You know ’em, you love ’em, you want ’em – 10/22 mags!
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I’ve been watching the news from Puerto Rico (PR) with some interest. PR is fascinating because, since it is an island, you can’t just have the Tenessee National Guard roll in with a convoy of MRE’s and fuel tankers. PR is, in many ways, cut off from easily-transportable aid. While places like San Juan get all the press, much of the island (especially the interior) is quite..uhm…Third World-ish…in many ways. Those regions will likely be the last to get the power back on.

Anyway, without electricity and regular propane deliveries your options for cooking start to get pretty thin. Burning some trees is reliable, but not terribly convenient. Maybe you have gasoline, but that would be more useful for the vehicle and generators, kerosene maybe?

If you drew a Venn diagram of ‘gear optimized for backpacking’ and ‘gear of great use to survivalists’, the common crossover point would have this little geegaw.

Years ago I got a Primus Omnifuel stove. This little jewel will burn virtually any flammable liquid you have (gasoline, white gas, jet fuel, kerosene, diesel, white gas) as well as the butane cartridges that are so convenient. But the survivalist in me cried “more!”.

Turns out, there’s an adapter to allow you to hook up the ubiquitous one-pound propane bottles so they can be used with your backpacking stove. Let’s order one up!

Seems like pretty sturdy construction. I’ll probably order another one or two as spares. So, first things first – change the jet orifice in the stove from the one used for kerosene to the one used for butane/propane. That took all of a minute using the supplied tool that came with the stove. Next, I pulled a 20-year-old bottle of propane out of storage and securely screwed the adapter  onto it. After that, I threaded the fuel line from the stove onto the adapter. Made sure the valve on the adapter was open, opened the fuel valve on the stove, lit it, and – voila – flame and heat. Noise-wise, it’s about as noisy as any other pressurized fuel backpacking stove…youre not going to be the stealthiest thing in the woods. The simmer was quite good and quite though and at lower levels of output it was much quieter.

Now, I keep several fuels on hand..propane, kerosene, gasoline, and a small amount of white gas. With this adapter, my Primus stove can run all of those. And, just for the sake of convenience and completeness, I’ll probably pick up a dozen butane cartridges as well just to round things out. Come the time I need to cook something (or boil water) I’ll have no less than five different options for getting the job done.

If you have one of those backpacking stoves (or lanterns) that take the small cartridges, you may want to investigate getting a couple of these adapters. Given the easy storage and versatility of 1# propane bottles, it would be an excellent option to have available.

While I have other stove options, including an ancient Coleman Peak1 that I’ve hauled around for damn near 30 years, the Primus has the advantage of being one stove that covers virtually every fuel choice that i might come across. For the person who doesn’t know where the or what the next fuel source will be, the Optimus is a nice choice and this little adapter makes it even more useful. Win – win.

As an aside, I had no problems with the stove or adapter but I did have trouble with the propane bottle itself. When I unscrewed the adapter from the propane bottle, the bottle did not seal properly and propane would leak out. Fortunately, I just screwed a different device into the bottle to act as a plug, but I need to investigate that sort of thing. In a crisis, I’d simply leave the adapter attached if the bottle wouldn’t seal properly when it was removed.

Ran into an interesting piece of gear this weekend. Somebody took the idea of the ol’ Trapper Keeper, dropped it in a vat of multicam, rolled it around in some molle, and added a lot of velcro to get these.

The one I got to examine was this model. I rather like the idea of having a separate system of keeping reference material at hand while writing. Could be maps, could be checklists, could be dryads, other code sheets, etc.

The one I examined appeared well-made and wuite well thought out. There’s a certain  modularity to these things allowing all sortsa useful accessories to be added on.

For the longest time I’ve been using one of the Write-In-The-Rain systems and while they work well, they are expensive and lack many of the features I saw on the TNC units.

I’m ordering up a couple of these for myself and will have more detail on them when they arrive. School starts next week and I’m looking forward to using this tactical Trapper Keeper at my classes.

