Tag Archives: DIY

Light work

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About three years ago, I picked up some AGM batteries off Craigslist. My original intent was that I wanted to rewire a common house lamp to use 12v LED lighting. The idea being, naturally, that in a power outage I would have a ‘normal’-looking source of light, rather than the stark and brutal harsh lighting that we get from just standing a battery lantern on top of the refrigerator or something.

So, my initial forray was…meh. I wound up buying an adapter to let me use a bayonet-type socket in place of a normal screw-in bulb socket...basically following these directions. But, in that case, it turned out there was a much easier way to do things – simply buy an LED desk lamp and remove the ‘wall wart’ AC-to-DC inverter and simply run it straight off 12v. Which I did…and it worked awesomely.

And that’s fine. My own testing showed that off of a battery jump pack the lamp would run non-stop for over a week. But try lighting an entire room with a desk lamp…it’s not really up to the task. So, I had a cheapo ‘dorm quality’ lamp sitting in the corner that I decided to experiment on.

First thing was to cut off the existing plug, determine where + and – were (you have a 50/50 shot of getting it right on the first try), and attaching some method of connecting to the battery. Bare wires work, but if you can make things neater, why not?

Next step was the bulb. Here you can see the previous bulb, and the bayonet adapter, that I had used. It worked, yes…but it didn’t put out enough light to seem like the lamp was ‘normal’ in its output. The other bulb is a Made-in-China (just like Covid!) bulb ‘designed’ for low voltage 12v systems. A somewhat more elegant solution than a bayonet adaptor and odd-attachment bulbs. All this required is a) bulb and b) changing the plug on the wire.

So, hows it look? Not bad.

(Yes, I have Archer on DVD. Do you not?)

Thank you for smoking

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Johnny Trochmann,, he of Militia Of Montana fame, puts in an appearance at the larger gun shows in these parts. He has about a dozen tables covered with what could best be desscribed a ‘survivalist’ gear…potassium iodide pills, surgical kits, QuickClot, books on everything, specialty ammo, and that sort of thing. At some point he must have found an in with someone in the cruise line industry or a subsidiary thereof because he always has parachute flares, hand flares, and smoke generating devices for sale that clearly came from someone’s lifeboat emergency kits. These items are usually a couple years ‘out of date’ but that doesn’t really mean much in materiel like this.

Invariably, I pick up a buncha parachute flares and smoke cans. Why not? Both can come in handy if something goes wrong in the boonies and you need to indicate your position to the ‘copter people, and, honestly, there are some tactical applications as well.

Despite having a pretty large store of these items squirreled away, I’ve never actually gotten around to trying the smoke devices. The reason was simple…I can’t very well touch one off in town without attracting a  large amount of attention (thats what the dang things are designed for, after all) and I never seem to have the time to head to anywhere remote to try them. Until today.

I was scouting out some hunting areas that I have not been to for many, many years and since they were hell-and-gone from prying eyes I figured I’d try one of those smoke cannisters. Pop the top, pull the igniter, and toss it for distance. It sputtered and then started spitting out a rather impressive cloud of smoke for a good three minutes. I didn’t take any pictures or video because YouTube has plenty of them showing this exact version, but it lived up to the expectations. Does it have, shall we say, ‘non-rescue applications’? Well, just from what I observed, you throw three of these down a stairwell or hallway and you’re pretty much going to reduce visibility to zero in a hurry. Maybe you have a use for that sort of thing, maybe not. But…like many tools, it’s a multitasker when you have the right mindset.

Johnny T. sells these at the gun shows for about $4 ea although if you buy enough he usually cuts you a deal. I’ve got a couple dozen in storage and I keep a few in the vehicle at all times ‘just in case’.

Buy them new? Man, I’d hate to have to…but, maybe I wouldn’t have to:

When I was a kid, my high school science teacher whipped up a sugar smoke bomb for a class movie project they were doing. He rather…underestimated…the amount of smoke his little device would generate and the fire department rolled up to the school thinking the roof was going up like Dresden. (Protip: instead of a coloring agent, mix in fine ground red pepper or cayenne to create an irritant effect.)

