Still not learning

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Well, nuts….another gun show where I had the best of intentions and still managed to return to the house with something that made absolutely no sense to purchase….

The fine print:

A little something from the Slick Willy legacy… a ‘restricted’ marking, denoting that this particular boomstick was only to be possessed by Only Ones. Someone at the Mohave Sherriff’s Office is missing a Mini-14GB.

Back in the old days of survivalism, if you wanted a .223 semi-auto rifle your choice was limited to either an AR or a Mini-14. (Yes, you could get an HK93 or an AR-180…..maybe a Valmet …or some other equally obscure gun, but broadly your choices were just between the AR and the Mini.) The Mini-14 was about as accurate as your average AK, but also about as reliable as your average AK. And it was a bit cheaper than the Colt (which was virtually the only outfit making AR’s back then).

The GB models were targeted (so to speak) at law enforcement and, amsuingly, military markets. (Yes, some tiny jerkwater nations did issue the Mini as their primary long arm.) When Bill Ruger decided to start throwing people out of the lifeboat, he yanked the GB models and the ‘high capacity’ mags from the public marketplace. Fortunately, Bill Ruger has left the biological stage of existence and the company has largely undone the damage he wrought and has come out with many awesome products since.

Anyway, the GB was not on my shopping list and I genuinely have no use for it…but it’s kind of a novelty with the police markings and the ‘Restricted’ stamps. And the price was right. I have no idea what I’m going to do with it. I suppose in for a penny, in for a pound….I may as well hunt down a GB folder to put on there and go full A-Team with it. Or I may just pick up a half dozen mags, stick it in a soft case, and use it as a tertiary level ‘just in case’ carbine to store somewhere. Or I may sell it to the first person I can make a hundred bucks off of. Who knows. But, it will definitely go out to the range for a spin.

Link – https://intershelter.com/

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These look very interesting. A couple things jump out at me. First, these seem like they’d be an interesting way to dump a small, easily concealed ‘cabin’ on a piece of remote property. Additionally, since they’re pretty much a ‘kit house’ I’d imagine you can knock it down and transport it if you needed to.

Not sure how much stress the design can handle, but it’d be interesting to use it as a ‘form’ and shotcrete over it or something similar. Byrying it seems unwiae but it looks like it wouldn’t take much to build up some railroad tie berms around three sides of it to make it all but invisible.

Pricing seems reasonable…for about seven grand you can get something that beats being homeless. If a fella had a piece of undeveloped property out in the sticks, this might make a nice weekend cabin sort of thing to hunker down in while you build the primary residence.

Also might make for an interesting ‘dual purpose’ building…plant int on your property as a shed or storage building that can be refitted as temporary housing in a crisis.

As I said, very interesting. I’d like to see one up close.

Reminder about Paratus

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Paratus is next week! That means most of you should be wrapping up your shopping, and wrapping up what you shopped in time to get it on the way to your Paratus  celebrants.

And, of course, if anyone wants to send me a little something for Paratus….well…I wouldn’t feel the least bit offended.

BUT! Paratus is Friday the 21st. Go hassle some vendors and demand to know why they aren’t offering Paratus Day discount codes! Together we can make Paratus the overhyped, heavily commercialized, vaguely legitimate holiday that it was born to be!

Water cans

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To set the stage, let’s go back to this post.

I wasn’t expecting any packages, so I was rather curious about what were the two large boxes sitting on my porch.

Cracked ’em open and…behold:

Years and years ago, Century Arms was selling, of all things, a ton of surplus NATO fuel cans and UK MOD water containers. I wound up buying about a dozen of each. The Brit water containters were actually pretty nice but good luck finding more of them. Plus, being somewhat milsurp they had a few hiccups with minor damage, keepers missing, etc. But…enough of them were in good enough shape that 2 of the 5-gallon (or is it 20-liter?) cans were tucked in the back of the truck ‘just in case’.

Flash forward a decade, and it’s probably time to replace them. While I have no interest in their fuel jerry cans, I fgured Scepter was the place to go for the water jerry cans. (They are apparently referred to as Military Water Cans [MWC] so I’m just gonna run with that.)

The boxes on my porch were from LC Industries. One of those military contract outfits that utilizes the labor of a struggling demographic…in this case, the blind. (And in the WTF Department, it appears that LCI is the owner of the TAG web commerce portal.)

Since I didn’t have to pay for these MWC (at least, I don’t think I do…it’s always a little sketchy with this person) I’m more than happy to examine them and see how they hold up. More importantly, I have samples (so to speak) to examine and evaluate to see if it’s worth going a little long on these. See, for my water storage I have a buncha 15-gallon ‘blue barrels’ which are just at the edge of man portability. (8#/gallon x 15 gallon = 120# weight) A five-gallon MWC is going to clock in at around 40# which is manageable by pretty much anyone who can hold a rifle. In a perfect world, maybe a dozen of these would fit the bill for my anticipated needs. For static emplacement, I like the 55-gallon blue barrels and I *really* like the IBC-type containers… especially since many times you can get them used on Craigslist. (Although you’ll probably use them to store non-potable water for things like gardening, firefighting, etc….why? ‘Cause you have no idea what used to be in that IBC.. coulda been pesticide for all you know.) But for portable water…well..these might be just the ticket. On that dreadful day when you gotta grab what you can and go, go, go it’ll be nice to know you can sling a few of these into the back of the vehicle and hightail it.

It occurs to me that this must be an early Paratus gift. I’ll need to generate a proportionate response. In the meantime, if these work out, I’ll probably order another ten for storage.

Just spamming about 10/22 mags

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C’mon guys…take these Hot Lips mags off my hands. I’ve got virtually no place to store them, and I’ve already a couple hundred for my own use set aside.

