[Dillinger]

Hello all - I stumbled upon this site and decided to join up, learn a few things and possibly share some as well.

I have extensive experience with many modern firearms and have spent about a year total, off & on, working as an apprentice in a custom gun shop under a true master in his craft, Brett Evans at NWArmswerkes, whom I also consider a great friend.

I make a regular pilgrimage to the SHOT SHOW and was recently in Vegas for the 2008 production. 4 days of wandering from booth to booth and handling some of the greatest weapons ever produced in the modern era will do wonders for any bad mood you find yourself in, so I would highly recommend the experience to any and all interested.

I look forward to reading the posts and maybe offering some advice, but I also look forward to learning much more than I could ever offer from the informed community that exists here.

For the record - I am a 1911 guy. John Browning was a GOD walking the Earth light years ahead of his time and I consider his works to be true masterpieces. I own several and will probably post a few pictures. I don't hunt, but I own several boltguns, all built by Brett, that are more of a sniper application and will shoot far better than I ever could.

Thank you for the opportunity to share and learn...

D

 

[bkt]

Welcome, Dillinger. It's good to have someone with your experience.

 

[Dillinger]

I appreciate that bkt - I will try to make my way through the forums and see if I can add any real world insight to the questions. I look forward to sharing experiences and hearing of the projects others are working on. You have a good site here and I look forward to becoming a more senior member of it...

D

 

[GlenJohnson]

Welcome, Mr. D. Glad to have you.

 

[Tom the roofer]

Welcome to the forum Dillinger

 

[fapprez]

Welcome to the forum!

 

[airlink]

Welcome, you will find this to be a great place for good talk.

 

[Gatekeeper]

Welcome to FTF from SW Pa!

 

[lonyaeger]

Welcome to the FTF!

 

[MoHawk]

That'll piss him off Gate. But welcome Dillinger

 

[Benning Boy]

Just keep your nose clean, kid, and you'll do fine here.

All you'll need is a thick skin, and don't pi$$ off the Mods.

Welcome.

 

[canebrake]

Go away, "Your Mother Was a Hamster and Your Father Smelt of Elderberries!"

 

[Dillinger]

My name is John Dillinger (I go by JD) and I don’t rob banks (at least not yet) but I have never refused to listen to a well laid plan.

For the past few years I have been a member & moderator of another large gun forum and spent quite a bit of time over there procuring deals for the members, arranging group buying discounts, doing product testing on knives, tomahawks and even took part in a .45 ACP shoot for the best defensive ammo. Trying my best to provide some insight and answer some to questions that arose concerning the world of small arms as to what brought me to the site in the first place.

My roll grew from there.

I was elevated to Moderator. A position with power, but with it comes a heavy crown. You can’t appease everyone and sooner or later you have to offend a few to be able to advance the whole.

I wanted to develop a place that would caution itself against getting into a rut. Create an outlet where less knowledgeable members won’t be shunned for their lack of terminology, or for a weapon they had already chosen, and have a place where senior or ranking memberships wont be able to just complain and ***** about everything instead of trying to inject something positive and help create a stronger site.

In the past, the work became more of a chore and the enjoyment of helping people with gun questions dwindled. It became like another full time job with the job description not being one I really wanted.

To say I was labored by the experience would be an understatement. I had to seriously consider turning off my PM function, or leaving the site all together, to get some peace and get back to a day when I was just talking about guns.

The peace hasn’t come. And the infighting has continued to the point that I am not sure who is friend and who is foe, or if there are two sides to the group after all, or just a bunch of members who felt they were more important than the forum experience itself.

I wanted to come back to a time. To a time when the forum didn’t have these problems. Wasn’t attacking each other, wasn’t picking & choosing who should stay & who should go, with PM’s in my ear, encouraging application of the Ban Hammer for what they thought was right.

I was perplexed. For years, this was my home. I had done give-a-ways, I had won give-a-ways. I had spent tons of my own money on a forum that I wanted to make better, wanted to have those that didn’t have the same yearly salary still be able to enjoy some great gear. Give-a-ways. Promotive. Donations.

And yet infighting reared its head and it was hell bent on destroying a forum that WE ALL had come to love.

So, I decided to come to back to a time where this forum was NOT in turmoil. It was NOT split down the center. It was a time when this forum was young, innocent and still new on the Gun Forum radar.

So…

Here is a little about me. At the age of 5, I was given my first BB gun, I still own today, and was taught to shoot beer cans off a saw horse under the watchful eye of my father, my first mentor.

From there I progressed into shooting NRA matches, starting in Tyro class (for the little ones) up through small bore and big bore silhouette competition for a few years as a young and teenage adult.