This is one of those ‘nice to know’ things. You’d be seven types of crazy to willingly store your ammo underwater for a long period of time, but any container that would (apparently) let you do that will certainly do a bang-up job of keeping your ammo dry when its sitting in the back of your truck as you drive through the night to your alpha site, or leave it sitting hidden under some forest debris for a while.

I would be extremely interested to see this sort of test performed using the Chinese knockoff ammo cans. Maybe they’d hold up, maybe not. But on this admittedly statistically small sample, it appears that good condition US ammo cans with good gaskets are capable of doing some amazing work keeping your ammo dry.

As an aside, I’m a belt-and-suspenders kinda guy…if it absolutely needs to be waterproof, put it int a water tight container…then put that in another waterproof container. And maybe vacuum seal the goodies inside in a nice thick plastic pouch.

A few posts back, I mentioned that I carry some spare clothes in the vehicle winter gear box. I vacuum pack them for two reasons – first, it keeps them clean and dry; second, it helps to compact items to conserve space. But, a picture is worth a thousand words.

For this example, we’ll use this Carrhart Face Mask..a bulky, thick, warm head/face covering that is well suited for spending the night in a cold vehicle. For the purpose of size comparison, note the beer-can sized object next to it.

We fold it into thirds so it’ll fit in the bag, slide it in and set it down for comparison. Note the amount of loft/bulk…it’s about half as tall as the Coke can. The coke can is about 4.75″. The folded face mask is about 3″ thick. Let’s draw the air out of it and see what it compresses down to.

Finished product. Not only is it now going to stay dry and clean, two very important features for a piece of gear that might be called upon in an emergency, but the thickness is a fraction of what it was before. When space is at a premium, this is an exceptionally good way of making the most of what you have.

Sure, buying yourself a vacuum sealer is a very(!) good way to maximize your savings on bulk purchases of meats and whatnot, but it also comes in very handy for protecting and storing items that absolutely must be stay in good condition. A buddy of mine just bought one the other day and when I talked to him a few days later he’d already had a good time experimenting with it and sealing up all sortsa stuff.

By the by, I actually do use the stupid thing for kitchen purposes. The absolute most useful thing I’ve done with it, in regards to food, is using it to store extra spaghetti sauce. See, I’ll make a huge batch of meat sauce with beef and sausage. Then I’ll put a couple ladles of sauce into a bag, let it freeze solid in the freezer, and once it’s solid I’ll vacuum seal the bag. (Because vacuum sealing a bag of liquids is messy. So..freeze solid.) Then, months (or years) down the road when I want a quick and easy meal, I’ll throw on a big pot of water for pasta. As the water comes to a boil I drop the bag of frozen spaghetti sauce in there. It thaws as the water comes to a boil. Remove bag, add pasta to water and cook. Put the thawed bag in the microwave for a couple minutes and when the pasta is done I just cut the edge of the bag and add sauce to the pasta. One pot cooking. I’m tellin’ ya, if you’re an imaginative dude you can come up with a lot of great ideas on how to exploit a vacuum sealer.

Clearly I need to get out more, because up until the other day I had never heard of Cuben fiber.

Silnylon is the shizznits when it comes to lightweight materials for backpacking gear. But, apparently the new kid on the block is this material called Cuben fiber. I was talking to a guy the other day and he was showing me his gear. He had the lightest bivvysack I’ve ever seen… the ground-side was Cuben fiber, the top side was snetting and silnylon. Apparently the CF was waterproof/resistant enough to be a good choice for that task.

It reminds me of Tyvek in terms of the feel and color. Apparently it got its start as sailcloth material for high-tech sailboats and, as with a ll technology, it eventually trickled into other fields.

I need to do some investigating to see if it comes in some more useful colors. And I’d like to test it out to see how waterproof it really is. With the ridiculous light weight it would make an awesome ‘tarp’ to take along in case you have to shelter overnight when on a hunting trip or something.

Clearly, more investigation is in order.