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Thread: Is it over yet? Ammo crunch.

  1. #21
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    Quote Originally Posted by randyt View Post
    They do make a marlin 60 that takes a box magazine, not sure of the model number.
    When you say box magazine do you mean a clip feed? If so I got one, that's a 989 M1 Carbine. I bought it in 1965 and still have it. It is in excellent condition and still have the adjustable rear sight. The rear sight alone is worth $75. Probably several thousand rounds have been fired through it. It is amazingly accurate. It fails to eject empty casings about once in 50 rounds. I tried to rebuild it this past spring with new springs and firing pin but the parts from Numeric Arms were junk. Taking it apart and cleaning the receiver helped more than anything. I also have a
    Marlin 60 and it works perfect.

    Can you tell me more about the " Great Raccoon War of 2012 "
    Last edited by jim Glass; 10-22-2017 at 04:58 PM.


  2. #22
    Senior Member randyt's Avatar
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    I googled it and the one I'm thinking of is the model 795
    so the definition of a criminal is someone who breaks the law and you want me to believe that somehow more laws make less criminals?

  3. #23
    Administrator Rick's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Jim
    Can you tell me more about the " Great Raccoon War of 2012 "


    Oh my word. I thought EVERYONE knew about that. That is right up there with the lost F.A.R.T. boat and the great canoe accident. Get some popcorn and your favorite beverage. Hop up in your lazy boy. Kyrat will be along shortly.

  4. #24
    Senior Member Graf's Avatar
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    I like the 10/22 but favor my Henry's they shoot any .22 I feed it CB, shorts, Long, Long Rifle just like the smooth action, that being said I need to replace a 10/22 recently stolen looking to replace it with 10/22 stainless take down unit. Switched sights on my older 10/22 to a Williams peep sight I do very well with it.
    Semper Paratus

  5. #25
    Senior Member hunter63's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Rick View Post
    Oh my word. I thought EVERYONE knew about that. That is right up there with the lost F.A.R.T. boat and the great canoe accident. Get some popcorn and your favorite beverage. Hop up in your lazy boy. Kyrat will be along shortly. [/COLOR]
    Yeah, Jim....you will get a kick out of the night vision scope(sorta) and duck tape part.....
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  6. #26
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    Quote Originally Posted by hunter63 View Post
    Yeah, Jim....you will get a kick out of the night vision scope(sorta) and duck tape part.....
    I can hardly wait! I googled "the great raccoon war of 2012" and this is what came up:http://alphahole.net/?p=723
    Looks like some kind of board game. I would like to know who the participants were in this raccoon war and who won?

  7. #27

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    Quote Originally Posted by Rick View Post
    Oh my word. I thought EVERYONE knew about that. That is right up there with the lost F.A.R.T. boat and the great canoe accident. Get some popcorn and your favorite beverage. Hop up in your lazy boy. Kyrat will be along shortly. [/COLOR]
    I'm relatively new here, so I haven't heard about any of these either.

    Links would be appreciated.
    "The more complex the mind, the greater the need for the simplicity of play." Capt. James T. Kirk

  8. #28

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    I have very little experience with firearms, so I'm glad you slightly detoured this thread kyrat. I was under the impression that the Ruger 10/22 was the "standard". A childhood friend who was into hunting had that opinion, and I've seen it expressed on the infallible internet.

    I do want to get a .22-ish gun for my son (and me, so we can learn together). Can you point me to a RELIABLE source of info (some kind of rifle primer) so that I might make an informed decision?
    "The more complex the mind, the greater the need for the simplicity of play." Capt. James T. Kirk

  9. #29
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    Quote Originally Posted by JohnLeePettimore View Post
    I'm relatively new here, so I haven't heard about any of these either.

    Links would be appreciated.
    John; Just a heads up, the folks here are easily entertained and easily distracted unless they are doing a firearm review. For me, the suspense is building to get this raccoon war cleared up.

