Emu, that would be my camp stove.  Not sure when I will get down there get it, but just hold onto it for now.  Won't be needing it anytime soon. I will let you know when I am planning on heading out there next and you can leave it out for me.

Thanks.

...It's not my place to spend HTF funds, but *IF* the general consensus is that access at the range is a valid use of funds (I think so, but then again I have an RV trapped out there along with the others ) I'm getting some prices to haul in gravel to improve the road....I can lay my hands on a skid steer to carry up this weekend, and next if needed....
...We had discussed at one point moving the trailer debris so the access road would be a straight line drive from the entrance to the range, so it seems a wasted effort to place gravel on the turn, so I guess the first order of business would be to move the trailer debris, and then lay in gravel.....

...In short, if anyone didn't get enough mud this past weekend it looks like there will be a repeat this coming weekend to try and make the range accessible regardless of weather.....Any and all assistance would be great.....

great idea for hot cans!


308 vs 50BMG  (I think that was APIT.... looks a little charred to me)


I have a video showing how quiet the GPC is, but I don't think I can link it from photobucket.  

I didn't take many pics at all.  If you are in a pic, and don't want to be, let me know and I will take it down.

...That was some gooooood eats this weekend...So much for a diet.......I'd love to know what seasoning was used on the chicken too.....

...Good food, good company, good weapons, shitty weather....Hey, the first three more than made up for the last....

Now that we have a suitable truck and trailer available, I can get my tractor hauled over/back for a work day as well as long as SC and I are on the same schedule.  As for rock, I'd look into #57 gate spread with a single track attachment* for the dump.   It makes a rough road, but it lasts for a super long time.  57 should be about $400 per dump truck load.  #4 may be just a bit cheaper.  I brought over crush n run ($350 per load), which makes a nice smooth road, but doesn't last nearly as long.  If we can avoid rain for a few days, the ground may be ready to be worked this weekend.   That was close to 4 tons of gravel from my place and it is mostly gone now, or will be effectively gone when the road is smoothed out.   I don't know if one truck load of rock would do it or not.  Obviously, if the road is straight, it would take less rock.  

Thoughts?


ETA... *  I have no idea why the call it a single track attachment.  It attaches to the center of the dump truck and keeps rock from falling in the center, so you have 2 lines of rock on the ground, effectively getting you about 33% further down the road with single track compared to solid spread.

Also.... crush n run doesn't single track well at all.  Only if they can get some really dry gravel.  So with c n r you would have 8 foot wide spread of gravel.  

I'm not sure a dump truck can get in there to spread.  The trees need to be clear for ~15 feet up so the box will clear.  That corner could also be a problem for a dump truck.

...I'm pricing #57 stone for the reasons you stated....GAB (crusher run) is a good topping on prepared subgrade but with the loose top we've got there it will disappear pretty quick..and it doesn't stay on slopes over time even when compacted to 100%...The fines wash away and you end up with #57 anyway.....The 57 will give us a good base that is support and passable (as you said)....I, like you, doubt we can get a dump to tailgate the load, so I planned on dumping at the end of the existing gravel driveway, skimming the scum off with the bobcat and then laying in two, 2'-0" or so wide tracks with any left over at the problem areas....
....Doing a quick take-off on material this morning I came up with a single truck (18 ton) would give us 300 feet length at 3" deep and two 2'-0" wide tracks....It really needs to be 6" but 3" after the loose is removed is the minimum....If we can swing two or more loads we can improve both the depth and width...
...In a perfect world, to make a 10'-0" wide drive, 600 foot long at the 3" minimum depth we would need 84 tons..or just under 5 full loads..... (#57 stone is approximately 1.5 ton per cubic yard)...But that is going to be a pretty heavy price tag....
...Taking out the corner will shorten the distance and require less gravel as well as prevent as much banking of the gravel as you get in turns, so that would help....If we have enough material, it would be good to have a full width run from the treeline and down past the bottom at the 'slip-n-slide' I would think....That seems to be the most problem area after you take out the turn....

...Just my take on it....

...Oh, and I still think the cost of your GAB should be taken off the top first and returned to you....Without that, many more people would've been stuck below the 'slip-n-slide-....

That sausage was THE BEST I have ever had. I woke up thinking about it.

I don't know where most of the guys are located that are doing all this range improvement work. I would like to help but I am 2+ hours away. I just can't swing the time to do that trip too often with my daughter's softball schedule that I am a slave to. I wish I could help.

