my routine and when I was home and when I was not and when I was awake and when I was asleep and they came when I was not watching and took what was mine. I had nothing, and yet someone wanted what little I had. One dog was a birthday present to me and one dog was a birthday present for my 4 year old daughter. One dog was only 6 weeks old! One dog was stole out of it's pen, while I was in Church on a Saturday night at mass, not 300 feet from my back door - in a matter of 45 minutes they had my dog and was long gone. I even offered a $1000 reward and never got my dog back. Just be glad that it was just one of your possessions, an inanimate object and not one of your animals or your children or your wife or that they burned down your house. Wake up and smell the coffee!

How to answer this post without inflaming someone. Back in the day, when hunting was nothing more then a old pair of camo clothes - bought at the Army and Navy surplus store and a 30/06 rifle and a box of Remington Core lockt ammo. All a man had to do to hunt deer was take a couple of 2 x 4's out in the woods and nail them to a tree and make a small platform and nail some boards to the tree for steps and you thought you were set for life. We didn't need any trail cam's, Mossy Oak camo clothes, a bow that cost more then our rifle or a $35,000 pick up truck to haul it home in. Now a days, people have too much free money lying around and nothing to spend it on and they feel the need to spend all kinds of money on such non sense as trail cams. The Posted signs, which first came out in Texas 40 years ago has migrated to Pennsylvania and now everyone thinks that a free roaming deer is theirs and greed has taken over and paid hunts and lease ground is the norm. What started out in the purest sense as a sport which could be enjoyed by everyone has turned into a obsession where everyone thinks that they have to know everything and they want to see everything that comes on their property. If you didn't want someone to steal your camera, you would have put it 12 feet up into the tree where most people couldn't reach it. As I have said in one of my previous posts, I don't need all that technology to shoot one little stupid deer. I would rather sit on a stump and hunt like the Indians did 300 years ago. If I get a deer, all is well, if I don't, then I suck as a hunter and I need to find a new place to hunt! I don't know when all this bragging started or why people are so obsessed with deer and antlers and the number of points. I would rather shoot 3 button bucks and have edible meat in the freezer then shoot a 23 point buck and then have everyone and his brother hounding me for directions to where my deer stand is at and asking for permission to hunt on my property. Just because you got one deer there, doesn't mean there will be more. Every once in a blue moon, one gets lost and ends up in my sights. I cannot say for sure that he lived there all of his life or that he just chased some does the wrong way and he ended up under my stand. I would take the loss of a deer camera pretty hard if I owned one. Especially since I have not had a income in the last 3 years. But I would never spend good money on something that does nothing but take pictures of silly old deer. Maybe someone thought that it was some type of security camera and that you were watching to see who went on your property. Maybe they didn't want to get caught and the easiest way for them to sneak on your property was to get rid of the trail camera. Maybe they sold it for dope money, or maybe they kept it for themselves. If I had a camera, I would paint and scribe my name all over it. Make sure that no one could steal it or sell it or use it without being caught. I am a honest person, but I would be really tempted to steal a camera if I found it on State Game Lands. Finders Keepers - is what the police said to me when someone stole my wallet in a grocery store one day. If it lands on the floor and someone picks it up - they didn't steal it, they found it. Before my wallet was stolen with all my identification and all the money I had in the world, I wouldn't even think of stealing someone else's property. But since it has been stolen, I see the world in different eye's. My bible in the New Testament says - Do unto others as you would have done to you. But in the old Testament it says - A Eye for a Eye and a Tooth for a Tooth! If you knew the story of my life and how I came from nothing and am fortunate enough not to be a homeless person right now, you wouldn't even care about the loss of a trail camera, compared to all the set backs I have endured. The loss of my sight, the loss of my hearing, the loss of my good health, the loss of my ability to go to work and earn a living and the disability not being bad enough to collect Social Security Disability or Public Assistance. If it was not for the food pantry, I wouldn't even be able to eat more then the most basic foods, which is all I buy in the stores. Day old bread, milk, egg's, butter, and a special treat of cookies or jelly or potato chips is all the more that is on my weekly grocery list. When you have no money coming in, you learn to do without. In the grand scheme of things, what is it going to matter in 100 years - who stole your trail cam or what happened to it. Just be glad that you have a job and a home and a family that cares about you and food on the table and money in your pocket and your good health. There are a lot of people in this world, and even in your neighborhood that does not have it as good as you do! Take the couple hundred dollars you spent on the camera and put it in the Salvation Army bucket and see how much good a couple hundred dollars can do to change the lives of someone who has nothing and quit worrying about how many deer are on your property or if someone is trespassing. I have nothing, yet I am willing to share what little I have with everyone around me and I give from the heart and not from my surplus - like what you read in the bible from the story of the Widow's Mite. Read that story sometime - along with the Book of Ruth and maybe it will change your life as it did mine - when I was a homeless person and had absolutely nothing. Store your treasures in heaven, there no thief can steal, nor fire destroy. All this information is coming from a person that isn't even religious... If there is a god in this world, the person that stole your camera will get his in the end. If this is all there is to life and if when we die, we are nothing more then something for the worms to eat, then I guess I ought to be out robbing and stealing to get what I don't have - just like everyone else is doing. Stepping all over the little people, trying to be a big shot. Screwing everyone along the way, thinking that they are getting ahead - when all the time they are putting blemishes on their immortal soul - with no hope of ever getting into heaven.

