ETA: Well nuts….looks like they won’t deal with anyone without a resale certificate or FFL. My suggestion is to trot down to your local gun shop and see if, in exchange for turning them onto this deal, they’ll let you piggyback on their order.
Someone asked if I’d be doing some sorta group buy on this…nope. Too much work, not enough profit. But if you look hard enough I’m sure you can find someone to order for you.
Ah, the joys of legacy gear. Back in The Day™, and by BITD I mean the mid to late ’80’s, your milsurp gear came in one color – OD – and your attachment system was ALICE. Fastex buckles, MOLLE webbing, and MultiCam were still unknown and not quite ready for prime time. As a result, some of the longer-in-the-tooth survivalists like yours truly tend to have quite a bit of legacy gear laying around.
I mention it because I was trying (and failing) to clean up the mountain of ballistic nylon that is sitting next to my desk. In it was this wonderful little pack from SpecOps. (And, yes, it’s quite overpriced on Amazon.) It’s basically a modernized version of the medium ALICE pack. The medium ALICE pack was capable of being used with or without the frame. (The large ALICE pack, on the other hand, must be used with a frame.) I picked thse packs up years ago on closeout, I believe, so I got a fairly decent deal on them. They were purchased with the notion these would be the packs to keep in the vehicle ‘just in case’.
While the ALICE packs had a lot of flaws, most notably being wildly uncomfortable, their low price and universal availability made them a good choice for tucking a pack away somewhere and not caring what happened to it. The SpecOps bag having compatability with the older ALICE frame was a nice feature for guys who have a buncha old ALICE packs and frames laying around.
As an aside, one of the things I love about the ALICE pack is its ability to be used, with the shelf attachment, to haul jerry cans and ammo crates. Do not underestimate how handy that can be. Would you rather carry 5-gallons of gas by can handle for a mile, or would you rather have it on your back leaving your hands free?
SpecOps isn’t the first outfit to modernize/upgrade the ALICE platform. The guys at Tactical Tailor had their Malice pack for quite a few years. But, ALICE gear has faded into the past and is actually getting a little harder to find as it is awash in the mountains of surplus MOLLE/PALS gear from the last twenty years of military activities.
The new MOLLE packs are, from what I am told, quite the improvement although early generations suffered from frames that tended to be a bit brittle. Being someone who loves gear, I wound up picking one up from the folks at Old Grouch Surplus a few years back. The nice thing about the MOLLE pack is it has a separate internal compartment that holds the military sleep system, which make this a good pack for throwing in the vehicle in the winter when you want to have all that I-guess-Im-gonna-be-here-a-while gear in one place.
By the by, I don’t know if SpecOps is still a going concern or what. Their various social media outlets havent been updated in years, and the selection on their website keeps dwindling. I hope they get some new blood and start putting out more products…I’ve been rather pleased with their offerings.
Anyway, I was putting those packs away and thought it was worth a post.
I was puttering around in the basement moving some stuff around and one of the things stacked in the corner with the ‘this pile is for the secondary location’ is a couple of Monovaults.
I had done a lengthy post on the Monovault back in 2013 but when the website crashed I lost about a years worth of posts and that was one of them. A shame too, because it was actually a pretty informative post about what I thought was a very good product. So much so, in fact, that I’m going to go through the tremendous pain in the butt of retaking the pictures and reposting about it.
Succinctly, the Monovault is a large diameter plastic tube designed for storing (and burying) whatever items you feel need to be tucked away somewhere. The tubes have a Gamma Seal lid closure at one end, and then a ‘burial cap’ that goes over that to make retrieval easier. The tubes come in several different lengths and diameters depending on what it is that you want to tuck away.
Remember those cylindrical weapons/supply containers from WW2 that we’d see in movies? It’s pretty much a very modernized version of that.
WW2-era airborne supply drop tube. These things still turn up once in a while when someone treks out into the dense forests and swamps over in Europe.
Purpose? Nominally, they are sold as burial vaults for whatever it is that you feel needs to be buried. And, that makes sense. But I’m a bit of an outside-the-box kind of guy and while I’m sure these would work just fine for burial, to me they are more of an ideal cache container. While burying is certainly an option, the qualities that make a container suitable for burying (waterproof, airtight, durable,etc.) also make them perfect for enplacing in above-ground environments – hidden in attics, under porches, buried in brush piles, sitting in the corner of the basement, under the gravel pile on the back forty, etc.
I wound up with two versions of the Monovault which were supplied to me by the fine folks there. (We actually did a bit of trading back and forth.) Being me, I wanted the biggest one they had (the #248) and a midling sized one – the #130.
