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

$23.99 for a box of bulk Federal .22? C’mon, really?

Three years ago it was about $10 cheaper per box.

This is why we used to buy 1000 rds. every trip we made to WalMart.

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

I have my own ideas about what the end of the world is going to look like. Fiction, naturally, has its own idea as well. How do they stack up?

The Road – Not a chance. Nada. Zip. Nil. A world where nothing grows anymore? (Read the book..that’s indeed what one of the stated problems is. No flora of any kind. Plenty of dead vegetation around, but nothing alive and growing. Makes you wonder where the oxygen is coming from.) Although the mechanism of the apocalypse is never mentioned in the book, the implication is that there is a nuclear winter going on as a result of either a nuclear exchange or possibly a celestial event. In either case, all plant life all around the globe isn’t going to just stop.

The Rift – Megaquake in the midwest? Possible, although I call it highly unlikely. Even then its not really an end of the world event for the people who don’t live nearby. If you life in that region, yeah your life just got interesting. However I think the folks in Fairbanks, AK and Honolulu, HI aren’t going to be too concerned.

The Survivalist – This comes in two flavors since thats the direction the book took. Starting with the first nine books or so: a nuclear exchange that devastates the major superpowers and is followed up by an invasion of the US? Possible, but, again, seems terribly unlikely. After about book #9 or so the entire atmosphere of the Earth was destroyed by the consequences of the nuclear exchange, eradicating all life from the planet except for a few small groups….I’m ranking that right up there with the scenario in The Road.

Lucifer’s Hammer – Comet smacks the planet leading to global devastation. Hmmmm…well, it’s possible. And, to some degree, it’s happened before. The scenario presented in the book seems plausible with it’s consequences, at least to an unscientific type like myself. But, lets look at it another way. Imagine that your lifespan is, say, about 100 years. Folks who believe in science over superstition figure the earth is around 4.5 billion years old. Your lifespan is 1/45,000,000th of the age of the planet…what are the odds that an event like that will happen in the miniscule blink of an eye that is your lifetime. Pretty small, I’d say.

One Second After – The entire US is crippled by an EMP strike. Chaos and hijinks ensue. Probably the most plausible so far but with a couple caveats. There’s plenty of science out there to support this sort of view, but the fact is that no one has ever done anything on a large enough scale like this to determine if it actually would be as destructive as portrayed. Everything stops? Everything? I’m the first to admit that I probably havent read as much as I should have on the subject, but what I have read seems to suggest that the smaller an objects profile or ’signature’, the less damage it will receive. The analogy I see used is radio waves…a smaller antennae receives far less signal than a larger one. A large device with plenty of radiating wiring and other conductive materials is going to receive a larger share of the pulse than a smaller system. As I read it, that means an electrical substation will be toast but my wristwatch might be just fine.

Zombie fiction – Right up there with the “Left Behind” series. Ditto for anything by S.M Sterling…fun to read and absolutely not gonna happen.

Red Dawn/Invasion USA/Invasion – A vulnerable US faces an invasion from a foreign power. In Red Dawn (the first one) it was the Soviets with the help of Latin American revolutionaries. In Eric Harry’s book, Invasion, its a powerful Chinese military. And, in Chuck Norris’s feel-good classic its..well, everybody. I really see Chuck Norris’ version being the most likely scenario of those three…laugh if you will…but let’s look at it. In the other two scenarios you have massive military invasion scenarios. In the Chuck Norris scenario you have very, very small groups of fighters sowing chaos and violence in carefully orchestrated events. An excellent example is where a few guys shoot up a bar and make it appear that it was a corrupt police action attacking the bar patrons. Riots ensue. In this manner you don’t need an invading army, you have the population do it for you. Heck, six guys shut down LA by knocking the crap out of a black motorist in ‘92…it just as easily could have been six guys faking the incident and letting the video ‘leak’ to cause rioting and chaos. Look at the 9/11 episode. Twenty guys shutdown all air traffic in the US, started a war, effected some massive political and economic changes, polarized certain demographics, and didn’t need an army of tens of thousands landing on a beach to do it. So, the terrorism-as-mechanism-of-apocalypse has a bit of life to it.

