Bandoleer stuff

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Unsurprisingly, I had a bunch of loose .223 ammo sitting aound that really needed to be organized better. A cardboard box full of 1000 loose rounds of ammo is no way to show up for the apocalypse.

When I go to the range, and I’m shooting .223 (or 5.56 [and, yeah, I know they’re different]) I usually pack them in a plastic 50-round ammo box. Other than keeping things neat and tidy, it also keeps me from turning too much money into noise.

But…for packing ammo away for that rainy day, I rather prefer to store .223 in bandoleers.

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Classic four-pocket bandoleer set

If you’re not familiar with them, a proper bandoleer contains a cloth bandoleer, ammo on stripper clips, cardboard inserts for the bandoleer pockets, a stripper clip guide (‘spoon’), and a safety pin to hold the spoon to the bandoleer. This is pretty much how they’ve been packing the stuff since Vietnam.

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New-style four-pocket set

The idea is not, as some geniuses would have you think, to carry this stuff around and then load magazines from stripper clips in the heat of battle. The idea is that it’s a convenient way to stage and transport a basic loadout of ammo. Original bandoleers were seven pockets holding 20 rounds each, for a total of 140 rounds. Of course, that was back when 20-round magazines were the norm. Nowadays there are bandoleers out there that are four pockets holding 30 rounds each. I’m a bit of a worst-case-scenario kinda guy, so I go with the seven-pocket bandoleer but put three clips in each pocket.

The bandoleers, spoons, and stripper clips are quite reusuable and its the rare survivalist that doesnt have some of them floating around in the garage or in his junk bin. But those damn cardboard inserts….they tend to get lost, destroyed, and they’re kind of a pain in the ass to source out. Now, I’ve got a shopping bag full of stripper clips, a cardboard box full of bandollers, and no 3-clip cardboard inserts. What to do, what to do…….

Naturally enough, a quick trip to Amazon showed that, yes, you could get the 3-clip cardboards there. Gotta love that instant gratification enabling that is Amazon. Ordered ’em up and a few days later -voila-:

20150607_201414So what do you do with them once they’re loaded up? Well, I dunno what you do with ’em, but I pack ’em away in some .30 cal. ammo cans until the day when I need them. Then I can grab a rifle, a couple mag pouches of magazines, throw one or two of these bandoleers over my shoulder, and head for the hills.

Is this superior to storing your ammo loose in an ammo can? I think so. For one thing, it makes an easy and quantifiable amount…one bandoleer is 210 rounds. (As opposed to a couple fistfuls of .223 which may or may not be enough to fill all your mags.) The stripper clips keep things nice and tidy, and load mags a heck of a lot faster than by onesies.

For range trips, I still use the plastic ammo boxes..but they don’t fit into BDU pockets very well, are noisy, and still require you to load your mags one cartridge at a time…all things that arent really a big deal at the range. I suppose some might question the utility and practicality of the bandoleers but I find them to be a convenient way of grabbing a ‘pre-measured’ amount of ammo, and also a convenient way to carry it.

Back into the breach with MH

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Much like the slapped-around trailerpark housewife who goes back to her drunk, abusive husband I have renewed my dealer account with Mountain House.

Years ago I got dealer status with them to punch up my food storage. The plan was simple – sell enough of their product that it would finance my own acquisition of that product. It actually worked pretty well. But then…MH came home drunk one night and things got dark.

More specifically, there was a period a few years back where MH stopped selling to small-time dealers. The thing that was especiialy hard to find were the #10 cans. There were all sorts of rumours swirling about trying to come up with a reason for MH freezing out its small-time dealers. The most popular rumour was that MH had gotten some big .gov contract and was purposing as much of their production as possible towards filling those contracts….thereby leaving the little guys out in the cold.

MH denied the .gov contract angle, but then again wouldn’t the terms of any .gov contract require them to keep hush-hush about it anyway? So for a year or so MH was in high demand in the preparedness community and in low supply. Eventually, MH started shipping again and things resumed an even keel….except with me. I was kinda annoyed with MH for their actions.