The #130. Fits a folding 10/22, a daypack, boots, water, food, radio, flashlight, batteries, and a few other things that might make a big difference to you when you discover that your world has suddenly taken a turn for the sideways.
Gamma Seal lid and ‘burial lid’ cover. Still enough room in there to pack the essentials that would give you several orders of advantage over the rest of the herd. Pack wisely.
The #130 seems like the perfect size for the “I want to keep some essentials around in case I have to leave in a hurry”. A folding (or takedown) 10/22 will fit in there [as will the new takedown Ruger 9mm carbine] along with a frameless medium ALICE pack (or your favorite daypack), along with room for comfortable shoes, a jacket, radio, pistol, water, and a few other goodies. If you were stuck in an office building on 9/11 and had to walk your way out of Manhattan, one of these would have held pretty much just what you needed – water, shoes, radio, flashlight, weapon of choice, and that sort of thing.
The #248 is where the real action comes into play. Large enough that hauling one full of gear to a burial or cache sight might be a two-man job, it’ll hold everything you need to get your immediate life back on the rails. A full size rifle like a 20″ AR or HK .308 will fit inside with no dificulty. If you pack a smaller or broken down rifle in there, theres room for a backpack, military sleep system, freeze drieds, and a bunch of other gear. My checklist for packing for this sort of thing is ‘it’s the middle of winter, dead of night, and I’m dropped naked in the middle of nowhere. What do I need right now?’. However, if you want to have a bundle of gear dedicated to a particular purpose….exclusively gunstuff, exclusively food and water, exclusively gear, etc, these things would be good choices for that.
Big enough to handle the larger rifles. When you’re done filling this thing up, it’ll be heavy so plan accordingly.
Although I use a large Pelican case for storing my winter vehicle gear, one of these would make an excellent container for that task. Especially since you could just leave it in the bed of your truck (secured, of course) and it’d be impervious to snow and wet. Also, it’s long cylindrical nature lets it take up less room.
For storing guns I prefer the Pelican rifle cases. They’re very good at that job and, as you might expect, theyre also fairly expensive. Problem is, unless you get into the really specialty Pelican cases (which are even spendier) you can’t really stuff a goodly amount of gear in a Pelican case along with your rifle. The Monovault lets you do exactly that. In fact, if I were storing some gear hidden away at the Beta Site I’d probably tuck the guns in Pelican cases and the gear in the Monovault. (Although, if I wanted an all-in-one solution it would all, gear and rifle, go in the Monovault.)
Pricing is about comparable to what you’d pay for a Pelican case, so it’s not too outrageous. Like a Pelican case, the annoying part is paying the shipping for a large bulky item.But…when it’s 2am, the snow is coming down, and you finally bring your exhausted vehicle to a stop at your bugout location what’s it worth to know that your food, guns, radios, camp stove, and winter gear are all dry and clean tucked away under the floorboards waiting for you?
Pretty much in every piece of survivalist fiction there is always at least one big shootout scene. It can be the brave townies against the invading cannibal army, the plucky conservative group against the dastardly UN troops, etc. It makes for entertaining reading but is it likely that at some point youre going to go to war with New Bern? I doubt it. Oh, I have no doubt that during Katrina and a few other major events there might have been a few people who were forced to play Blackhawk Down as best they could (Roof Koreans!). But I believe those were the extreme outliers. Unless you’re Harry Beckwith (record holder for most amount of shots fired in defense of self), I’d bet most people never even needed a mag change.
But…we never know what the future holds, do we? So, we practice. Today is a range day to practice fast target acquisition and some shoot-n-move stuff with the HKlone. Given the always high price of ammo, it makes sense to try and save money when possible. To that end, the Germans, always looking for an excuse to engineer some new form of Teutonic brilliance, made a very nice .22 conversion kit for the G3. I bought one of these years ago and although it was rather expensive at the time (and still is), it pays for itself rather quickly.
.22 conversion kits for guns are an extremely handy thing if you’re going to take your practice seriously. They arent really about accuracy as much as they are about gun handling. Practicing bring your AR up from a low ready, getting a fast sight picture, and snapping of a shot that hits a steel plate….you can do that at $9 per mag of 30, or you can do it for $1.20 per mag of 30. I prefer the more bang-for-your-buck approach. For practicing things like shooting while moving, weak hand shooting, transitions, etc, there’s no reason the .22 conversions shouldn’t be used.