I shot for the State Championships twice in my time and I scored a perfect 100 in rim fires (pistol/rifle), followed by a “less than” performance to score a solid, but disappointing 5th at my best. Truth be told, it was probably some Tango bastard that beat me.

That said, the Army and Marine recruiters were calling my house NON-STOP from the time I was 16 until well after graduation.

Small arms had always been a passion of mine. I couldn’t get enough knowledge about them, so I bought all sorts of books & subscribed to hundreds of magazines over the years, reading about new technologies, new products and new cartridges.

Having a small case of OCD didn’t help matters. The more I learned the more I needed to enhance that knowledge, only to find out six months later what I held true was now being debunked.

What the hell was going on here?

Gun knowledge was changing direction as fast as the wind. This was when I learned the very first axiom of the gun world

EVERYONE is a firearms expert, and if you ask them, they will tell you everything about your theory that is wrong.

About 10 years ago I started the seemingly natural progression towards long distance shooting (in excess of 600 yards with the goal being 1,000 plus yard shooter). I have always had an extensive library on topics of interest, so I started adding to it with quality works from long distance authors.

I devoured most of the books that were out there concerning long range shooting from a sniper and modern shooter perspective( Plaster, MacPherson, Lonsdale, Chandler - multiple books) and then I did some reading about benchrest shooting and the collective minds of whom I consider the mad scientists’ of modern gun evolution. At that point, I knew I needed to find a good gunsmith, spend some time spec’ing out my first build, and starting to learn what being a real small arms guru was all about.

During this time I was traveling a lot. I had worked in 17 different cities, in 6 states, and had been to both Korea and Japan on behalf of the D.o.D. I had no true home, I lived in hotels and I read all the time. It kept me out of the bars and strip clubs. *grin*

It also gave me the opportunity to spend a lot of time in gun stores and talking to “gun guys about gun stuff”. It didn’t take long until I learned the second axiom of the gun world:

Everyone has a better product than you have, or are thinking about buying, and they are MORE than willing to tell you all about it.

When I got back to my home in the Pacific Northwest I did some gun shop inquiries and that is where I met Brett Evans from N.W. Armswerkes. Our relationship started as customer/owner, but after a couple of years, a couple of ground up builds and a lot of jokes we became friends and he has become my “mentor” in small arms.

For the past 6 or 7 years I have been a “shop rat” in his Bonney Lake production facility.

N.W. Armswerkes is a custom gun shop that has produced top small arms that have taken a plethora of titles and trophies ranging from Boone & Crockett rated racks, to top sniper challenges, to benchrest and “Across the Course” championships with several customers having set world records with products from the shop.

One of the bread and butter weapons that are built by the shop are AR’s. We build a ton of them, and as such, I have seen just about every product out there that was ordered in for one customer or another. My roll is that I stop by a few hours a week, I work on stuff, I clean up, I help out, but mostly I ask a lot of questions and I watch a lot of work being performed on a lot of different weapons. I have run the gambit there and one of the running jokes is that about half of my “Apprentice” card has been punched and signed, meaning I am only about 10 more years away from officially being listed as “Apprentice Gunsmith” in Brett’s eyes.

I still do a lot of reading, but I have found that I really enjoy helping people out with informed decisions when it comes to the world of small arms, knives and good quality gear. I believe in the Bug Out Bag, I believe in the Right to Keep & Bear Arms and I believe the next big “Katrina level” societal disaster, or the Space Zombie Invasion, will happen at some point, so what possible wrong could there be in being prepared??

I look forward to conversing with all of you, even though I am sure some of us will disagree from time to time. Because I believe everyone can learn something from everyone, even if what you learn is to NEVER listen to that guy again, I encourage, posting.

I hope to be of some help, to some of you, moving forward in these trying times.


JD

PS - Yeah. This is my 20,000th post.

 

[AusLach]

Congrats mate, very well said

 

[NitroxAZ]

A most profound statement for your 20,000th post. Huge thumbs up here!!!

 

[Benning Boy]

Well done, My Friend.

And sound and timely advice.

I look forward to 20K more.

 

[Jesse17]

Welcome to the community JD.

Cane, don't you have some reading materials for the FNG?

Congrats of 20,000 and thank you for keeping me from feeling like a post who're.

 

[winds-of-change]

Awesome post, JD, as are you.

Thank you for working so hard for this forum. I appreciate you!!

 

[Car54]

Welcome to the FTF, glad to have you here. Now you've wasted enough time, get back to work.

FYI, that was one of the best introduction I've seen on any forum.

 

[skullcrusher]

Most excellent and epic milestone post eva!! The original...meh.

Gave a thumbs up.