A year or so goes by and, lo and behold, I discovered this.  (Here’s the complete post.) By that point I had a pretty good amount of MH on the shelf and was branching out in the much broader variety of Augason Farms.  I figured my needs with MH had been met, so I didn’t take any steps to keep my dealer account active with them. Then, the other day, I was up at REI and I was perusing the camping food section (because….why not?) and I saw some new things. Specifically, these. The Italian Pepper Steak, especialy, caught my attention.

So I called the guys (gals, actually) at MH and asked if my account with them was still valid and could be brought up-to-date. (See, MH really tightened up their dealer policy a while back and getting dealer status with them nowadays is a bit trickier.) They said they could do that and, by the way, we’ll send you some samples of those new products.

And then FedEx came by today.

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Yay for free samples! Maybe..maybe he’s really sorry this time! Maybe I’m being to hard on him…maybe….

We shall see. In the meantime, I’ll be getting together with my local cadre of like-minded individuals and see if we can’t all pool our resources and needs to put in one big group buy.

Hows that CrossFit thing going?

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Here’s a CrossFit joke for you:

An atheist, a vegan, and a CrossFitter walk into a bar…..and I know this beacuse they told everyone there within the first two minutes.

The humour(?) comes from the perception that people who are into CrossFit just will. not. shut. up. about how awesome their lifestyle is, etc, etc.

I bring this up because someone asked me, in comments a few weeks back, how CrossFit was going. I didn’t want to turn it into some sort of rabid kool-aid-drinker CrossFit post, but I figured I’d answer the question.

It goes. I hate going, I hate being there, I hate having it hang over my head during the day. But there’s no arguing that Im in better shape for it. Most of the metrics are right where they were when I was doing it more intensely four years ago, and some are not. My deadlift isn’t up to where it was, byt my numbers for snatches, presses, and cleans is a bit better. My squats have stayed the same. I can do more pullups now and I’m able to do more stretches of intense exercise with less breaks and timeouts.

Injuries? Sure. Had a few weeks with a shoulder issue, am currently going through some pain with my elbow, but over time that all clears up.

The upshot is that at 48 years old I’m in better shape than most guys my age. I could stand to lose a few pounds but Im kind of a squat, stocky, ‘fire hydrant’ shaped guy to begin with…being a lanky, wiry, runner-type was never in the cards for me. BUT…..when you’re pinned under heavy debris, dude, Im your man!

Random musings

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Paratus, the holiday of preparedness, is coming up. This year it falls on September 18th. There is a FAQ up about it if you care to read it. In the spirit of the individualist nature that Paratus represents, you don’t ‘make a list and check it twice’. Why? Because:

  • We’re already on someone’s lists somewhere
  • Checking it twice is the same as checking it only once, since one is none and two is one
  • OPSEC

But in the back of my head I think I’ll probably have a few folks to send Paratus gifts to. It’ll be a fun and somewhat humourous diversion.

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Summer in Montana is here. This is the optimum time to do shooting and outdoor-related stuff that you really don’t feel like doing when it is ten degrees outside. My plan for the summer is to pick a small handful of rifles and laboriously work up ideal loads for them. My plans are to work with the Ruger GSR, my flagpole 7×57, and my .44 Contender. I am especially curious to play with GSR since it’s limited optics make tight groups a challenge…but its not a rifle meant for shooting groups, its a rifle meant for shooting objects. That means that while it may not shot a 1″ group at 100 yards, it will hit a mammal-sized target reliably at, say, 300. (Which, really, is kinda Coopers original spec for the thing.) Regardless, its a very pleasant, and satisfying solitary project. I look forward to it.

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There’s some buzz in the news about (yawn) new gun laws to be passed by the administration. The buzz is that ‘high-powered’ handguns like the AR/AK pistols will get dropped into some NFA classification or some such. I dunno, man…I think the barn door has been open too long on that one. Last time the fedgoons arbitrarily reclassified a firearms into that sort of category was back when the Street Sweepers, USAS/Daewoo shotguns got lumped in as Destructive Devices. There probably weren’t nearly as many of them in people’s hands as there are AR pistols these days. Still, stupider edicts have come out of the unstable minds at ATFE, so I suppose anything is possible. My money is still on this ‘wrist brace’ thing coming to a head. We’ll see.

