"Fish fingers" is of course the English term for what Americans call "fish sticks." The diamond jubilee of the introduction of fish fingers into Great Britain has occasioned a number of off-beat stories in The Guardian and elsewhere. Introduced in 1955 by Birds Eye, the nearly tasteless fish finger made from cod, pollack, or haddock beat out competing products made from stronger flavored fish like salmon or herring. (And in the UK, "fish fingers" likewise triumphed over the name I would have preferred, "cod pieces.") Children, of course, typically love fish fingers and retain a fondness for them.
Recent studies have demonstrated, however, that a significant percentage of primary school children in the UK are more than a little confused about what constitutes a fish finger. In a study by the British Nutrition Foundation (BNF) of more than 27,500 children, 18% believed that fish fingers come from chicken. Other findings from the BNF survey are that 10% of primary school children believe that tomatoes grow underground, while 29% believe that cheese comes from plants.
One would like to hope that enlightenment accompanies additional age, but a survey of 16-24 year-olds by the firm Rouse Honey points in another direction. One in eight of these 16-24 year-olds think that bees have to be squeezed to produce honey. One in seven--14%--believe that potatoes grow on trees. And my favorite finding is that one in five--20%, that's twenty per cent-- of British young adults believe that fish fingers come from the fingers of fish!
Hits and Misses
Monday, November 30, 2015
Thursday, November 19, 2015
Carl Akeley's In Brightest Africa
Thanks to Stephen Christopher Quinn's wonderfully illustrated book, The Great Habitat Dioramas of the American Museum of Natural History, I became interested in Carl Akeley, the person who was primarily responsible for the idea of representing wild animals in lifelike poses in a meticulously replicated habitat, one based on a specific place, seaon, and time of day.
I soon was happily immersed in Akeley's In Brightest Africa (Garden City, NY, 1920), an autobiographical account of his trips to Africa published four years before he died and dedicated to the memory of Theodore Roosevelt. Born in 1864 in western New York State, Akeley had only three years of formal education, but he knew when he was sixteen that he wanted to be a taxidermist.
At that time, taxidermy was a catch as catch can business. To learn how to mount animals, Akeley went to Ward's Natural Science Establishment in Rochester, where he discovered that taxidermy consisted of treating the skin of an animal, wiring the bones of the legs so it could stand up, and then stuffing the skin with straw until it could hold no more. No attempt was made to replicate the musculature of the creature in question, let alone its bone structure. If the stuffing was too thick in one area, they simply took a long needle and sewed through it. "The profession I had chosen as the most satisfying and stimulating to a man's soul," Akeley laments, "turned out at that time to have very little science and no art at all."
So through a combination of self-study and getting tutored by others on his own time while he held down full-time jobs, Akeley learned anatomy and studied art, applying what he learned to taxidermy. He was one of the first to make manikins, noting as an aside that though it seemed simple, the process had been more difficult than learning how to cast in bronze, something he continued to do for his sculptures the rest of his life. He wanted to study animals in the field, the longer, the better. And he soon realized that particular care had to be taken when collecting a specimen: it wasn't enough just to skin the animal--careful measurements had to be taken, and then one had to correct those measurements to what they would be were the animal still alive with its muscles taut rather than limp.
While working at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, he made his first trip to Africa in 1896 and his second in 1905. In 1909, he went again for the American Museum of Natural History. By his return in 1911, he had resolved to create a great African Hall in the museum. He wanted it to memorialize Teddy Roosevelt, but it's now called the Akeley Hall of African Mammals.
Akeley met Roosevelt several times, and one of the amusing incidents in this book is his meeting the president for the first time at a White House dinner in 1906. Also present was a man from Alaska who had been describing the hunting there. As they entered the dining room, Roosevelt remarked, "As soon as I am through with this job, I am going to Alaska for a good hunt." But during the dinner, Roosevelt asked Akeley so many questions about Africa that Akeley never got to eat a bite. At the end of dinner, Akeley relates, "the President turned to me and said: 'As soon as I am through with this job, I am gong to Africa.'
"'But,' interposed the hunter from the north, 'what is to become of Alaska?'
"'Alaska will have to wait,' Roosevelt replied with finality." And thus came about Roosevelt's African expedition. Back in Africa, on safari, Akeley did encounter Roosevelt, who shot a cow elephant for the group Akeley was planning for the American Museum of Natural History. The two of them talked for three hours, and it was then, Akeley declares, that he learned to love Roosevelt because he'd come to realize "his sincerity, his integrity, and the bigness of the man."