  10. #30
    Senior Member hunter63's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by jim Glass View Post
    John; Just a heads up, the folks here are easily entertained and easily distracted unless they are doing a firearm review. For me, the suspense is building to get this raccoon war cleared up.
    LOL.....PM Kyrat....See if he remembers the thread....

    I was just looking in "search" for "Great racoon wars of 2012"......but as usual....thread titles many time have nothing to do with the threads select.....just an attempt to be "cool" but hard to locate.

    I don't believe there is a conspiracy to withhold stories or the F.A.R.T. or the infamous tragic canoe accidents........but somethings just get fondly remembered....
    Do not think there is a "list".

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  11. #31
    Senior Member kyratshooter's Avatar
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    Those threads are so old I do not even remember which section most were posted in, either homesteading or the G&A section here, and it would have been through the years of 2012-2013 when the raccoons attacked and human and chicken existence as we know it was endangered.

    http://www.wilderness-survival.net/f...ht=chicks+guns

    I went into extreme homestead mode the year I retired and decided to add a flock of chickens to my situation. I had a big garden planted and the chickens seemed the logical next move. I built a pen and bought a couple dozen chicks, raised them to proper age and put them to the task of laying eggs.

    About the time I had $100 worth of chicken feed in each bird the raccoons attacked, and I am not talking about one raccoon taking a chicken. They attacked en-mass and in organized fashion, sometimes raiding in stealth mode like little bandit masked ninjas. I was losing a chicken each week and they were breaching the cage in ways I could not imagine. I would swear I saw one standing on another's shoulders using a cordless drill to unscrew the door hinges one night!

    Apparently the raccoons in my area had been trained by special forces troops and employed as paid assassins by the CIA, and their training camp was somewhere on the banks of the nearby lake. There were hundreds of them! I did not just kill one or two raccoons, I killed dozens!

    They would come in during the wee hours of the morning and attempt to breech the pen defenses. The chickens would squawk and if they were lucky they would wake me up and I would go attempt to shoot a raccoon, in the dark, at 40 yards, while they were moving.

    By the time I got out the door with the rifle they were usually gone, so that prompted several unusual activities including the removal of the back kitchen window for use of the house as a shooting blind, a set of motion activated alarms to wake me when trouble approached and the trial and use of several novel rifle sighting devices to improve efficiency.

    Even though I live in a rural area I do have some neighbors a few hundred yards distant and one of them happens to be a county judge, who I hesitated to awaken each night at 3am with a flurry of very loud and distinctive gunshots. As nice as he is that might bring down county legislation I did not wish to deal with, or have on my permanent record.

    Besides that after one shot was fired the entire assault force would disappear instantly and the fun would be over for the morning.

    I began the efforts using an assortment of .22lr rifles, the 10/22 being one of the first of the selection. I had encountered several glitches with the 10/22 over the years and it was this raccoon attack that magnified all the problems the rifle had.

    The 10/22 is a fine little plinking rifle for use in broad daylight, at a shooting bench, when using the ammo it prefers. Not so much when the attempts are in the middle of the night, in the dark (If I turned on interior lights the raccoons ran away before I could get a shot). I invariably wound up with a first shot misfire, followed by a second round jammed on the feed ramp which required the magazine to be removed before the jam could be cleared, then the magazine would fail to seat and the next round would also jam as the magazine fell to the floor and bounced across the kitchen.

    All the while the raccoons would be doing a square dance on top of the chicken coop and mocking me with obscene hand gestures known only to the raccoon world. They would give me an appropriate few seconds and disappear into the brush behind the chicken coop.

    There was one memorable night when the alarm went off and I went to the back window with rifle in hand. I had installed some sort of black light or something and the critters would not notice the illumination but would show up like small characters in a steamboat minstrel show. When I flipped on the switch I had three or four raccoons on top of the coop, two coyotes waiting on the ground and a possum ambling in from one corner.

    By the time I decided which was the most important target I had made some noise and all were gone!

    At any rate there is a difference between shooting a moving raccoon in the dark and shooting the same critter in daylight and one is not always assured a brain shot from 40 yards for that "you should not take a shot if you do not have perfect shot placement" approach. Just as stupid was the ".22lr will kill anything with proper shot placement" approach. There was not such thing as perfect shot placement!

