Tag Archives: gear

Shelf Actualization

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I about twentyfive years ago, I built several really nice reloading benches. Really nice, solid, beasts made of 2×4’s and plywood sheeting. Problem is, I really only use one of them and the others take up space. So…..I chucked a screwdriver bit into the Dewalt and took the thing apart. What to replace it with? Why, more wire shelving of course.

As I was assembling the shelving, I took a few pics to demonstrate those wonderful S-hooks that I highly recommend for folks who use this type of shelving.

Notice that while one rack uses four uprights, the other rack will use only two. The S-cliips hung from the other rack will support the shelf instead of another set of upright.

S-hooks in place with shelf seated in them.

Finished unit. Still have another set of uprights (since each set comes with four and i only used six) so I could make a three-wide set of shelves using only two complete shelving sets.

Once the shelves were up, it was time to rearrange some things and one of those things was all the first aid and medical gear that had been in storage for…well…a while. Naturally, as I was doing this, I couldn’t leave well enough alone and had to make some changes. Biggest change is that a bunch of stuff got vacuum sealed to help keep the packaging clean, dry, and intact. Those paper pouches that hold the gauze and pads tend to delaminate after a while. I’m hoping that vacuum sealing them will prevent that.

And, while I was doing that, I figured I might as well vacuum seal the contents of the grab-n-go first aid kits. These are a couple milsurp medical bags I picked up off Sportsmans Guide or Major Surplus many years ago. Ideally, it’s not for immediate use, but rather a stash of items to take with you as you run out the door so that when you get to the Beta Site you can unpack them and have a full first aid kit on hand. All the contents of those went into the vacuum sealer too.

Seriously, gang…if you don’t have one already, go get one. It’s one of the most useful survival-oriented gadgets you can buy.

So, once all that was done, it was time to play musical chairs with all the crates, cans, boxes, and drums. Ideally, I’d like everything to be organized neatly and out of the way. The difference between hoarding and prepping is, I suspect, organization.

 

An example of the ‘loaner’ or ‘disposable’ gun

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Tam very nicely linked back to this post and opined in her blog:

But say you wind up with a friend or family member who suddenly finds themselves in a life circumstance where they realize that they need a better way to protect themselves than 911? A crazy ex, a stalker, a neighbor making threats, or just one of those violent criminal incidents that happens close enough to home to be a wake-up call…

If you’re the “gun person” in your family or social circle, this has probably happened to you at least once already. Lately, seeing the occasional sub-$300 fire sale prices on Smith & Wesson Shields and SD9s, I’ve more than once thought about buying one to set aside for just this sort of occasion. “In case of crisis, remove unfired-in-box gat from safe.”

And no sooner had that post hit the light of day than my vehicle decided that it’s alternator had had enough of this mortal coil (get it? ‘Coil’?) and shuffled off to wherever dead car parts go. As a result, my vehicle very inconveniently puttered to a stop. In front of the homeless shelter.

Joy.

So, I called a buddy of mine to come help me push it off the road because I really didn’t want to ask the whiskey-for-breakfast crowd for a hand. My mood was already several orders of magnitude into the red zone and it wouldn’t have taken much to release some pressure in an unprofessional manner. So my buddy shows up and asks how long till the tow truck arrives. “Two hours”, I reply. He looks over at the homeless milling around aimlessly, goes back to his truck, and pulls a beater Beretta 96 out from under the seat. “Wanna borrow this until the tow truck gets here?”, he asks. I thanked him and told him me and my G19 were just fine. But…here’s the big takeaway from that: because he had what amounted to a ‘disposable’ or ‘beater’ or ‘truck gun’ available he was able to offer it to someone else. And a scenario like that is precisely why we have extras, and extras on top of extras – because someday a friend, family member, or other person you care about might be in a bad position and in this way you can offer them assistance. And thats not just guns, guys…. that could be food, ammo, batteries, money, or any host of other things that, when you don’t have it and really need it, are really important.

This is a big distinction from charity. Charity is generalized giving out of some sense of moral or religious imperative or duty. I generally don’t suffer from this particular quality, so my generosity is a bit more selfish – I give to those that add a value to my life, or I give for the satisfaction I get from the act of giving. It may seem like that’s a difference with no distinction, but I see a distinction. I suppose the greatest distinction, for me, is that charity often comes across as an obligation and I am extremely opposed to obligations being forced upon me rather than they being voluntarily assumed.