A hundred bucks gets you fourteen of them..delivered. Thats $7.14 each for a brand new 25-rd magazine. At that price you can put a half dozen with each 10/22 you have. Or give ’em away as Paratus gifts.

Email me and I’ll send you an invoice you can pay online and you too can have the joy of magazine security.

More LED lighting experimenting

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So, if you recall, late last year I had a post up about picking up one of those handy-dandy battery jump-packs at CostCo. They’re a fairly simple, though not perfect, solution for people who are just not inclined, mechanically or motivationally, to whip up their own battery-in-a-box.

After that, I got the curious interest of wondering how long my converted DC LED desk lamp would run on the jump-pack before failing. (The short answer was at least a week 24/7, which, at 6 hours per evening comes out to a freakin’ month of light. Probably more…I quit the program after a week figuring I had enough info.)

It was, to me, a very useful experiment and showed the potential for some tremendous utility from those devices in case of emergency. But…it’s very localized lighting. Its a desk lamp, after all. Which means it’s ‘area of effect’ in terms of illumination isn’t very large. So…what if……….

Was up at CostCo and they have a 4′ LED shoplight that looks similar to the old-style fluorescent shop lights we’re all familiar with. Now, lets state right up front that these were not the really high output LED worklights that are avaialble…for $25 the box says you get about 4000 lumens. Ok, thats fine…what I’m after is the ability to light up a room in a manner that looks virtually identical to what it looks like when the power is on, and not like someone pulled the housing off a MagLight and set it up on a file cabinet in the corner.

Here’s the rub…its set up for AC current, which means that I have to plug it into the built-in inverter on the battery pack. Problem is, the LEDs are DC to begin with…. converting DC (battery) to AC(fixture) to DC (LEDs), as I understand it, isn’t as efficient as if it was just straight DC to begin with. Fortunately, the internet is not without a supply of posts and DIY from people who wanted to do exactly that…. so, I may dig out my snips and electrical tape and see what I can do. But, for now, I’m curious to see how long it’ll run off the battery pack.

I still have these guys sitting here and it would be interesting to put them together to form a self-contained emergency backup lighting system for the storage area where all the emergency gear is.

I have no illusion this thing will run as long as the desk lamp did, but that lamp ran over 168 hours…this thing, on the ther hand, ran for three. Three. I suspect that the actual runtime would be several orders of magnitude longer if it were DC-DC. So….some tinkering is in order.

Weekend rambling

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I’m pretty much out of the Steel Lips mags, but if you want 14 Hot Lips mags for $100, drop me an email, I’ve about a eighty left.
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Hunting season is coming up and I very much doubt I’ll have the time or resources to spend time out in the field. I love being outdoors with a gun in hand, but the expense and opportunity cost of going hunting is just absurd.

For what I’d spend in gas, plus the lost revenue from the time out tromping in the woods, I could buy a lot of food to tuck away in the freezer. And, yes, I know it’s not about the money….but people who usually say ‘its not about the money’ are in a position where they don’t have to worry about it as much as I do.
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I was reading this post from Tam the other day and wondered….are there any gunwriters out there who have actually gotten into a shootout? I mean, sure, there are always the (ex)cops and (ex)military gunwriters who shot people in the course of their jobs, but are there any gunwriters (or gun bloggers) who actually have shot someone (other than themselves)?

 

Routine

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I was talking to my mailman letter-carrier today and we got onto the topic of absurd city politics and taxes and social programs. This further reinforces my belief that people who spend a lot of time in vehicles all day (truck drivers, letter carriers, etc.) tend to be fairly like minded. Not sure its a result of having not much to listen to except talk radio, or if people who are like minded wind up gravitating to those jobs. It is, however, kinda consistent.
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I’ve been trying to get into some better habits lately. Most notably, I really need to consistently leave things like my keys and phone in the same place every time I return to the house. There are plenty of things in this house that are always, always, always left in the same place in order to facilitate not having to think about it in an urgent situation. If something goes bump in the middle of the night, I know there’s a flashlight and gun sitting on the shelf by the bed. If I poke a hole in me, I know there’s a pretty comprehensive first aid kit in the living room, if I need to run outside in a hurry I know there’s always a pair of sweatpants and sweatshirt by the door…..that sort of thing.

But thats what habits are – an unconscious behaviour. Something that requires no active thought on my part, but happens automatically…like breathing or blinking. And a few months ago I had a hell of a time finding my keys when I was in a hurry and after thinking about it I realized that, yes, I need to have that same level of ‘don’t need to think about it’ going on with my keys.

From a survivalist standpoint, some habits (or routines, if you will) are bad… outside actors can observe your routines and take advantage of them. For example, my neighbor is a schoolteacher. I know, with utter certainty, when her house will be empty and for how long during the day. Were I of a different mindset, that information would be useful for nefarious purposes. But on the other hand, some habits… like always locking the door, checking the world news first thing in the morning, keeping gas tanks at least half full, etc…promote a more prepared life without exposing oneself to risk.

Many shortsighted (in my opinion) people equate routines with boring and mundane existence. I see routines as providing security and stability….two things I desperately want. All aspects of a personas life don’t have to be routine, obviously, but for me there are certain things in life I would like to have be predictable and routine. And there are some things I would very much like to be wildly unpredictable and  spontaneous. But on the whole, for me, I crave the security, stability, and predictability that comes from having some things be habit and routine.

There are other routines/habits Im trying to develop, and all of them, I think, go along towards increasing my level of general preparedness. They are, however, a pain in the ass to develop when you’ve never done them before.

Anyway, thats my thoughts for the day. (Speaking of which, a good routine I need to get into would be  a more regular posting schedule.)
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Thought For The Day: