doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com OT ... other hobbies besides shooting

I'm really enjoying this. How about you other guys' hobbies?

I didn't mention earlier my summertime passion. Fast boats. When I was a lad I satisfied my need for speed with cars. Now, I do it with boats. I have a restored '87 Allison with a 2.5L Merc V-6 two-stroke making 260 hp on it. I run it on the Savannah River near me (2 miles to a landing) and on Clarks Hill Lake occasionally. It's a 90+ mph boat with me in it by myself. There is no speed limit on the public waters of GA, so I can satisfy my current need for speed without breaking the law, unlike how I did it as a teenager. Allisons are vee-bottoms that have a small flat pad in the rear of the bottom, extending forward from the transom. At speed they ride on that little narrow pad, with air packing under the nose creating lift, and stability (if it's set up properly).

Killing some time on a sandbar in 2023. 1987 21 ft. Allison XTB.



Here's what a vee-bottom looks like stretched out and "on the pad".



We get a lot of fun out of the boats, but we don't run them wide open but every now and then. My son's STV (Summerford Tunnel Vee) has the same size 260 Merc on it but runs 118 mph easily,

Music. I've been playing guitar since I was 9, which was 62 years ago. I had my own country dance band for close to 20 years. I also play fiddle and played trombone for many years. Recently I took up piano. When country music disappeared to wherever it disappeared to I reverted to big band and swing and 50's and 60's pop which is where I am now....mostly. I catch a little flak because of all the "weird chords in that music". You either strive to improve or you don't. I still entertain at senior housing facilities. I'll give the older generation the highest marks for good taste in music.

Fishing. The last 20+ years all I've fished with is bamboo fly rods, silk line and leaders. I also restore bamboo fly rods and one of my retirement projects was to build me a 6'6", 2/2, 3/4 wt. bamboo rod for the tiny Ozark creeks. It is a simply delightful rod to fish.

Vintage MG's. I have three MG's, a 1955 TF, a 1956 A and a 1974 B along with a 1967 Morris Minor. I do most maintenance and repairs on them and love driving them.

When younger I loved to ski. We lived in Wyoming for a few years so I got in a lot of it. When we moved back to Missouri I'd make a trip to Wisconsin, which was a LOT closer and a LOT LESS EXPENSIVE than driving to Colorado or Wyoming and for me, just as much fun. I never needed the ski apris.

Moving back to Missouri I decided I needed to know how to sail. Missouri not being an end destination for sailing I mostly had smaller boats, 14ft. and 12 ft. For a few years my wife and I did keep a 22 ft. Catalina in a slip at Stockton reservoir. Spending 6 hours on the road for a couple days sailing became a burden so we sold the Cat and I had a 12 ft. O'Day, Widgeon that was fun and easily kept me entertained on smaller local lakes. As with skiing, that too came to a halt after a bout with colon cancer.

We had horses for 20 years and I still believe 'the outside of a horse is good for the inside of a man'. I also have no doubts that the cheapest thing about a horse is buying it. I still miss time in the saddle and a good horse.

Hmm,

Shooting: Skeet, sporting clays & 5 stand on occasion, cowboy shooting, plate matches.
Books: Science Fiction, some mystery, military history & technology, mostly WWII with an emphasis on the British Indian Army and the Burma campaign.
American Indian: Sand paintings from the Southwest and Eskimo & Inuit art including stone carvings.

I do enjoy shooting Skeet and what little upland I can scrounge.
For the past 20 years I've been learning how to smoke meat.
Hands down favorite, Beef back ribs. Trim. Pecan smoked.

I’m not exactly a “shooter” as I don’t participate in clays, skeet or trap. My shooting is in the pursuit of game. I enjoy the type of guns I hunt with and handload and reload for some of them. As for hobbies outside of hunting, I enjoy astronomy, telescope making, fly tying, fishing and have split cane to build a flyrod. I’ve been grinding, polishing and figuring telescope optics starting in my teen age years. I always have an outstanding, unfinished project lingering on my mind and in fact. Below are photographs of three scopes I’ve made. The largest was a 15.5” F/4.8 Newtonian that I built from scraps of plywood and other readily available materials. The mirror was hand ground, polished and figured by me out of a ship’s porthole. It was a good low power scope but suffered from astigmatism due to strain in the glass. The one with the blue tube was also made from scrap and the tube is Sonotube, construction tube for concrete columns, covered with model airplane iron on skin. The mirror was hand ground, polished and figured by me out of a Pyrex 8” blank cast specifically for making telescope mirrors. It is an F/5 8” mirror meaning it has a 40” focal length of Newtonian design. It is a Dobsonian design, alt/azimuth over Teflon scraps riding over a Formica base and PVC rings. With a 32 mm eyepiece It offers a widefield (2 degrees) suitable for deep sky views outside of our solar system. With a shorter eyepiece, it is decent on planets. It can be carried easily in the backseat of my 4Runner and set up in minutes. The long skinny tube in the third photo houses a 4” refractror lens at f/15 (60” focal length) and is an aplanat of Fraunhofer design. I ground, figured and polished the flint and crown blanks of optical quality glass and it is housed in a baffled tube of aluminum irrigation pipe I bought from Hastings Irrigation. It sits on a tripod in use (not depicted). It offers a coma free view across its field of view. Of the three scopes, the 8” is the easiest to use. I disassembled the largest. Another hobby has been ham radio. I’ve built and used more than a handful qrp (low power) transceivers and have communicated around the world using wire antennas and Morse Code (CW). I bounce in and out of that hobby. I've also enjoyed collecting old gunning shorebird decoys, but am in the "had enough" acquisition phase presently. My focus now is on a 1.5 year old French Brittany as I am getting her ready for woodcock and quail. “A hobby is nothing more than an enjoyable means of murdering time” or something like that.



[URL=https://lunapic.com][IMG]https://i.imgur.com/pt6Avrb.j

GLS, I am VERY impressed with your hobby. Your Greek is pretty good too!!

My other physical therapy option here.

And then, of course, this:



The polar opposite of an EV.

Not a “mopar” guy per se, but the ‘68 charger is one of my favourite cars of the muscle car era. Nice👍

I have (and have had) many interests over the years. Building flintlocks, gun engraving, hot rods (currently ford model A’s, both stock and rodded as well as currently building a “restomod” 1959 Mack B-61 (to pull my holiday trailer). So much so that it becomes overwhelming at times.