march ’08

March, ’08 Works in progress

March 1-31: Had to do a boring, repetitive production job to help pay the bills (Blue Cross raised our rates for a third time; now the nut is $1,800/month!!). Have been working on cannon, setting it to rights. Grief mostly behind me but Sandybear is still missed in the shop. Buddybear’s staying pretty close these days and so is Shadow. Melanie roams as usual, none the worse for the change in lineup. Sigh…

Last year around this time I got to shoot my cannon for the first time and in so doing learned a lot about the proper kit one must have on hand. I’ve spent the past few weeks noodling on what’s needed and making up a proper set of tackle so that I’d be ready in time for the next Big Event, which is scheduled for Saturday, April 5.

The first thing I needed to organize was a better method of aiming the beastie. Last year I missed the targets completely and managed to snap branches off of a nearby tree three times! I did quite a bit of searching around for what I wanted and failed completely, so I wound up making my own whatchacallit. It looks OK; the real test will be whether or not it works tho.

Photo #1: Here’s the base of the sighting mechanism. The trick is to make it removable but repeatable, so that it isn’t knocked out of kilter by the large recoil. This is done by drilling three shallow cones into the barrel, then using pointy setscrews to register the assembly in the depressions. Here I’m fitting some brass parts that will control elevation. Right/left alignment of sight is adjusted by loosening brass assembly’s forward mounting screw so it can be traversed along a milled slot in the forward arm of the blue bit.