    When critters are after your livestock in the dark you shoot at the biggest part of the target and hope for a hit. In that situation a 40 grain .22lr is a poor choice. Raccoons are hard to kill!

    Add to that the requirement that only one shot be fired, so as not to awaken the Judge, and one is caught in a quandary. You do not want an extremely loud report, but you need some power to anchor a hard to kill critter with one shot from 35-40 yards. You also have to do this work in the dark, much like Jim Glass and his Florida hog hunting.

    It only took a week or two of this to realize the ability of a .22lr to accomplish this work was fantasy. Simply not enough power and not any ability to guarantee shot placement in the walnut sized brain of a raccoon. That was not before I had tried several different things to enhance both the decibel rating and night time accuracy potential of the selection of .22 rifles on hand.

    We will not speak of the decibel rating thing. I will admit to using low velocity .22 subsonic loads to lessen the crack of the shot. Anything else I will leave to the imagination and say that if one knows what they are doing anything can be accomplished and the 10/22, once again, is inhibited in this effort by having an extremely loud bolt that rings like a bell when returning to battery. It is almost as loud as the report of the shell! But most of the internet myths do not really work well enough to bother with. Don't take the risk.

    At that point in time the best price on a night vision scope was around $1k. You can buy a lot of eggs for $1k so that was not going to be in the cards. Something cheaper was called for.

    There was one failed attempt using the famed duct tape and a night vision device from Toys or Us. Strangely, it worked better than expected but not good enough. Suffice it to same that those $50 NV classes from ToU are good out to 100 yards and after 5 years are still working. Money well spent and I wish I had owned then back in the early 1970s on a few dark nights.

    The Cross hairs of a scope simply disappear in low light conditions, no good for my needs. I tried fiber optics, no good. I tried a laser, no good at that range. I tried a red dot, better but still not exactly what I needed.

    Suddenly one night I was watching an episode of Person of Interest and one of the primaries was using a scope with illuminated cross hairs and they showed up on camera so well that my first though was that it had to be fake, a camera trick, and it was. But instead of dismissing it I went to the famed website of the Sportsman's Guide and ordered an NCStar scope with illuminated cross hairs for $50.

    The results were not fake. I now have IL scopes on most of my rifles, especially the ones I use in deep woods low light conditions and every one of my EBRs. I now prefer a low magnification LR scope to a red dot for most uses.

    At about the same time I obtained a .357 barrel for my H&R Handirifle and the race was on!

    I staked some solar yard lights around the pen to give background light and using the magnificent technology of illuminated cross hairs and 158 grain SWC .38 special reloads I began to eliminate the raccoon population from the chicken run. With the use of the .38 I had a round that would knock out a raccoon even with a marginal shot. He might drag himself away for a few yards but I would find him bled out at the edge of the yard the next morning.

    Sad to say that I did not win this long and hard fought war. Once the Raccoons were gone the coyotes continued and I eventually lost the entire flock of birds except for one lone little hen. The last of the survivors, she mopped around the yard pitiful and lonely for several months and became a real pet. She followed me around when I did garden work, came and pecked on the door for treats and slept on the back porch, or sometimes on top of the car or occasionally in the trees, always changing her place to hide from the predators.

    I finally gave her away to a neighbor who was starting her own flock so the little hen would have company at last. She was very prone to go broody and the neighbor used her to hatch several clutches of chicks over the next few months.
    Last edited by kyratshooter; 10-23-2017 at 05:29 PM.
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  12. #32
    Senior Member hunter63's Avatar
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    I never use smilies.....
    There you go Jim......
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  13. #33
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    WOW....Holy crap.....the raccoons won?????????? That makes my story about raccoons under the house nothing compared to the great raccoon war of 2012.

    I think I would have graduated to explosives though, triggered by a manual switch so not to blow up the neighbors dog or cat. Ya know, a game warden in Florida told me I could kill hogs with any weapon I could legally posses including dynamite. There are youtube videos of people culling herds of hogs with explosives, Beware I think alcohol is involve from the background noise.

