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Looks like a fantastic gun for the money really, most especially with barrels re-made, that already costs the bomb!

I had the Bollé in yellow for a while, before loosing them -- I thought they were very good! Again, these are polarised, it makes a lot of difference in contrast in my experience.

On the plus side, we did manage 54 pages before the snobs arrived on their righteous high horses.

No, I don't. I'm quite handy with a SxS and I put the first trigger on the near-tip of my index, and let my finger 'fall' on the second one for the second barrels. Moving my hand around while the gun is still shaking from the recoil seems like a rather challenging prospect to me.

Actually single trigger is something I was looking for -- given her small hands, accessing both trigger on her existing gun is a problem as she literally have to move her hand back as she shoots. not terribly handy. The single trigger fixes that. I know it's not a 'proper' trad SxS, but she already has one of these, lovely ,and quite 'precious' -- that Winchester would be ideal for banging about, rough shooting or walked on -- it's also very much easier to cart around than the 28" alternative in bushes. I hear you about spares/fixes -- the gun is going to be serviced before I buy it anyway, so *hopefully* it should be reliable for the foreseable future!

Any opinions on Winchester Model 23 "Pigeon Grade"? We found a tiny one (24" barrels) that is a perfect fit for my wife, and she shoots it very well. It has all the 'new features' like single trigger, barrel selectors etc, however, it needs a service and some work on the wood. Any general opinion on these guns? Reliable? Some pics, including the one next to my 30" guerini for size comparison :-) !

I recently bough some of "Slipery ***** finishing oil" from a guy who advertises on facebook, tried in on a couple of scrap bits and was well pleased, so I topped up the finish on my Maleham and I have to say I am very, very impressed. I ended up with a very nice finish in a couple of applications. It's basically oil with a good mix of solvant, dries very quickly and leave a lovely finish, you can build up the finish very easily as well, in a matter of hours -- not weeks!

For flies, I'am afraid to say, but get rid of any 'new' indoor plants you've been given. Get rid of the lot! I've had that problems pretty much everytime someone comes with a 'present'f of a plant/flower thing with soil, basically they come in with the plant/soil and will stick around forever after that until you get rid of the habitat. for wasp queens, you need to nuke them from orbit, as everyone else said :-)

As much as I find DTL boring as hell, I have a HUGE amount of respect for guys who straight stupid stuff like 100/100 etc. I have enough experience to recognise the amount of sheer concentration required to so that sort of things, and that's something I'm completely incapable of, so two thumbs up, even if it's some sort of alien discipline to me! Only fun I ever had shooting DTL is gun down! I've shot english skeet "a lot" and I'm *not* a skeet shooter. But I think that it's a very, very good exercise for any gun to shoot skeet. Again, it's humbling, I've seen quite a few 'good shot' fail miserably at this 'silly' discipline. It does require a lot of practice and concentration again. I spent quite lot of time shooting skeet until I straighted it (to be fair I was shooting a browning B25 with full/full+) I can't recall the times I did 24/25 until I eventually nailed it. Oh, gun down too. Not 'FITASC' gun down but gun off the shoulder. I think it's fantastic practice, I still do > 20 if I do a run, as I stopped training it, but everytime I shoot skeet I 'discover' something that I now do differently, better (or not sometimes) and it's a very good 'metric' on how your overall shooting is going. Now Olympic Skeet is a different fish. Just the 3s random pause gets your nerves on edge. It's great fun. Thanks @grrclark for the writeup on FITASC rules. I shoot quite a bit of "old" FITASC and love it, I'm a lot better at /that/ than English Sporting, but yes the format is a bit of a bore for competitions. It actually take the whole DAY. Sure if you have a squad and a whole day it might be fun, but really it's boring as hell to come in, start at 9:30 and leave at 5pm to have shot 100 clays. As much as I love the format, I hate the time it takes!

@Uilleachan many times I've given up on this forum until I find some rare folk doing stuff like you just did. Thanks for the time you spent testing these! It's very likely the steaming is due to one of the 'feature' of the glasses: all encompassing around the head, basically preventing projectile to go 'around' the glass into the eye, so it's very likely the £xxxx glasses and the cheap 3M have the same 'requirements' there. As demonstrated they do the job pretty well, despite the 'failure' of one side. Optically is very likely the more 'interesting' business. The 3M glasses (which i tried) are very good and lighten up the scene, but 'wash out' also, the polarised one I pointed to have really, truely excellent contrast -- in fact sometime it's amazing, there are some situations were you feel you see several meters MORE with them on than without. Fog, or sparse woodland comes to mind. But, it's VERY unlikely the models I've pointed out would fare as well in a proper safety test.

