Originally published at Notes from the bunker…. You can comment here or there.

Gas at the local CostCo finally passed the $4 mark. Now, a $20 won’t be enough to fill a 5-gallon fuel can. That’s one of my personal benchmarks on gasoline prices. Where will prices go from here? Well, I think that with the summer travel season upon us the price will go up more but Im not sure how far. What really concerns me is the upcoming winter season and the fuel costs for heating the house. On the bright side, I don’t heat with oil. On the bad side, I heat with natural gas. So there’ll be a bit of ‘winterizing’ over the summer to do what I can to help keep the heat in and the cold out this winter.

=-=-=-=-=-=

This weekend is the Fourth O’ July. This and Patriots Day (The genuine April 19^th version, not the absurd and badly named ‘Patriot Day’) are the two holidays that I try to get out to the range for. Fourth O’ July is kind of optional but Patriots Day is a must-go for me. This time of year is also the best time to head up to the reservation and pick up fireworks. Commercial made-in-China fireworks actually do have some tactical application. You mix the smoke bombs with a little road flare compound and a good dose of powdered red pepper to make your own tear gas grenades. I have a file around here somewhere that covers this…I’ll have to see if I can find it.

=-=-=-=-=-=

A quick reminder that, unless you live in Washington DC, nothing has really changed and that you need to buy your magazines and boomsticks before the election. Get out there and jumpstart the economy.

=-=-=-=-=-=

Speaking of, as you know I sometimes extol the virtues of the PTR HK-91 clones. Im the first to say that I don’t think they’re the best .308 out there (I really prefer the FAL) but I think for the money they are the best out there. Someone emailed me a few weeks ago asking my opinions and reasoning and I replied with an email stating why I thought that if you were going to buy a .308 semiauto they’d be the most practical choice. Fastforward a week or so and I got an email from the fella saying he had taken my advice and enclosed a .jpg of his new rifle, magazines and a case of surp .308.

Cool!

Your mileage may vary, and Im not propping myself up as an expert on anything, but if anyone is reckless enough to ask my opinion on something Im more than happy to share it. As an aside, I think the purchaser of the aforementioned rifle will be very pleased with his purchase. At least, I hope he is.

Originally published at Notes from the bunker…. You can comment here or there.

I wanted to get either a .22 conversion for the AR or a dedicated .22 upper. Its just to expensive to drop $0.25 per round on ammo for the damn gun to practice with. Now, I loves me practice, but I love being able to pay for groceries more. So, it was decided that a .22 conversin or upper would be called for. This is when the research began.

A friend of mine has a .22 upper for his AR and I like it very much. The only drawback is that many of the  uppers (as well as conversions) use proprietary magazines and not all have a 30-rd capacity. Even if the company making the conversion offers a 30-rd magazinee still sort of over a barrel in the accuracy department. Certainly ‘good enough’ accuracy for practicing but more accuracy is always better, right? The problem with a conversion is that the actual suggested bore diameter for a .223 bullet is different than that of a .22LR bullet. As a result, the .22LR bullet rattles down the bore a bit. Now, for shooting steel plates at short range thats fine and dandy but it would be nice to have the gun be accurate enough for gopher shooting and general plinking.

Go with a dedicated upper and you get better accuracy but theres only a handful out there that have the availability of 30-rd mags (and those mags arent cheap). Additionally, it means tying up a perfectly good lower that could be used on , say, a real AR15.

So, since what I really want to focus on are move-n-shoot type drills, high magazine capacity, and something close to AR ergonomics I was thinking of tweaking out one of the 10/22’s I have laying around here into an AR trainer. The major changes will be a stock that duplicates the AR stock and sights that duplicate the AR sights. What I’ve decied on, so far, are these sights and a stock along these lines.
Im sure someone will c hime in to remind me that the magazine, charging and safety of the 10/22 are quite different than that of the AR series. I know that, but Im not wanting this package for magazine drills, safety drills, or charging drills…I want it so I can bring the gun up to my shoulder with my hands and shoulder in the same position as if it were an AR, and my sight picture being the same as an AR. For moving-and-shooting drills I think this would be just the ticket.