For the AR, I very much like the CMMG conversion and recommend them.Although there are plenty of .22 conversion kits for your AR out on the market the one that seems to get universal approval is the CMMG. Ciener conversions, in my experience, are…’lacking’. If it were me, I would recommend a CMMG conversion, and four mags. Why four? Start your drills with one in the gun and three in your plate carrier or GI mag pouch.
When I practice with the .22 conversions I’m usually doing stuff like:
Make up your own drills. Get a #50 bag of something and drag it to safety with one hand while covering with your rifle in the other, pie some corners, do some fire/movement drills with your mates, etc, etc.
Odds are pretty good that you’ll never need to do an Australian peel or anything like that, but any drill that improves your gun handling, gun safety, and tactical options is worth doing. And with a decent .22 conversion kit you can spend a long afternoon drilling with your buddies for the cost of two bricks of .22
.22 conversion kits for pistols have been, in my experience, a bit hit-n-miss. Tactical Solutions made one for the Glock but it never seemed to be reliable enough for a day of practice at the range. If anyone can recommend a good G17 .22 kit, I’d like to hear about it.
I cant recall all the details, but the dream was in some sort of new ice age scenario. Me and a group of people were trying to navigate these dark, narrow passageways under a building looking for supplies. Of course, no one had a flashlight. And then, in the dream, I remembered I had one in my pocket.
I really hate using trendy terms like ‘EDC’ but this little guy has been rolling around in my pocket for a couple years now and the more I carry it around the more I really like it. I’ve given away a handful to friends and every single one of them has commented on what a good light it is. I won’t bore you with details like lumens, weight, runtime, etc. You can look those up yourself. I’ll simply say that I have three of these sitting on the shelf as spares and there is always one in my pocket and one lanyarded to my Bag O’ Tricks…and I’m a tough customer on flashlights.
For about twenty-five bucks this thing does everything I need in a ‘non tactical’ flashlight. But its most important and most redeeming feature is that it is always there…so much a part of my everyday routing that even my subconscious knew that I’d have it with me in the dream.
I’ve mentioned these little Fenix E-series lights before, but I’ve found them to be an excellent light for toting around in a pocket every day and figured it was worth a bump.
We’ll start with a hat tip to Tam for this link: I Am a Stryker-X Assault Backpack, and This Airport Lounge Is an Insult
Y’know, I’ve a lovely Tactical Tailor 3-Day Assault Pack that I have been slinging around almost everyday for something like 13 or 15 years. Actually, lemme blog it up…ah..3/19/2004 is when my TT bag reported for duty. So..about 14 years.
Anyway….
I have never assaulted anything (except good taste), if I did I would hope it wouldnt take three days, and if it was going to take three days I’d imagine I’d need more gear than what fits in a 3-Day Assault Pack. But the simple fact is that while I hope I never have to live the zombie-apocalypse lifestyle, gear that is designed to do so will more than adequately meet my day-to-day needs and be able to handle that sudden, unexpected hiccup in societal cohesion.
In short, if it’s good enough to climb the mountains in Afghanistan its good enough to sling over my shoulder while wandering downtown Montana.
Same for military surplus stuff. Someone spent a zillion dollars to develop product X, they built enough of them to get the per-piece price down to almost nothing, and then they tested the design to be durable enough to win a war. Why wouldn’t I take advantage of that?
Broadly speaking, there are only two drawbacks to overkill when it comes to gear: weight and price. Crap thats built to survive Ragnarok is not going to be cheap. And it ain’t gonna be light. But what it will do is give you exponentially better chances of keeping your act together when that 0.1% chance of disaster hits. Plus, that stuff literally lasts a lifetime. Buy once, cry once, and rock on.
I’ve paid some stupid money for gear in the past and….every single piece of expensive gear I paid a lot of money for is still with me today, functioning 100%, and has never let me down.
So just because you’re not planning to jump out of a helicopter and into a sangar in Sangar doesn’t mean you don’t want the high-speed,low-drag, high-price,low-discount gear. Life is short, it’s shorter with low-quality critical gear.
And then……nothing…as I noted almost a year and a half later….
Just in time for hedging my bets against 2020:
I ordered….uhm….25….and got free shipping and a bulk discount that lowered it to $17 per magazine. I need to go out to the range tomorrow to adjust the new sights on the G17 so these will come along for the ride.
Anyone know of a leather maker who will make Galco Miami Classic compatible mag pouches that’ll hold extended mags like this?
Your average G17 carried 17 freedom seeds…If the day comes when you need a spare reload of 27 rounds, your life has pegged the needle on the Interesting-O-Meter. However, given the amount of 9mm carbines that take Glock mags these days, why wouldnt you have a dozen of these? True fact: I was going to order a hundred to put away in Deep Sleep but just couldn’t bring myself to commit to that kind of expense. I settled for 25…for this month.