Soylent Green – Overpopulation leading to state-sponsored cannibalism? Never going to happen. Overpopulation has a way of fixing itself. It’s like the old joke about clan warfare being Scottish birth control. You get enough humans on one piece of real estate, they’ll take care of the overpopulation problem eventually. Think ‘liebensraum’. (And by that, I mean they go to war.)

Mad Max – Global dystopia because of fuel shortages? Possible, I suppose, except Im having a hard time believing that a lack of fuel regresses civilization into the leather-clad, crossbow-shooting carnage that was the Mad Max series of films. And, you know, for a world that presumably had run out of gasoline they sure had some awesome car chases. Even if the Peak Oil crowd is right, I don’t think the end of the world will result from it. Craptacular standard of living? Maybe. Regression to 19th century lifestyle? Unlikely, but possible. Lord Humongous and V8 Interceptors? No.

Jericho – I’d say the first season, and especially the first few episodes, were probably about as realistic as youre going to get in a fictional setting. (Which isnt to say Jericho was technically accurate in every regard, but it certainly had more ‘lifelike’ aspects to it than other treatments of similar material.) Hunger, fuel shortage, looting, social issues arising from disaster, etc, etc….definitely interesting. The day-to-day aspects of survival interested me far more than the conspiracy plot that eventually overwhelmed the series (esp. the abbreviated season two.) Sure it had some obvious deus ex machina moments, but still enjoyable. The premise of individual nuclear warheads smuggled into cities and detonated is, in my opinion, more likely than a genuine nuclear exchange but still, to me, seems pretty unlikely.

Atlas Shrugged – Well, thats really what it is…an end of the world book. While it’s a bit heavy-handed and so very, very, very long (a 68-page speech? Seriously??) some of the premises and events portrayed in it seem to be either coming to pass or darn near close to it. This is one of those books that polarizes people, which I suppose is the hallmark of good literature. Like everything you find between the covers of a book, take it with a grain of salt. However, the premises of pillorization (did I just make up a word?) of the rich, the idea of wealth redistribution, the notion that the individual is subordinate to the ‘greater good’, etc, etc, all seem to be getting too much play these days. So, I’d say the half of the book about that is correct, the notion that there’ll be a great change that sets all that aside and ushers in an age of personal responsibility and moral freedom? Not holding my breath.

What’s interesting is that, as far as books go, the scenarios I see being most likely aren’t found in fiction but rather in history texts. A little Great Depression here, some Weimar Republic there, a bunch of Carter Administration to hold it all together and -whammo- you’ve pretty much defined the times we live in. What;s really interesting is that across the entire pantheon of fiction and literature there is virtually nothing that, as far as I know, contrived anything like the situation we are currently in. You’d think someone somewhere would have thought it up, but, no, it was easier to dream up Russian invasions and zombie uprisings than to predict what’s going on now.

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

It’s an ugly world out there these days, and I’m guessing that it’s gonna get a lot uglier before it gets prettier. While being armed doesn’t make the world any prettier, it does a fairly good job of keeping the ugly at a distance.

Normally, I stick to factory/OEM magazines for guns if I can. What this means is that, in the case of , say, Browning HiPowers I use only Browning-made mags or mags made by whoever is making them for Browning. (Mec-Gar, most likely.) Why? Usually the folks who make the gun provide the best magazine for that gun. Spend $700 on a Browning and drop a $15 Triple K magazine into it (or a USA Brand mag) and become a master of the malfunction drill.

Some guns, though, are so ubiquitous that everyone makes a magazine for it. Take the 1911, for example. A hundred years of existence creates a fairly large aftermarket manufacturer base. What’s good? What isn’t?

Of the 1911’s I own, I don’t think I have a single genuine Colt magazine. Mostly because, for whatever reason, any magazine with the prancing pony on it starts commanding a lot of money. I’m poor. I’m trying to prepare for the apocalypse while my currency is devaluing. For the price of a genuine Colt magazine (which actually may not be the best choice for the 1911) I can get (usually) two of another brand of magazine at better quality. In the course of my travels I’ve tried a bunch of 1911 mags. Here are my two favorites:

Wilson Combat 8-round mags – These are some seriously nice mags. My experience has been that this is a terrific magazine in terms of quality. I’d have a stack of fifty of these in the bunker except for one little niggling detail…they price out at over $30 each. Owie. These are the kind of mags that if you’re wandering around with one in the gun and two on your belt, it’s worth the expense. But if, like me, you want the ‘lifetime supply’ and need about thirty or fifty….well, you’d have a really great lifetime supply but you’d also be hurting in the wallet pretty bad. My feeling on this is to buy three or four of the Wilson’s and use them for the everyday carry.

