Infinitely Pointless

Just lately I’ve found that both myself and Kay have been making quite a few new arrows, well it’s mainly me to be honest

Up to now, we’ve only had the one fletching jig between us. When you both want to make arrows it gets a bit time consuming sharing the jig. On a recent trip down to Quicks archery I decided to get a new jig. The only jig I’ve used up to now has been the tollgate fletching jig. Unfortunately, Tollgate were bought out by a company called Arten who have stopped making the jig. I looked at several jigs and finally settled on a Cartel.

I made half a dozen arrows with the cartel jig, but I wasn’t overly impressed. I still preferred the Tollgate. I started to have a dig around ebay and see if there were any second hand Tollgates for sale. Luckily I found two currently on offer and proceeded to watch them. The prices weren’t bad, both of them were currently at about £12. I decided to stick a bid on one of them and find out if there were any auto bids on there. I got my bid accepted at £16.50.

I continued watching both items, but there was no further movement on the one I was bidding on. Having experienced ebay sniping before I made sure I was in front of the computer for the last hour of the auction. Nothing much happened, that is until some little bastard put a bid on there with 15 seconds to go. No when I’m sniping I leave it late, but 15 seconds is taking the piss. Thankfully I had an auto bid on up to the amount I was willing to pay and got the bid on just in time to piss the other bidder off. I eventually won the item with a bit of 19.50.

I figured the person that  I beat for this particular jig would then go off and bid on the other one that was up for auction. He’d managed to annoy me enough for me to go and bid on the other jig. I put an auto bid on this one up to £15 (it was currently at £10). The auction ended at roughly the same time the next day, so once again I made sure I was in front of the PC. Sure enough, with 20 seconds to go someone, I assume the same person, someone tried to outbid me. Yet again, I still had enough time to get my counter bid in and win the item. The ironic thing is I actually got the second one cheaper, the second one only cost me £18.10. I didn’t particularly need a second one, but now we have 3 in total. It does make making arrows a lot faster with 2 or 3 jigs on the go at the same time.

So I’m awake at 6:30am on Sunday morning. This is in part because we had to be up early this morning and with the clocks going forward, I wasn’t sure if my alarm would go off at the right time but it’s mainly thank to the two idiot kids that decided to shout and bounce of our hedge at 3:30 this morning.
There is something nice about being up at this time though. I’ve just been out for a cigarette and although it’s cold, the sun is just coming up and the birds are all singing.
We’re off to Market Rasen this morning for the Blacksheep NFAS shoot. Weather forcsst is good an it should be a nice day. I have all the best intentions of enjoying myself today regardless of how I shoot…I’ll let you know how that works out!

Right, off to wake up Kay and grab a shower.

As I’m sat here in the car waiting for Kay to finish at the hairdressers I thought I’d write something here.

I’ve just had a drive up to KG Archery after dropping kay off at the hairdresser. Now it’s confirmed we’re booked on the Scottish Champs at Easter we’re going to need some more kit, not cheap this archery business. We’ve decided to make another 18 arrows each for Scotland which will keep Kay busy for a while

There were a few things I couldn’t get from KG, so as soon as Kay is finished with the hairdresser we’ll take a drive over to CBA and pick up the rest of the stuff…hopefully. We also need to take a drive over to halfords to get the last thing.

If you’re wondering what I could need from halfords for archery, I’ll tell you because you’ll never guess in a million years. It’s go faster stripes! Yep, I’m going to put go faster stripes on my arrows and no, it’s not to make them go faster or to make them look nice.

I should clarify that a bit I guess. For those not familiar with field archery, each arrow needs to be marked as either first, second or third shot. We both used to use coloured nocks to mark the arrows, but this is a pain when you break/loose one. Changing the colour of the tape around the arrow shaft is much easier. So go faster stripes it is!

Testing another piece of blogging software in my quest to find something useable on linux.

Testing QTM this time, bit easier to install that Drivel, available from the openSuSE build service by adding the IndigoJo repository.

Ok. Let’s try adding an image.

Let see what that looks like…