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It’s still over a year until the Presidential election. Does that mean its too late or too early to start stockpiling?

Single-serving burn gel

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I’m a big fan of the Water Jel burn relief product. This stuff is the most awesome thing in the world for taking the pain out burns. Years ago I made the mistake of picking up a lawnmower by the exhaust manifold. Ow. I literally could not sleep unless my hand was clutching a bag full of ice cubes, the pain and ache was that strong. Nowadays, I slap some of this stuff on it and -presto- the pain goes away. Nothing magical, its just a topical anesthetic, but when you burn yourself, especially on parts of the body that really make you feel it…like fingertips…the stuff is a wonder.

20150605_181355I keep the large bottle of it around the house but thats really too large for most first-aid kits. Fortunately, they offer single-serving ‘ketchup packets’ of the stuff. Several of these are going into the various FAKs that go in the hunting/fishing bags. Nine times out of ten the burns I get outdoors are the simplest and stupidest ones….those stupid wire handles on the canteen cup. Its a long day of chasing Bambi, you stop to heat some water on the esbit stove to mix up some lunch, your hands are a little cold so you don’t notice how hot the wire handles are at first, and…ouch. And while burns are never fun, the ones on fingers..esp fingertips….really suck. So…a couple packets of this stuff will go into each FAK.

As I was ordering the stuff up offa Amazon I noticed they even make a ‘military’ kit that is suitable for white phosphorus injuries. Kinda cool, although if I’m in a situation where there is a genuiune risk of Willy Pete injuries then things have truly gone off the rails.

I’d posted a while back about Water Jel but didn’t mention the extremely convenient single-serve packets. I ordered them up a few days ago and they just arrived. Figured I’d mention it because it is some really awesome stuff and there’s really no excuse for not having some in your kits when you can get it in something as convenient and small as the single-serving packets.

 

Article – Not my apocalypse: a black woman reads a white-guy prepper magazine

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Apparently, those darn prepper magazines are a hotbed of coded racial injustices. I am especially WTF’ed by this jewel:

It’s important to note that, despite the robbery, the reader is starting from a place of privilege – even after being robbed, he has a single-family home with attached garage and the “usual personal belongings,” including two cars with full tanks of gas, tools, three mobile phones, a second secret stash of a food and water (one man removed his from behind the bathroom drywall), and a loaded gun, which was apparently of no help in the confrontation with the gunmen. (And was apparently of no interest to them anyway.)

Because, apparently, in this womyn’s world, having gear that you worked hard to acquire is privilege. As if someone just dropped a gold Cabela’s card in your lap and said ‘go forth and prep’. But, this chick is no doubt of the mindset that whenever you have more than her (or people who look like her, have the same plumbing as her, or the same economic mobility as her) that is an ‘injustice’ or ‘inequality’.

There’s actually a much more sinister implication here. This womyn, who is ‘of color’, seems to imply that the ‘prepper culture’ caters mostly to white males. If thats the case, and there is indeed a lack of ‘preppers of color’, is that an indictment of a publishing and marketing industry that is racist or  does it show that the notion of self-reliance, taking care of ones self, being responsible for your own well-being,  and independence from government support is a mindset not supported by the ‘of color’ community. Or, to put it in a very racially charged, but much simpler context, are white people more inclined to resist being in a state of dependency on others and .gov than non-whites? Now that’s a tack the writer should have taken. Rather than ask ‘why is the demographic for this magazine mostly white males’ perhaps she should be asking ‘why aren’t more non-whites interested in this’.

From a devils advocate point of view, I suppose you could make the argument that in our society the ‘marginalized’ segments (the people of color, the ‘econmically unprivileged’, etc.) simply cannot afford to spare the money, time, and other resources since they are already at a deficit on those resources compared to the white population. Or, put another way, if most other racial and ethnic groups are earning less, then they have less time and effort to put towards this sort of thing…they’re too busy just trying to catch up.

