Federal .22 ammo at four cents per round, delivered.
Bought ten thousand.
This post brought to you by Low Resistance To Impulse Buys and the letter $
ETA: Dealer pricing from RSR. Must order by the case (100 boxes) for case price.
Tag Archives: guns
New stuff from Repackbox.com
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. 
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.
Link – Air Force Testing Anti-Drone Shotgun Shells
Three left.
============
This is kinda interesting…….(and, yes, clever name)
The Mi-5 shells are anti-drone rounds and contain a five-foot wide capture net. When fired, five tethered segments spin and extend to create the net which travels towards the targeted drone, wraps around the frame, and brings it down, according to pcmag.com.
The only damage caused will be from the impact with the ground, which should offer a chance to inspect and collect evidence from the drone.
The types of drones these shells can target are classed as Category 1 & 2 by the Pentagon. They weigh up to 55 pounds and typically fly at heights of no more than 3,500 feet….
They must be fired from a rifled choke barrel. You can buy them on the web in three packs for $20 each.
I had no idea that there were specific ‘anti-drone’ shotgun shells. To my way of thinking, virtually any shotgun shell is ‘anti-drone’. You see someone floating a drone 80′ over your hot tub one evening, why screw around with specialty ammo? Whatever is sitting in the 870 will probably do the job just fine.
Also, I’ve yet to meet the shotgun shell that has a reach of 3500 feet. If such animals existed, we’d have a lot less geese.
But, it does segue into a larger issue – how do you secure your little slice ‘o heaven against such intrusions? I mean, all the systems I’ve seen…shotguns, jammers, trained eagles, etc, are all active systems – someone has to be directing the action at the time of intrusion. There needs to be some sort of passive ‘electric fence’ sort of preventative. I suppose you could set up some sort of powerful jamming system that is on all the ime and rotates through the most popular known frequencies for these sorts of things. You know, come to think of it, I’m kinda surprised this hasn’t come up on The Walking Dead yet.
I suppose the most logical, although not the easiest, method is to make sure that you don’t keep anything in the open that you wouldn’t want someone to see. It’s not my favorite option since, as I see it, I should be able to do whatever the heck i want on my property without having to worry about airborne peeping toms, but thats just not the world we live in.
Mike Rowe, of ‘Dirty Jobs’ fame and seemingly genuine great guy, had his own incident which he talked about in a podcast which turned into an impromptu advertisement for the Mossberg 500:
I might, just for giggles, pick up a tubes worth of these anti-drone shotgun shells just for the novelty value in rounding out my ‘specialty’ shotgun ammo selection. But, really, if I need to knock down something like that I’d imagine the cheap bulk shotgun ammo from WalMart will do just fine.
The Deep Sleepers
Being a survivalist, you tend to ‘go long’ on stuff…a hundred rolls of TP at a time, canned goods by the case, socks by the dozen, etc. On a long enough timeline, all this stuff will get used. Some sooner than others. For example, the canned goods will probably get used up within a year or two, but some things, like the #10 cans of freezedrieds, are meant to never be used. They are a ‘only in case of apocalypse’ sort of thing. Some other items, like the bulk AR mags I bought a few weeks ago, aren’t meant to be used but rather tucked away safely for, probably, at least a decade or two.
Items that are meant to be put into long, long, long-term storage are referred to around these parts as ‘Deep Sleepers’. They are items that are not intended to be used anytime within the foreseeable future. And, honestly, probably not even after that.
Case in point, the recent stash of Magpul AR mags. I have no intention of using them. I have enough mags on hand to handle my needs for quite some time. So, this recent batch of Magpuls are Deep Sleepers. They are there as a ward against a new ban, in case the next civil war breaks out, or some other Very Bad Thing happens.
First thing we do is stuff them away into a clean, solid, ammo can with good seals. They’re arranged carefully and sealed up in the ammo can. Once the can is closed up, I put a couple loops of poly strapping around it. This serves two purposes – first, it makes sure the lid stays closed. Second, it keeps me from sneaking a mag or two out of there when I think “Ah, I’ll just take a couple from the stash and put them back later.” (Trust me…you are your own worst looter.) Once that can is sealed up it gets marked up with the contents and quantity on it..preferably on each side and top so I can see at a glance whats in it. After that, I write the contents on a ‘key tag’ and wire it to the bail on the ammo can. After that, the can gets tucked way back in storage and…byebye, baby…see you in twenty years. Once that’s done, the records (I use Evernote and Excel) are updated. In Evernote, this is tagged as “magazines”,”Deep Sleeper”, “Storage”, “AR”, and “MagPul”. I also make a note that this is an item that does not need to be periodically inspected.
That’s it. Right now, as I think about it, Deep Sleepers include stashes of magazines, clothes, freezedrieds, and a few other things. But, most importantly, I know what I have, how much of it I have, where I have it, and how well it is stored. Peace of mind.
Link – Rental Range endurance of ARs
I love articles like these. Real-world numbers and experiences. It is interesting to note that the article does not look favorably at the piston ARs. I guess it makes a bit of sense that the direct impingement versions, which are going to have no reciprocating parts on the barrel (and less parts overall) are going to be a bit more durable than a piston version. On the other other hand, I’d be very curious to see the failure numbers on a designed-from-the-ground-up piston .223 like the Min-14 or AR-180.
In a similar vein, they had a similar article about the AK family as well.
Link – Rugers new takedown AR
Looks like everyone just found something new for their bugout bag:
Ruger SR-556 Takedown Autoloading Rifle
Holy crap is Ruger going to sell a ton of these. …. until the .308 comes out, and then its gonna sell even more.