In Brightest Africa contains much more than I can recount here: he went mano a mano with a leopard and survived; charged by an elephant, he saved his life by grabbing a tusk with each hand and swinging between them. He invented and manufactured a cement gun for spraying concrete as well as a "pancake" motion picture camera that proved useful for aerial photography in WW I. He would do anything to obtain a suitable specimen for an exhibit, but he also grieved for the deaths that he caused. Akeley led an expedition to collect mountain gorillas, and he was so impressed by their pacific nature--as opposed to the man-eating monsters of popular fiction--that he lobbied to establish a park to protect this species. His efforts were successful: in 1925, the year before Akeley died, King Albert I of Belgium established the first national park in Africa precisely for this reason. Today, it known as Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Akeley is buried there.
Widely acknowledged as the father of taxidermy, Carl Akeley was much more, an extraordinary man at an extraordinary time--and a writer well worth reading.
I soon was happily immersed in Akeley's In Brightest Africa (Garden City, NY, 1920), an autobiographical account of his trips to Africa published four years before he died and dedicated to the memory of Theodore Roosevelt. Born in 1864 in western New York State, Akeley had only three years of formal education, but he knew when he was sixteen that he wanted to be a taxidermist.
At that time, taxidermy was a catch as catch can business. To learn how to mount animals, Akeley went to Ward's Natural Science Establishment in Rochester, where he discovered that taxidermy consisted of treating the skin of an animal, wiring the bones of the legs so it could stand up, and then stuffing the skin with straw until it could hold no more. No attempt was made to replicate the musculature of the creature in question, let alone its bone structure. If the stuffing was too thick in one area, they simply took a long needle and sewed through it. "The profession I had chosen as the most satisfying and stimulating to a man's soul," Akeley laments, "turned out at that time to have very little science and no art at all."
So through a combination of self-study and getting tutored by others on his own time while he held down full-time jobs, Akeley learned anatomy and studied art, applying what he learned to taxidermy. He was one of the first to make manikins, noting as an aside that though it seemed simple, the process had been more difficult than learning how to cast in bronze, something he continued to do for his sculptures the rest of his life. He wanted to study animals in the field, the longer, the better. And he soon realized that particular care had to be taken when collecting a specimen: it wasn't enough just to skin the animal--careful measurements had to be taken, and then one had to correct those measurements to what they would be were the animal still alive with its muscles taut rather than limp.
While working at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, he made his first trip to Africa in 1896 and his second in 1905. In 1909, he went again for the American Museum of Natural History. By his return in 1911, he had resolved to create a great African Hall in the museum. He wanted it to memorialize Teddy Roosevelt, but it's now called the Akeley Hall of African Mammals.
Akeley met Roosevelt several times, and one of the amusing incidents in this book is his meeting the president for the first time at a White House dinner in 1906. Also present was a man from Alaska who had been describing the hunting there. As they entered the dining room, Roosevelt remarked, "As soon as I am through with this job, I am going to Alaska for a good hunt." But during the dinner, Roosevelt asked Akeley so many questions about Africa that Akeley never got to eat a bite. At the end of dinner, Akeley relates, "the President turned to me and said: 'As soon as I am through with this job, I am gong to Africa.'
"'But,' interposed the hunter from the north, 'what is to become of Alaska?'
"'Alaska will have to wait,' Roosevelt replied with finality." And thus came about Roosevelt's African expedition. Back in Africa, on safari, Akeley did encounter Roosevelt, who shot a cow elephant for the group Akeley was planning for the American Museum of Natural History. The two of them talked for three hours, and it was then, Akeley declares, that he learned to love Roosevelt because he'd come to realize "his sincerity, his integrity, and the bigness of the man."
In Brightest Africa contains much more than I can recount here: he went mano a mano with a leopard and survived; charged by an elephant, he saved his life by grabbing a tusk with each hand and swinging between them. He invented and manufactured a cement gun for spraying concrete as well as a "pancake" motion picture camera that proved useful for aerial photography in WW I. He would do anything to obtain a suitable specimen for an exhibit, but he also grieved for the deaths that he caused. Akeley led an expedition to collect mountain gorillas, and he was so impressed by their pacific nature--as opposed to the man-eating monsters of popular fiction--that he lobbied to establish a park to protect this species. His efforts were successful: in 1925, the year before Akeley died, King Albert I of Belgium established the first national park in Africa precisely for this reason. Today, it known as Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Akeley is buried there.
