Randy

Hey Geof, good to here from you. Yea, I'd go with those Buick springs. Actually, The springs are usually pretty easy, it sucks if you ever need an extractor for one of those though. If that happens, you have to whittle a new one yourself.

The answer McMillan gave is correct, their are no parts available for the G. McMillan/Harris built guns. My suggestion would be to find an industrial supply store that has a good spring selection and see if you can find a replacement that way.

You also might want to check to see if it is now nose heavy, it must have at least 10% of the total weight of the gun on the buttstock when the gun is at rest on it's front rest or bi-pod in order to shoot accurately.

Currently the membership application form page is down. I would suggest downloading the form and sending it in by mail. The problem with the secure certificates is that shortly we will be moving the whole site to a new server. Due to logistical problems and the necessity of having the SSL certificates active to get the new secure pages working properly, the certificates were moved to the new server before the sight was ready to go online on that server. That problem should be remedied in the next couple of weeks, but as it involves coordinating the work of several people, who all have work to complete to get the new site up, it is taking longer than expected. Sorry for the inconvenience.

I am not sure what the cost is now, but you can call Dick Fisher at 931-592-2853.

Personal attacks on other members of the forum is not allowed here. For direction on the accepted behavior on this forum, read the "Forum Rules and Terms of use" at the link on the top of this page.

I would like to see a tangent ogive boat-tail bullet in the 750-800 grain weight range, designed to be shot in a 1 in 15" twist barrel at between 2600-2900 fps. Tangent ogive because we have tried dozens of different secant ogive bullets that shoot great at up to 600 yards but are not as accurate as the tangent ogive bullets are at 1000 yards which is what we normally shoot. 1 in 15" twist because that is what 98% of .50's are. Weight and velocity to be competitive with the bullets we are currently shooting. With the exception of the 750 grain AMAX, the majority of competition bullets currently being shot are 740-800 grain monolithic solid bronze bullets.

We know exactly what took down our server. What basically happened is that while installing some server software upgrades the pointers which direct access to various parts of our site got wiped out. This is similar to accidentally erasing your hard drive, the data is all still there, it just can't be accessed. At that point nobody could access our data on the server not even the people at the data center who are physically at the server. Then the server had to be reconfigured from scratch. Once that was done we restored our data from backups. In other words, the tech that was installing the upgrades at the server screwed up. Actually that is correct, sort of. The only place that your complete credit card number exists once it leaves your computer is at the FCSA office in hard copy form. When it leaves our secure server it is not a credit card number, nor is it complete. Actually, our secure server is a Unix server running Apache/1.3.37(Unix). The only part of our site that is on a windows server is the main FCSA web page, all other parts of the site, including these forums are run on the Unix server. At no time was your credit card data on a Windows server. I don't know why you didn't receive the confirmation then, as the same mail server is used for both and we tested the membership application page as recently as yesterday and it is working fine.

First off, it is highly unlikely that our servers were hacked and even less likely that a hacker could get your credit card info if they did. I will not explain here how the credit card numbers are decrypted, but I can tell you that at no time after your credit card info leaves your computer is it in a form in which anyone could generate your credit card info from the data they would get by hacking our servers. In other words, if you think someone has got your credit card number I would recommend checking your computer immediately for a data logger virus or data miner, as that is how it would have been done. As far as you not receiving the confirmation email goes, if your credit card was charged then the order went through, check your junk mail folder, as a confirmation was sent to the email address you gave but because of the mass of email sent from our mail server it is often tagged as spam or junk mail.

Yep, I am sure it will pick back up in no time. The spammers got back here in less than 12 hours.

Yep, that is true, they haven't allowed fifties there since the late 90's.

Actually, from my experience of running and participating in long range matches for over 25 years, more than half of the competitors show up at the match without having zeroed their rifle. In my case, I often haven't even shot my rifle prior to coming to the match. That being said, this is one of those things that their is more than one way to skin the cat. Although, I'll have to admit the sighting aid the OP is referring to is a new one on me. If you have your rifle zeroed prior to going to 1000 yards, it shouldn't be much of a problem to dial in the appropriate number of minutes from your zero to hit the target. If you don't have a zero, it still isn't much of a problem to bore sight the gun at the 1000 yard target and then dial in 28-32 minutes which should get you on paper. Or you could always do it the way I do, mount the scope and set it at approximately 30 minutes, aim at the center of the target and fire a round. Watch where the round impacts, then line the gun up on the center of the target and hold it there while dialing the crosshairs to the impact point. The next round will be in the x-ring.

I don't know, I have only shot at Raton once that I thought it was windy, then again I shoot at Reno a lot where 20 mph winds are considered a minor breeze. Unfortunately, I won't be able to make the Raton match this year, conflicting obligations. If you do go you should by all means take your gun and shoot, watching a fifty match isn't all that exciting, shooting one, on the other hand, is a blast.

Well, we were given some bullets, but they were unsolicited by either of us, and quite frankly, we never could come up with any use for them that made any sense. At the velocities we would have had to shoot the cast bullets their are a lot of cartridges better suited to them than the .50 BMG. After they sat around my shop for several years, someone expressed an interest in experimenting with cast bullets in a fifty, so I sent them on to him. He was requested to let us know what he did and how they worked, but I never heard back from him, that was several years ago. So your information may be correct, as far as it goes. People send us stuff all the time, in reality, we rarely have time to try much of it. Now Skip may have intended to do an article about cast bullets from data generated by someone else. As far as I know he never completed it if he had intended to. I wouldn't know for sure about that, as he never mentioned it to me, he usually wouldn't automatically mention it to me unless he intended to actually physically test them himself though.

Skip never played with any cast bullets. I had some but never shot any, so can't be much help either. I gave the ones I had to someone in Arizona but can't remember who, as it was several years ago.