...I'm 1 1/2 hours away, but I have a vested interest in a passable exit....

Will do!!!!

I thought I saw your delicious pot of Brunswick stew on it, and had you in the back of my mind.

I can throw a couple hundred in the pot to help with the cost, unfortunately I'm kinda tapped right now after putting about $300+ish into the Fall Shoot out of my pocket. I'm game for a workday, and will do my best to volunteer my son and his buddy, as well as being there for the first couple or three hours, before heading to work. As I stated above, I can see lots of potential out there, but reliable access needs to be priority number one!

Vested interest or not, THANK YOU Draconis, for spearheading so many worthwhile projects out at the range!!! You are one hell of an asset to the GAHTF!!!

Let us know how the accounting goes Sourthencross, so we know what funds might be available from the Fall Shoot donations.

I want to thank Emu for hospitality and everyone else for either weighing down the back of my truck or taking turns pulling me up the hill. I heard that someone broke or jammed their thumb in the process - who was that and how are they?

The rain didn't bother me or the boys at all otherwise. The rain coats worked and water doesn't affect the firearms. I spend 8 hours on Sunday cleaning everything up though!

I'm in for another donation or work day, when it comes time to decide. Fridays and Saturdays are the best for me. You will probably have to email me to get my attention; I sometimes go a week without even lurking.

Hoping to see more pictures posted!

Hi Everyone! I have news about the injury- He dislocated his thumb and was seen by a doctor. He should be okay and will keep you informed. I had a really great time meeting everyone, helping out, getting some pro-trips from some great shooters and I got my rifle zeroed in! Yay! I also think this is my very first post so be gentle, I have been lurking for a long time, but I shall lurk no more. Again, thank you for making me feel so very welcome to the community, it is rare these days!

According to Westgram, his buddy, he went and got x-rays, and found out that it wasn't broken, is was ~just~ dislocated. OUCH!!!

That was stated over in the Fall Shoot pix thread.

ETA: We'll likely be looking for more donations ASAP to put some gravel down to have good access! STAY TUNED!!!

WELCOME to the fray!!!!

I'm thinking this is Westgram's buddy J*****. Glad you came out, thanks for all your help with the range in the past, and am looking forward to you posting regularly on the GAHTF!!!!

Sorry that I missed the shoot .   I got as far as the Crawfordville  exit .   The pain in my left knee was to the point that I decided to just return home .  I would just have been a burden to others .  Plus it sounds like I'd just got stuck .  And would have been of no use to anyone.

But I do have one question ???  Did anyone take any photos of the 2 steel plates I took out there on the previous Saturday .  Hope they served their purpose and ya'll shot the crap out of them .


gd

....Glad you FINALLY decided to come out of the shadows and post something....  And now, your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to surpass my post count...

...but beware, as Redgoat was *kind enough* to point out, I've posted more in three months than he has in three years, so get those fingers loose....

(seriously, Meme will be happy to see you on, J......good to have you around giving this place a touch of class.... )

You are one I forgot to thank GD!!!! The plates were hung, appreciated, shot at, and beat to HELL!!!!

The pic above, with the hole in the plate, that has the jacket left behind in the hole is one of your plates. They became the .50 cal plates at the end of the shoot, and are somewhat perforated now, but are still hanging, and will continue to do so until they look like a sieve!!!

THANKS Gandy!!!!!

Edit to add: and I sure hope you feel up to the next one!!!!

Glad that the steel was put to a good  use.As was intended .  Thanks for the words of encouragement on the knee .   Sorry to hear that a member injured his hand .  Hope he heals quickly .

And I still want my HTF T-shirt.  Tell SC not to use it for washing cars or cutting up for cleaning patches.


gd

It's me! I won't be a stranger. I do have some ideas floating around, I will want to pick your brain on them once I have a more concrete plan. :D Stay tuned!

...Oh NO !......Now look, we know the couch in the corner looks a bit rough but it's comfortable....the stuffed armadillo over the mantel is gonna' stay and the dog hiking his leg over there on the....Hey...Get OUT OF THERE....nevermind the dog...


.....But if you want to pick up around the place and do the windows, that's fine....

(...and with that Draconis ducks to avoid the flung shoe and quietly leaves the premises.......and in a damn hurry since her AR is now sighted in....)

I accept your challenge! I really enjoyed meeting you and Meme, you two are a really neat couple! I didn't realize you guys got stuck until about an hour ago when I read through some of the older posts- Oh boy!  I use the range rather frequently and I am trying to figure out how to best contribute to the road construction. I may need a few days but there is something I can do... Keep on keeping on with your healthy stuff, so encouraging!