I’ll wait a few years to allow the traditional Ruger new-product recall to occur, then I’m going to be on board in a big way.
Bandoleer stuff
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.
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.
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-:
So 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.
Serendipity
Oh, the things that people walk through the door with. No need to go looking for ammo, sometimes the battle packs coming looking for you.
Sig MPX in the wild
Mmmmm…if you can’t get yourself an HK94/MP5 this thing runs a real close second.
Came 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.
Thoughts on the PTR
People throw the phrase ‘battle rifle’ or ‘battle carbine’ around and it always sounds a little…weird…to me. I suppose you may want to differentiate between youre hunting rifle that you knock down deer with and your ‘just in case’ FAL thats sitting in the closet, but ‘battle rifle’ always sounds kinda hokey. But..what else do you call it? Your ‘social rifle’? I usually just call it a ‘rifle’ and, maybe, depending on the context, ‘defensive rifle’. Anyway, Friend Of The Blog, Ryan at TSLRF, has been mulling a .308 defensive rifle. I threw my two cents in and suggested the PTR.
The PTR is a fairly accurate copy of the HK91. There are several copies of HK rifles out there, and there are a few ‘niche’ or ’boutique’ makers who make a very nice (and very expensive) product, but in terms of mass-market stuff its either Century or PTR. My feelings on Century is that it is the ballistic equivalent of treasure hunting at the sight of old outhouses….you might find a jewel once in a while, but most of the time what you find is crap. (Not withstanding their new milled AK which I may have to get two or three of.)
Personally, I rather like the FAL. But economically, if you’re wanting a .308 semiauto for the day the wheels fly of civilization, and you’re on a budget, you would be hard pressed to find a better value.
Eliminating the exotic stuff, here’s the rundown of whats available in .308 these days that fits the bill and isn’t some super-rare oddball thing (like a .308 Galil or Valmet): AR-10, FAL, PTR, M1A and maybe one of the AK-pattern .308s. I’m limiting this discussion to stuff based on platforms that have been around a while…the AR-10 being the newest. Stuff like the KelTec RFB or other gunny-come-lately need to be around for a while so we can see if they have legs or not.
Whats your budget for the gun and it’s necessary gear? Well, let’s say, mmmm, $1250. Let’s also not cheap out and go with the absolute cheapest [rifle/mag/etc] we can find. We want what works. So, while the Century FrankenFAL may be 1/2 the price of a DSA, it is not a contender because it’s simply a crapshoot in terms of its manufacture. LWRC and SIG don’t have anything for less than $1250 at the moment. S&W has some ‘bargain’ AR-10 rifles but nothing on Gunbroker is less than $1250, and while Remington makes one as well I’m holding off on any of their new stuff until they get their act together in terms of QC.
A basic rifle suitable for defensive use, not a target, match or hunting gun:
- SA M1a Standard, synthetic, green, $1250
- PTR 18 inch barrel, black, $900
- AR-10, Windham Weaponry – $1082
- DSA Voyager – $1125
Magazines? You’ll need a few. Assuming OEM or similar quality..no Tapco, no USA, no Korean/Chinese. Magpul is ok.
- AR-10, on average about $20 ea.
- PTR, $3 aluminum or $10 steel
- M1A, $15-$30 depending on source. OEM is about $30
- FAL surplus mags, $15..$20ish for newer
So, working within our arbitrary $1250 budget, and not counting mags that came with the gun, we get:
A Springfield Armory M1A with no extra mags
A PTR-91 with 116 extra mags
An AR-10 with 8~ mags
An FAL with 9~ mags
Or, to work it from another angle, a rifle and 30 mags would be:
M1A – $1700
PTR – $990
AR-10 – $1682
FAL – $1575
So, from a ‘bang for your buck’ standpoint the PTR seems to be at the top. But, that isn’t everything when it comes to these matters. What about reliability, ergonomics, modularity, etc, etc? The AR-10 platform is the newest and thus doesnt have the track record of the others, but it seems to be as reliable as most other piston designs. The PTR, while based on a design that has been extremely reliable, suffered a bit with the early guns. Newer PTR rifles (within the last couple years, and all “GI” models) have corrected the fault that caused rifles to choke on tar-sealed surplus ammo. So, assuming you have one of the rfiles made in the last couple years, it should be as reliable as any HK.
Ergonomics suck but, for me, theyre no more awkward than an AK. If you really wanna go nuts, you can have the receiver sent out for the paddle mag conversion to make it ‘true’ to a G3 but I find that the magazine release isn’t a big deal. The AR-10 wins, hands down, on ergonomics, by the way.
The PTR, with a railed handguard, is about as modular as any other gun. There are provisions for folding, tele, and regular stocks. New guns can be had with railed receivers, making optics much easier to mount, and the rifles are accurate enough that a scope really is worth the investment….the guns are capable of very fine accuracy.
Do they eat the brass? Not to the point you can’t reload it. Someday I’ll take the gun, one cartridge, and a loading press to the range and fire/reload the same case several times to prove it. Until the, though, believe me…you can reload the cases just fine.
So, Im not saying the PTR is the best rifle for anyone. For me, who wanted a .308 in a proven platform without breaking the bank, the PTR fit the bill nicely. From a logistics standpoint, it is at the top of the list with cheap mags and spare parts availability (for now). Some folks prefer the AR-10, some folks (including myself) prefer the FAL, but for the guy who wants a quality, reliable, semi-auto and it’s accessories at a reasonable price…well, its pretty hard to beat.