On a side note, I had my Bag Of Tricks with me as well as my mountain bike sitting in the back of the vehicle so I could very easily have left the area and made it back to base with minimal inconvenience…if I was willing to just abandon the vehicle, which was not called for at that point.

Fenix E11/E12

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A number of years ago I was in REI and, as I was waiting in line for the checkout, there was a bin of closeout merchandise. On a whim I picked up a small LED flashlight and have been mightily impressed with it ever since.

The flashlight, a Fenix E11, has been supplanted by the newer E12 model which features a tap switch on the tailcap to adjust brightness levels. In pretty much all other regards, its the same as the E11.

When I got started in survivalism, the go-to flashlight was the MagLite. Big, beefy, and built for cracking skulls it was pretty much everyone’s first choice. Time goes by and with the development of LED technology we now have pocket flashlights that put out more light using AA batteries than the old-style MagLites ever did with D batteries.

When you really go all in and decide to get some top of the line photon blasters you often wind up at SureFire (or, to a lesser degree, Streamlight). SureFire is great stuff and I have a bunch of their weaponlights….but they are spendy. On the other hand, if you want to go all ‘poverty prepper’ and grab a fistful of $1 LED flashlights from a plastic fishbowl in the checkout line at WalMart….well, thats great for looking for the keys you dropped behind your desk but durability might be an issue.

SO…middle of the road – durable and efficient enough to withstand use and abuse, cheap enough that if you lose it you’re not heartbroken, but not so cheap that when you need it there’s a 50/50 shot it won’t work. As I discovered, this little light fits the bill perfectly.

How much do I like and recommend? Well, putting my money where my mouth is:

I keep several of these things because theyre so dang handy. Let’s hit the high points:

Battery compatibility – my battery logistics call for only three batteries: AA, D, and CR123. This light takes one AA battery, making it compact and efficient. I’ve taken to using rechargeable Eneloops for devices I foresee changing batteries in regularly. I do this for economics…I’ll use the rechargeables and save the stored lithium AA’s for when it really counts. Battery life seems pretty good. I change the battery out every month just to keep things at maximum efficiency.

Output – Advertised is about 115 lumens. For indoor use I find it to be amazingly bright. Outdoors its pretty good for the immediate area but it’s not a long-distance light…thats where the LED 3D MagLite comes in handy. The older E11 has two brightness settings, toggled by twisting the head of the light. The lower setting is perfect for close-in work like reading notes, ro doing work with your hands as you hold the light in your mouth. The E12 uses a tap switch on the tailcap to go through a couple different brightness settings.

Size – Perfect size for keeping in your pants pocket. I carry one around as my ‘everyday carry’ pocket junk and do not find it to be the least bit obtrusive. (But I do find it amazingly handy.)

Survivability – It’s gone through the washing machine, been dropped on concrete, sat on, rolled off tables, and has not flickered once. Theres a small attachment point for a lanyard and I highly recommend using a lanyard to keep the light attached to your gear in such a way as to allow you to find it in a hurry. I  keep one in my pack with the lanyard attached to a little plastic carabiner so I can find it in total darkness.

If I had the money, I’d have a pocketful of SureFire but, in practice, I really haven’t felt ‘undergunned’ with this thing as far as pocket lights go. I would definitely take it over the AA MiniMag light or some discount bin special. For the particular niche that I bought these for (compact, pocket-size, affordable, personal light that I can carry everyday) they are darn near perfect. Highly recommended.

Spec-Ops closeout

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I loves me a bargain. Being a survivalist is a resource-intensive lifestyle when you’re getting started. Once you’v been at it a while, and gotten the major purchasing sprees out of the way, it’s really just a little hear-and-there upgrades and ‘nice to have’s. The guys at Spec-Ops are having a closeout on two products that I’ve found to be quite good. They are:

A three-mag MOLLE/PALS panel in your choice of camo for $12.50

And a very nice knife scabbard in either brown/coyote/whatever-the-new-term-for-desert-is or the hideous ACU for $11.25.

I have an extra G3 bayonet without a scabbard laying around, so this sheath is perfect for finding a home for that bayonet and keeping it with the bag of G3 support gear.

Floor porn!