    I plan to reduce the raccoon population in Florida though. I have 4-5 raccoons coming into my bait pile at night. One night I watched a raccoon climb a tree about 15' away. I asked myself what he was up to. A few minutes later the raccoon made a God awful screeching sound. Trying to scare me off I assumed. I have a Crossman dual cylinder CO2 pellet gun to try on the raccoons or I may use a crossbow with a lighted crosshair scope.
    Last edited by jim Glass; 10-23-2017 at 02:59 PM.

  14. #34
    Senior Member kyratshooter's Avatar
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    Now as a separate post regarding which .22 to purchase/what is the best .22lr to buy?

    I can not tell you that because the purchase of a 22 is for many different motivations and uses.

    In my opinion, and that is all it is, my opinion, the purchase of a .22 will fall into three different categories.

    1. You are buying the rifle for fun, plinking and playing with the kids/grand-kids, and the rare hunting experience.

    2. You are buying the rifle for serious target work in competition

    3. You need a rifle for serious food gathering within the rifle's capabilities.

    While sometimes the rifles are used for overlapping reasons they are really not made with overlapping quality.

    For a plinking rifle the primary concerns are reasonable accuracy and reasonable reliability. No one wants to miss every shot due to defects in the rifle and no one wants to spend all their time clearing jams. About anything that works can and is used for this tin can and candy lollipop shooting and one is as good as the other as long as it can hit a tin can at 25 yards and does not jam more than once every few magazines.

    That could be Cricket Rifle, it could be a Marlin or Mossberg. It might even be a Chinese knock off of something or a Henry, or the 10/22.

    The 10/22 is about the top of this heap. However, people have very selective memories and they fail to remember all the times the magazine did not seat fully, all the times they had to use a pocket knife to pull a case out of the chamber, and all of those mysterious shots that you cold swear were dead on target but you still missed!

    And the 10/22, when bought at retail, is not cheap!

    The Henry is really over priced for inclusion in this horde. Fact is that for the price the Henry does not fit well in either category. It is over priced as a plinker and under qualified as a serious target rifle. It falls more in the line of the old Marlin M39, as an entry level game gun.

    In my opinion, and that is what it is, just an opinion, the best plinker for the money that can be pressed into occasional squirrel hunting use is one of the Marlin M60 variations or the Mossberg copies of the same.

    They are good, dependable, reasonably accurate rifles that cost half of the price of a 10/22 and do exactly the same thing and do it just as well. They can be bought for $100 on sale and less than $175 as normal retail. They will then shoot for the next 50 years with only an occasional spray out with carb cleaner and re-lubing with WD-40. You can get one with tube magazine or box magazine from 5 shots to 20 shots. They are already grooved on top for a scope so not special mounts are needed. They also have a better factory stock than the 10/22, which is set up specifically for scope use.

    They also have the benefit of an aftermarket much less well know than the 10/22. You can buy extension mags for the box fed guns, aftermarket stocks, and many goodies for the platform. It can be a real fun system to use. Add to that an unlimited parts availability due to the nearly one century of production and you are assured to keep them running.

    Stepping up to the more expensive .22 rifles is a bit odd. Section 2 would contain the bulk of the expensive target rifles specified to be in .22 rimfire. Each rifle has specification all its own and one brand over another is not anything we even care about here. Most folks do not even know which brand of .22 was shot by the winner of gold at the 2014 winter Olympic biathlon competition. Most do not even know what operation system they use, which is a spring loaded straight pull system.

    This area of expertise is above my pay grade, but I have checked some of the prices and if you want in be prepared to spend thousands and not hundreds.

    I do know some guys in my local club that have confiscated some good quality target .22 rifles and re-purposed them to the needs of our club shoots which include golf balls at 200 meters and computer print outs of life sized flies which are shot at 50 meters. They mostly use old Winchester and Remington target rifles purchased from the CMP "back in the day". As rebuilt they weigh about 25 pounds and are of no use in the plinking or hunting field.