Honestly, I know absolutely zero non-white survivalists. In fact, from a strict racial standpoint, I’m the only one I know (I’m 50% ‘other’ ingredients.) But part of that, no doubt, is because I wound up living in a place where the population tends to be rather homogenous. Still, as I diddybop across the blogosphere I find very few survivalist or prepper blogs that aren’t being done by someone not ‘of color’. Oh, there are some exceptions…the ones I have found tend to be less about survivalism and more about ‘urban homesteading’, ‘organic gardening‘, and that sort of thing, which does kinda come into the preparedness Venn diagram. In fact, the only black person I’ve ever even read about who comes close is this fellow. (And I had to dig back over seven years to even find that.) Wiki.

As a commenter to the article said, the outrage the author shows about the overwhelming white maleness of the prepper magazines must be how he feels when he flips through Jet and notes a decided lack of not-of-color people. Face it, some things target a niche or demographic that tends to be very homogenous. And there’s nothing wrong with that if that homogenous nature is due to a simple lack of interest from others and not a result of exclusionary policy.

I’ve met dozens of people over the years who are into preparedness in some form or another…some religious, some not. Some male, some female, Some gay, most straight. Most rightist, some leftist. Most race-indifferent, some rather race-conscious. But everyone across the board was some shade of white person.

Do I think that the prepper magazines out there are full of images of white people and absolutely vacant of positive images of non-white people? Somewhat, yes. Do I think it’s because of a racist mindset? Uh, no..I think it’s because when you’re trying to sell magazines you sell to the market you think exists for that magazine.

As an interesting project, if anyone can find me some preparedness-themed blogs that are run by ‘people of color’, I’d like the links so I can go check ’em out.

Sig MPX in the wild

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Mmmmm…if you can’t get yourself an HK94/MP5 this thing runs a real close second.

IMG_7730Came across the Sig MPX today. First one I’ve seen in the wild. Although it did have the ‘wrist brace’, it did not have the controversial muzzle device. Obviously, I didn’t get to shoot this thing but I sure got my fingerprints all over (and inside) it. My overall impression is that SIG is really living up to their reputation. Ambi safety, ambi bolt lock, ambi mag release, single point attachments, plenty of rail, etc, etc. The overall impression was that if you can’t find yourself an SP89 to ‘arm brace’ (yes, Im using arm brace as a verb) this little jewel might be just the ticket. Of course, its also $1600~. Still havent gotten my hands on a CZ Evo yet but I hope its just as nice as the SIG. And, lemme tell ya man, those AR controls were just nice. Come to think of it, all the MPX really is is a 9mm AR with a dedicated magazine well. But, wow, was it handy. I like my Uzi but its an aged design and the MPX really brought that home. On the other hand I can buy Uzi mags all day for about $10 whereas the SIG mags are around 7x that….for now.

If money wasn’t that big an issue, I might have a couple of these MPX but I really want to give the Evo a look. The price point makes the Evo very attractive and I think thats going to translate into a much larger logistics aftermarket as the Evo uses its MSRP to grab more market share.

Handy little gun…really would like to shoot one.

Canned water

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It’s kind of interesting to look back on the history prepping back to the golden-age of the Red Scare and Cuban Missile Crisis and seeing the gear that was marketed towards those wanting to survive the inevitable nukefest.

cw-1One of the things that I often see pictures of in old bomb shelters is canned water. More specifically, drinking water that was packaged in cans like beer or other canned food would be. Here’s an example of what I’m talking about. Notice that this was in the days of dinosaurs before the pull-top can was invented. So, if you wanted to slake your thirst in the post-nuke world, you needed the old-fashioned church key to open it. Although there are plenty of these relics floating around, and people come across them from time to time and post pictures of them on the internet, very infrequently do you find those same people saying if the cans were still full or not. Assuming the cans were not lined with any particular barrier coating (which seems pretty likely considering the era), and their steel construction,  the cans probably succumbed to rusting pretty quickly. (This, by the way, is why those old Civil Defense water barrels were not stored full of water,  but rather stored in such a condition as to allow them to be rapidly filled when the warnings were given.)

