Originally published at Notes from the bunker…. You can comment here or there.

More signs of the times:

Farm Thieves Target Grapes, and Even Bees
Thieves target North Texas ambulances

Darn… if only there was some sort of automated armed sentry system you could deploy to keep the thieves outta your fiels and outta your ambulance bay. You know, something like these:

Well, as it turns out, here’s how to build your own sentry gun.
Personally, I’d be really reluctant to strap a 10/22 and a 50-round drum to something like this…but it would be handy with something less than lethal like paintball gun or the like. More likely it would be useful with some sort of high-intensity searchlight mounted on it to track targets for the human operators. But, I suppose if youre confident in your programming and you havent seen 2001: A Space Odyssey you can trust your programming skills to not get yourself killed.

Originally published at Notes from the bunker…. You can comment here or there.

Being prepared requires, for good or bad, that you maintain a certain amount of awareness about what goes on around you. Sure, this is meant literally…as in making sure no one is standing behind you at an ATM, etc. But it also means being aware of what is going on around you on a larger, broader scale. To me, that means having to stay on top of the news. Not parked in front of the computer 24 hours a day hitting the ‘refresh’ button every thirty seconds….just taking a few minutes a couple times a day to view US and, especially, non-US news sources to see whats going on in the world. The problem with this is that, as a wise man once said, when all you have is a hammer every problem looks like a nail. Meaning, when you’re gearing up for the end of the world every news item looks like a portent of the apocalypse.

Current frontrunner for being the catalyst that throws the world into chaos is the current economic crisis that is dominating the news. I was rereading some of my earlier (like 2003) posts and I pretty much said that the big threats that would be coming would more likely be economic than terroristic. I might have been right on that one. This debt ceiling debacle is dominating the headlines and the way people carry on you would think we’re going to devolve into a Mad Max-ian dystopia if we don’t borrow more money that we cant afford to pay back.

I’m not sure I’m all that concerned. Raised or not, there’s going to be unpleasant economic consequences either way. They won’t appear overnight, and they won’t appear as grand and dramatic sudden changes, but the consequences will exist nonetheless. (I’m reminded of Rand’s statement “You can ignore reality, but you cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring reality”) Higher taxes, unemployment, currency valuation issues, etc, etc. It’s looking like a choice between a death by a thousand cuts or a death by two thousand cuts. Really, there’s absolutely nothing I can do about it so I’m simply going to follow it just out of curiosity to see how it turns out, and instead focus on mitigating, if possible, the consequences.

A trip through CostCo the other day showed that prices continue to rise on many items and on the items that are ‘holding the line’ you can see tricks to keep prices static. My ice cream costs the same, but now it’s 1.5 quarts instead of a half gallon…same size container though, so you dont notice. Toilet paper that used to be 500 sheets to a roll? 400 sheets. Same price. Five pound bag of sugar? Four pounds. It’s subtle, and you may not notice it, but these are the tricks and gimmicks going on at the moment to keep you from noticing that prices are going up. More than ever, you need to do the math at the supermarket these days and see just how much youre paying per unit/pound/ounce/gallon.

I’ve mentioned it before, go read The Alpha Strategy. It makes the argument, much better than I can, that one of the most sensible things you can do is to stock up (heavily) on things that you’ll always need and will likely be more expensive later. I was rereading some posts from 2004 and apparently back then I was buying 7.62×39 for $90 a case of 1000. That warm, nostalgic, ‘gosh I wish I had stocked up’ feeling that youre having right now when I talk about $90/1000 ammo? Imagine that exact same feeling about disposable razors, toilet paper, sugar, socks and car tires.

I started this post about having to stay aware of things by watching/reading the news and, as usual, it evolved into something else. Well, writing is an organic process…you never know where it’s going to end up.

Originally published at Notes from the bunker…. You can comment here or there.

The .22 conversion kit for the Glock has arrived. Most .22 conversions usually have you replace the slide of your pistol. The slide that is used as a replacement is often of a lighter alloy than the original slide…the .22 usually doesnt generate enough recoil normally to move a massive steel slide like a centerfire cartridge will. However, with a little ingenuity and engineering you can not only get a slide of ‘normal’ mass to operate, you can even do a fairly accurate simulation of recoil as well. (The Colt .22 conversions utilized a ‘floating chamber’ to achieve this effect.) The conversion kit we picked up is made by Tactical Solutions. We picked up their kit designed for use on full-size 9/40 frames. Also picked up two spare mags for a total of three 15-shot mags. As an aside, TS also offers a threaded barrel for the conversion which might be kinda handy if you have a suppressor.

First thing you notice is that if you didnt know better youd swear the TS slide was a genuine OEM Glock slide…heft, shape, color and everything else are identical to the Glock slide. It even has Glock factory sights on it. Obviously theres some internal differences but outwardly you wouldnt be able to tell the difference between the two except by the markings. Unlike many conversion, the slide is steel rather than aluminum, zinc or other lightweight alloy.

The conversion has no locking mechanism…operation is pretty much straight blowback, unlock the centerfire versions which lock up on the hood of the ejection port.

