Hunting In The House

[JimT]

I do a little hunting and shooting in the house most days.

With the Bug-A-Salt gun.

Bug A Salt.jpg

These are not only fun, they have practical uses, such as at the dinner table when someone says, "Pass the salt please." You can just salt their food from across the table!

We actually have 2 of these and have used them not only to kill flies, but moths, millers, scorpions, wasps and just plain bugs. A lady was visiting us who got interested in them and bought herself one. She told me the other day that she has been pretty successful in shooting flies on the wing!

[JMick]

It's my constant companion on the porch.
I use a different one on my walks

[AJMD429]

.
When our upstairs was just 4 ft concrete block up to the joists/roof, and a oriented-strand-board floor, there were mice up there.

I put on goggles and headed up there with my Single-Six revolver and a bunch of 22 LR Shot Shells.

Gotta admit it was FUN (not for the mice, though)...

[JimT]

When I was a kid my Dad was building our house. We lived in the basement and being out in the country we had a "mouse problem." When Mom wasn't home Dad would load up his 1858 Remington .44 with a full load of black powder and a wad over it and shoot the mice. If the blast didn't kill them they at least had no hair left!

Of course when Mom came home she could smell what Dad had been doing ...

[GunnyMack]

Are you using table salt or kosher salt? I use kosher in mine, the larger grain size gives it a bit more killing power on larger critters.
It's been fun hunting the Lantern Flies that are now all over the east coast. Another import we have is stink bugs, much tougher to kill with the Bug a salt as they are quite armored.

[Bill in Oregon]

Was always tempted to mess with one of those.

[JimT]

Are you using table salt or kosher salt? I use kosher in mine, the larger grain size gives it a bit more killing power on larger critters.
It's been fun hunting the Lantern Flies that are now all over the east coast. Another import we have is stink bugs, much tougher to kill with the Bug a salt as they are quite armored.

We are using Sea Salt that has fairly large grains. As you say, some bugs are armored. A wasp is tough to take down. You have to wreck their wings quickly. Scorpions take 5 or 6 rapid-fire hits.

[GunnyMack]

I didn't think of sea salt, that's more like OOO where kosher is more like 4buck!

When I was in school, my roommate buddy kept saying a mouse chewing was keeping him awake at night. We were already running 2 trap lines in the house. To no avail he couldn't get that mouse. One night I'm in bed reading and BOOM! I jumped out of bed and ran to his room to see what in Hades was going on. There he laid in his bed, Maglight in one hand, Bearcat in the other and diabolically laughing and saying ' I got that little sucker!' . 22 shot shell is more than enough for mice!

[Bill in Oregon]

Are these really only effective to three feet?

[JimT]

Are these really only effective to three feet?

We have 2 of them .. a 1st Generation and the latest. The latest model will kill flies at that distance. Shooting wasps or scorpions, you want to be closer and do rapid fire on them till they go down.

[Malamute]

When I lived in the tipi I had a mouse problem. I kept the marlin 39 loaded with CBs next to the bed along with a flashlight. The sound of them running across the canvas floor would wake me up. Id very slowly get the rifle and light, point towards the sounds, and turn it on. I had about 1-2 seconds to make a shot before they figured out something bad was about to happen. I got pretty good at it. When I moved north and into a very rough cabin someone else built, it was badly infested with mice, and a few packrats now and then. I used CBs in the cabin, the holes were pretty small and not very noticeable. I killed a couple dozen or so mice, several packrats and one rattlesnake in that cabin. The rattlesnake got a 44 birdshot load, it was on an unfinished floor, so didnt matter too much. I rented a farmhouse for a short time from some people I knew from church. The prospective landlady said, " Now_____, theres no shooting in the house."

When I built my own cabins I made them tight, zero mice for the most part, though in one they chewed through the chinking when I was away for an extended time. Took a while to find the hole and fix it, it was behind the small electric water heater for the kitchen sink, in a small doghouse on the outside. If the water line hadnt frozen and broke and had to remove the heater to fix it I may never have found it.

[JRD]

Lesson on the salt shooting bug blaster:

A now departed friend got one for his machine shop and the guys had a heck of a time blasting flies. Until it got humid in the summer and all the grains of salt that had landed on the ways of their milling machines started to cause rust. They had to do a bunch of cleaning and oiling and stopped slinging salt around.

Years ago my dad and I had the chance to shoot rats in a chicken farmers coops. The ancient barn had a field stone foundation and they had lots of rats that would eat the chicken feed out of the feeders.
We used 22 mag revolvers. It wasn't constant shooting. A good flurry when you first turned on the light, then you'd sit in the dark and wait for them to come back out but they were very cautious.

I even built a Custom Rat Revolver with the barrel bored out to be Paradox rifled and it patterned so much better with shot.

[GunnyMack]

I really could have used my bug a salt yesterday! I was at my sister to cut some trees down around her foundation. Come to find out the trees were Tree of Heaven, the favorite tree of the Lantern Fly and they were everywhere by the hundreds! I would have needed a hi-cap magazine salt gun!

[Old No7]

Was always tempted to mess with one of those.

We use them to kill the annoying/biting "August flies" that we get when we're chilling on the boat at the lake -- table salt kills 'em good, and it doesn't scratch the gel coat on the boat.

I "pattern" mine on large leaves to assess the kill zone.

They are NOT cheap, but do work well!

Old No7