new use for shotgun: Horticulture!

[nelsonted1]

Mom was griping last time I visited MN. Problem was two 6o year old soft maples had rotted through the trunk and were scaring her (and everyone else) because they were overhanging the house. She wanted them down but the cost of a tree cutter with a lift to get up there was 100s of dollars, one nieghbor scared her with a suggestion of at least $1000.

Twenty years ago we had an old elm hanging over the house dead. Before we could cut that one down we shot off a big limb with a hundred 308s. That wasn't much in the big scheme of things and we had fun. The problem with doing it again was soft maples are soft and may be hard to shoot off especially hard since they were live.

We'd finished up deer hunting the day before and still had the 500 Mossbergs out. So I suggested shotting them off. Dad laughed at my hesitation and said go ahead.

I started shooting 20 or 30 cheap mixmaster 12 guage slugs. Then proceeded to the Brennekes, 20 of them. Then shot ll the round ball loads I had, a lot of them. Before I was done we'd shot off all our 12 and 20 guage slugs and bought more twice. Broke the stock on the first shotgun. Luckily it was close to zero degrees so I had plenty of winter clothes cushioning the recoil. Plus had fun.

I leaned a lot. The three Mossbergs are pretty accurate shooting uphill. Round balls would blow right through and we could see them fly off still soaring upward (we have a huge cattail swamp for buffer zone). I should have glued the stock up on the 12 guage when I realized it was cracked when I bought it in 1980 but it had 100s of shells and slugs through it without a worry. 20 guage slugs have more power than some give them credit for. Live soft maples are really tough and springy. And shooting hundreds of slugs is fun!

Dad laughed at the expense- comparing 60 or 70 slugs to hiring someone to come in and take them down is a no-brainer.

[hoosierlogger]

And people from the south wonder why there are so many jokes about kentucky boys. LOL It sounds like fun though.

[old turtle]

Hay! down south we know how to get things done with what we have at hand. In this case guns and ammo.

[longbow]

I did much the same thing many years ago. Again, a maple tree with a large and dangerous overhanging branch that would be very awkward to cut off.

A friend and I used two .45-70's to remove the branch. It took about 20 rounds and down she came.

A gun is a multi purpose tool!

Longbow

[akajun]

I use the same technique, but I use a 22lr. I have tried a shotgun with buck, no slugs though, and keep coming back to a 22. No matter the type of wood or diameter of the branch, it cuts them all down.

[jmsj]

A couple of years ago the wind had blown a dead Cottonwood tree into the crocth of another tree.
It was snagged about 15' feet up. Our back fence is miles back, so after work I would go and shoot at it w/ whatever struck my fancy (.357 mag, .44 mag, .22 LR., .45 Colt,etc). It was a great stress reliever. It took about 5 outings and I don't know how many rounds to bring it down.

[winelover]

Never done it but it has crossed my mind many times when bow hunting in my tree stands. You know, I should come back out here during the off-season and shoot that unreachable branch out of the way.

Winelover

[nelsonted1]

There is a magnificent hard maple on the front of my parents home. The dang tree insists on growing limbs toward the house roof. We use either the loader tractor, ladder or an extension saw to trim the branches every year. (If the branches reach the roof they can take off the shingles.)

Dad doesn't like us to use the ladder on small branches since if they broke off we'd be clutching the ladder on the way toward the ground. Dad doesn't want to buy another ladder.

Several years ago he and a daredevil neighbor were trimming an old ladies trees and the dinglebarry was on the wrong kind of branch and the ladder rolled upside down. Dad was so shocked and overwhelmed by the cartoon quality of the idiot hanging under the ladder by one hand that he always worried about us recreating the procedure.

Anyway, we cut new branches with a .22 or a blast of birdshot

[DLCTEX]

Birdshot at anything under 15 ft. is a quick tree trimmer. My insurance co. says a limb through the roof, brought down by ice, is an act of God and is not covered. Hailstones are covered. ???

[bohica2xo]

What are these "trees" you people speak of?

[nelsonted1]

What are these "trees" you people speak of?

Come on! You people have trees in Las Vegas!

[Beekeeper]

come on you ain't never been to lost wages have you.
whisper of wind in idiho and it don't stop till it gets to californy.

Jim

[bohica2xo]

Come on! You people have trees in Las Vegas!

Nope. Just hoodrats armed with spraypaint. They are protected too.

The hoodrats are allowed to shoot in the air, but us citizens are not.

[matm0702]

I remember an old oak tree we used as a backstop. Some of the heavy rifle stuff
would cut right thru it. Didn't realize how bad until after Hurricanes Francis & Jean rolled thru. Most oaks blow over exposing the roots. After all our abuse the tree was snapped of at where the rounds penetrated. Alot of 7.62 and 8mm were used on that old tree. We had plenty of fire wood after that.

Mike

[Tom R]

I took my cousin out shooting one time. We went to the local bring **** to shoot range. And shot up a computer that pissed us off. After the case was shredded we took out the mother board and shot off all the smaller components. My cousin fires one round from my 22 right through the processor. Right after the shot was fired a tree about 8 inches in diameter falls lazily over like a cartoon. The poor tree had been shot so many times. I was happy to be present when it happened. A once in a lifetime event. I just wish I had made the shot.