Widely acknowledged as the father of taxidermy, Carl Akeley was much more, an extraordinary man at an extraordinary time--and a writer well worth reading.
Thursday, October 29, 2015
Atul Gawande's Being Mortal
The human condition is such that we all live with a contradiction. Consider the Classical syllogism: "All men are mortal. I am a man. Therefore, I am mortal." When pressed, we reluctantly assent to its truth for our species, but nearly all of us refuse to believe it in our heart's core. The eventuality of our own death is postponed, pushed off into the indeterminate future, far from now. And even then, we fondly hope, a medical miracle may defeat death, if not forever, at least until we're really, really old.
Atul Gawande's Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End (Metropolitan Books, 2014) goes a long way to blowing this fantasy out of the water. Doctors are very skilled at performing operations to deal with specific problems. But Gawande--a surgeon himself--points out that by recommending and performing these operations, doctors are being unwittingly cruel because their patients consent to them in the hope that they can continue to live longer--much longer. The MD knows this is a stop-gap operation but doesn't want to depress the patient with that information. The patient, meanwhile, is desperate to hold on to life, to do everything possible rather than "give up," and often doesn't want to disappoint the family. Too often, this gap in communication remains unbridged. The doctor does not admit that such surgery, even if successful, will only extend the patient's life a relatively short time--a few months--and may well make the patient's quality of life even worse. The patient, on the other hand, never divulges to the doctor that the additional span of life being hoped for is on the order of twenty years.
Being Mortal casts a wide net, covering the historical reasons why hospitals became the place to die and how they have begun to be succeeded by hospices, which offer palliative care focused on a patient's quality of life. What sets Being Mortal apart, however, is less its analysis of the medical practices involving the terminally ill than its empathetic exploration of what happens when individuals approach the end. Among other things, this is a book about specific individuals, and Gawande makes every one of them memorable. Gawande is refreshingly candid about how difficult it is to engage in straightforward, honest conversations with a dying person. Although I don't believe he ever uses this term, Gawande argues for a collaborative model of care for the terminally ill. The doctor not only provides information on what can be done but also asks the patient about his or her preferences about how to live and how to die. He argues that the family needs to be brought into this collaboration as well, both to become informed about the patient's wishes and to ensure that the doctor does not make all the decisions.
The last part of Being Mortal deals with the death of Gawande's own terminally ill father, a surgeon himself (his mother is also a doctor) who eventually opts for hospice care. By writing about his own family's experiences, he illuminates a better way of dealing with the limited time left to an individual and how this process in turn can help the family cope with that death when it comes. Described this way, it may sound barren, even cold. It is not. Rather, it is a moving account that makes the reader empathize with the entire family.
.
This is a heart-warming book, humane in the best sense of the word. Atul Gawande's Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End deserves to be read by every adult in this country: it is that good and that important.
Atul Gawande's Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End (Metropolitan Books, 2014) goes a long way to blowing this fantasy out of the water. Doctors are very skilled at performing operations to deal with specific problems. But Gawande--a surgeon himself--points out that by recommending and performing these operations, doctors are being unwittingly cruel because their patients consent to them in the hope that they can continue to live longer--much longer. The MD knows this is a stop-gap operation but doesn't want to depress the patient with that information. The patient, meanwhile, is desperate to hold on to life, to do everything possible rather than "give up," and often doesn't want to disappoint the family. Too often, this gap in communication remains unbridged. The doctor does not admit that such surgery, even if successful, will only extend the patient's life a relatively short time--a few months--and may well make the patient's quality of life even worse. The patient, on the other hand, never divulges to the doctor that the additional span of life being hoped for is on the order of twenty years.
Being Mortal casts a wide net, covering the historical reasons why hospitals became the place to die and how they have begun to be succeeded by hospices, which offer palliative care focused on a patient's quality of life. What sets Being Mortal apart, however, is less its analysis of the medical practices involving the terminally ill than its empathetic exploration of what happens when individuals approach the end. Among other things, this is a book about specific individuals, and Gawande makes every one of them memorable. Gawande is refreshingly candid about how difficult it is to engage in straightforward, honest conversations with a dying person. Although I don't believe he ever uses this term, Gawande argues for a collaborative model of care for the terminally ill. The doctor not only provides information on what can be done but also asks the patient about his or her preferences about how to live and how to die. He argues that the family needs to be brought into this collaboration as well, both to become informed about the patient's wishes and to ensure that the doctor does not make all the decisions.
