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

I walk it as I talk it……….

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

Montana is an interesting state. Other than our total lack of ocean frontage, you can find pretty much every sort of climatological and environmental element in this state. We got ‘em all…deserts, rain forest, heavy timber, prairie, wind-blasted rock, mountains, valleys, plains, glaciers, tundra, and eveyting else you can imagine. Camouflage is, naturally, a tricky call. I am very taken with the Crye multicam camo pattern…it seems perfect for just about anything in Montana. However, like anything that is new and really cool it is also, for now, fairly expensive…since it was never, as far as I know, adopted officially by any military there arent millions of cheap surplus clothes, gear and tents available in multicam.

What other pattern works well? I’ve been a fan of the flectarn pattern which seems to work pretty well here in my region. (To be fair, simple, basic, unpretentious and dirt cheap OD also works quite well.) The flectarn (also spelled flecktarn and flectar) pattern traces its German roots back a little further than most modenr German military folks would care to admit.Too bad because despite that whole crimes against humanity thing, the Nazi’s had some pretty advanced (for the day) field gear.

Anyway, I like the flectarn pattern and Im also pretty pleased with most W. German military surplus gear so that works out well for me. I was flipping through Sportsmans Guide’s HQ catalog (their military surplus catalog) last week and saw that they had a few goodies I wanted and nothin’ says lovin’ like something from the Bund. First and foremost, there was a package deal of five surplus .308 cleaning kits and five G3 leather slings for a lousy $15. Well…thats a definite buy. I just happen to have a couple PTR-91 HKlones that’ll love having new slings and a few extra cleaning kits.

What caught my after that was these babies. Five flectar shelter halves for $22. This was interesting because I was hoping that the Germans would have thrown political correctness aside in favor of functionality and these would be the zeltbahns. (And zeltbahns are an entirely different post. Those things are probably the most useful and versatile piece of kit you can have. I’d love to have several made of modern materials.)

So..I ordered ‘em up and they arrived today. Man, I love that musty surplus smell. Anyway, turns out the shelter halves are not of the ze;tbahn variety but, I believe, simply knockoffs of the US pattern shelter halves. There are, apparently, some provisions for wearing it as a poncho and that puts it a step ahead of the US shelter half.

So…shelter halves. How the bloody hell do you use them? The internet was not as forthcoming as I would have preferred but perhaps my Google-fu is weak. I did come up with this interesting link to a .pdf that shows pretty clearly how to do what to whom.  The flectarn shelter halves are of the same diamond-ish pattern and should join together in the same way. Thus, the two-halves shelter should look pretty much just like the one in the .pdf. I need to experiment and try setting this thing up.

Why did I get them? A couple reasons. They would make excellent groundcloths and I wanted some sort of camouflage for covering things up in the boonies. If I wanted to stash something in the woods for the short term, maybe ditch my pack for a few hours so I could go fishing or something, hiding it in a well camouflaged pile goes a long way towards keeping it secure. Also, I wanted some flectar-pattern fabric for any future tailoring endeavours. I may take this down to a seamstress in town along with the dimensions and pattern for an orginal zeltbahn and have one made up.

As an aside, the cleaning kits, slings, and shelter halves were in excellent shape and if you feel the need to have such items I can say that the ones I got from SG:HQ were not lacking in any regard. I’ll be experimenting with the shelter halves in one way or another here shortly and if anyting interesting comes up I’ll try to post it.

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

Its so hard to stay focussed on the day-to-day nuts-n-bolts of preparedness when I get distracted by the latest schemes, scams and outright outrageousness that oozes out of Washington. But, its exactly because of those weasels and their fellow travelers that the missus and me need to have our ducks in a row.

Did a cursory inventory of primers the other night. We’re good on pistol but light on rifle. Okay on powder, but could be better. If youre like me and wanna be able to reload for everything with minimal headaches, pick up some IMR 3031 and some Unique. With IMR 3031 you’ll be able to reload, for the most part, any rifle cartridge you may need. Same for Unique – it’ll work in just about any handgun cartridge. Are there better powders? Absolutely. Are there any with that amazing versatility? Not many. An 8# keg of 3031 and an 8# keg of Unique will let you reload almost any cartridge you come across.

Don’t reload your own ammo? Then, my friend, you are a fool. I don’t take namecalling lightly but if, in this time of uncertainty, you havent bothered to take the steps to secure your ammo supply then youre just being foolish. The money you would save alone makes it worth it. Example: I have customers that shoot weird stuff like .378 Weatherby or .416 Remington Mag. This is stuff that’ll set you back $70 for a box of 20 cartridges. Or, put another way, more than $3 per cartridge. Now, assuming you saved your brass, all you need is powder, primer and bullet. Fifteen cents worth of powder, four cents worth of primer, and maybe forty cents of bullet. That $70 box of cartridges now costs $12.00. Take the $58 you saved and buy more reloading components.

I have in front of me catalogs from the major manufacturers. All of them sell kits that provide you all the equipment you need, less dies, to reload. Some are cheaper than others, some are more expensive, some are better quality, some are lower quality, all will do the trick.

Lee Challenger Press Kit, with dies – $53

Lee Anniversary Reloading Kit – $120

RCBS Rock Chucker Supreme Kit – $407 (total BS..I sell them all the time for $300)

Lyman, Redding and a couple other outfits all offer similar kits.

I tell customers, if youre not sure if you want to get into reloading and don’t wanna spend a lot of money just to find out youre not into it, buy the Lee kit. If you don’t like reloading, youre not out a lot of money; if you do enjoy it and plan to stick with it, get yourself the RCBS kit.