LMAO!!!!!

Don't pull a tigeress by her tail!! bhahaaaa!

Yes'M.....

Trying to get prices for rock delivered to the range, by one of the local boys who does hauling. We ought to be able to save some $$$ by doing it locally since the quarry is about 7 miles from the range, on the same road, and the hauler is about 3 miles from the range, going toward the quarry. It's hard to get much more local than that. The only gotcha might be if my local guy, who I have done business with before, many, many, moons ago, and who I have GREAT confidence in, needs to make more off each hauling due to a lack of sheer volume here in this sleepy little county. His phone is not acting right, as we speak. But I ought to have info in a day or two, at the most. If I have to, I'll go bang on his door and say, howdy!

If he can't do it, or the price seems high.... stop by the quarry.  They will likely have a printed list of local haulers, and they should also have a price list of the different sized rock per ton.  From my experience... the hauler runs on a flat price for the area, and they have never upcharged me for singles (nor have I gotten a discount for 3 loads in a day).  Being that close, I would hope we could get it for a little less, not more.  If he can't 'single track' it, I would start calling around as it will take 30% more rock to cover the same ground.  I think some tractor / bobcat / manual work may need to be done first before the rock.  (ie... straighten the road, clear off all the 'slime' and smooth out the current road, trim the trees higher...)

Will do! Thanks for all the sound advice!!!

As the owner of the NICEST, most successfu, private range, in the GAHTF, I hope you'll join in on the new thread concerning improvements to the Angry Emu Range. Your input, and critiques, will be MOST welcome!!! After all, I'm thinking you told me you've hosted something like 21 shoots out at your place. There is NOTHING like the voice of experience, and I am all ears!!!!

.
On a side note, Crush and Run is almost useless for anything except top dressing. It worked in an emergency like we had but it will be all gone like it wasn't even there after its driven on more and after another rain.

CNR is best used after a road bed is made of #4 then topped with #57 then finished with CNR that is rolled/compacted. The #4 makes a stable road bed, the #57 smooths it and helps bid it together while the CNR acts as a top dressing with the fines helping to hold everything together if its rolled/compacted. CNR looks like you are getting a bunch for a cheap price but after its driven on several times or rains a few times, most of it is gone. There is a reason it is cheap, its mostly fines! It is more expensive to do it this way, but it is more stable and needs less work in the long run IE saves money over just doing 57 topped with CNR.

I might be able to get free this weekend. Is there a work day planned and a time?

Check out the improvements to the Angry Emu Range. Draconis the Incredible is organizing this thing, and he was wanting to start it in a new thread since the Fall Shoot is officially a soggy memory at this point....

I'm sure we'll be looking for any and all help, once Draconis finds out availability on the equipment. Oh, and when we find out what funds are available from the Fall Shoot donations that can be used for the gravel. I'm sure Southerncross will be chiming in on that, soonest!

I've never used #4.  The #57 that I have gotten ranged from 2" to pieces maybe 2x6x3"  The loggers love it.   If I had that on hand I would have brought it and it would have done a lot more!  It was either CNR or going to Lowes and buying bagged rock.  Either way... it was a bandaid repair in poor conditions.  

The road to my place is only CNR, but I have worked on it for 10 years and many, many dump truck loads to accomplish it.

Thank you to everyone that made this shoot happen...I had a good time and really didn't mind the rain.  Getting to spend time with everyone around the range, fire, food, coffee etc...  Don't know if I can stand the wait until we do this again.

A BIGGGGG thank you to Mike for letting me shoot the big gun...SWEET.

Everyone stay safe.
Meme

We took in $845 total between checks/money orders/cash donations. We spent a total of $653.10 on food/misc so that leaves $191.90 currently in the account. Of what is left, I need to get square with T_F (one of the donations included money for a shirt, which I wasn't handling, so I have to get that and the shipping cost to teufel_hunden so he can ship out that shirt). Another thing to think about is whether we will have to go get Gahunter95's tractor out there for a day (and we may have to) to pull those two campers out and scrape the road so it is passable again once it dries out. Not sure what that will cost but it won't be free (diesel cost to haul it/run it if nothing else). No one has/is charging labor to the HTF fund by the way, just hard cost. I do think we should do our best to get that road back to the condition it was in before the shoot occured.