Water_sideFrom a manufacturing standpoint, the market for this sort of thing would have been a no-brainer for a company that was already involved in the bottling/canning process. For example, here’s some canned water that was canned by the folks at Royal Crown, or as we know it today – RC Cola. If you’ve already got the canning operation set up to make pop, why not just turn the taps on and can some water at the same time? No additional capital investment and a whole new market to sell to….seems like a win to me. But, realistically, that market for canned water, even at the peak of the crisis, probably couldn’t even begin to compare to the market for the regular product.

Anheuser-Busch-Water-Cans-in-Packaging-1 Interestingly, canned water actually does turn up these days in disasters. The folks at Anheuser-Busch, most famous for Budweiser beer, periodically use their resources to run off batches of canned water to be distributed in disaster areas. Compared to the old cans, these things are rocketships…pull-top cans so no opener is required, lined interiors to preserve taste, and aluminum construction to reduce weight and increase durability. And, considering the manufacturing technology and resources of a company like A-B, they probably produce more of these things in an 8-hour shift than most companies could have produced in a week back in the days of Sputnik.

51BhAMJrHnL._SX425_Interestingly, if a person was interested in getting some of this sort of thing for their own bunker you can find it online without having to hang around a disaster relief tent. There’s at least one vendor on Amazon selling the stuff. (Blue Can) And although I rather like the idea of the convenience and durability of an aluminum can, I think that, when you really think about it, any advantages offered by an aluminum can are pretty much available in other forms…most specifically the ubiquitous plastic water bottle that we get at WalMart for around $5 a case. (Versus what amounts to about a buck a can for the aluminum cased stuff.)

I can’t speak for everyone, but my own experience has been that the plastic water bottles are exceptionally durable and probably more durable than the aluminum cans. The biggest issue that springs to mind is what happens in cold weather…I’ve had cans of Coke freeze and explode like an M67, but I’ve never had one of the plastic bottles explode. The bottles also have a bit of ‘give’ to them so things that might puncture an aluminum can don’t necessarily have the same effect on the plastic bottle. In fact, pretty much the only advantage I can come up with for the can over the plastic bottle is the opaque nature of the can preventing light transmission and inhibiting any type of growths.

thTwo other packaging options are the ‘juice box’ style of packaging, which is also pretty tough to find, and the foil pouches that we often see marketed specifically towards preparedness. The boxes seem like a clever idea but I think theyre the least durable and therefore the least attractive option. I do very much like the foil pouches. While I don’t think they have the puncture resistance of the plastic bottles, I very much like their small serving size…their small size means that if they freeze (like in your car in the winter) you can thaw them quickly and easily by just tucking them under your arm or sitting on them. Contrast that with trying to quick-thaw a 16 oz. frozen plastic bottle of water.

It’s also worth pointing out that if you’re the DIY type of guy you can actually ‘can’ water same as you’d can fruits or other foods using your pressure cooker. The water is completely sterilized, the containers are sterilized, and pretty much the only weak point is the glass container.

Article – Couple missing for 2 weeks found in California wilderness

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WARNER SPRINGS, Calif. (AP) — A couple missing for two weeks were found Sunday in a remote part of San Diego County with the elderly husband dead and his wife severely dehydrated, after surviving on just rain water and some food, authorities said.

Cecil Knutson, 79, Dianna Bedwell, 68, were found near a Boy Scouts camp on the Los Coyotes Indian Reservation near Warner Springs, sheriff’s Lt. Ken Nelson said.

Knutson’s body was near a white car and Bedwell was inside the vehicle, he said.

 

That last sentence is curious. So the white car was not the same one that the woman was in? Did the woman stay with the vehicle and the husband went off for help and found another car?

Perhaps staying with the vehicle isn’t so great an option when the clock is ticking on your need for insulin. Bad story all around. Be interesting to follow this and get more details.