I’ve used the Spec-Ops stuff for years and have been extremely pleased. It’s American-made (unlike Maxpedition and most Blackhawk gear), seems pretty durable, and is pretty basic no-frills stuff. I’ve been carrying their messenger bag as a bookbag to school for the last two years and have had absolutely no issues with it. I’ve been using their discontinued SOB buttpacks (make your own joke) for the last decade and found them remarkably rugged and durable.

Their designs are, for the most part, unimaginative but the quality and price is pretty hard to beat. And at closeout prices, even better.

Housecleaning

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Ugh…Im immersing myself in a bit of reorganization of the long-term food. The positive aspect is that it gives me a chance to inspect, update , and repackage things. The negative side is that it’s a buncha work. After the last big Mountain House buy I wound up with a dozen cases of leftovers to add to my own stockpile. But…where to put it? Its an eye-opening experience. I’ve come across quite a bit of older stuff that may need to be excised from the current stash…most notably some MRE’s that are, no lie, 20 years old. Gotta figure out what to do with those.

It’s very odd to come across all these different things that have been in storage so long I’ve forgotten about them.

Anyway, when you have spent as many years as I have doing this sort of lifestyle you wind up having these sorts of to-do lists. I’m hoping that once Im done I’ll have freed up a bunch more space for better organization. And, really, I need to split the whole thing into an even distribution of three or four stockpiles to be relocated elsewhere…Ive got way too many eggs in too few baskets.

But…there’s a certain fun and bittersweet nostalgia to going through stuff from so many years ago. I’m curous to see what turns up and what winds up not being worth keeping. (For example..the cheap sleeping bags will probably be eliminated since I have so many of the military sleep systems these days.)

Range time

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There is not a single thing that is, pricewise, cheap about HK products. Even the clones are spendy. And the accessories as well.

Which is why I should not have been surprised to find that the PTR I picked up shot about 6″ to the left and 18″ low at 50 yards. Why? Because unless you’re willing to spend about $80 for a genuine HK tool, or $45 for a knockoff, your ability to zero your rifle is rather limited. (Yes, you can use snap ring pliers but the marks it leaves on that sight drum ain’t pretty.)

Fortunately, being an evil yuppie survivalist, I actually have an HK sight tool and was able to zero the gun properly. But I did learn something I did not know. The sight drum has three aperatures and a v-notch. The idea is that the v-notch is your quick acquisition sight, and the subsequent “2”, “3”, and “4” aperatures are for 200, 300 and 400 yards respectively. Ok, fine. What I did not know is that the v-notch is not a 100 yard sight. I just assumed it was. As it turns out, from what I read, the V-notch and the “2” aperature are the same elevation. Didn’t know that.

I’ve posted it before, but here’s one of the best instructions on sighting in your G3-type rifle.

Years ago, Cheaper Than Dirt (home of the $99 Pmag) had a sale on surplus G3 furniture kits…stock, forend, and pistol grip….for ten bucks. I bought a bunch of them and since I have so many spares, I could afford to whip out the Krylon and DIY some winter white.

Might send this gun out to be dipped or coated in a winter camo pattern.

Yup..thats the ancient WGerman snow camo. I desperately want the new Danish or Finnish snow camo but its a colossal pain in the ass to find that stuff here. I may have to make friends with someone overseas, figure out the Byzantine metric clothing size system, and ask them to hit the surplus stores for me. Didn’t wear the matching pants to the range because..well..I figured I was already looking a little tinfoil-y with the color-coordinated rifle and outerwear. Which reminds me…anyone know a vendor for white 3-point rifle slings? I suppose I could order up some white webbing and fab up my own, but……..

Kerosene and the ghost of Y2K

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Well, I think I’m pretty much done on buying kerosene for the rest of my life. Last time I bought kerosene was here. That was an awesome deal.

Was tooling through Craigslist (when? When will I learn??) and, lo and behold, a fella selling 14 5-gallon drums of kero. For those of you who went to public government schools, that’s 70 gallons. Or, if you’re in a country that never put a man on the moon, 265 liters.

20170801_101755The fella was asking way, way, too much for the stuff so I made him an offer. Wound up getting it for $200…a tad under $3/gallon. (ok, fine….$2.86/gallon).

I  love kerosene…it burns hottest of the liquid fuels, keeps forever with no special treatment, is safe to store, and has a nice market of stoves, lamps, and heaters out there.