Second favorite mag, and the one I stockpile for that rainy decade is:

Chip McCormick (CMC) Shooting Star magazines – This is the magazine I stockpile. They’re 8-shot, come with a removable base pad, have an excellent follower design, and seem to work great. MSRP on them is around $20 but I can find them from time to time on special at wholesalers for about ten bucks. (Even at $12.99 theyre still a great value.) When that happens, it’s the best value out there for a high-quality 1911 mag. Only drawback to this mag (and to a lesser degree the Wilson) is that if you have the basepads on the magazine they may be too long for the flap on your magazine pouch to close properly. Obviously, on open top mag pouches this isnt a problem. Personally, I prefer the basepads on my 1911 mags because it gives me a little extra length to make sure my mag is seated properly. It also protects the mags when you do mag changes at the range and the mag hits the concrete.

I’ve also used a bunch of other mags, including quite a few GI mags of dubious age, and have found that there are plenty of mags out there that will work but not very many that work consistently, reliably, and affordably. In my experience, the two I’ve just mentioned are, to me, the best choice.

Other mags out there that might be better choices? Sure…It’s just foolish to think I’ve tried every brand of mag out there. Plus you may be shooting a higher (or lower) end gun than what I normally shoot and it may have a preference for a particular magazine. In my experience, with my guns, I’ve found that the Wilson and CMC mags seem to be the best mags out there for the 1911-pattern pistols.

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

It’s handy knowing someone who works in a medical field sometimes……

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

A quick note to the several people who offered to loan me their copy of ,Rawles’ new book so I wouldn’t have to fork out the cash….thank you, but I succumbed to temptation and bought a copy.

I am weak.

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

Went up to CostCo to check things out for myself. Indeed, there were Mountain House freezedrieds there. Two different types.

First up was a ten-pack of their ‘two serving’-size entrees. I forget the flavors…lasagna, teriyaki, stroganoff and something else. Price was $39.99 or $3.99 per pouch.

Next up was this package of ‘Kirkland’ brand fruit. Kirkland is CostCo’s ‘in-house’ branding. Buy a few million dollars worth of any product and the manufacturer will slap whatever name you want on it. (You really think Sears made all those .30-30 rifles we see on the used rack?)

Notice on the corner of the box where it says Oregon Freeze Dried? That’s the parent company of Mountain House. Apparently CostCo contracted to buy enough of this product to get OFD to package it up as Kirkland. Reasonable price, by the way, for a little snack size of freeze dried fruit. Winds up at something like eightysix cents per package. A nice addition to your morning oatmeal when out in the boonies.

Speaking of Mountain House, I received an email from thm other day. It says they are re-introducing the #10 cans to their dealer network. In my opinion MH was a jerk to their lesser-volume dealers over the last couple years. They basically only released the #10 cans to their highest volume dealers while letting the little guy get virtually none. That’s not how you build brand loyalty. In fact, I would bet that MH’s behavior and HK-like attitude (“Because you suck. And we hate you.”) is one thing that has put Augason Farms on the map in terms of food storage. Mountain House sells some great product, and has a few things that are hard to find elsewhere, but before plunking down coin with them I’d check AF and see if they have a similar product.

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

Wandering the gunshops with an out-of-town visitor today. At the gunshop a fella came in to buy a lower to match an upper he’d purchased. He opened the gun case to show the upper to the gun store guy. Oh it was an upper all right…..14.5″ barrel, M4 cut, and a full-auto bolt carrier as well as Knight’s rails and some cool flip up rear sight. Yup…it appeared to be stolen mil property. (and the story I overheard was “…bought it from a guy in the army…”) I was half expecting the guy behind the counter to say “Close that up and get it out of my store…NOW.” But he calmly explained to the guy that he might wanna call ATF and turn it in before he shows it to the wrong person (or assembles the damn thing) and steps on his own dick. I heard the term “I urge you…” more than once.

