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Nice house and beautiful knives!! Great stuff as always!!

Mr Wills,

How do you keep your loading bench so danged clean!?!?

PS All you guys rock with the sharing of the knowledge and skills.

Rabbitdog, you came to the right place. I have used at least four thousand Lasercast with no real problems. Then I started casting and though I do not make good bullets yet I am having too much fun. Come back and come often.

what got me onto a 696smith
years ago a deputy friend got in a shootout with a misunderstood individual with the shots coming at him in the drivers seat of the patrol car. Like everyone he was packing a model 19smith. He emptied the gun at the guy and it ended well as my friend was not hurt. About a week later i ran into him in a store buying a charter arms bulldog five shot 44special.
I never forgot that, and when the chance came to buy a 696, i took it. I am actually the third owner, the first owner was a guy that writes for the gun rags. Second guy had an action job done on it. there isn't going to be a fourth guy.
In one of pearce's old articles on the 44special he had three separate load ranges for that round. the 696 was capable of taking more than the standard factory specs.
it is flat surprising what you can push one to if you had a mind too. I have no intent of that, but a 250grainer you can get in the 950fps range pretty easily. And i am happy with that.
I also worked up some snake loads with no 12 shot from a venturino article, and like to carry it dove hunting.

You are DA MAN Ron!!! I looked for a 696 Smith for a couple of years before giving up on finding one and bought those three Rossi's. If I ever come across one of those 696 Smith's locally, it will come home with me. But I want the 696, not the 696-1 and for sure not the 696-2. Meanwhile, the 44 special Rossi is my constant companion and I'll just have to learn to live with the indignity of it not being a Smith.

mine is a no dash, i was talking to a friend of mine in his gunshop yesterday, blowing smoke with a few others. He said he had one in the safe, but price i think is gonna be 950 to 1000 bucks. Kind of ouch.
i got mine some years back from a guy who is/was kind of a gun hustler.
but not as much aware as he thought/thinks. It was owned prior to him by another guy who i know, had an action job done on it. first owner was a pretty well known gun writer.
I think i paid 300bucks for it, and i am sure he had plenty of boot in it. He sold it to get a 296 as if that made any sense.

those knives by the way are pretty sweet. probably my first addiction going back to childhood. Part of it was my dad could make a good knife, had a forge that kind of thing. I, on the other hand, never could do it. But spent a lot of hours researching metals, knives made around the world that kind of thing.
just like guns, almost nobody understands how much thought and skill goes into a good knife.
When i first saw yours i was thinking of a little three inch skinning knife i have made out a sawblade. works good. The only problem i ever had was in colorado where using it the fat on the deer would congeal on that cold blade. usually doesn't happen in arizona.

along that line, knives, i have one made by my dad out of a sawmill piece of steel. It's so friggin hard i can't get an edge on it, but that's normal for me, like i said no skill.
i had the same knife that i finished at the same time. an exwife when she took off in 1969 took that knife with her out of spite. few years ago i ran across her on facebook with that knife still on my mind, course she didn't know anything about it.

You said a mouth full of truth there. I can't tell you how many guys have come to camp with a gut hook knife and ended up cussing it before he got his game skinned. The gut hooks on their knives keep coming out of the cut and will not stay hooked nor will it cut very well even though it is sharp. Why?

It's simple: the gut hook is too small, is built at the wrong angle to the blade for cutting, and with insufficient hook pilot or lead. But it is in proportion to the knife and it looks good. I made the gut hook on my knife first and then let the rest of the knife go where it needed to and didn't give a fig about how it looks. It WORKS REALLY GOOD which is what the whole exercise ought to be about. But it's amazing how many people buy a knife for how it looks rather than how it works. If you want to see many examples of that, just read the blade and knife forum below. I don't know whether to laugh or cry after reading some of that. To each his own I guess, but I can't help recall Ronald Reagan saying so much of what some people know is just not true!!!

The first knives with that hook in the back of the blade were not sharp. It was there to use to place or remove pots with bails on them on and off the camp fire. They were intended to be pot hooks and that's all. Then some jazzbo sharpened one and then everybody did. But they didn't change anything else. A hook that works great for pots does not work for skinning. It is at the wrong angle. It is not long enough to stay hooked. It is not big enough to change the angle or the hook design. But knife makers have always made them that way, so guess what?? They don't work very well because they were never designed to do what they are trying to do.

But if you make the hook bigger and increase the angle and the lead on the hook, it makes the knife look unbalanced and out of porportion and ugly, and nobody wants an ugly knife except me because form follows function far as I am concerned. So they make good looking, balanced, properly porportioned blades that don't work very well. Sounds like politicians and I don't want anything designed or made by politicians because it usually doesn't work very well.