Sorry Buddy, but in the corporate world, more then one company is connected at times by the same corporation. All 3 manufacturers comes under the same umbrella of owners. At times, one manufacturer - division might separate from the others, and since i do not spend my time looking at company prospectives - I cannot tell you the names of the companies involved, but I can tell you that at one time they were all the same company. Stihl is a Commercial / Industrial saw and Husky is a homeowners type saw that is designed for casual use only. Not that you couldn't use a Husky out in the woods or that the Stihl will last any longer. Just that they make larger models of saws for commercial use and usually they have heavier components in the Stihl saws. My buddy had a Stihl that was two years old that already needed a new jug and the replacement cylinder was almost as much money as a new saw and they just part's it out. The saw it replaced was 20 years old and still ran when they bought the new one. That pretty much tells me that the new stuff on the market today is mostly junk. The David Bradley saw I had when I was a kid would probably be 50 years old by now and would still be running, had my dad not lent it out to my cousin who used it and then gave it away to his neighbor - probably for beer money.

I will not tell you that I am a professional hunter, but I will tell you that I have harvested over 130 deer in my lifetime.Hunting requires skill and dedication and lot's of years of experience before you can be proficient enough to call yourself a real hunter. Paying your dues' and years of experience is the best teacher.I am the type of person that is always the first out the door at camp on opening day of deer season and the last to return to camp on the last day. While others are going back to camp to eat lunch, take a pee, sleep, I am sitting in my tree stand, waiting for Mr. Buck or Miss Doe to come walking by.I do not, nor have I ever relied on scents or cover scents to make me a better hunter. In the woods, everything has a time and a place. Deer live there 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year and they know every bush, every tree, every tree stump in the woods. Just one little thing out of place, like a car parked along a road is enough to set them off and make them leary of going someplace where they might get shot.On the other hand, I have worked in the woods and have ran chainsaw and looked behind me and saw deer watching me run the saw. Once they learn that the sound of the chainsaw means browse on the ground that they could not reach, they will go out of their way to be the first to the dinner table.About 7 years ago, I bought on sale, after the season was over, a bottle of Tinks 69. Most times it sits in my backpack and I forget to use it. Products like Tink's 69 relies on the time of year when the deer are in full rut. If the rut is over, all the Tink's 69 in the world is not going to help you. As a matter of fact, it will repel the deer if the deer that produced the scent is stronger then the deer in the woods you are hunting.Animals can smell other animals pee and can tell what condition - physically that animal is in. It's like leaving a calling card.This year my Pennsylvania hunt consisted of 3 1/2 hours in a tree stand over looking a bedding area. I consistently saw deer and bucks from 7 Am that morning - at the time when the season opened, until 9:30 Am when I harvested my buck. At 7:30 Am that morning, a herd of about 12 deer, including about 3 bucks invaded my territory and a small spike stood not 40 yards from my tree stand as a look out from 7:30 to 9:30 when the deer decided to leave the bedding area.About 9 Am that morning, I decided to squirt a little Tink's 69 on the side of the tree I was sitting in and something ticked off the deer and made them mad enough to get up and run past my stand. The large bucks were herding the doe's and did not want to loose their doe's to a foreign buck.This hunt was in a 4 point to a side zone and anything smaller then a 4 point buck was illegal. I left trophy bucks go that morning because I could not put 4 points on one side of their rack.Needless to say, after 6 years of not getting a buck, I took the first opportunity that came along this year. At the end of the day, we had two large bucks on the ground out of the same tree stand. This stand was not on posted ground and was only 4 feet x 4 feet, not some big tower stand over looking a corn field or food plot. That Saturday, my dad also shot a nice trophy buck out of the same stand. We do not use trail cams and we did not know that there was even any deer in the area. We just relied on the knowledge that in years past that the stand was productive.I would have to say that the $5 I spent on the bottle of Tink's 69 was the best $5 I ever spent!