On pain meds I would guess at this point. Healing is the hard part, really, but afterward all those beautiful hills to hike in just waiting with the summer. Heal fast!

It's purdy, but I'd never use it

I guess I always thought the purpose of the QD would be to get it off quickly in the event you broke your optic and were in a bad situation and needed to keep shooting. In that scenario I could care less about return to zero.  I don't see myself spending more than I did for the gun to put an optic on it and then taking it off to shoot with the irons, unless Someone was shooting back at me and the glass was shattered or something. But I have no formal training so maybe I'm missing something?




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On one of our flights up near the Syrian border, one aircraft took fire...FROM THE SYRIANS! The bullets struck a rotor blade, the fuselage and one of the gunners personal M4. His M4 was destroyed by the single AK round tearing it up. Had that been just the ACOG, then the weapon could have still been used accurately with BUIS.

On another engagement the gunner was hit in the chest armor, and the power chord going to his mini gun was nearly severed rendering the gun useless. My point is in a fight, the darnedest things seem to happen. So losing an optic is well within the realm of possible, I believe

JR for a successful surgery and a speedy recovery, X2.
Don: Sam's Wife, for healing
Miss Kay, Healing, strength from a medical condition
Our Nation for spiritual healing, and to find a Godly leader
Our Warriors everywhere for protection
Atkinsmatt: My brother, Tim, having problems with bones in his foot and they are seriously considering amputation.
Wilbur: My Dad Gordon who is starting the last journey of his life. We don't know if it will be a month or months, but it won't be long. May it be peaceful and pain free for him. And for my mother who provides constant care and attention that she find peace and comfort in this most difficult time.
Cudakidd: Mike P.s son Jacob in Oregon find his way in life and a job

I wonder sometimes why all this stuff happened to me or around me...Maybe cause the Lord knew I would share it someday and all of you deserve some humor?

Gotta be other mil/non mil guys with similar funny stuff...

I'm def comfortable with a QD optic as long as I always have BUS.

My M1A with the ART-2 removable scope mount has never failed me after removing and reattaching shooting at softball sized things out to 300-350, my normal "Long Range" Shooting 800 a few times I was hitting Clorox gallon jugs, so it is definitely "Zeroed enough" for me

Watching last nights debate... I personally see voting as a responsibility to my loved ones, and my country and my neighbor. I saw enough last night, I won't vote for Trump....nominee or not.

Ouch!

I take it other conservatives might do the same.

I've run in high ranking military officer circles. The successful ones who had the respect of their troops were in a lot of ways similar to trump. Brash, unafraid, not always right, but hootin-tootin no doubt about who the Sherriff was either!

I hope those voting give conservatives some chance and vote for the republican nominee as opposed to leveraging the vote a bit for the opposition.

It really isn't that big of a deal these days. I came out of the recovery room and drove over to get a quiznos sub!

Man, you people are detail oriented!

Made me think of my Chinook. Know how it has a dual wheel up front and a single wheel on the back? Well those wheels, either 12" or 14 ", well not sure but 14 ply with 88psi. I had a front one way out of balance once.

I had landed in a river bed in Korea...A river bed made up with these football sized stones. Know where I'm going with this? So we take off and set the brakes and the chief who clears us for flight is doing the hanging out of the aircraft thing and he says, "Sir, we have a big stone wedged in the right front wheel.

Hmmm, never had that happen again. I thought of doing some maneuver over some village and dropping the stone, but quickly thought better of the idea. Ah, as soon as I land, we'll roll forward a couple feet and it will get knocked out. Then the rock will be laying on the taxiway where some airplane driver will get all ticked off once again at these big offensive Armee helicopters messing up HIS pretty airfield...he will get angry and the thought of that happening is very satisfying to me.

Well, we land to the taxiway and start to roll forward and right away, I get this nice crunch sound followed by the aircraft trying to do a turn about the front tire. (Read: Uncontrollable in four wheel taxi mode). Well, not to be stopped by a rock stuck in the tires, I locked the aft swivels, turned on the AFCS, go 2" aft on the cyclic and bring in the power. Well, she stands up pretty as a princess on the aft gear and by lowering the power a tad the nose comes down just a bit and we start going forward, with the aft wheels on the ground. This is an acceptable method of taxiing. Well acceptable is a relative statement. It is acceptable where the huge rotor wash caused by a half hovering Chinook isn't happening next to, say an area where construction is taking place. Near a place with silt containment dams, stacks of plywood and sheet rock, piles of boxes of light fixture's and bits of all sorts of things. No, it is not good to two wheel taxi next to those things.

