Dear Ed:
I simply cannot say very much that others have not said, but have to offer a few thoughts.
Like so many others, I never met him in person, but Russ was an inspiration to me. We carried out an email and phone correspondence for quite a while, and I found I could share the oddest gun questions with him and he would already have thought about them, or sometimes had already figured them out. He encouraged me to do my Flues failure research, looking at it as an engineering problem rather than and old wives tail. He even contributed a cracked frame to my research. It sits on my desk as I write this.
He was sometimes irascible, frequently entertaining, but I knew he was honest in his appraisals , was no respecter of persons, and could be relied upon to liven up a dull conversation.
When I expressed some trepidation about cutting and machining some elephant ivory tusk he had sold me to make gun grips, he made a comment about civil engineers not being super bright and then provided me with a step by step "how to " , so I could get up to speed quickly.
All I could do was grin and think "yup, thats the Klunkermeister".
My family extends our prayers for you and yours in your loss.
Regards
Gregory K. Taggart