Anyway…if you’re in Montana and happen to run across Johnny Trochmann and his Tables Of Fun, be sure to grab a dozen or so of those things. And tell him Commander Zero sent you.

Not an expert

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When it comes to guns, I’m not ashamed to say that I think of myself as a bit of an expert on most things…history, function, disassembly, etc. Oh, sure, you bring out something esoteric enough like a Gewehr41 or a Rast-Gasser and you’ll probably stump me on something like disassembly, but by and large I’d say I’m pretty darn good.

At least, that’s what I thought until working on the rather plebian Beretta 92. As a good survivalist, I figured I should have at least a couple 92’s laying around since the military uses/used them and therefore there’d be surplus (or ‘liberated’) parts and mags aplenty. But, I don’t like manual safeties on a double-action gun. There’s no need, since the gun is DA and usually carried with the hammer down.

Beretta eventually recognized this and has a variant, designated as ‘G’, where the safety acts as a decocker only. (Much like my dear Ruger P95DC pistols.) Beretta makes the conversion available as a kit for about $55. So..I ordered one. Step one was to disassemble the existing safety from the slide. I did so and as I looked at the back of the slide I saw this:

Well, bloody hell….the slide is cracked. And I kicked myself for not inspecting the gun more closely when I bought it years ago. Alright, let’s go to Beretta’s customer service and see if we can wheedle a new slide from them since this one clearly is broken. Their reply:

It’s supposed to look like that. I have to give kudos to Beretta CS for a) replying within 48 hrs and b) not calling me a dumbass.

I’ve taken apart a lot of pistols in my years of gun fondling. You look at the back of a 1911, Glock, Sig, HiPower, Ruger, etc, etc, and that hole for the firing pin is always solid. I’ve never seen a relief cut in that area of a pistol. But..I’m not a machinist, not a mechanical engineer, and not a metals stress expert. So, if the guys at Beretta, who have been making boomtoys for several hundred years, say “No, no, dude….it’s supposed to look like that”, well, I guess that’ll have to do.

But….it sure looked like a stress fracture to me.

Clearly I need more time tinkering with Berettas. But it was a bit sobering to realize that, maybe I don’t know it all after all. Maybe I should have read the warning printed on the slide:

By the way, the G conversion was a breeze if you ignore Beretta’s incredibly complicated online instructions and just YouTube your way through it. (ProTip: watch video, watch video again.) Took me about ten minutes to get it installed and it works like a champ. A lot of folks carry guns like this with the hammer down and safety off, which is reasonably safe. However, those same people are usually concerned about the safety accidentally becoming engaged as the gun is bumped around or brushed up against things…last thing you want is to grab your gun, bring it up, pull the trigger and have nothing happen because the safety you left in the off position has somehow engaged itself. This G conversion prevents that.

Article – How to Make a 5,000-Year-Old Energy Bar

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Perhaps 5,000 years ago this sort of thing was the pinnacle of food portability, but I suspect that with modern techniques, materials, and technologies we can come up with something better. However, when those things are lacking it’s nice to know the fallback position will work.

In Secrets of Polar Travel, explorer Robert Peary spends several pages waxing poetic about the merits of a ration he brought on his expeditions to the Arctic between 1886 and 1909. In addition to ranking it “first in importance” among his supplies, he genuinely enjoyed the food, writing that it was the only meal “a man can eat twice a day for three hundred and sixty-five days in a year and have the last mouthful taste as good as the first.”

Peary was talking about pemmican, a blend of rendered fat and powdered, dried meat that fueled exploration and expansion long before his attempts to reach the North Pole. Archaeological evidence suggests that as early as 2800 BC humans hunted the bison that roamed North America’s Great Plains and blended their meat, fat, and marrow into energy-dense patties with a serious shelf-life. A single pound of pemmican lasted for years and might’ve packed as many as 3,500 calories.

Food certainly does give energy, but I’m not sure if I’d call these ‘energy bars’ rather than ‘food bars’, anymore than beef jerky is ‘energy strips’.

