Portable Reloading Setup Part 2

Finished the little stand for the reloading scale.    Not a big deal but it works.  Thumb screws will compensate for whatever angle the Jeep winds up parked at and the levels are glued in place so there's one less thing to forget when I head to the shooting place.

Nothing about it is particularly interesting or fancy.  About the only thing unusual about it is the wood.  Its plain old yellow Poplar from Lowes but I stained it with stain that I made from walnuts that came from a tree that my Great Grandmother planted on the old family farm well over a hundred years ago. 

If you've never messed with walnuts in the wild, they are sort of like cocoanuts in that the nut is surrounded by a tough, fibrous husk.   I used vise grip type pliers to pinch the husks off a little bit at a time.  When I had about five or six walnuts cleaned that way, I put the husks in a mason jar and poured ammonia into it.  Screwed the lid on loosely to let the ammonia evaporate and let it sit for a few weeks.  The ammonia evaporates before the water so you wind up with a thick soup.  Strain it through some cheese cloth or whatever you have for straining stuff and you have a dark water based stain.  The hardest part of the whole process was finding a place that had ammonia that wasn't sudsy or lemon scented.