The last part of Being Mortal deals with the death of Gawande's own terminally ill father, a surgeon himself (his mother is also a doctor) who eventually opts for hospice care. By writing about his own family's experiences, he illuminates a better way of dealing with the limited time left to an individual and how this process in turn can help the family cope with that death when it comes. Described this way, it may sound barren, even cold. It is not. Rather, it is a moving account that makes the reader empathize with the entire family.
.
This is a heart-warming book, humane in the best sense of the word. Atul Gawande's Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End deserves to be read by every adult in this country: it is that good and that important.
Saturday, October 10, 2015
Vickery's Advanced Gunsmithing: a Review
W. F. Vickery's Advanced Gunsmithing, which first appeared in the Samworth series of publications in 1940, has been reprinted this year by Skyhorse Publishing. As the subtitle states, this is "A Manual of Instruction in the Manufacture, Alteration, and Repair of Firearms," and for once this is precisely what this book is about. After a preliminary survey of shop equipment, Vickery explains "Barrel Changing and Its Adjustments," proceeds to "Chambering, Boring, and Reaming Tools," and then gives a clear account of "Rifling Tools and the Rifling of Barrels." Actions and their alterations come next, then "Sights, Scopes, and Small Parts." And so Vickery proceeds: after rifles, shotguns; then rimfires; then pistols. The following chapters discuss hand tool procedures, soldering and brazing, heat treatment, and bluing. The last two chapters cover making cartridge dies and reloading tools.
I mentioned earlier that the subtitle is accurate. So, too, the title: this book covers advanced gunsmithing. The beginner like me can learn from it, but not as much, I imagine, as the more experienced gunsmith will learn. As in any craft, the more you know, the more you realize what you don't know. Advanced Gunsmithing is valuable both for Vickery's broad coverage and for the insight he provides into methods of work current seventy-five years ago. Like other Skyhorse paperback reprints, it is relatively inexpensive, so it should be a useful addition to any gunsmith's reference library.
Vickery is one of the clearest writers I have ever read, in no small part because he knows how to move from one aspect of a given task to the next. It seems a bit odd, therefore, that this carefully arranged exposition has neither a table of contents nor an index. I have never seen the original 1940 edition of Vickery's Advanced Gunsmithing or the limited edition published by Wolfe in 1988, so I don't know whether these omissions were present in the original or due to Skyhorse. In any case, be advised: it's a good idea as you read to make a running list on the end pages of the topics that interest you.
I mentioned earlier that the subtitle is accurate. So, too, the title: this book covers advanced gunsmithing. The beginner like me can learn from it, but not as much, I imagine, as the more experienced gunsmith will learn. As in any craft, the more you know, the more you realize what you don't know. Advanced Gunsmithing is valuable both for Vickery's broad coverage and for the insight he provides into methods of work current seventy-five years ago. Like other Skyhorse paperback reprints, it is relatively inexpensive, so it should be a useful addition to any gunsmith's reference library.
Vickery is one of the clearest writers I have ever read, in no small part because he knows how to move from one aspect of a given task to the next. It seems a bit odd, therefore, that this carefully arranged exposition has neither a table of contents nor an index. I have never seen the original 1940 edition of Vickery's Advanced Gunsmithing or the limited edition published by Wolfe in 1988, so I don't know whether these omissions were present in the original or due to Skyhorse. In any case, be advised: it's a good idea as you read to make a running list on the end pages of the topics that interest you.
Tuesday, September 8, 2015
A Savage 99 in .250/3000
Nearly twenty years ago, I tried to bargain for a consigned Savage 99 in a gun shop. Its caliber was .250 Savage or, as it was originally named, .250/3000. I liked its tang safety, but its 20" barrel felt a bit muzzle light to me. What bothered me even more was its heavy trigger pull. John Barsness's informative articles on Savage 99's* hadn't yet appeared, so I didn't know then how easy it was to adjust the trigger pull. The price was $500, as I recall, and I didn't want to go over $450. The consigner said no deal, and because of its muzzle light balance and its heavy trigger pull I wasn't especially disappointed.
