Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters Notable date Feb 2000

Was going thru a stack of Handloader magazines yesterday trying to find an article for research. Ran across the Feb 2000 issue. Has it really been that long? In bright bold letters was B29. The story that those of us of loon persuasion will never forget. Thanks again John for years of great entertainment and great information.

You're welcome!

That was an interesting "project"--partly because so many handloaders/hunters got taken in by the fictitious B29, even though I sprinkled some pretty heavy hints about it throughout the story, like Monica Lewinsky making the chamber reamers, because she had to switch careers....

Ross Seyfried wondered how I "stamped" the B-29 on the stainless barrel. It was actually pretty easy, even though back then I (along with almost everybody else) was still shooting film. I put a strip of matte Scotch Tape on the barrel, then carefully wrote B-29 on the tape with a black ballpoint pen.

Some other interesting stuff kept occurring. First, the office manager at Wolfe Publishing told me to never, ever write anything like that again, because she was answering phone calls and e-mails all day long for 2-3 weeks. But stuff kept happening even a year or two. The PR at Redding Reloading called me, saying they'd just received a serious phone call from somebody wanting to order some B-29 dies, and I could hear the other guys laughing in the background....

Another instance occurred several years later, when Charlie Sisk and I did come up with an actual wildcat, the .350 Remington Magnum case necked up to 9.3mm, which we called the 9.3 Barsness-Sisk--or BS for short. Quite a few people thought it was another fictitious wildcat, and that was in 2004.

This is not to mention a friend of yours working at the LGS had to fend off questions about the B-29 for about 3 years....

I believe he also told you to never, ever write another article like that....

That whole series was quite entertaining, John!
What a fiction writer!

It was a grand bit of humour 👍😃

Thanks!

I was assigned the article due to a September evening on the New Mexico prairie, where Winchester invited a number of gun/hunting writers on a pronghorn hunt with an outfitter who set up tipis for us to sleep in. By the second evening, as I recall, we'd all taken bucks, and Dave Scovill, Ron Spomer and I were sitting around the campfire amid the tipis after everyone else had gone to sleep, drinking some beer and talking. I mentioned that .29 caliber rifle cartridges were sadly neglected, despite 7mm and .30 being very popular, and the conversation took a .29 turn--and I was eventually assigned to do the article.

I'd recently acquired a Swiss K31 straight-pull military rifle in 7.5x55. It was in excellent condition and grouped very well, and I did an article on it for Handloader or Rifle, I forget--which also eventually appeared as a chapter in the first Big Book of Gun Gack. So I decided to base the mythical B-29 on the 7.5x55 case, since it's a pretty modern design, despite appearing in 1889, and I had plenty of brass to use to fake photos. (By the way, the office manager who told me I could never, ever do another article like that was Scovill's wife Roberta, who I'd guess also had a private talk with Dave about the entire deal....)

But evidently it sold a lot of magazines, partly because the headline along the top of the cover read "B-29: The Ultimate Wildcat?"

Great background John. After 24 years still gets chuckles.

A great foray into the world of humorous fiction, that I recall fondly. It really surprises me that so many people didn't "get it" and took it seriously. Reminds me of that old P.T. Barnum quote about the type of people that "are born every minute".

22250,

Well, there are a bunch of hunters who firmly believe some cartridges are "magic," while very similar cartridges aren't. The B-29 proved to be an example of how many hunters believe in such magic!