Oh, small Korean guards on their 2.5 ton bicycles...? No those are not wind resistant either. That poor guard came pedaling down the side of the taxiway toward us and being a Korean, he has had little to no experience riding bicycles in typhoons. That guard ran into the wall of wind and was immediately swept over the embankment and into a six foot deep ditch full of sewer and nasty stuff.

In hindsight it would have been better to just land to the sod somewhere and let the chief get out and pry the rock out, but that's hindsight...

So did you ever end up mounting that scope to the 716?

If yes how'd it work for you?

If no, well then disregard.

Mounted it: Yes

Then took it off awaiting a better mount.

I'm not comfortable running a gun without iron sights

We have all sorts of gun shows coming up, I thought I'd visit one to find the right mount that fits that weapon

I'm thinking the roads never see salt in Alberta, am I correct?

Those trucks look good, and knowing what salt does, or doesn't do when it isn't present, I can see the trucks lasting a very long time.

I am glad it is fixed for you.  But it still doesn't make any sense.  Changing tires shouldn't have any affect on the electrical systems. 
There wasn't anything wrong with any electrical system.

The loss of traction light and system came on because the grossly different traction between the nearly new to nearly worn out tires caused the front end to bite into the turns like never before. You see the rear is where you should put the best tires. The rear is the part of the vehicle where it is most stable, or in a way of thinking, the part that is anchored. With my old tires the rear end was loose. It was slipping and spinning a bit and rotating the newer tires back there stopped all that nonsense. Then the poorer tires placed on the front now caused more erratic steering which was more pronounced since the rear end was now more stable. That caused unnecessary rolling to take place as rates built up quickly. The rate at which the vehicle was rolling exceeded the parameters for the traction control system causing illumination of the light.
New tires fixed it completely, so there really is no other explanation.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/MOKi5YeNtRI

The first big surprise happened on the alignment rack. The alignment was perfect! It hadn't moved at all, despite all that driving off road and hitting pot holes and all sorts of things.

Next during the test drive the truck was completely normal. It rode like it did before, although smoother due to the new rubber and balancing. I'm all healed it seems!

If anyone ever wondered what those balance beads look inside the tire, here ya go:

You will notice the bag remains somewhat intact in there but definitely mostly disintegrates.

Those machines are pretty gentle on the tire and wheel

http://www.aimsurplus.com/product.aspx?item=AIMI556M855&utm_source=AIM+Surplus+Main+List&utm_campaign=be9ca673bb-03012016&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_6870497a6a-be9ca673bb-18560829

@#)*!&!! Gopher!!

Northern Tool has all their trailers on sale at the moment:

http://www.northerntool.com/shop/tools/product_200311375_200311375

I have a john Deere model 15 trailer I purchased in 2003 that I still use today. I fill it with scrap steel! It has some dents, but is pulling along just fine!

Speaking of tread depth, the BFG's do not even have 1/2" of tread depth.

The Toyo AT's have more

But the MT's swallow up the whole finger tip and are far deeper than the highway tires

So my plan was to get all the candidate tires on property so I could do a good tire for tire comparison and make the decision which one to go with.

Here is the stack that started to show up

Cat in the lap

Had a conversation with my cat today. Odd how we feel it is necessary to talk to something like a cat (or a rock) all the while knowing it doesn’t understand, or in the cat’s case, care. But we do. We feel that need to just clutter up a perfectly quiet and peaceful morning with a bunch of chatter. God’s outside building in a beautiful morning which is just begging to be looked at and here you sit, cat in lap, talking to it. I’m not actually sure that the cat even knows you are alive. I think it is more concerned that it is comfortable, that you are stable, and the spot it chose is permeating warmth. Yep cats are simple.

Cats are simple but women are not. You can’t just have a conversation with a woman. It may start off as one but in the end you are left feeling like you aren’t sure exactly what just happened. You can remember bits and pieces of it, but in my case never the part that caused things to get all caty-wumpus. It must have happened, and because I woke up and I was still a man, I caused it! I have been conditioned to believe that it must have been me simply because I am a man. There is something awfully terrible about men. I don’t know what it is exactly, I just know that we are wrong. All men are created in some screwed up fashion. I have been told that enough, so, now I understand. Well, maybe I don’t, but that’s not important.

So back to the cat. It’s just sitting there looking at a place on the wall. A plain area with no particular features. Cats don’t need anything to focus on most of the time, a swath of wall will work just fine. I think if it’s vague enough and the platform it chose to sit upon is stable enough, then it will start to vibrate. Actually it emits a sound, but being a helicopter pilot, I can’t hear it. I know the sound is caused by something vibrating and anything vibrating is getting ready to break. That makes me nervous and the cat senses my increasing anxiety so it stops this vibrating for a while. But, alas in a moment or two the pattern will start and repeat itself once again.