Assembly to the frame of your Glock is about what you expect…just like fieldstripping your gun normally. I havent weighed the conversion slide to see if theres a weight discrepency but if there is it isnt terribly noticeable. EDIT: Its about 4 ounces lighter.

So how’s it shoot? Not bad. The instructions call for MiniMags, Blazer, and Federal Automatch ammo. Having none of that on hand I went with Remington and Federal bulk. Personally, I have been disappointed with the performance of Remington .22 in the past and this was no different. Remington, to me, has become the bottom of the barrel for ammo…their cartridge cases are usually the worst for inconsistency and their rimfire ammo gives my semiautos more headaches than any other brand. It’s okay for revolvers and bolt guns butI’ll continue to stockpile Fed bulk and you should too. (Although I do keep a small stash of CCI Stingers around because they work best in my Beretta 21A.)

Loading up a few mags with the Remingtons produced a few failures to fire (typical in a rimfire since the distribution of priming compound isn’t exactly a science) and more than a few failures to extract. Im attributing the FTE to it being a new ‘gun’ and the extractor might need to break in a bit. Switching over to Fed bulk gave much more reliable ignition and only a couple FTE. The conversion itself performed great…slide locked back on last shot, slide lock released the slide the way it was supposed to, and groups were quite nice. Recoil was, as expected, not the same as with the centerfire ammo but to me that isnt a big deal. I see this kit as being used mostly for gun handling drills rather than accuracy drills. What I mean by that is that I see its major use as practicing one-hand/weak hand draw/shoot drills, practicing draw-and-snap-sight-picture drills, practicing transition drills from longarm to pistol and vice versa, and that sort of thing…for which this kit excels.

Is it cheap? Holy Crom, no. If you dont shop around you’ll pay almost as much as you would for a used police trade-in Glock. Is it worth the money? It depends on how seriously you take your shooting and how much you shoot. The .22 ammo recommended is around four cents per round. Thats $40/1000. Whats cheap factory reloads costing these days? $12/50? Thats about 24 cents each. Or a 6:1 ratio. Meaning that you can shoot six mags of .22 for the price of one mag of .40. Or, to put it in better terms, you can practice one day per week with .40 or you can practice six days a week with .22. We got the kit for our own use, but we’ll be doing a demo for the local police department since theyre budget is tight and they could use an alternative for cheap practice drills.

What I really love, love, love is that I can now slap the .22 conversion into my PTR-91 or AR-15, put the Glock .22 conversion in my holster, head to the range and do longgun/pistol transition drills, from behind cover, weak hand, etc, etc, all day long for about $20.

Conclusion? Yeah, its a great kit. Seems to do everything it’s supposed to. Is it the best? Beats me, I;ve only tried this one but having tried it I think if anyone bought one theyd be quite pleased.

Originally published at Notes from the bunker…. You can comment here or there.

The stupid…it burns!

This isnt the first time some brainless politician (but I repeat myself) has come up with such an amazingly stupid idea. Pat Moynihan, I believe, wanted to tax the crap outta .22, .25 and .32 pistol ammo back in the 90’s since they were what were used in many crime guns of the time.

On a national level, as you may know, theres already an excise tax on guns and ammo. In addition, if you want fun guns like SBR’s, full autos, sawed-off shotguns, etc, theres a further tax penalty.

For me, reloading my own ammo, in addition to saving money, gives me a bit of a headstart on avoiding these sorts of issues. The bottleneck, of course, is primers…I can make my own bullets, and in a pinch I might be able to even make my own black powder, but making my own primers just is not in the cards (although it can be done with more than a small amount of difficulty and a large helping of unreliability.) I suppose some pipe-bomb-on-a-stick muzzleloading flintlock would put you completely off the radar in terms of self-sufficiency…cast your own balls, make your own powder, make your own flints…, and while a rocklock beats an empty hand, I think I’d rather just stock up on primers and smokeless powder.

Anyway, its an interesting avenue to take since making something prohibitively expensive can work just as effectively as a total ban. And , yes, the proposed legislation mentioned in the article is local to that city, and it is likely that the ammo is acquired the same way the guns are – illegally – and thus the only ones inconvenienced will be legitimate shooters and retailers.

Originally published at Notes from the bunker…. You can comment here or there.

Although bird flu is no longer the catalyst-of-the-moment for the end of the world, that hasnt stopped filmmakers from coming up with a new movie on the subject:

If youre going to watch a movie about this sort of thing, I recommend ‘Carrier‘, which was much more apocalyptic and quite a bit darker than most movies of this genre. (And by ‘dark’ I dont mean violent or bloody…any idiot can slosh buckets of blood in front of a camera, I mean ‘dark’ in the sense that it deals more with the dark side of human nature and the descent into ….uncivility?…and corruption.)

But, as fanciful and unrealistic as movies like these can be, they are useful…they get a person thinking about things they may not have thought about before or thinking about them in a way they may not have thought about them before. This is one reason that I think ’survival fiction’ and ‘zombie apocalypse’ movies/books have a legitimate place in one’s library of resources…it makes you think.