Since then, I have read the two articles by Barsness as well as the book he recommended, John Murray's The Ninety-Nine, 3rd ed. (Westbury, NY, 1985). As so often happens with firearms enthusiasts, the acquisition of a little learning soon leads to the acquisition of another gun. Recently, when I came across another tang safety 99 in .250 Savage being auctioned on GunBroker, I decided the time had come to try this legendary rifle and caliber. Its barrel was 22" long, and I hoped that additional length might solve the muzzle lightness. I won the auction for a bit less than twice what I had wanted to pay for the earlier one (pretty much what I'd expect, given inflation), and this time I was pleased.
Thanks to Murray's description, I could tell before bidding that this was a very late 99-A, made in Westfield, MA, not long before rising production costs forced Savage to drop the 99 from its line. This one was a revival of the older 99-A, a saddle gun, but without the saddle ring. It featured a tang safety, Electro-Cote coating instead of bluing, and unlike earlier 99's it was drilled and tapped at the factory for a scope. It retains the magazine rotor, but one made of stainless steel rather than the traditional brass.
Most important for my intended use of deer hunting, this reincarnation of the 99-A in .250 Savage has 1 in 10" rifling, so it should stabilize a 100 grain bullet. Designer Charles Newton apparently had wanted this twist in the first place for a 100 grain bullet at about 2800 fps, but Savage wanted to exploit the 3,000 fps obtainable with an 87 grain bullet, so the publicity value of the first American rifle to achieve 3,000 fps outweighed any ballistic disadvantages from the slower twist and lighter bullet. [For reloading the earlier 99's with a 1 in 14" twist, see the articles in Handloader by Barsness* and by Terry Wieland#.]
The rifle arrived, exactly as advertised. I ran some dummy rounds through the action, tested the safety, tried the trigger--the pull was even heavier than the earlier one, I'd guess somewhere in the region of ten pounds!--passed the background check, and took it home. Some Wipe-Out removed quite a bit of fouling from its barrel. I took off the butt stock so I could lighten the trigger pull. Taking a deep breath, I turned the bolt screw counter-clockwise. It worked: the trigger pull was lighter! Thank you, John Barsness! I lightened it some more. We'll see if it holds there. If it moves, I'll follow Barsness's suggestion to keep it in place with a washer.
I then looked at the butt stock and fore end. The latter had some factory plastic filling the gap between the action and the fore end. Time is money, of course, so this probably was a cost-cutting measure, taking less time than fitting the fore end to the action by hand. I'm not keen on that plastic, but it is invisible. What was visible was the outline of a snarling panther a previous owner had incised on the left side of the butt. I'm not a fan of gunstock carving, but whoever had done this was quite a good artist. I rather liked it, but you had to tilt the rifle to catch the light for all the lines to show up. I knew I couldn't cut the lines any deeper without screwing it up, so with no small degree of reluctance I sanded the panther to oblivion.
Like every other 99 I've ever picked up, this 99-A had a short length of pull. As early as 1918, Townsend Whelen pointed out in The American Rifle that Savage stocks were about a half inch too short to fit the average man, but apparently nobody at Savage ever saw reason to change. (How tall was Arthur Savage, anyway?) I'm six feet tall and have a 35" sleeve, so I decided to cut off the curvature of the butt and to install a 3/4" recoil pad, giving me the 13 3/4" length of pull I like. I did want to duplicate the pitch of the butt, hoping that this would help keep the butt on my shoulder for a follow-up shot, so I used a sliding bevel to replicate the original angle. Making sure to tape the underside of the butt to prevent it from splintering, I put the butt stock in a miter box and shimmed it until the saw blade followed the line I had marked with a China pencil. Cutting it off was straightforward.
The lines of the butt stock looked a bit off to me, so I picked up a straight edge. The line of the comb was straight, but the underline of the butt--the belly, as it's sometimes called--wasn't. Not as pronounced as a fish belly, which has its own opulent Victorian charm, the curve just represented careless attention to detail. A few minutes with a block plane took care of that problem.
The more I looked at the stock, however, the more I thought its proportions were out of whack. The chief problem was that the flared cheeks behind the action (the portion in front of the wrist) came too far back. As a result, the back edge of the cheek interfered with my trigger finger. That the lines were dubbed over as a result of mass production didn't help the stock's appearance, either.