It might be interesting to experiment with. Be kinda nice to make, essentially, some Purina People Chow.

Link – DIY Panzerfaust

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Well, crap….there’s another project I’m going to have to pencil in some time for.

The niche market for legally registered disposable anti-tank weapons may soon experience a well overdue boom with the introduction of a historically accurate Panzerfaust 60 copy you can make at home. Jonathan Wild started the project last year which will eventually culminate in a book detailing how to build one yourself from scratch.

Capable of firing over 100 yards, the warhead (in this case is a practice dummy) uses a propelling charge of Goex cannon black powder housed in a cardboard tube attached to the rear of the fins. Like the original Panzerfaust design, initiation is provided by means of a primer (in this case commercial muzzleloading primers) fitted into an external nipple that is struck via the sheet metal trigger mechanism. The launching tube is simply a length of commercially available steel tube onto which the trigger mechanism is welded.

The potential seems…interesting.

Ammo Security VI – Economics of reloading

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There’s not a lot of things I consider myself an expert on. But, one thing I genuinely do think of myself as an expert on is reloading ammunition. I’ve done it all from .22 Hornet to .50-140, using every brand of press, jacketed and lead bullets, cast my own bullets, reformed my own brass, etc, etc.

I am also a tightwad with a streak of money nerd. Is reloading cost effective? Well, when you reload the cost of your ammo goes down so you wind up shooting more…so, in that regard it’s mostly a wash. But, on terms of shooting the same amount of ammo, it’s a different story. What I mean is, if you buy a box of .300 Win. Mag and then you reload that box of .300 Win. Mag. one is going to be a buttload cheaper than the other. Cheap enough to make it worth it? Let’s find out.

Let’s go with one of the belted mags……300 Win, 7mm Rem, .338 Win, .257 Weatherby….whatever. They all track around $2-$4 a round. Let’s buy 20 pieces of new brass, 100 premium bullets, a brick of primers, and a pound of powder.

I’m just gonna run over to GunBroker and get some prices….

  • Federal .300 Win Mag 165 gr. Nosler Partition, 20 rounds for about $40
  • Nosler Partitions, .30 165 gr, 100 bullets is about $45
  • New brass from Winchester is about $30/50
  • And we’ll use a load of 70 grains of IMR 4350 (There are 7000 grains of powder per pound, so under “Qty” one pound would be ‘7000’)

Factory ammo is $2. We can reload it for $1.39. But, once we fire it off and re-use the brass our cost per round drops to $0.79.

What if you reload something really spendy like .338 Lapua.

  • Federal Premium 250 gr. Sierra MK 20 rounds for about $90
  • Hornady brass at $3 each
  • Sierra 250 MK at $40/50
  • 76 grains of powder

Factory ammo is $4.50. We can reload it for $4.16. But, once we fire it off and re-use the brass our cost per round drops to $1.16.

If you buy a good reloading kit, like RCBS RockChucker kit, thats about $400. You would have to reload 120 rounds of .338 Lapua for it to pay for itself. Or reload 329~ rounds of .300 Win Mag.

Seems like a good deal, right? It is…until you get into economies of scale. Federal cranks out a bazillion rounds of 5.56 every year for the military. As a result, they’ve got the whole thing dialed in…they’ve got their costs down, their equipment amortized, production streamlined…as a result they can make 5.56 so cheap that you almost don’t want to waste your time reloading. Let’s check out some 55 gr. FMJ Federal ammo:

  • Federal 820 rounds for about $350 (From Midway)
  • Hornady brass at $0.29 each
  • 55 gr. FMJ at $.0.13
  • 25 grains of powder

Admittedly, almost no one uses new commercial brass to load .223 since fired brass is available at virtually no cost. But, for consistency….

You’re at $0.56 per round for your first loading…thats actually more than what factory ammo costs. However, once you fire that off and reload it, you drop down by sixteen cents per round. Put another way, you paid Midway $350 but once you fire it off that ammo can be reloaded at around $227.

When you get into stuff like 9mm and .223 the savings really become negligible when you factor in your time and whatnot. However, when ammo isn’t available at any price, then the advantages become readily apparent.

