I had some minor orthoscopic knee work done this past Thursday. While sitting here at the house I heard the unmistakable pitter patter of squirrel feet, across the rafters in the attic. The first thought was getting out the 22 and the rat shot and be done with it. This would have been fine, except they are at our farm house being used by my grandson and daughter for similar work in the pecan tree up there.

So I looked through everything and figured that the pump .243 I had would make a nice hole in the critter with a well placed wax bullet. Got out the ingredients, and after an hour or so had several drilled out and ready for testing. After several different shapes were tested it was found that the parraffin was too brittle for the desired effect.

So back to the drawing board. Had to head off to the local Academy and pick up some more vacume seal bags, and as we slowly strolled through the store back to where they were, I thought of the 22 caliber pellet guns. Man I need one of those I thought, but after looking at the prices on them I decided they were a bit out of my budet for the moment. I did however pick up a tin of the pellets. After getting home, I pulled out a few milsurp cases that had been used for some limited loads, and checked the fit of the pellet in the sized neck. WOW, hit the jackpot. The skirt on the pellets, is just big enough to allow a press fit, and the diameter of the pointed end just just fits the inside diameter of the neck.

After setting up the needed tools on the end of the kitchen table and getting some not so friendly glares from my sweetie, I managed to drill out the primer holes on 4 cases, gathered up several different primers and set out to test a few loads.(again to the looks from the sweetie.)

So I pulled out my 14" TC set the scope to 2.5X rolled the objective back to 25, set up a cardboard box at he end of the hall and let the fun begin. The worst part was depriming them after firing. The groups were within 1" at 25' and well within minute of squirrel. With a little piddling, I found that the Win-WSR Mag primers seemed to work the best, and that with a tad of super glue around the rim where the pellet meets the shell case, makes them really come to life.

Now I just wished that my target box had not been recycled as I would have loved to have plinked a bit more this morning. However, during a short nap I had yesterday afternoon, my backstop disappeared. I did however find that the pellets would penetrate three to four layers of the 1/4" or so thick cardboard, and had a nicely mushroomed nose on them afterward.

I am somewhat looking forward to dropping the hammer on the noisy intruder this morning sometime if I can convince the sweetie to help me get set up in the attic. Since I would need her to help me get my TC, up the ladder, and for her to hold the light, it might take a bit of talking, but she will probably do it with no problems as long as it keeps me from building any more stuff on the end of her table. LOL

MY BL22 feeds CB-shorts reliably enough...



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