The bundle o’ Siege’s I ordered up from that megasuperawesome sale a few days ago showed up today. One or two will got out this weekend as holiday gifts. The rest…well….Zero needs lighting.
This recent purchase of a fairly substantial quantity of D-batt using devices means that I need to head up to CostCo this weekend and pick up more batteries. I picked some up last weekend and I was rather shocked at what D-batts cost these days. To be fair, I hadn’t bought any in a while but they still seemed egregiously expensive.
And, as 2018 limps to a finish, my goal is for 2019 to not be an expensive year. This year was a tad heavy on gun purchases. How heavy? Uhmmm….six carbines, seven Ruger 9mm pistols (I clearly lost track of how many on that one), four 12 ga shotguns, a couple Glocks, and one or two pocket guns.
But…also managed to sock away a chunk of Mountain House freeze drieds, put back almost 50k rounds of .22, and actually managed to put a bit of money in the bank.
At the moment, my preparedness goals for 2019 are extremely unsexy: pay off house, get money in the bank, try not to buy All The Guns.
You’d think that wouldn’t be that hard, but you’d be wrong……..
Hmmm. Was bopping around Amazon looking for holiday gifts and encountered that age-old problem that occurs when shopping for other people: the gift you’re looking at is so cool you decide you want it for yourself.
It happens, right?
So, the people I was going to send a buncha Siege lanterns to will have to get something else. In the meantime, I have several of them showing up Monday.
Actually, if youre stuck with what to get that survivalist-type person on your wish list, I strongly recommend these things. They’re handy, pretty affordable, and they do exactly what you need them to do. Three levels of brightness, a blinky strobe function, and a red’save your night vision’ mode. I really can’t say enough good things about them. Of course, when you come up with a cool product, there are imitators. Everready and Rayovac make some similar produccts but for a lousy $27 I see no reason to go with an imitator. I mean, if Rayovac made a weaponlight that was a knockoff of the Streamlight you’d have some doubts about that, right? Same thing.
I’d been meaning to pick up a few extra of these for a while now, but I just never got around to it. Now that winter is here, and we had, what, an earthquake two years ago and a couple power outages in the last year, it seemed a good time to move some money out of one budget category and into another.
I’ll head up to CostCo this weekend and stock up on D-batts to load these things up when they get here Monday.
Pick up three or four for the LMI on your gift-giving holiday list.
A while back, I purchased an ICOM R6 handheld receiver (scanner). I’d been on the fence about it because even though it was rather affordable at only about $200, it was still a chunk of money for a tightwad like me.
I wanted it because too often I would be somewhere and either come across some sort of accident or other police/rescue activity, or I’d hear sirens (alot of them) in the distance and wonder what was going on. Now, it isn’t necessarily that Im nosy (although I am) but rather if there is some Big Hairy Deal going on somewhere that requires the efforts of a large amount of overcompensated city employees…well…I should probably be aware of it. Chlorine tanker derails? I wanna now…now. Shooting at the Walmart and that side of town is locked down? I need to know. Car fire on the bridge downtown? Need to know. So..I picked up the R6. The R6 is tiny, which has some problems, but fits in my Bag O’ Tricks and runs on AA batts. I did a bit of research and programmed it to cover all the local police/fire channels, FRS, GRMS, and a few other useful frequencies. Sometimes it is very useful to know what other people are doing. Sure, many agencies use encrypted communications these days or some other method of defeating casual listeners like me, but…lets be honest….most cops and firemen will take the easy way out and that means just keying the mic and talking rather than remembering tactical frequencies, protocols, encryption keys, and which button on the Motorola turns off that horrible noise.
Biggest drawback is that because of the thing’s tiny size, alot of buttons do double or triple duty. Programming and navigating through different functions can be challenging with constant references back to the user manual. (Tip: keep the .pdf of the manual in your phone)
Since my bag is expected to get bounced and banged around, I keep the R6 in a little Pelican 1010 Micro case.. keeps everything safe and uncrushed.
One item I splurged on, a year or so after I bought the radio, was a programming cable and software package. Rather than go through the button pushing process, I just hooked the scanner up to my computer and loaded up the frequencies that way. Highly recommend.
Since the R6 runs on AA batts, it fits into my logistics plans nicely. The Pelican case keeps it dry and in one piece. And, when everyone is looking out the windows at all the flashing lights whizzing by on the highway I can get a handle on whats going on around me and adjust my pans accordingly. Forewarned is forearmed and all that jazz.