Originally published at Notes from the bunker…. You can comment here or there.

Found this while cleaning off my desktop and thought I’d share:

Originally published at Notes from the bunker…. You can comment here or there.

Ah…the German (West German, originally) G3 cleaning kits arrived.

And, really, at $2 each wouldnt you have bought a bunch as well? Not sure what the word is that comes after ‘tertiary’ (quadriary? Pentary?) Never mind..found it: Primary (1st), Secondary (2nd), Ternary (3), Quartary (4th), Quintary (5th), Sextary (6th), Septenary (7), Octonary (8), Nonary (9th), Denary (10). We’ve apparently gone past the point of duodenary levels of redundancy on .30 caliber cleaning kits.

Enough about the semantics, lets talk about the goods. All of the kits appear to be either new or like new. They include a pull through chain, two brushes for said pull through, a small ‘paint brush’ for cleaning in the tight spots, a small vial for lube which everyone seems to agree leaks horribly, and two bundles of what appear to be cotton strands like youd find on the end of a mop. Not sure how theyre to be used.

I’ll swap out the empty lube container for a small tube of Tetra or BreakFree. Add a small length of brass or bronze rod for knocking snow out of the muzzle and I think that’ll be all the mods I need to make. I’ll keep one of these with each of my .30 rifles and stow the rest. Hey, for two bucks, man………

Originally published at Notes from the bunker…. You can comment here or there.

Hmmmm …. Typing away and *boom* thunder followed by a power outage. Second weather related one in less than month. Fortunately, the iPhone retained it’s functionality.

Originally published at Notes from the bunker…. You can comment here or there.

Administration to propose steps on gun safety
Guns are already a very safe product. If you keep them pointed in a safe direction and dont’ screw with them when you shouldnt, they tend to be about as safe as your average toaster oven. Unfortunately, ‘gun safety’ to some means ‘gun prohibition’ or confiscation or registration or neutering under the guise of ‘evil features’. If, Crom forbid, Obama wins a second term, well, he’ll have nothing to lose by bringing out the really unpopular legislation. Word to the wise, man.
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Speaking of guns, the missus has finally managed to come across a Tactical Solutions conversion for the Glock. We laready have .22 conversions for the ARs and the HKlones. Having the option of .22 to use in the Glocks for practicing things like sight acquisition, weak hand drills, etc, is just good sense. The kit isnt cheap….I can actually buy a used Glock for the price of the kit…but it should pay for itself in about 2000 rounds. As soon as it gets here and we’ve had a chance to shake it out, I’ll let you know what I think of it. We’ve been having a hell of a time finding a vendor who had one in stock and wound up being on a waiting list for most of this year.

Originally published at Notes from the bunker…. You can comment here or there.

CTD has the HK .30 cleaning kits on sale for $2 ea. Assume a failure rate of 50% just to be safe. Meaning, if you want three kits, buy five…that way if one comes missing a part or something is broken, youre good to go. At $2 each you should probably have at least a dozen. Linkification. While we’re at it, they also still have the ninety-seven cent HK mags. (Reject rate on those was about 6% in my experience…meaning if you order 20, one or two will probably be trashed. Still a fantabulous deal, though.)

I have a few of the cleaning kits already. Bought them a couple years ago at, I think, ten bucks each. Theyre obviously very handy if you have a .30 caliber rifle. Just the thing for wandering around the woods with your .30-30 or PTR-91. One things to add would be a length of caliber-diameter brass rod. Why? Because you cant push a rope. While the little chain-like pull-through is great for pulling a patch through the bore, its going to suck for getting snow out of the muzzle. In cases like that a length of heavy brass rod dropped down the barrel from the breach end is just the ticket.

Speaking of PTR rifles, the buzz in the blogosphere has been that the PTR is less-than-HK-reliable with ammo that uses tar sealant in the case. My experience has been that this is true. The story, as Ive read it, is that PTR ‘improved’ the HK design by making the flutes in the chamber shallower and reducing the number of them. As a result, the tar builds up in those flutes and without the fluted chamber to ease extraction you get failures to eject. The most obvious solution is to simply shoot ammo that isnt tar sealed. However, the guys at PTR must have been getting an inordinate amount of crap from the shooting community because they have now introduced the PTR GI model. This model supposedly addresses those concerns, although PTR is very quiet about it.

I’m not sure I see a real problem here. People who are quick to castigate the PTR for not shooting tar sealed ammo feel that if you cant use all ammo available then the gun is a liability, yet they’ll refuse to shoot steel cased Wolf out of their custom ARs. The surplus .308 that used to be on the market is almost completely gone, so the notion that you are somehow deprived of the ability to shoot ‘cheap, plentiful surplus .308′ is kind of a non-starter. I’m a cheap bastard so I reload all my .308 on the big Dillon 1050. Fired brass, surplus powder, and bulk .308 bullets are all it takes. It duplicates military ball and is mind-numbingly reliable to shoot.

I still say the PTR is the best value for a .308 “battle rifle” on the market today. Mags for a buck, cleaning kits for two bucks, and scads of genuine HK surplus parts and accessories abound.