You guys...... The guy who gave the rifle to me was beyond into B/P, he was obsessed, as was the guy who built it, a guy was named Art Vandervogle who booked hunts for famous people out of New York. Strangely, a friend and fellow bow maker ran into Art's son at one of the larger bow tournaments, the son talked about his father booking hunts. When my friend mentioned the guy's name, I told him I had one of his father's guns, small world, the guy never showed up again. We are all up there in age so the time line fits.
My friend owned the rifle for 30 years the last 10 or so his health was too poor to shoot much. He told me for many years he shot a pound of powder a week through the gun shooting a 30 gr load of 3F, he was a target puncher and only killed one deer with the rifle. He was at Friendship every year and belonged to an M/L club in Fl that was very active. At that time he was a master blacksmith and horse trainer at a race track in Fl.
I don't understand the snarky comments, I knew the guy, you snarky guys didn't.
When my friend had a tumor the size of a baseball sticking out of his neck, he called me to a modest house in Collinwood TN he had made out of a garage and gave me everything B/P related he had, all his guns and everything else related to shooting them. He had nothing but still thought enough of me to give me all his stuff.
This guy had had some bad knocks in life, a brilliant man; he punched out a captain in the Navy and got a dishonorable discharge, this set the stage for a life time of challenges. I only found this out after he died, when I mentioned his service, he said "we don't talk about that". After he died, his girlfriend told me his dad was an admiral and never spoke to him again after the incident.
He was kicked in the face by a horse and badly injured, he didn't have health insurance and tried to ride it out, things went bad for him. The race track fired him rather than pay his medical bills, he had a heart attack, his jaw became abscessed. With nowhere to go he moved into a garage on his father-in-law's land and tried to make a go of it.
When I met him, he had been working for years running a debarking machine at a huge sawmill, the vibration of the machine killed the nerves in his feet, he had neuropathy on a level that made walking extremely painful for him but he never stopped.
I shot archery tournaments with him for 20 years, he had once been the best of the best where he grew up in California, he thrived on competition. In the later years he would stagger to the next target stake and sit on a folding chair, I would take care of any arrow retrieval for him, he couldn't make it to the target, I did that for the last 5 years of his life at tournaments all over the south east. When we met up, he always had a smile from ear to ear and said " I love this, with your help I am going to shoot until I can't take another step", and he did.
His nickname was "Biff", his real name was Ralph Moore, some of you may have met him at Friendship.
This is the last time I saw him alive; he met me at a tournament at Enid MS, he was finally too weak to walk, the cancer had consumed him. He loved the crawdad cook the archery club put on at the tournament and met me one last time, I served him plate after plate until he could eat no more.
You knuckle draggers might call BS on this man but I wouldn't think of it, I knew him too well. He was the toughest mentally and physically person I ever knew, nothing stopped him.
He died a week or so after I took this picture of him eating mud bugs.
He was an amazing craftsman, he made the horns and bags he gave me.
More of his work;
