Well, my week of employment at the Guns of Freedom shoot has come to a close. Got to replace a disconnector in a malfunctioning rifle, troubleshoot a rifle that wouldn't feed right, pound a squib discharge out of a barrel, and reattach the roller mechanism in the top cover of a MG 42.
By far, the most popular item was the .50 BMG rifle. Not sure how much we went through, but it was alot. The next most popular thing to shoot was the shorty 1919 in 8mm. Not sure how long the barrel is on it, but it's definitely wayyy shorter than the standard. Makes for one hell of a flame thrower, let me tell you.
So far, I've seen a Frog, a half a dozen Aussies, and about the same number of Canucks, a Dutchman, and a Brit at the shoot. But one Aussie in particular takes the cake for the "Funniest Moment of The Shoot". It all happened Wednesday night about an hour before we closed down. Dude came in wanting to shoot 4 through the .500 S&W. Guy did his 4 rounds and wanted some pictures of him holding an M16. Now, I should also note that whilst our intrepid Aussie was having his picture snapped, there was another customer loading up the .50 rifle for 4 rounds. He watched as they loaded the rifle, he watched as they turned the bolt down. Hell, he was standing about 3 ft behind and to the left of the shooter so it shouldn't have been a big surprise what was coming. Well, the customer on the .50 cranked off a round and our brave Aussie damn near messed himself. Jumped about 2 feet in the air. I was surprised he didn't toss the rifle, but he held onto it and promptly turned and handed me the rifle and took off like someone had lit his butt on fire. I couldn't stop laughing for a good 5 minutes.
The high point of the shoot so far was getting to meet Joe Perry of Aerosmith. He came over and wanted to shoot a little of everything, but once he got behind the controls of Ma Deuce, he pretty much didn't want to shoot anything else:
The other high point was Miss Montana USA showed up. She got some trigger time on an M16.
I guess the low point would be the thunderstorm we had Friday night. Saw the weather coming in for about an hour. Didn't think much of it as we'd dealt with some form of rain all week long. But Friday afternoon we got pounded. Winds had to be in excess of 60 mph; at one point we actually thought we may have been caught in a tornado. Which was a pretty fair assumption based on the size of some the hail we found afterwards. With the amount of rain we were getting, and how fast the wind was blowing, we couldn't see the monster hay bails about 100 ft from where we took shelter.
Fortunately, there was no visible damage from the storm, given the size of some the stones. Thankfully, these were the exception rather than the rule. Most of the hail was between dime and quarter size.
Given the eventful nature of last week's shoot, I can't wait for the next one, this time a weekend gig at Wall, SD in September.
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