Moral: stuff like that is out there. And although this guy may have bought it in a cloud of blissful ignorance about the law, it’s also just as possible someone there had a microphone taped under their jacket lapel. No matter how tempting, how good the price, or how well you know the guy….walk the frak away and do not look back.

Nice looking upper though………

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

As you may remember, I tested out a drum magazine for the HK-91 made by Allied Armament (AA). It worked flawlessly, looked awesome, and just generally made me feel like some sort of ballistic superman by having 50 rounds of .308 on tap. I told the evil genius from Allied Armament that he had a great product and while I appreciated having one for my PTR-91, there were probably more sales to be made for the other, more commonly found, .308 rilfes out there like the FAL. I naively suggested that just making the magazine drum a modular part with interchangeable feed towers would be the way to go. Shows what I know.

X-FAL? Excellent!

I received an Allied Armament drum for the FAL a few weeks ago. It casually resembles the drum for the HK-91 series of rifles, but it has a few changes…the cartridge followers are steel, the winding knob is slightly different, and there are a few differences to allow it to work in the FAL series of rifles. At first blush, they look the same but in reality the FAL drum is quite different and necessarily so.

From a magazine development standpoint the HK series of rifles must be pretty easy to design a magazine for….there’s no bolt hold open system to plan for and the bolt and carrier don’t rotate or do any other gymnastics. The FAL system, though, not only has a bolt hold open to factor in, but there are two distinct magazine flavors…metric or inch pattern, and each one uses a somewhat unique magazine catch. Rather than have two different styles of drums, there is a small interchangeable part at the front of the drum feed tower…swap out the part depending on if your gun is metric or inch pattern. Clever.

There is one huge (to me) difference between this drum and the HK drum. The metric FALs must be ‘modified’ to accept the drum.The bolt release on the metric FALs has to either be removed or replaced with an L1A1 bolt release for the drum to fit the gun. The metric release has a little projection on it that the L1A1 version does not. For the drum to fit in the well and lock in place you have to either remove the bolt release or replace it with the L1A1 part which is, according to the video from AA, a six dollar part. Now, anytime you have to replace a part of your gun to enable it to function with an accessory I get nervous. I think its an acceptable ‘modification’ to the gun, and calling it a modification is probably an overstatement since its really just swapping out one OEM part for another. You decide. Personally, swapping one genuine military part for a slightly different but genuine military part that lets me have 50 rounds of .308 on tap seems like an acceptable change. Doing this part swap will leave you with a gun that will not lock open on the last shot from a 20-rd magazine, but you will be able to manually lock the bolt back. This is pretty much the same procedure the HK series of guns had…you could lock them open manually, but otherwise had no last-shot hold open.

Loading the drum was pretty much what you’d expect after loading the HK drum – give the winding knob a bit of a turn to pull the follower back, drop in some rounds, regrip the knob to turn it some more, and repeat until the magazine is filled. A big change from the X-91 drum I received is that the FAL drum required a bit of creative engineering to overcome the problem of upward pressure of cartridges from the magazine against a moving/rotating bolt. In the makers own words:

The pinball flipper or what we call the kicker device was designed and patented out of necessity, as the drum would never work in it’s original configuration with the FAL platform. The HK’s delayed blowback bolt is unlike any other bolt design, it does not rotate when operating therefore there is no downward pressure on the magazine when the bolt head passes the ammunition. Almost all firearms however have a rotating bolt head that interacts with the magazine, as a result we had to create a device that would relieve magazine tension when the bolt passed by, and -voila- there you have the kicker device. The kicker device is essentially the same thing that sits on the front of the motor of a car and allows for consistent tension while the motor operates.

-The increased spring tension and larger handwheel are for three reasons. One due to the increased drag of the kicker device, more spring tension was needed. Secondly larger tower lengths like the X-25 (sr-25 platform rifles) and the M14 model, require more spring tension to feed ammunition up the larger tower. A third aspect that is quite interesting is because the kicker removes the majority of spring tension when operating we can run almost infinite spring pressure in the main body allowing the magazine to perform with weapons that run well into 800 plus rounds per minute. Before this device single stack magazines were always limited by the direct force they exerted on a bolt.

