Quote from: Pat B on February 18, 2026, 03:54:53 PMIf you are gonna use beaver tail or leather you can wrap masking tape around the handle a few times then with a sharp razor cut down the center along the back and peel it off. That makes a perfect pattern for your wrap.

Pat's right on with this!

I had a customer of mine request black glass belly ramp caps on his bow to help give the illusion of a one piece bow. i've never done this before. So here she is with some sanding sealer... what do you think?

I've got a pretty large 36X36 pole building, and have a mezzanine on one 12' X 36' section that only has a 7' ceiling and the stairs coming up on one end. i insulated a 12X12 room That i can heat with light bulbs to keep above freezing. the other 12x12 area at 7' is tool storage ans a wood rack too.

The main working portion of my shop is  24' X 36' and i have a 10' ceiling/2nd floor in a 24'x 24' section.the other 12x 24' section is vaulted with an 18' eve line and a 12'x 10' garage door.   

what i do in the winter is drop an arctic curtain and only heat that 24X24 area. I have no insulation in my work area, and only heat it when i'm out there. I have a small spray booth insulated that i keep my glue and finishes, and pain from freezing just using light bulbs. I just used fiberglass insulation and styrofoam on the spray booth.

You would be surprised how well an arctic curtain works...

Thanks Pat and Pappy!  Coming with my daughter, her husband and my granddaughter, who is probably the best shooter of the bunch. We are really looking forward to the shoot.  We have nothing but great things it.

Looking forward to trying mine next month!

Same here... I don't see it unless I click on the first of Terry's 2 links.  That first one points to a "Board=5.0" and the 2nd one doesn't.  I can't get to the shooter's forum without that first link.

Congratulations sir!  

Nice shooting!

A very well written piece! Thanks for taking us along.

Rather than begin trailing immediately, I went back to the cabin I had built to enlist the help of a bundle of brown hair, caffeine, and optimism, my three year old pudelpointer, Jackson.

While he has found several deer and pigs, I haven't worked with him enough on the whole concept of trailing versus casting widely about in the hopes that he smells something.  While not the classic NAVHDA approved method for big game, searching the woods a half county at a time is actually pretty effective.  Sure enough, only seconds after taking him to the blood-soaked arrow with the command, "Dead Bird", he had found pig #1, a nice eating sized sow that had made it only 40 yards into the woods.  Her last trail was just what you'd want, consistent large drops and splashes of bright oxygen enriched blood. 

But now for the hard one.  Following along that same line near the tree line, we found a few drops of blood, and not the bright red of a good lung hit.  I let Jackson do his thing out ahead as I slowly picked my way along, sometimes 6 inches at a time, sometimes several feet. We proceeded this way over a quarter mile, me methodically dropping pink flagging tape at each drop, and Jackson covering probably acres at a time in front.

After about an hour, I decided it best to get the first pig skinned, gutted, and on ice then resume the trail that afternoon.
And for the record, I would rather clean three deer now than one pig.
With the afternoon sun making it just hot enough to break a sweat with any kind of physical activity, I went back into the woods along the creek to still hunt along the blood trail and see if I could make better progress on my own.  Slowly following the trail of pink tape markers, I got to  where we had called it off that morning and watched a doe with two yearlings slowly feed along the creek about 80 yards away. The world was definitely shifting towards spring, and I still had a pig to find.  But the blood trail just stopped.  I could follow kicked up leaves for a bit along what was most likely the pig's path, but not a single drop of blood to be found.  Nowhere.  Tons of sign where pigs had been rooting in the mud between the cypress knees didn't help matters either.  I cast about along several possible paths the pig could have taken, but still nothing, not a fresh crossing of the creek, nothing.  Two wood duck drakes kept pressing their case to a hen at the bend by a big oak, but she soon became tired of their advances and left.  Still no pig.  A deep voiced gobbler answered some woodpecker's search for dinner.  Still no pig.  We had been heading into the breeze that morning and those pigs smelled so bad even I could smell them at a distance if they were there.  Every dark shadow turned out to be just that, or a fallen tree stump, but never a pig.  Finally, I had to admit defeat, wherever that pig was, I would never find it, and whether that wound would prove fatal, or it would just have a scar and scary stories to tell the little black and tan piglets, I would never know.  Taking an animal cleanly is part of life, and definitely my objective.  Wounding one like this, probably severely, is something I never want, even if it is what most people, including me, view as a nuisance animal.
Checking my watch, there were about 30 minutes officially left in the season, and I decided to head back and call it a year.  Looking at the judo point arrow in the bow quiver, I pulled it out, thought about all of the clumps of grass, dead sycamore leaves, and fire ant mounds I had shot with on the way through the fields and the woods this year and figured it was time for it to go.  Drawing back, I aimed up through a gap in the cypress limbs and let it go where the orange crest and fletching caught the last rays of the setting sun before dropping out of sight for good.  And with that, the season was over with one pig in the freezer, one to regret, no deer, but a lot of memories and lessons learned.