    Which leaves category #3. Serious hunting.

    In site of the overblown hype of the imagined capabilities of the .22 round it is best restricted to shooting very small game or targets. To me that includes rabbits, squirrels and in some areas various birds.

    I know grandad and Uncle Jim used a .22 to shoot hogs on the farm and "It did the job" but that hog was shot at 2' range, stunned and its throat cut before it hit the ground. Most of the tales of use of the .22 on larger game never refer to the game that was missed, was wounded or ran off to live for years with a .22 slug in their shoulder or neck.

    Yes if you hit a deer square in the brain it will be dead in a few thrashes, but I know two people who are walking around to this day with a .22 slug in their heads and except for the occasional twitching they are fine. It is that selected memory thing in play again. No one admits to dating the ugly girls.

    This is the category where you spend some money because you may or may not be required to feed yourself with the rifle, you may be using it for a paid hunt such as going on safari, or you just have money to spend on good quality firearms to plink with.

    This is where the Henry and Marlin lever guns enter the picture at entry level, along with some of the good old Remington and Winchester rifles in bolt and semi-auto form. Browning autos are another good example as are the fine semi-autos made by Wetherby. Many of these fine rifles are no longer in production due to lack of market or cost effectiveness in production.

    Mixed in here are some good offerings from the CZ America company and low level Anchez, Walther and other quality European makers.

    These are very much in the area of 100% percent reliability and accuracy better than the ammo they shoot. The average plinker and occasional squirrel hunter is not going to pay the price for these rifles and most would feel the money spent was a waste. $500-$1000 for a .22lr is a bit more than most intend to spend on a centerfire rifle or a good shotgun.

    What is my favored .22 ???

    My "go to" rifle in .22lr is a fine old Remington Nylon 66 w/Weaver K4 scope on top. Both rifle and scope are older than some of the members here.

    Now that is just my opinion and no one has to agree with me. You can be wrong if you want too.
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    Wow, kyrat. That's for both posts.

    Thanks. Very helpful.
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  16. #36
    Senior Member Phaedrus's Avatar
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    That's odd. I've had a few 10/22s although none of them newer than early 90's. All ran like sewing machines and were quite accurate. My oldest one was owned by me when I was just a kid; my brother and I set up empty .22 and 12 ga shells to use as targets. In the decade I had that gun I don't recall ever having to pry an empty from the chamber (although it happened with a friend's Marlin frequently enough that I ruined a blade on my pocket knife helping him frequently clear it). It was a long time ago but I think the whole gun was steel and wood back then. The rotary mag strikes me as a marvel of engineering. I can't recall ever having an issue when using CCI Mini-Mag ammo although like all .22's there were a couple brands it didn't like.

    FWIW my experience with the Remington Nylon 66 was also very good.

  17. #37
    Administrator Rick's Avatar
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    I must have bought my 10/22 in the mid 70's and I've never had any trouble with it. I'm not keen on its accuracy but it isn't too bad. As far as function it eats everything I put in it and I can't recall ever having a fail to eject although in all that time I'm sure I have had. As I said earlier, my grandson love's to shoot it and he gives it a pretty decent work out. I clean all my weapons after every trip to the range so maybe that has something to do with it. I'm pretty fanatic about clean weapons and clean tools. If I use them I clean them. The only real complaint I have is with the bolt release. That has to be one of the poorest designs ever put on any firearm.

  18. #38
    Senior Member randyt's Avatar
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    I have a nylon 66 that I traded from my dad many years ago. Shot it some but not much. I have two 22 lr target rifles, both peep sighted. One is a bolt action that had belonged to my dad back in the early 1950s. He shot competition with it. I think it may be a savage 44, not sure. The other is a BSA martini. Both are heavy as, well lets just say they are heavy.
    so the definition of a criminal is someone who breaks the law and you want me to believe that somehow more laws make less criminals?

  19. #39
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    See, Jim. That's the kind of entertainment you get around here for free. That's the kind of stuff legends are born of.

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