And here I was foolishly thinking that all that was involved would be modifying the feed tower to accommodate the FAL magazine well geometry. This is why I’m not in the magazine business. Well, that and a brilliant idea like his never occurred to me.

Test guns for this little adventure were a SAR-4800 from Springfield Armory, an StG58 built on a DSA FAL receiver, and an early Springfield Armory Israeli model….and let me tell you, that Israeli heavy-barrel model is exactly the kind of gun this drum was meant for. Fold down the bipod legs, insert a drum, drop the bipod on the hood of a car, get comfortable behind the stock and you are a one-man roadblock. Unfortunately the X-FAL did not fit in the magazine well of the Israeli model…just a bit too snug a fit. If your history is a little fuzzy, let me recap – the Israeli heavy-barrel FALs were put together by Springfield Armory years and years ago from military parts kits. Since the lower receiver was a former military product made in Israel it may have been a little off in it’s tolerances. :::shrug::: Such is the world of parts-kit guns using GI parts. In the SAR-4800 (Imbel receiver) and the DSA (DSA receiver) the magazine locked in place just fine. Very little play and no problems removing the mag from the well

Testing followed the same procedure as for the HK drum. Load it up, fire one shot every second until empty. According to AA, there are two versions of this drum…one for semiautos and one for full-autos. The difference, apparently, is in the spring system. Since I’m not fortunate enough to have access to a full-auto FAL this particular distinction was wasted on me.

Ammo for this testing was the glorious South African batlepack stuff that used to be so common at the gun shows. It’s a good performer and an excellent example of military ball ammo. As I expected the drum never missed a beat (get it? Drum? Beat?). Slow fire, rapid fire, whatever…it just chugged along like a champ.

Is it fun? Absolutely. Is it practical? Well, I suppose that depends on what you’re expecting out of your life. Since my interest is in being prepared for the uncertain future, I’ll take every advantage I can get and this drum is definitely something that can give you an advantage in some scenarios. I’ll leave it up to your imagination what those scenarios might be, but I doubt there has ever been anyone who got into a violent encounter and thought to himself “geez, I wish the magazine in my rifle held less ammo”. If you’re the kind of guy who thinks that the future may involve armed gangs roaming the countryside looting and pillaging…well, two or three buddies armed with rifles with a few of these drums are going to do more to deter that sort of behavior than any social program ever would. Big magazines are no solution all on their own…training, tactics, maneuverability, etc, all are valuable in a violent encounter, but everything else being equal I’d like to have as many rounds in my rifle as possible. I don’t mind hauling the unfired ones back to the bunker.

It was pointed out to me that Beta has jumped on the .308 drum bandwagon and is offering a 100-rd drum for the G3/HK91 series of rifles. Twice the firepower, twice the price of the AA product. I have mixed feelings about the Beta drums…on the one hand, hey, 100 rounds! On the other, plastic magazine loaded with five pounds of ammo dropped on a hard surface = $470 flushed down the crapper. The AA product is a far more robust design. In fact, I think AA should do a YouTube video of their mag versus the plastic Beta product in a rough-n-tumble head-to-head comparison and see which one wins.

The folks at AA have done an amazing job of bringing a product to market with a level of quality and innovation that is rarely seen outside of huge manufacturers with larger budgets for R&D. These magazines are solid, dependable, and practical. This is the second one I’ve gotten to play with and if anything it’s even better than the last one I reviewed…and I’m a big fan of that HK drum.

If you’ve got an FAL (or PTR-91 / HK clone) and you want something to give you a bit more capacity than your average 20-round magazine, you may need to get yourself these drums from Allied Armament. Even if the world doesn’t come to an end, they’re excellent accessories and, probably, good investments.

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

Apparently CostCo is also selling, under their Kirkland house branding, varieties of freeze-dried fruit produced by…surprise…Oregon Freeze Dried – MH’s parent company.

I knew OFD had gotten a huge contract from ’someone’ and used a giant wad of cash to ramp up their capacity….looks like some of the side benefit to that will be OFD moving more product into other markets like this.