That being said, I want to make something clear: I am merely the current keeper of the HTF funds for this shoot and do not feel I am in a position to make a decision for the whole of the HTF on whether to use the funds provided for food/misc items to gravel the road to the range (if we have anything left over after the above listed possible costs). The decisions I feel I am able to make regarding HTF funds pertain ONLY to event specific monetary needs. If the general consensus is that you folks want any remaining donation money to be used for that or any other capital improvements, that is where I will send it. I will say that this was the first and will be the last time I handle the donations for an HTF event. I know too many of you too well to be making enemies because of what happens with HTF money.

I honestly think a road building fund would be best served with its own thread and donations.

Now that the formalities are out of the way:

Thank you to everyone who showed up;  thank you for all the donations, thank you for the help, the shoveling of gravel , the comraderie, the willingness to endure the mud and the rain.  Thank you to Emu for opening up your place and being a gracious host. Thank you to RolandDeschain, Redwolf, Tok762, Draconis, Gahunter95, Redgoat, Glockfan68, Votefromrooftops, RamblinWreck, teufel_hunden, wiseanhyzer, and anyone else who donated time, money, and sweat equity into making the event work. You guys (including the rest of the HTF) are awesome and the reason I put my time into organizing these shoots.

Well said and I agree 100%


Posted Via AR15.Com Mobile

Well said.  

And thank you for being the organizer for this shoot.  I think we can all clearly see that this is too much for one person.  Next time we may want to have a small committee to coordinate all of this.  Maybe one person for food, one person to organize the workers, and one person as the accountant?  It takes a lot of work to host one of these.  Doubling the # of guests, is not just doubling the work, it probably goes up an order of magnitude.  

As I have stated before ; a committee comprised of shoot hosts would be a good thing. More heads to think together and  spreading the accountability.

****ETA -  shirt + shipping was $22. New total is $169.90****

+1
...Putting all of the organizing on one person is too much....."Many hands make light work" comes to mind.....

Well said +1.
Having a separate gravel fund would probably be best served. If nothing else it will help in case someone gets their panties in a knot for having funds donated to that.

GA HTF is a great group of guys and the shoots have been fun. Thanks to GAhunter95 for having better skills than I and not hitting the porta john .

One more thing; it takes a few days for money to transfer from a bank account to paypal. I dumped all the HTF funds into a specific bank account and withdrew it all so I had cash for whatever we needed. I should have everything back into paypal by the weekend at the latest.

I know I can speak for everybody that attended or planned to attend that without Emu Hosting and you SC volunteering to Organize the 2015 Fall Shoot, it would not have turned out how great it was since the weather was against us starting 3 days prior to the Shoot!

The work was finished on time and as each new weather related problem arose they were tackled with leadership followed by a team effort to knock them out. Just the fact that everybody was able to shoot and stay safe in the weather conditions when the event was planned for a sunny day speaks volumes. Then getting even all the 2 wheel drive cars out so nobody had to call a wrecker shows how everybody was willing to pitch in to make sure not one single GA HTF Member was stranded or put out.

What was even more amazing was what a bunch of Boy Scouts the group was as a whole. Somebody asked if anybody had a cordless drill for target maintenance and I said that I did. Somebody needed Blue Loctite, for something other then gun lube (see CMSHOOT Thread), for a scope mount and it was provided. Hey it would be great if we had some gravel, GAHunter said I have some let's go get it. These factory loads are not functioning in the Thompson, here try these and on and on ........

So in summary, Hats Off to Emu and SouthernCross for a great Shoot and a great Time.

.

Thanks for the kind words. We do it so everybody can get together and enjoy themselves. Its all for the greater good of the HTF.

Spoken like a scholar.

...Have you settled up with GaHunter on the GAB that was brought over?....Three and half to four ton of GAB at about $30.00 a ton is $120.00.....I don't know what Mike paid for it, but that's the going rate not counting haulage around Macon.....

He "sold" it at a steep discount. He's covered in the current account I gave. I put some towards my fuel cost to get it as well, considering that hauling 12-13k lbs 80 miles roundtrip is hard on the fuel mileage.

...Not questioning...just didn't think he needed to be left out since his GAB was the reason as many got out as they did.....

Yikes!  I'll double check tomorrow as I need to replace what we used.

ETA... just called... I'm still at ~$21/ton delivered for CNR (full load pricing)  #57 is ~$26.50/ton.  (Each load costs ~$365 for CNR, ~$476 for #57)

If we need to adjust cost, let me know.