My anticipated use? Well, it’s winter for a good chunk of the year here and it would be nice to keep the house toasty in the event of a power outage. Most likely these will go into storage with the last batch of 5-gallon drums I bought. There they will wait until the day when it’s dark, cold, and dreary and I shall have light, heat, and hot food.

Here’s the interesting part… I met the guy, a rather old gentleman who, sadly, was dying of cancer, and as I was moving the cans out of his rather neat and nicely stocked garage I asked him why he had so much of it. His reply was that it was his leftover Y2K stash. Apparently he’d gone long on Y2K stuff. I suspected as much as I looked around his garage and saw the rifle cases, cases of ammo, etc, etc. All the hallmarks of someone who is on the same page. We chatted a bit about the Y2K thing and about how we’d rather have it and not need it, etc, etc. I thanked him for the deal and assured him it was going to a home that shared his concerns and mindset.

I also told him that if he had any other Y2K leftovers he wanted to sell, to please keep me in mind.

So for those of you who wonder how you meet like-minded individuals, there’s another example.

I did the math to figure out how may gallons of kerosene I have in storage and I think I may have actually gone a tad heavier than I planned. I’m going to have to contact a few of the LMI and see if they want some…I don’t think I really need more than 100 gallons for any forseeable emergency.

 

New stuff from Repackbox.com

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I got a postcard in the mail the other day (who sends real mail these days??) from repackbox.com telling me that they’ve expanded their product line to include boxes for more calibers of ammo.

What is repackbox.com? Well, they sell a few useful cardboard products that have appeal to those of us who keep ammo onhand. What I’ve been getting from them are cardboard boxes to store ammo in.

Every so often I find deals on ‘bulk’ ammo. Bulk ammo is just that – bulk. You buy a thousand rounds of ammo you dont get a nice cardboard box with fifty little boxes of 20 rounds each. Nope, you get a big ol’ polybag or box filled with loose cartridges. 8290915400329fc2a66d65b6f89dfeaf (1aa)Great savings, but not exactly easy to store. When the zombies are massing at the barricades the last thing you want to be doing is counting ammo into little ziploc baggies and handing them to your buddies. Repackbox gives you small cardboard boxes, appropriately sized to a particular cartridge, so you can have your ammo organized, neat, and ready for the apocalypse. Case in point: a guy came into the shop and sold me a .50 can full of loose 7.62×39 ammo. I’m not just sticking a can of a thousand loose rounds on the shelf…grabbed a stack of 7.62×39 boxes and a little while later everything was neat, organized, and ready for the apocalypse.

The advantage? Plastic ammo boxes are great, but they aren’t cheap. The cardboard boxes are cheap enough that you can hand out ammo to your buddies at the range or at the rally point and not feel like you’re throwing away money. Also, inexpensive storage boxes are hard to find for some calibers. Repackbox just came out with boxes in a buncha new calibers inc. .30-06, .303 brit., 7.62x54R (better than those string-n-paper bundles you get outta the spam can), and, of interest to me, .30-30.

Although I don’t talk about it much, I like the .30-30. My like for it stems from the fact that after the ubiquitous .22 rifle, the .30-30 carbine is probably the most common rifle in many parts of the country (although the SKS may have supplanted that for a while…but since the days of the cheap Chinese SKS are long behind us….) I rather like the .30-30 in an unltralight single shot Contender carbine, but there are still several million Winchester and Marlin rifles out there. (And Savages and other brands as well.) So…I stock a decent amount of .30-30 and now have a convenient way to package it for distribution and storage.

I’m also a huge fan of he old ‘military style; 50-round ammo boxes. Repackbox makes these for .45 ACP as well as other calibers. Extremely handy.

Since I have a Dillon 1050RL sitting on the bench, I can whip out a lot of ammo in a couple hours. There is very little more satisfying than watching the boxes of ammo stack up like bricks as I package the ammo for storage.

Check ’em out.

 

Flare for the dramatic

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,Rawles mentioned the a supplier for 26.5mm flares the other day.

Years back, Sportsmans Guide had a deal on genuine HK21A flare guns. As I recall, they were something like thirtyfive bucks or so and I bought a few. At the time there was a goodly amount of 26.5mm Czech flares on the market (26mm will work also). I wound up with quite a variety of projectiles and smoke. Hey, why not? They were cheap(ish) and definitely fun to play with.