I get lured in this rhythm for some reason. Call it a flaw in my personality. Probably the same problem that causes me to be a man. Comes from the same area in the brain (Must be a small area) that allows for successful interpretation of what a woman is communicating. I got all that right once! (The successful interpretation of woman communication) But only once and that was a long time ago, so I’ve actually forgotten all about it, and if the truth be known, I can’t really swear to having gotten the message right even once, I just don’t like admitting to defeat so I claim it true or not!

Never mind this cat thing is fascinating in a way. The dog is nearby and I am picking up on something. The dog is under my watchful eye. I gave him a “Place” command which did just that. He is parked in a place over there in this place. He won’t move. If he does I’ll point the finger at him. If I do that he will feel dejected and all failure prone and will lower his head. I think the act of the dog lowering its head is painful, because he doesn’t like to do it, so he just listens to me and stays in “Place.” You know, so he never sees the finger. The cat figured all this out, and so armed with that knowledge, chooses this time to move in to my space. Sure it is using me as a cushion, but I believe at a deeper level I believe the cat did this ultimately to torment the dog. Note here: The dog is male and the cat is female.

Not sure where I am going with that, but being of the scientific mind, I know to take note of everything that is going on, so that later on I will be thoroughly confused which will cause me to stop thinking about it and move on to straightening up the house or something. Where was I? Oh yes, Cat-Dog thing.

So this cat staring at the wall is vibrating and the dog is picking up on all this over there in his place. HE is probably dreaming of shaking the cat to a violent death, but he is giving all the appearances of just sitting there peacefully. Man he’s good! Has me fooled. But the cat, no, that cat is calculating. Not sure if it is because the cat is made up of cat molecules or it is female. Hmmm, perhaps it’s the the combination of the two! Anyway, this cat is really tormenting the dog. It is also vibrating on me so as to suggest it likes me. But a cat likes nothing. It simply uses things to its own pleasure and by its design. It is using me to both stay warm, and to torment the dog. It will likely become bored with the whole situation in time and move along to its next distraction, but for now it is extending an unseen middle finger toward that dog, and laughing.

The dog of course is storing up untold hatred. It has a bank of revenge that rivals Fort Knox no doubt. And from time to time around here I have seen the results of the release of all that stored up seething hatred. One day as Duane preceded me going down to the basement to get some gun part, he says,” Ah, Don, you had better come over here.” I wasn’t smelling the pungent odor of an animal accident, and he was already stepping over and around kid’s toys, so it wasn’t going to be good. And it wasn’t. There all crunched and twisted up was the woman’s favorite cat. It had either spent some time in a tornado after being run over by a bull dozer, or something with big powerful jaws had had its way with it. Thinking back quickly, I recalled earlier having seen Jack, the large Siberian with a sort of smile like expression. He was basking as if in a sauna, kind of like he had just had the time of his life…

Another time I found a three foot long cat. It had started normal size, but with a dog on each end facing each other with both transmissions in reverse, they had managed to lengthen the cat significantly. I think the lungs just got stretched too far away from everything else which caused it to expire. That cat, of course, was a favorite as well.

Now all of this is automatically my fault. It’s my fault because I should have done something. Or I didn’t train the dog properly. Or I wasn’t watching as closely as I should have. Or I didn’t cage them or whatever. The reasons are endless, but the one constant is: It is always going to be my fault. There is relief for me though. It’s called death! Yep, at some point in life I get to die and since I know and love my Jesus, I will meet him in heaven where I have heard we don’t make mistakes like the ones I constantly make on earth. Up there we were all screw-ups, but were perfected in, well, a perfect God and are no longer susceptible to the Chinese man traps that lie in wait around every corner of life.

Where was all this taking us? Ready for the moral of the story? Ya, me too, but I’m clueless as to a good ending to all this. Sometimes it’s just the quoffee working its magic, a quiet morning, and old dog, and a cat vibrating in your lap, and nothing more!

Just you all wait...I am going to be so detail orientated Don is gonna say "By golly, I believe them there Calipers match the inner fender and stuff"  I even found some new old stock only used and not cleaned once brushes.  ;D

I'm Waitin'

(And I REALLY want to see it)
(Especially after the quality work we saw already)
(...From Miss Kay ;-)

Quite the compliment there, Don.  Not sure I rise to that level.  I did, afterall, turn down a scholarship to the AF Academy....which is a testament to my lack of smarts..

What makes you think I rose to that level?

Probably just a big Armee mistake. Some guy was getting sent to flight school, and I was about to get court martialed and sent to nome Alaska. The messenger picked up the wrong letter and some schmuck froze for three years up in the Alaska while I was trying out my look with Ray bans!

You remember the story I wrote where Mitch and I "Test flew" a jet ranger??

That definitely didn't point to my having any special gifts!