[AaronJ]

I went to the family farm last week to break in the bore on my new 338 lapua. After hours of shooting cleaning and waiting for the barrel to cool paper targets where just not satisfying anymore. Thats when we spied an eight inch thick branch sticking up out off the flooded river. Well six precisely placed 300gr SMKs later there was no more branch.

[beemer]

There was a large white pine about 25 feet from the end of my house. It was at the edge of the woods so most of the limbs were on the side next to the house. During a heavy ice storm I walked outside and what I saw scared me silly, the tree was so heavy with ice that it was leaning toward the house. White pine trees will break off with the weight of ice and the storm wasn't over yet. I shot the limbs off with a 22 LR, one shot at the base and it would break off. The limbs were so heavy with ice that I couldn't move them so I just piled them up. When I finished there was just a large trunk with no limbs.

Dave

[klcarroll]

We need to recruit some muzzle loading cannon people for these forums! .....One round of Chain Shot from a 12 pounder would have done a workman-like job for the O.P.!!

(......A cannonball is just a Boolit; ......Right??)

Kent

[nanuk]

at hunting camp we always bring a brick of 22's and pick a tree at about 30 yds, and then cut the top off.

sometimes takes over 100 rounds, as hitting a pencil at 30-35 yds is not easy for me.

[Linstrum]

Yeah, guns do come in handy! Going back probably 35 years, I've used my guns a few times for doing yard work, maintenance, and weed abatement. I used to raise Central American ornamental and edible cactus leaf and fruit (nopales and tunas for those of you who are familiar with such edible delights) and I had one place in my rows of cactus where I could not get to a big water-thirsty white nightshade bush that was approaching 6' high in order to chop it down. Darned weed, I finally took aim with my High Standard Flite-King 12 gauge pump with 30" modified choke barrel and with one shot of #8 birdshot chopped that water-sucker off clean! It had a trunk about 3" in diameter, too, big thing that it was. I had to lasso that recalcitrant bush to drag it out of my cactus patch with my wheel tractor. To keep the freezer full I also used to run four Holstein steers on the rest of the land not occupied by my cactus and to keep them moved around to areas where the browse was best I used an electric fence. I kept the fence charger down at the house so I could check on it to see if it were working or not and the feed line up the hill to the back 20 acres had to run through a row of pine trees. I could not reach the 25 feet height where the wire ran through the trees to trim off limbs, so again my High Standard 12 gauge pump did the job of cutting off the many limbs in the way quite admirably. I was really quite surprised at how effective 1-1/8 ounce of #7 or #8 birdshot is for breaking pretty cleanly through woody limbs.

I have also used my .22 for making holes in sheet metal where I couldn't get a drill or punch, but the one instance that takes the cake for using a gun for great good was told to me by a deceased buddy (his name is James Anglin, RIP old pal!) who was a U.S. Navy veteran of the Pacific Theater of World War 2. His MOS was as a Machinist's Mate and he was a machinist on the destroyer he served on. He was always inventing "G-jobs" to do in the machine shop to get out of swabbing the deck, scraping rust, and painting. The armorer always gave the machine shop the scrapped gun parts for emergency raw material to make other things out of and they had some bad M1 Garand barrels around in the scrap bin, so one day my buddy and the armorer decided to bore one out. It was finished to 0.348" with a letter size "S" reamer, then the neck portion of the chamber was reamed to 0.386" with a letter size "W" reamer, and then they made and jerry-rigged a primitive rifling cutter machine on one of the lathes. He said they cut the rifling so it slugged 0.358", which he said was kind of thin at the muzzle, and it would be with 0.77" thick walls. He and the armorer ended up with a functioning Garand in .35 Whelen. Since they didn't have any Whelen ammo on board they also pulled the bullets and powder out of some live .30-06 rounds and neck expanded them with a mandrel my buddy made to take the .358" slugs machined out of yellow brass. The armorer weighed them and my buddy machined them to size so they all weighed in at 180 grains. Then they loaded them up. He and the armorer test fired it with a bunch of other reworked guns when they had shore leave on one of the islands and it worked pretty good. After that the armorer kept it hidden in with his junk. The fleet he was with was the one that got caught in The Big Typhoon of 1944 that sunk and damaged a lot of our ships. On his ship they had some kind of really big equipment lashed down on the deck that worked loose from the violent rocking the ship was enduring in the 40-foot seas and it was bashing things up pretty good as it slid around, kept from going overboard by one cable. The captain ordered my buddy to bring a cutting torch up on deck but he couldn't get up close to it with the big oxy-acetylene tank cart as it slammed back and forth on the deck, so the captain decided to shoot the cable in two with AP. My buddy figured out it would probably be easier to dislodge the pin through the cable eye up in the davit arm instead of trying to hit a thin moving cable enough times in the same place to cut it while also shooting the ship full of holes with AP. Since the big heavy soft brass bullets in the .35 Whelen would do a better job of driving the pin out instead of penetrating and expanding the pin end and swelling it solidly in place with .30-06 AP, he went and got the rifle he and the armorer had made. The captain was a good shot so he took the rifle out of his hands and knocked the pin out with the first round. The equipment slid overboard and was gone. When the captain saw the rifle muzzle he asked my buddy what in hell the rifle was and where it came from, so the cat was out of the bag. The captain ordered him and the armorer to load up 160 rounds, enough for 20 en bloc clips, and the rifle was painted red, marked ".35 Whelen", and put in the armorer's rack with orders to keep it for other emergencies.


rl896