AFRICA HUNTER QUEST©    

     Chapter 24 - THE PILGRIM’S LABORS IN PURGATORY    

     The shooting equipment and reloading tools took several weeks to arrive. Donny felt he was fortunate that everything he ordered was in stock. He suspected that one of the primary reasons for that good fortune was there were not that many folks on the path on which he now found himself, so demand was not as intense as it was for simpler, more mainstream reloading products and shooting equipment.     

     He didn’t understand the relevance of the flash-hole deburring tool. He could feel it cut the typically one small tit of brass around the flash-hole periphery. Most of the burs were removed without much effort, but occasionally there was one that tested his grip strength on the tool.    

     The VLD chamfer tool took some getting used to. He could understand why GG had told him to do it by hand. His first turn of the tool felt awful as the cutters bit into the sharp, perpendicular edges of the trimmed case mouth. He couldn’t decide if a ½ turn was enough; it certainly didn’t feel right. He decided to keep using the tool until the cutting action noticeably smoothed out. When he looked at the case mouth after the cutting had smoothed out, he saw that he had cut about a 1/64th inch taper. Eyeing his flat-base bullet, he decided that taper somehow looked ‘right’, considering what he was asking the case mouth to do and not really bugger the bullet while doing it. The result was way more than a simple debur that his dad had shown him.    

     After looking at the resultant inside mouth chamfer, he felt what he had done on the outside of the mouth was positively pathetic. Use of the case driver he had purchased had eluded him up until that point. He chucked the case driver in his variable speed drill and selected the low rpm setting. He then chucked a case into the driver and spun the case in his outside neck chamfer tool for about 3 seconds. He decided that result, too, looked ‘right’. He then followed up by spinning the case in a wad of 000 steel wool to lightly polish the neck and remove the modest powder residue from the shoulder.    

     GG had told him to polish the inside of the case mouth with 000 steel wool. The method had also eluded him. Use of his drill to polish the outside of the case got him thinking. He decided to wrap a spent bronze bore brush with 000 steel wool, then chuck the brush in his drill to polish the interior of the case mouths. It took a

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while to build up the steel wool in the bristles, but soon he found he could do a reasonable job removing the powder residue by cycling the case back and forth with his free hand. The steel wool had to be frequently refurbished, and that took some time to learn.     

     After Donny had polished the inside of his twelfth case mouth, he decided to see how it compared to the first several he had done. No comparison. Evolving his polishing technique and learning to refresh the steel wool had resulted in case mouths with an obviously variable sheen to the brass. He touched up his prior case mouths so that they all had the same relative sheen.     

     The hand primer he purchased had an adjustable piston to adjust the degree of over-seat travel. Just as with setting up his full-length resizing die, Donny had to again rely on a Goldilocks ‘just right’ feeling of over travel. One thing was for sure, the primers didn’t just touch.    

     Weighing powder to the nearest 0.1 grain was an iterative process that took some practice. He decided that the easiest way to do it was to adjust his powder measure so it dispensed powder slightly over his targeted weight, then slowly roll the case back and forth to expel the excess powder a kernel at a time. The excess powder was expelled into a small tuna tin he salvaged and cleaned. If he rolled more powder out than he needed, he used his wife’s tweezers to pick up kernels and place them back into the case. He found out that three kernels of the powder he was using typically equaled 0.1 grain, a useful calibration.     

     He recognized he would be in serious trouble if his wife ever found out about his appropriation of her tweezers. He promptly went out and bought new tweezers and replaced them in his wife’s cosmetic drawer.    

     He used a plastic ammo box to segregate the loaded rounds. He used a small sticky note and recorded the arrangement so he would know what was what at the range. To be safe, he cellophane-taped the note to the inside of the box’s lid.    

     Installing the scope level had been a pain. Donny decided he wanted one that flipped off to the side so he could see it when he was lining up his shot. He had to both remount the scope and reposition the rings on the Pic rail in order to fit the level at a distance where he could actually see the bubble.     

     He was finally ready. He was excited but uneasy. The alarm bell had gone off when GG said he didn’t want him to bring his chronograph. Everything he had read

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on the internet indicated that a chronograph was a required tool for load development. Ladder tests to identify velocity nodes were the basic foundation for every load development technique he had seen. With no chrono data, he knew his load development with GG would be another walk on the wild side with no apparent outside validation.     

     In his cosmic moment of enlightened confession, Donny realized the Geezer was fixated on what actually worked, based on tried-and-true that was embedded in local practice. He had taken that reality and worked backwards to identify an empirical predictive path to that reality, relying on scientific and engineering principles to guide him. He filled in his concept gaps with actual tests and data. He really didn’t give a rip about what was considered ‘accepted thinking’ by media-types concerning bullet terminal performance.     

     Although the Old Man claimed the reason he had helped him was for the animals, Donny now suspected that wasn’t entirely true. The Geezer had also done it to spare him from the indignity and embarrassment of a potential ballistic train wreck in Africa. In doing so, GG had taken great pains to explain what he had done because he knew it was a radical and unprecedented approach that would require heavy-duty buy-in to accept, let alone implement.    

     And how had he repaid the Old Man? Basically with a periodic ration of $#!+. GG was again right: he was arguing with a person who had taken the time to help him. GG had been polite in saying that Donny had disrespected his time. Donny now understood that he had really disrespected him.    

     Donny had struggled to understand why he had done that to the Old Man. The answer was disturbingly simple: he had been irrationally afraid. Afraid of an inability to understand. Afraid to make independent decisions. Afraid of successfully applying and implementing those decisions. Afraid of what others thought about his decisions.     

     Losing an animal was the least of it, but he recognized it would expose him to a ‘dumb-a$$’ award for accepting and implementing counter-culture terminal performance doctrine. There would be no protective cover afforded by the mantle of victimhood.     

     His fear had been present from the git-go. GG had been coming from what seemed to be an alternate universe with no identifiable safe space. He had exposed

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what appeared to be fallacies of accepted, existing standards used by hunters and the media to judge terminal performance, like kinetic energy and bullet weight retention.     

     Donny admitted that his fear had been compounded by his feelings of inadequacy because he had no formal classroom education that gave him a basis for accepting or rejecting GG’s explanations. GG had compounded those feelings by substituting such undocumented standards as wound cavity volume coupled with generic bullet design and impact velocity for evaluating terminal performance. Those substitutions were apparently only supported by his own rogue gel testing. There were potentially no real published data to support those substitutions, making his acceptance of them an intellectual leap of faith.    

     Not only had the Old Man argued with accepted terminal performance measuring sticks, he had synthesized the process down to an empiricism seemingly picked out of thin air that resulted only in an approximation rather than an absolute value. Donny’s formal education had taught him that such calculations were bogus and the results should not be relied upon. Yet GG had waved his hands and claimed the resultant number told a story sufficiently significant to assess risk and make decisions on how he conducted his hunts.    

     Donny knew there was no way for him to validate any of what the Old Man had done. He was certain few, if any, with established credentials from any discipline would validate it. The wild side, indeed. Donny figured GG knew how Columbus felt. But he also knew the Old Man didn’t care.    

     Donny sensed that learning load development from the Old Man would at least be unconventional. But unlike GG’s empiricism, the load development would result in a reality he could actually see and know to be true: a target that he could touch and measure. Donny believed he would gain considerable confidence in achieving positive hunt outcomes based on its reality. After all, his aim point was likely going to be the heart, and he would likely have a load with sufficient accuracy to take it out if he did his part.    

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