Atelier Luteiventris - Montgomery J Nelson

Sunday, March 30, 2025

Painting pottery and panels

Painting glaze designs on a hand built little bowl that will be fire in the backyard in a 33 qt canner I drilled full of holes.

©️Montgomery J Nelson / Artists Rights Society

Two 8X10” acrylic paintings.

©️Montgomery J Nelson / Artists Rights Society

Monday, February 24, 2025

Tuesday, February 18, 2025

Monday, February 17, 2025

Fieldcraft for Boys: Field Expedient Frangible Slingshot Ammunition

At some point our childhood armory expanded to include wrist rockets. It was literally an arms race: did your slingshot have an arm brace or not? Having a regular slingshot made you an under-gunned “wussy”.

You could get steel and lead ball ammo for the wrist rocket, but who had money for that? A child‘s economy required some manner of childish field expedient solution. Rocks were just ok, no accuracy. Steel nuts had the heft you wanted, but meh. Any ball bearing you could find was as good as it got, but this was a rare find. It turned out that the railroad would provide us with the ultimate no-cost ammo. Pellets of iron ore and mineral binder. Taconite pellets.

Our treehouse overlooked the railroad tracks. It was a very busy line that included both freight and passenger traffic. Our tracks were the rail line from Duluth-Superior to the big factory cities to the south and east. Most importantly, our tracks were the land transport route for the iron ore from the Mesabi Range to reach the steel mills (The water route began at the Twin Ports as well. The SS Edmund Fitzgerald was transporting taconite pellets when it sank in 1975). All along the rock ballast under the tracks could be found taconite pellets that had fallen from the open top hopper cars that passed our tree fort by the thousands. Those leaky hoppers blessed us with excellent free wrist rocket ammo.

Taconite pellets had excellent weight and were just round enough to make excellent ammo. The were also frangible! The mineral binder that held the ore into its pellet shape assured a lovely puff of dust when the pellet struck a hard object- and this added value to one’s boyish ballistic glee.

All a kid had to do was grab a container and walk along the tracks picking up Taconite pellets until you had enough ammo for whatever adventure or vandalism was planned for the day. Or the container got too heavy to carry. The track line was very straight in our area, so there was little real danger. Their were some hazards to occasionally contend with- we would sometimes see hobos and railroad security patrols and those rail safety trucks with the cool adapters so that they could run on the rail.

Those Mesabi pellets are a great memory, but some of those memories also hold vague feelings of guilt for the actions of the feral children we once were.