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

Had the first major snowfall of the year here the other day. This particular region of Montana is usually very mild in terms of snowfall. Three inches here, two inches there, that sort of thing. Once in a blue moon it may dump eight or ten inches at once but that’s been pretty rare…I haven’t seen it happen for at least the last five years or so. We wound up getting about six inches of heavy wet snow the other day. Every so often the lights would flicker and there were three or four moments when we were without power for five minutes but that was about it. No real outage. Others in the region weren’t so lucky and there are probably still some people out there without power. Biggest culprit was overloaded tree branches dropping onto power lines.

When the lights flickered I went ahead and made sure everything that was rechargeable was plugged in, made sure the cell phones were charging, and set up the police scanner to keep tabs on things. All in all, very uneventful. In addition to a small segment of the local population without power there were a few traffic intersections without traffic lights. Very Mickey Mouse. Nonetheless, its nice to know that if the power had gone out for any real length of time we’d have been just fine, thank you very much.

Historically, when the power goes out around here its in the winter and usually due to these exact circumstances. Sometimes in the summer, however, if the fires are exceptionally bad, there’ll be outages as transmission towers get caught up in the conflagration but that usually happense elsewhere in the region. Since the precursor for the power going out around here is usually very cold weather, I don’t worry about the freezer being offline for too long. Worse comes to worse I can just sit everything on the porch in a box and they’ll stay frozen.

I did wind up mounting several of those lovely puck-shaped LED lights in the critical pathways. They put out a good amount of light and should run a pretty long time considering the low power requirements of LEDs.

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Other thing Im working on, in preparation for the elections, is to update and increase my spare parts supply for my Glocks. The primary sidearm around here is the 9mm Glock pistol. Although we have 1911 and P35 pistols as well, the Glock is the first choice for its reliability, durability, and affordability. However, nothing lasts forever and if a critical part breaks on your handgun you’re left with a very awkward club or a rather expensive single-shot. Parts need replacing for two reasons – either you broke the part or you lost the part. Im guessing the latter occurs more than the former.

Determining what spare parts to keep around for the Glock is pretty simple. Its based on parts that I’ve seen break in the past (or have reports of being prone to breakage), parts that are likely to get lost, and parts that are affordable to have in quantity. Nice thing about the Glocks is that other than major things like barrels, extractors and slides everything is usually five bucks or less.

Theres several variants of the 9mm Glock (longlside, competition, fullsize, mid size, compact) but they all use, mostly, the same parts. Obviously some things like recoil spring assemblys and the like will be different but the other stuff is all the same. Parts Im ordering:

Recoil spring assemblies – I’ve seen one of ours break and I’ve heard from others that they do can let go after a while. The gun continues to operate just fine, the spring goes from being ‘captive’ to ‘noncaptive’ and that makes disassembly a bit more involved. But, fortunately, it seems to have zero affect on the gun. They list for $4.95 ea. So I’ll probably get four in the G17 size, four in the G19 size, two for the G26.

Trigger spring – another part I have personally seen fail. Trigger will need to be reset manually. That means after firing you’ll have to push the trigger forward again for the next shot. Still, the gun will continue firing. $2.50 ea. And fits all Glocks. Half dozen please.

The rest of the stuff is mostly small parts that can get lost/broken if a detailed disassembly goes south. Spring cups ($2.50, fits all), spacer sleeve ($2.50, fits all), firing pin spring ($2.50, fits all), trigger bar ($14.95, fits all 9mm), and a few other sundries. Spare OEM sights are $6.95 for the set.

This isn’t a comprehensive list, I purchased a bunch of spare parts a few years ago and still have them so this is just ‘topping off the tank’, so to speak. Since the last time I ordered parts we’ve added another few Glocks to the safe so what was ‘plenty’ of spare parts became an ‘adequate’ amount. Need to fix that.