If you want to play “what if”, I’ll give you a copy of the spreadsheet. Anything in green is a variable that you can tinker with. Crunch some numbers. You’ll see that if you’re a guy who shoots oddball calibers (Weatherby, Ultramag, Lapua, etc.) you can save some serious coin. Explore your options – what if you get a really good deal on powder? What if you use inexpensive cast bullets? What if you use cheap once-fired brass?

If you find this info useful….

 

Marlin surgery

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Pistol caliber carbines (PCCs) are all the rage today. Why not? Yes, you lose ballistics performance but you gain streamlined logistics. Anyway, let’s recall that the original idea behind PCC’s was not to have a carbine that took the same mags as your Glock. No, the original idea was to have a carbine that took the same ammo as your Colt revolver. The genesis of the PCC goes back to the Colt Single Action and the iconic Win. ’73. A fella with a saddlebag full of .44-40 ammo could keep his rifle, pistol, and himself fed. Leverguns: the OG PCC.

I have a lovely Marlin 1894 in .357 and it’s a perfect companion to my GP-100’s. But…I wanted a little more horsepower. Time for a .44 Mag. And then I came across a nice Marlin in .44 Mag but it had one glaring little problem:

This … abberation… has no place on a rifle as otherwise magnificent as this old-style Marlin

A crossbolt safety on a hammered lever-action rifle is an affront to Crom, nature, and pre-litigious society. If you run around in the woods with a cocked hammer on your levergun you are, sir, a fool. It is no less and no more work to cock the hammer when ready to fire than it is to push an ugly, obtrusive crossbolt safety. This is why Marlins (and Winchesters) without the crossbolt safety bring more money than those that have them. So, you have an otherwise excellent, high-quality, Marlin rifle but it has the absurd crossbolt safety. Do you live with it? Slap an itty bitty o-ring on the ‘FIRE’ side of it to prevent accidentally setting it to SAFE? Or….do you….remove it.

Duh and/or hello…..you remove the worthless thing.

Several outfits offer replacement ‘plugs’ to get that stupid safety outta there. I went with this one which was suggested to me by fellow blogger Ryan. (How ya doin’, buddy!) It arrived today. Time for gun surgery.

First, know your enemy:

Know your exploded diagram as you know yourself and in a thousand disassemblies you will never be left with ‘extra’ parts. In this case, that v-groove is what keeps you from pushing the crossbolt completely through and out the other side of the receiver. There is a set screw, spring, and ball bearing that keeps it in place. Let’s get the stock off and find that set screw.

I think I can guess where to start looking. Under whatever crap that yellow stuff is, there lies our starting point. Let’s clean that crap out with a dental pick and get rolling.

Alright…back that thing out and be careful not to lose it. It’s tiny. There’s also a ball and spring in there. Get those too and don’t lose ’em. Once it’s out, push the crossbolt out the ‘SAFE’ side of the receiver (right side). You’ll be left a with a glaringly large hole in the side of your beautiful Marlin.

Take your replacement crossbolt and slide it in. You need to line up the little dent for the detent on the crossbolt with the hole for the set screw. Easiest way? Get crossbolt in place, look down set screwhole with bright flashlight, rotate crossbolt until detent lines up with hole. Firmly hold crossbolt in place and replace set screw tightly. Put stock back on gun and bask in the beauty:

And there you go. Not as pretty as if it had never had the stupid crossbolt safety, but miles better than still having it.

Hey, if you find this imformative or useful howabout kicking back a little something to yours truly?

Captain Video

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It ain’t exactly the Eye Of Sauron, but…I replaced the video camera system at the house. I initially installed it around..mmm…seven or eight years ago. Was a lot of work, too. Lotsa time moving ladders and running wire. But, when it was done, it covered all angles of approach and a few others as well.