The solution seemed to lie in shortening and delineating the stock's panels. I got out some French curves and found one that had the right scale for that portion of the stock. I decided to have that section end farther forward, in line with the back of the trigger guard, and to echo both the trigger and the top of the wrist with a slightly downward curvature.
Here is a photo of the planned alteration. The line with dashes indicates the way it left the factory; the solid line represents the curve I was going to follow in re-cutting these panels.
I also slimmed down the area right behind the receiver tang, removing as much as I could of the hump just visible in the photo above.
Here's the butt stock after cutting the new panels, mounting the recoil pad, and refinishing. The aniline dyes followed by alkanet oil have given the bland wood a richer tone:
These altered panel details probably wouldn't be noticed by anybody other than a Savage collector or another stocker, but to me they improve the flow of this rifle's lines. The rear of the outward flaring portion is now far enough forward that it no longer interferes with my trigger finger. I like the crispness of the newly defined panels, but if I were to start over again, I'd move them forward just a little more, perhaps making the curve line up with the trigger rather than the rear of the trigger guard.
Here's a photo of the entire rifle:
Now I've got to load some 100 grain bullets and sight it in. I am hoping Dame Fortune lets me find a whitetail with it in Maine this fall.
------------
*John Barsness, "Savage Model 99: A User's Guide," Rifle 221 (Sept. 2005), 46ff; "Handloading Savage Cartridges," Handloader 238 (Dec. 2005) 84ff.
#Terry Wieland, "The Perfect .250-3000," Handloader 297 (August 2015), 32ff.
Since then, I have read the two articles by Barsness as well as the book he recommended, John Murray's The Ninety-Nine, 3rd ed. (Westbury, NY, 1985). As so often happens with firearms enthusiasts, the acquisition of a little learning soon leads to the acquisition of another gun. Recently, when I came across another tang safety 99 in .250 Savage being auctioned on GunBroker, I decided the time had come to try this legendary rifle and caliber. Its barrel was 22" long, and I hoped that additional length might solve the muzzle lightness. I won the auction for a bit less than twice what I had wanted to pay for the earlier one (pretty much what I'd expect, given inflation), and this time I was pleased.
Thanks to Murray's description, I could tell before bidding that this was a very late 99-A, made in Westfield, MA, not long before rising production costs forced Savage to drop the 99 from its line. This one was a revival of the older 99-A, a saddle gun, but without the saddle ring. It featured a tang safety, Electro-Cote coating instead of bluing, and unlike earlier 99's it was drilled and tapped at the factory for a scope. It retains the magazine rotor, but one made of stainless steel rather than the traditional brass.
Most important for my intended use of deer hunting, this reincarnation of the 99-A in .250 Savage has 1 in 10" rifling, so it should stabilize a 100 grain bullet. Designer Charles Newton apparently had wanted this twist in the first place for a 100 grain bullet at about 2800 fps, but Savage wanted to exploit the 3,000 fps obtainable with an 87 grain bullet, so the publicity value of the first American rifle to achieve 3,000 fps outweighed any ballistic disadvantages from the slower twist and lighter bullet. [For reloading the earlier 99's with a 1 in 14" twist, see the articles in Handloader by Barsness* and by Terry Wieland#.]
The rifle arrived, exactly as advertised. I ran some dummy rounds through the action, tested the safety, tried the trigger--the pull was even heavier than the earlier one, I'd guess somewhere in the region of ten pounds!--passed the background check, and took it home. Some Wipe-Out removed quite a bit of fouling from its barrel. I took off the butt stock so I could lighten the trigger pull. Taking a deep breath, I turned the bolt screw counter-clockwise. It worked: the trigger pull was lighter! Thank you, John Barsness! I lightened it some more. We'll see if it holds there. If it moves, I'll follow Barsness's suggestion to keep it in place with a washer.
I then looked at the butt stock and fore end. The latter had some factory plastic filling the gap between the action and the fore end. Time is money, of course, so this probably was a cost-cutting measure, taking less time than fitting the fore end to the action by hand. I'm not keen on that plastic, but it is invisible. What was visible was the outline of a snarling panther a previous owner had incised on the left side of the butt. I'm not a fan of gunstock carving, but whoever had done this was quite a good artist. I rather liked it, but you had to tilt the rifle to catch the light for all the lines to show up. I knew I couldn't cut the lines any deeper without screwing it up, so with no small degree of reluctance I sanded the panther to oblivion.