Practical? Mmmmm….not sure. But..here’s where they shine – 26.5mm flares are far more…substantial..for your perimeter tripflare warning systems than those rinkydink 12 ga. Olin flares. A quick trip through the plumbing section of Home Depot gets you pretty much everything you need to build a tripflare warning system.

For the more DIY minded, I recall reading a how-to somewhere on the internet about nailing a rat trap to stake, and then attaching the pull chain off some of those Skyblazer flares to the trap bar. Set the trap, it gets triggered, bar snaps down pulling the chain and igniting the flare. Clever.

Of course, thinking about that sort of thing led me down the rabbit hole to how to make other perimeter warning devices using mousetraps. Interesting stuff.


Remember: primers are dangerous and they might ignite things you didn’t want to ignite that were in close proximity to them. So..be careful. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge.

Streamlight Siege

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You guys remember Hydrox cookies? If you couldn’t pop for real Oreos, you bought Hydrox. Much like how if you’re on a budget, you don’t buy Frosted Flakes but rather the generic store brand ‘Frostie Flakes’ or some such (Slogan: “Theyrrrrrrrre….okay”.)

To me, Streamlight has always been the working-class version of SureFire. Yes, Streamlight has, as I read it, been around a tad longer than SureFire but SureFire gets the rep as the ‘high end’ tacticool product. (Interestingly, Hydrox came out before Oreos, as well.)

20160731_142828I’m kind of a gear snob, but I’m a pragmatists even more. A few years ago Streamlight came out with a product that, as far as  I know, has no comparable version from SureFire…the Streamlight Siege. (Although, to be fair, Eveready and a few others make a similar product but I don’t believe it to be as rugged and well thought out as the Streamlight product.)

The Siege is an LED lantern for area lighting. Nothing remarkable about that, but as you look the product over more closely you get the idea that it was designed for a very particular demographic….we happy survivalists.

20160731_143108The Siege runs on three D-cell batteries….one of the most common sizes of batteries around. Just about everyone has a couple D-cell MagLites floating around the house or car..the Siege takes advantage of that common battery. If you really want to streamline things, there are battery adapters that allow you to run one size of battery in devices meant for a larger size. Most often we see this with adapters that let you run AA-batts in devices that were meant for D-cells. But, my logistics revolves around three battery sizes (AA,D, and CR123) so I have plenty of D-batts laying around. (Interestingly, it seems like virtually the only thing I have that runs on D’s these days are flashlights. The days of radios and other devices running on D-batteries is coming to a close. )

20160731_142908The light source for the Siege is four white LED’s, and a fifth red LED. Holding down the one control button toggles between red or white. When the white LEDs are selected you have a choice of three brightness levels, starting with the highest. When the red LED is selected you have one brightness level, but double-clicking the button puts the red LED into SOS blinky mode.  The plastic ‘shade’ of the Siege diffuses the glow of the LEDs and is removable if you want more harsh lighting.

The top and bottom of the Siege has rugged rubber ‘bumpers’ making the light pretty resistant to being dropped, knocked over, or just banged around. Theres a foldaway clip on the underside of the light for hanging it upsidedown when you have the shade removed, and there’s a bail handle on the other end to hang it from whatever is handy when you do have the shade on.20160731_143039

The non-skid tread on the bumper-like bottom of the light keeps it from sliding on slick surfaces and provides an excellent grip for unscrewing the base to change batteries.

Light output on low is enough to illuminate a room so you don’t trip over anything, on high it’s bright enough to get things done but you’ll still feel like you’re in a power outage. Where this light seems to really shine (as it were) is as an emergency ‘area light’. When the power goes out its the light you turn on and stick high up in a corner of the room, hang in the stairwell, or put in your emergency gear storage area. It’s an awesome emergency light for when the power goes out and you need some light to get your gear together or start up your secondary systems (generator, transfer switch, etc.)

I haven’t beaten the crap out of it yet, but it has rolled off my desk a few times, and once bounced out of the truck….seems to still be doing just fine. Your mileage may vary. Personally, I’ve been very pleased with mine and will be getting three or four more as spares/backups/loaners.

They’re available at the usual sources, like Amazon, but once in a while you can find an outdoors-gear vendor having them on sale. Even at regular price, though, they’re a good purchase.