Years go by and technology does it’s thing….features go up, price goes down. The DVR on the system was acting hinky and I was losing data. So..time to replace. Ideally, I wanted a system that used the existing wires and plugs so I wouldn’t have to hang new wire. Easy enough. I spent about 30% less than what they system costs those many years ago, and the features are eye-popping. Much better resolution, a larger drive, I can playback several channels of video simultaneously, and I can even remotely activate an intense light to light up an area in question. I replaced a couple cameras with the new ones and the difference in image quality was staggering. My security footage no longer looks like the Zapruder film.

I have a UPS (uninterruptible power supply) that is usually meant for desktop computers, but it works quite nicely for the camera system. When the power goes down I can still keep an eye on things until I get the EU2000 going. Handy, that.

99.9% of the time, the cameras just pick up the normal comings and goings, Jehovah’s Witnesses knocking on the door, the UPS guy dropping of packages, etc. But, once in a while, something worthwhile gets recorded. I’ve got excellent footage of several car accidents, and one video of someone trying to break into my neighbors house.

What I really appreciate about it is that when the doorbell rings I can glance at the monitor an see who is at the door and, more importantly, who might sneaking around the back of the house while my attention is diverted to the front door. Forewarned is forearmed.

 

Minor mods

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I am not one of those guys who believe , as far as guns are concerned, that just because you can add an accessory to it, you should. Youre a sovereign individual and can do whatever you want, but for me all an AR needs is a sling, light, and good sights/scope. (Maybe a stock-mounted spare mag, but thats iffy.)

However, since I’m putting a sling on the gun I want to give myself a couple options. As of late I’ve been pleased with Magpuls two-point-to-one-point sling. Since it uses a QD attachment method, I needed a to replace the plate that goes between the castle nut and the receiver. Fortunately, Magpul makes pretty much everything I need and I put in one of their sling attachment points. Seems to work well.

I had a couple cheap castle nut wrenches for the AR laying around, but a few years back I bought a Hammerhead Rifle-Tool which is sort of an AR ‘multitool’. It was perfect for removing the castle nut and replacing it. Highly, highly recommend. Not cheap, and I’m sure someone will say “My $5.99 gun show Made In China wrench works just fine!”. May be. But I had he money, it’s made in Oregon, has lotsa useful features, and seemed pretty stout.

The point of this post, though, is that if you’re going to keep guns around, and you plan on holding onto them for a long time, it isn’t enough that you keep some spare parts around…you need the tools. And if you need tools to last you the rest of your life you don’t cheap out. I actually have a 40mm ammo can in storage full of AR parts, tools, technical manuals, cleaning gear, etc. I call it ‘support gear’. There are some ‘armorers’ packages available for the AR but too many of them are made in China or have a lot of unnecessary or useless tools in them at the expense of more useful/better tools. Much like no pre-packaged survival kit is a good one, you’re better off parting your own kit together. And, if you decide to do so (which you really should), I recommend that Hammerhead tool.

Lighting

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Last week I plugged in the 12v desk lamp into the rehabbed Goal 0 battery to see how long it would run. Well, today is about a week since then and the little battery meter says it’s down to approximately 40% charge.

So, seven days at 24 hour usage means I could run this thing for six hours every night for a month. Or eight hours a night for three weeks. Thats a not inconsiderable amount of time to have ‘normal’ lighting.

Sometimes it’s hard to wrap your head around something like an economic collapse, a gigantic earthquake, a global pandemic, etc, but pretty much everyone can relate to a blackout or loss of electricity because we’ve all experienced it before at some point in our lives.  A power failure is probably the ‘disaster’ that the majority of people can relate to. Not everyone thinks keeping a case of 5.56 and years worth of freeze drieds is a good idea, but pretty much everyone has a flashlight at home.

Anyway, as I mentioned in the previous post on the subject, I like keeping a couple battery-in-a-box type of items on hand so that I can just set up a light source and pretty much not have to worry about it. I’ve yet to experience the outage that lasts more than a day and at the moment I have the resources to not have to sit in the dark for an entire month.

Gotta say, man….Ii remember when LED lighting started to be a thing. I recall thinking that if it delivered the lighting they promised at the low-usage rates they calculated it would revolutionize emergency lighting and low-power lighting systems for remote locations. Apparently it lived up to the hype.