I personally use these: bit more expensive, but are polarised. There are quite a few other in the same price bracket. https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B07HMXLYCP/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Just try CompX 28g. it's the softest cartridge on the market. It's softer than pretty much all 24g I tried, and only beaten by ... CompX 21g. CompX is cheap, 65mm so fits into any gun, even antiques, is fiber, and will break pretty much anything I shoot straight at. I've beaten guys shooting perazzis with fancy carts with my 130yo hammer gun and CompX at my club. I KNOW I get better dustballs of this and this and that with plastic etc etc, but overall, "thump" vs price vs quality of CompX is great. The Imperial Game is CompX with game shots too, so I shoot that as well, in various sizes depending.

I think the 3L straight 6 is well worth it now -- just the noise of it; I wasn't 'sure' when I bought the X3 but now I wouldn't buy anything else. The 4 cyl can also sound nice, but often it does sound quite clanky (especially when cold). I've also got a Z3 2.8 with a straight 6, 205bhp and when I drive it anywhere, I'm trying to think about how many tunnels I can drive thru :-)

I have an X3 2.0 -- I do 46-52 mpg on a long journey with a mix of mway and A roads. It drives fantastic, and despite what is said, the Xdrive is really great, I can /actually/ do some offroad with it. Ok it's not a defender, but I drag in in really rough terrain and it copes just fine. On snow/ice it's just amazing. To me it's a great mix, as I want a good 'road' car, space at the back, but still be able to go on tracks etc. It also /drives/ well, and the 2.0 engine (~185bhp) is just fine. Perhaps I wish I'd taken the 3.0, but they don't make in in manual and I wanted a manual. I had it from new, nearly 6 years, 91k miles, and they changed the cluch pedal assembly under warranty, that's it. I'm likely going to get another one new this year as a replacement, the 3.0 this time.

@silver pigeon69 look for a tool that reads EXIF properties -- something like GraphicConverter. If the photo hasn't been stripped of tags, AND the camera date was correct, you'll find that sort of things in there.

I still don't know, but what sort of NOISE level do you get with subsonics with that sort of gun? Ie un-modded air-rifle sort of noise? More? less?

I used the clay-ground & car method, with a bit of variation. We drove to the ground and didn't open the car, stayed in with her and talked normally... you could already hear the guns and she was curious but not worried as we were there having a chat. Also, we were rather lucky than the neigbours were having work done and there was lots of banging about the previous few weeks. Then a bit later (another day) we did it again and cracked open a window (away from the gun) and continued staying in the car. And we gradually did this until the windows were all open, then the door, then we put her on the ground, about 50+m from a stand and she completely ignored the gunfire by then. She's 6 months, and we won't move any closer until way-way later -- she's now exposed to what WE humans can stand without flinching, and that's enough for us to have our pup around the clay ground instead of having to leave her at home...

It's a fantastic building, sure enough, but it's a religious building that was built on the back of 200 years worth of people who quite frankly would have done better trying to take care of their family. I'm not anti-whatever here, just saying that there is a lot of sweat in that building, and likely a hell of a lot of tearsand blood, even before it was finished. I'm sure the church commiserated appropriately.

I have to say I won't watch it anytime soon. It's surely a very good and amazing film, but it does *ruin* songs when they *hammer* you with them forever and ever for marketing purpose. And they've been doing that a LOT with that film, like they did with ABBA, or worse with the Doors etc where it's so much I can't hear the damn *good* songs without reaching for the 'next' button because it's been so overplayed. For the love of Beep, I hope they don't do a film about David B or Led Zep.

He's right. Also, unlocking zillions of fund for a rebuild while he was battling the gilletjaunes who just want the odd penny more on their wages. Bound to be popular.

As I keep saying to people who fear "AI" will replace us, it's far, far FAR from ready for anything useful unless the context is so artificially limited that it's pretty much useless in the real world. Chess? OK. Go? Ok. Driving? LOL. Here, look how AI deals with stickers on the road: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/04/02/tencent_tesla_hacking/ That AI/Robot fear mongering is done by people who don't understand anything about it.

Not open on Thursday, unfortunately! Thanks for the pointer tho, I'll keep it in mind as I'm rather regularly around there. He's open on Wednesday..

I've got the occasion to spend next Thursday around monmouth, I was wondering if there are grounds in easy driving distance from there? Google isn't terribly useful...

Here's the 4.5 month old Isabelle, who's growing up as a pretty serious and steady girl! Also a bit of a *****, she'll nick anything that isn't bolted down! :-)

The difference between self braking and fully driverless with no input form the driver, on normal road is immense. Self braking is pretty straightforward, just needs one set of sensor, and the input for sensors that are good enough to integrate quickly and calculate your differential speed in real time. Even then, I bet it's very confused if it rains, or if a bike overtakes you and goes in front of your car, or tons of little corner cases you need to take into account to prevent the system sending the driver into the windscreen. Now multiply by 10000 or more the complexity of a system that drives on our road without driver input. Have you seen Tesla accidents lately? And the backpedaling they do to say to everyone that what they called "autopilot" truely isn't, and shouldn't be trusted as you need to keep your hands on the wheel. And that's for large, straightish, american highways. There must be a reason why several very very large companies have spent billions on the subject in the previous few years and all that got out was tesla's attempt.