Like every other 99 I've ever picked up, this 99-A had a short length of pull. As early as 1918, Townsend Whelen pointed out in The American Rifle that Savage stocks were about a half inch too short to fit the average man, but apparently nobody at Savage ever saw reason to change. (How tall was Arthur Savage, anyway?) I'm six feet tall and have a 35" sleeve, so I decided to cut off the curvature of the butt and to install a 3/4" recoil pad, giving me the 13 3/4" length of pull I like. I did want to duplicate the pitch of the butt, hoping that this would help keep the butt on my shoulder for a follow-up shot, so I used a sliding bevel to replicate the original angle. Making sure to tape the underside of the butt to prevent it from splintering, I put the butt stock in a miter box and shimmed it until the saw blade followed the line I had marked with a China pencil. Cutting it off was straightforward.
The lines of the butt stock looked a bit off to me, so I picked up a straight edge. The line of the comb was straight, but the underline of the butt--the belly, as it's sometimes called--wasn't. Not as pronounced as a fish belly, which has its own opulent Victorian charm, the curve just represented careless attention to detail. A few minutes with a block plane took care of that problem.
The more I looked at the stock, however, the more I thought its proportions were out of whack. The chief problem was that the flared cheeks behind the action (the portion in front of the wrist) came too far back. As a result, the back edge of the cheek interfered with my trigger finger. That the lines were dubbed over as a result of mass production didn't help the stock's appearance, either.
The solution seemed to lie in shortening and delineating the stock's panels. I got out some French curves and found one that had the right scale for that portion of the stock. I decided to have that section end farther forward, in line with the back of the trigger guard, and to echo both the trigger and the top of the wrist with a slightly downward curvature.
Here is a photo of the planned alteration. The line with dashes indicates the way it left the factory; the solid line represents the curve I was going to follow in re-cutting these panels.
I also slimmed down the area right behind the receiver tang, removing as much as I could of the hump just visible in the photo above.
Here's the butt stock after cutting the new panels, mounting the recoil pad, and refinishing. The aniline dyes followed by alkanet oil have given the bland wood a richer tone:
Given that this later 99-A was factory drilled and tapped for a scope, I've mounted a Leupold VX-3 1.5-5x20mm in the pleasingly old-fashioned Weaver rings. Scoped, it weighs one ounce over eight pounds. Here's a photo of the entire rifle:
Now I've got to load some 100 grain bullets and sight it in. I am hoping Dame Fortune lets me find a whitetail with it in Maine this fall.
------------
*John Barsness, "Savage Model 99: A User's Guide," Rifle 221 (Sept. 2005), 46ff; "Handloading Savage Cartridges," Handloader 238 (Dec. 2005) 84ff.
#Terry Wieland, "The Perfect .250-3000," Handloader 297 (August 2015), 32ff.
Sunday, September 6, 2015
A Lab Puppy's First Swim
Our Black Lab puppy Bête Noir is exuberant, perhaps even excessively so, in nearly every way except one: she has shown no interest in swimming. Thanks to our friend John Bailey and his two water-loving dogs, Keel and Buddy, Bête at nine months learned to wade in a pond, but she was emphatically not going to follow their example and swim. She remained a wader, and not even a very deep-water wader at that.
Now, I don't want you to get the impression that I was concerned about this characteristic of hers. I was completely reconciled to owning the only Lab in the entire US that didn't swim. I told myself that it wasn't really that big a deal: I could always shave, and then none of my friends would recognize me, any more than they did after I grew a beard. So I was stoically prepared to have a non-swimming Lab.
Several days ago, just after Bête became nine months old, the two of us went out to Jennings Pond in Danby, NY, where there is a swimming beach marked off with guard ropes. It was late enough that the life guard had gone home. Given that Bête always wants to go where I go, I reasoned, I would wade around with her and at some point perhaps wade out to where she would have to swim. As we splashed around together, she gradually waded in deeper, to the point where she could just touch the fine gravel bottom.