Lets say youre someone who just wants to be prepared ‘just in case’. You own a couple 1911’s and a .357. You want to have the fixin’s to make your own ammo in case someday ‘they’ say you cant have any more. Here’s your shopping list:

Lee Challenger Kit with Lee dies in .45 ACP and .38/.357

A powder suitable to both cartridges…Unique will work in both. You’ll get about 1000 rounds per pound.

Large pistol primers for the .45, small pistol magnum primers for the .357. At least 1000 of each.

Lee bullet mould for .45 ACP and .357, with handles

Lee bullet sizer for .452” and .358”

Lee bullet lube

Lee lead furnace, dipper, ingot mould

Cartridge cases, .45 ACP , 500 pieces

Cartridge cases, .38 Spl or .357 Mag, 500 pieces

All of this will fit into a milsurp rocket case…a container about half the size of a dorm fridge. With a setup like this you could keep your pistols fed for as long as your primers and powder last. (Yes, you could make your own black powder and possibly re-use your primers…but thats alot more work than I’d wanna do.) Bullets are easily made from scrounged lead (wheelweights, linotype, old lead pipes, etc). This is the absolute cheapest setup that would work without getting into the super-cheap Lee Loader or Ideal 310 tools. The quality of the equipment is okay, but if youre on a budget this is the way to go. If money isn’t an issue swap the Lee gear for RCBS. 1000 primers and 1# of powder is a bare minimum. A ‘case’ of primers is 5000, and a ‘keg’ of powder is usually 8#….thats enough primer and powder to provide you with a lot of pistol ammo. And this doesn’t take into account the possibility of what you may scavenge from odd ammo that you cant use.

That is, in my opinion, the least amount that would give the most result. Even then it’s still a couple hundred bucks. But whats it worth to you to be able to have ammo for your guns in five years? Or fifty years? Stored properly this stuff will last a long, long time. I routinely use powder and primers ten or twenty years old. I’ve used primers as old as I am and never had a hiccup.

Now, ignoring the tinfoil-hat-quotient of the above paragraphs, here’s another reason for you to reload: economy. Assuming you’ve saved your brass or picked some up off the ground at the range (or scrounged through the garbage cans there like I do) your brass costs $0.00 after the first firing. If I load for my .38 Special and I just use a cheap lead bullet, Im at about $6 a box of 50 to reload for it. Want to do the math on your own? Here’s your factors:

Brass – After firing it once, its cost becomes $0.00

Powder – Divide price of powder per pound by 7000 to get cost per grain of powder ($20/7000 = $0.002 per grain…10 grains of powder = two cents)

Primer – Bought by the thousand, around $0.03 @

Bullet – Cheap lead bullets for as little as six cents apiece, all the way up to high performance jacketed stuff at twenty cents each.

Figure youre going to save at least 50% off the price of factory ammo. Or, put another way, you can have twice the ammo you would normally be able to purchase.

Safety issues? Sure…use the wrong powder or use too much and you’ll wreck your precious firearm. So RTFM and double check your data and you’ll be fine.

I started reloading when I was 19. I loved guns and had no money for ammo so the only way I could afford to shoot was to reload. In that time I have seen powder go from $13/# to $20/#, primers go from $12/m to $25/m, and bullets go from as low as $.05/@ to $.20@ and it is STILL cheaper to reload them all.

So…get yourself a reloading kit, find a buddy who reloads to show you the ropes, and start saving some money and securing your ammo supply.

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

For those keeping track of such things, about a year or so ago the stock market was twice what it was today. Or, to put it more accurately, its dropped by 50% since then. Whats it mean to me? Not much..I have almost nothing in the stock market. However, the blowback is totally different….I (and you) are affected indirectly as unemployment rises, people who were counting on the market to fund their retirements become broke, municipalities become money-starved, etc, etc, etc. Interesting times. But youre ready for it, right? Right?

So, we have an official definition of a recession…but what about a Depression? How do you tell when a recession becomes a depression?

Here’s an article speculating that we may be in one now.  The article goes on to state that we may not be in a depression. In short, a depression, it seems, is oneof those things that you dont know youve had one until youre past it. Its obvious though that even if this were a depression no one in power is wanting to be the one to slap the name on it. Its a recession, a prolonged recession, a severe recession, a lengthy recesssion…but its not a depression.

This sort of Orwellian newspeak is going to become more common here as things progress. The unemployed will be ‘underemployed’, the morons that bought $700,000 houses on $40,000 incomes will be ‘victims of greedy banks’, and people who, as Santelli says, “carry the water instead of drink the water” will be ‘the rich’….and we all know that the rich are evil, mean, nasty people who deserve to have 40% of their paycheck go straight to someone else.

Are we in a Depression? I dunno….The lefties and Clinton apologists are quick to point out that during Slick Willie’s administration things were just wonderful. Well, the stock market and unemployment numbers are pretty much where they were when he gave a state of the union address that called the nations situation good.

Whats this got to do with anything relevant to the usual topics? I suppose the important thing here is that it really doesnt matter what anyone calls it…recession, depression, stagflation, recovery, etc. What matters is the result it has. If the talking heads on the television said that we are ‘officially in recovery’ and that all economic indicators were pointing to a bull market just around the corner it would be meaningless if, the next day, you lost your job.  Don’t think that just because some pundits say things may get better towards the end of the year or next year that we’re out of the woods. Heck, Im pretty sure we’re not even as far in the woods as we’re gonna get.

So, no, its not a depression. Not yet. And we won’t know until its over. But in the meantime don’t be lulled into complacency because its ‘only a recession’. Personally, I can look around me and see the failing businesses, empty storefronts, banks with non-existent interest rates, lots full of new cars, and houses with ‘price reduced’ signs and get a far better indicator of the current economic situation than Ill ever get from official sources.