Then she decided it would be fun to bite the little buoys spaced every three feet or so to keep the swimming area's boundary lines afloat. I did say that she's exuberant, right? Starting about ankle deep, she lunged and bit the first one, in a foot or so of water. She then lunged and bit the second one, in a foot and a half or so of water. I hit the third one with my hand to give it some motion, and she lunged for it, mouth agape. Surprise! No bottom under her paws! She look startled but not scared as she dog paddled forward and bit that buoy as well, then turned around and swam back to the bank. A few minutes later, in she went again, and she appeared altogether comfortable swimming from then on.
I then tossed a dummy out where she could wade. She brought it in and dropped it. Good girl! I tossed it a bit farther out, but still where she could wade. She brought that back, and dropped it. Good girl! The third toss was into deeper water, but not far out. She promptly waded in and then with no hesitation swam for it and brought it back. Good girl! Not wanting to press my luck, I stopped there.
Caroline said after I got home that I was beaming like a proud father!
Thursday, August 27, 2015
Grilling Corn on the Cob: Simple Perfection
For those of us fortunate enough to live where sweet corn is grown, corn on the cob is one of the delights of summer. But what is the best way to cook it? The method I use has changed over the years. I started out by bringing a large pot of water to the boil, adding the shucked corn, bringing it back to the boil, putting on the lid and turning off the heat. Ten minutes later, it was ready to eat. Slathered with butter and salt, it was delicious.
Friends of mine simply microwaved the corn: two minutes for one ear; five minutes for two ears. This method produces corn that is excellent, but somehow I don't find it as satisfying as the next method, grilling.
Grilling corn on the cob has the great advantage over boiling of not heating up the kitchen by bringing a large pot of water to 212 degrees and over microwaving of adding more flavor, but the process I followed was time-consuming. First you pulled back the husks, removed the corn silk, replaced the husks, and then soaked it for twenty minutes or so. I grilled the ears on low heat for about seven minutes, turned each ear 180 degrees, and grilled for another seven minutes. The grilling added some flavor, and I no longer cared about adding butter. The only drawback was that husking the grilled ears left flakes of charred husk scattered around.
Recently, I read somewhere--I am sorry I can't give credit either to the writer or to the magazine--about a variation on this grilling method. The article said that it wasn't necessary to remove the corn silk or to soak in water. I was skeptical about putting the ear directly on the grill, but I tried it. This method does in fact work, and work well: the outer leaves get charred, but the corn is delicious. I should note that it cooks faster this way, so check it after five minutes or so to see if it's ready to turn over.
The article also claimed that it isn't necessary to shuck the ear. Instead, after grilling, use a sharp knife to cut through the ear approximately at the bottom row or so of kernels (which of course are covered up by the husks). Working from the sheared end, the article claimed, it's much easier to remove the husks and corn silk. That also turns out to be correct. There are no charred remnants that the breeze invariably blows into other food.
Caroline eats it as is with no seasoning; I add only some ground pepper. Either way, corn grilled this way is simple perfection.
Friends of mine simply microwaved the corn: two minutes for one ear; five minutes for two ears. This method produces corn that is excellent, but somehow I don't find it as satisfying as the next method, grilling.
Grilling corn on the cob has the great advantage over boiling of not heating up the kitchen by bringing a large pot of water to 212 degrees and over microwaving of adding more flavor, but the process I followed was time-consuming. First you pulled back the husks, removed the corn silk, replaced the husks, and then soaked it for twenty minutes or so. I grilled the ears on low heat for about seven minutes, turned each ear 180 degrees, and grilled for another seven minutes. The grilling added some flavor, and I no longer cared about adding butter. The only drawback was that husking the grilled ears left flakes of charred husk scattered around.
Recently, I read somewhere--I am sorry I can't give credit either to the writer or to the magazine--about a variation on this grilling method. The article said that it wasn't necessary to remove the corn silk or to soak in water. I was skeptical about putting the ear directly on the grill, but I tried it. This method does in fact work, and work well: the outer leaves get charred, but the corn is delicious. I should note that it cooks faster this way, so check it after five minutes or so to see if it's ready to turn over.
The article also claimed that it isn't necessary to shuck the ear. Instead, after grilling, use a sharp knife to cut through the ear approximately at the bottom row or so of kernels (which of course are covered up by the husks). Working from the sheared end, the article claimed, it's much easier to remove the husks and corn silk. That also turns out to be correct. There are no charred remnants that the breeze invariably blows into other food.
Caroline eats it as is with no seasoning; I add only some ground pepper. Either way, corn grilled this way is simple perfection.
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