Author Archives: Commander Zero

Government-maintained private caches????

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I was diddybopping around the internet and stumbled across this article from about six years ago. Succinctly, a local government in Oregon was urging citizens to be prepared for earthquakes and/or tsunami. Here’s where it gets interesting. It is urging citizens to create ‘caches’ for their families. The city will even sell you the fabulous 55-gallon ‘blue barrels’ to fill with supplies and provide a workshop to advise you on how to do it. So far so good, yes? Now, see where it goes off the rails…

Each shipping container is loaded with three different types of supplies: family cache containers; medical, administrative, and support equipment; and tourist, employee and visitor kits. City emergency management personnel will open the containers in case of an emergency.

The local government is also setting out shipping containers to be used as storage for all those personal caches. Or, put another way, you load up a 55-gallon drum with survival supplies and hand it to your local government to lock away in a cargo container so it’ll  be available during a crisis … assuming the government lackey with the keys to the conex shows up and says its okay for you to get your stuff. Oh…and you pay the government a fee for yearly maintenance of your stuff. Because.

What could possibly go wrong?

The more cynical among you will opine that the local government just found a way to stockpile emergency supplies without having to pay for them.

Good intentions, I’m sure….but I would much rather have a 55-gallon drum of supplies hidden somewhere where I can have constant access to it, and no one else knows about it, rather than put my gear in a cargo container with a hundred other strangers gear and hope the government will unlock the doors and let me have it in an emergency.

I wonder if this program is still in effect or if it ever got off the ground………

Serendipity

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Years ago, I was talking to a long-time gun collector who would come into the most amazing stuff and I asked him how he found these deals. He said something that has stuck in my mind as very wise and very true; he said “When you’ve been in this business long enough, you don’t have to go looking for good deals..the good deals come looking for you.”

SNSTIW, minding my own business and getting ready for class. I had walked into the room a bit early, the teacher not being there yet, flopped my bag on the desk, took off my coat, was pulling my books outta the bag, and as I sat down a voice two rows behind me said….

“Anyone wanna buy some guns?”

Now, I realize how absurd that sounds but, hand to Crom, that’s what happened. What happened next was my head reactively spinning around as I said “Me!” and so did three other guys. I talked over them and basically browbeat my way into a conversation with the potential gun seller. He had an AR and a ‘custom’ Glock he wanted to sell. Tip: when someone says they have a ‘custom’ Glock (or especially a ‘Custom’ AR) what they really mean is they kitchen-tabled a bunch of mods into their guns. I don’t care how talented an amateur gun-plumber you are, you are not as skilled and experienced in assembling an AR as the guys at Stag/Bushmaster/Noveske/Ruger/etc. who have the tools and experience and do it for a living. (Although you’re probably more skilled than the drunken monkeys at Century). So. I took a pass on the custom longslide threaded Glock .40 and went hard for this:

Operators gonna operate….

A Rock River Arms Operator…for when operators need to operate operationally. Nice gun except for the funky half cheese-grater/half smooth forend. But the flip up sights, side swivels, and really surprisingly nice 2-stage trigger are quite pleasant. And its got box-n-docs. And….no paperwork. A lovely free-range AR to go in the bunker.

My AR leveling up skills seem to be improving. I’ll pull a Palmetto outta storage and what I sell it for will cover what I put out for this guy. It’ll be a net of zero dollars, but a severe upgrade in quality and features.

In the meantime I discovered that virtually every guy in the class was a gun guy.

If you want ’em, it looks like now is the time to buy

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ETA: Looks like Gunbroker might be a good source right now.

I have, as of late, been trying to keep gun posts limited to Fridays but sometimes stuff occurs that, I think, should be brought to the attention of the fanbase as soon as possible. So….

Something funny is going on at Remington. (H/T to ,Rawles over at SurvivalBlog for posting a link that brought it to my attention.)

Succinctly, it appears, that Remington is ..closing? Reogranzing? Consolidating? …several of it’s acquired companies. Notably DPMS, Bushmaster, and TAPCO. The AR market is already so heavy that the loss of Bushy and DPMS can’t be lamented too loudly but TAPCO….

TAPCO is the company that is meme-famous being able to provide you with $600 worth of parts to turn your $200 SKS into a pale imitation of a $400 AK. Cheesey stocks, geegaws of questionable utility, and that sort of thing. BUT….TAPCO makes one of the very few aftermarket Mini-14 magazines that work and that I recommend. If TAPCO is indeed being put down then the future of reliable aftermarket Mini mags becomes …well…what it was ten years ago. I already went to several of my vendors and they have all their TAPCO mags marked as ‘closeout’ and….out of stock. Writing is on the wall.

Maybe it’s just a reorganization. Maybe it’s just Remington working on new websites. But it appears that there is a disruption going on that Mini-14 owners may want to get ahead of.

Will blog for ammo

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A pleasant surprise today. A very thoughtful note, and lovely rectangle of green paper with a dead president on it, from a reader. They had some nice words of encouragement and, honestly, it’s always nice to have a couple bucks in hand to throw at the hosting service. So, to that very thoughtful individual, I thank you veddy much.

Sharp-eyed readers will notice that the ‘Donate money to the Bunker Equippage Fund’ button has been absent from the website for the last year or so. The reason is pretty simple – the folks at PayPal don’t take too kindly to people using their service to trade in evil rifle magazines. Thus, they sent me a lovely form letter saying that our relationship must, sadly, come to an end.

But…but…we can still be friends, right?

So what is a person to do if they are feeling generous and want to encourage yours truly to continue polluting the blogosphere with dry humour, NSFW innuendo, and real-time updates of a life lived with a major gun addiction? Not much, it seems.

Normally I put the arm on people for blog-related expenses once every couple years. I throw in some Amazon referral links form time to time to help defray costs, but pretty much any remuneration I receive for blogging is virtually nil. And I’m fine with that, I’m not blogging to pay my grocery bill…I’m blogging because I enjoy it and the Warholian 15-minutes it sometimes brings.

However……

Should you ever feel the spirit move you to do something nice for that guy in Montana who sometimes actually has a post that makes you go “Hmmm….I never thought of that”, and you’re at a loss for ideas, here are some options:

  • An Amazon gift card in email goes a long way towards giving me the ability to get gear to beat up and talk about. I used to keep an Amazon Wish List but it’s really quite a bit of work to update and maintain one, so if you wanna send the Zero some love head over to Amazon’s ‘send gift card via email’ section and send it to zero@commanderzero.com
  • Or, if you’re less about email and more about physical mail, just send something to the PO Box. The address is in the ‘Contact‘ page which is on the menu bar up top somewhere. Cash, silver, gold, mags, other gear, Jennifer Lawrence’s apartment keys, whatever…..

That’s pretty much all there is to say on that except… I very much appreciate the actions of those who, from time to time, send the Zero some tangible encouragement. Good on ya, mates! Thx!

Wisdom from the T-800

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Really, these ‘reboots’ and unwanted sequels in The Terminator franchise are getting rather lame. BUT…once in while, there’s a nugget. Such as this:

To be honest, I was a little underwhelmed with the gun room. My own is a bit more…densely populated…than that one. But…I guess they needed to save money for all the CGI.

But the summation of why he has all these guns ‘around’? Spot on.

 

Ok then

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Literally the front page of todays local newspaper:

I have no problem with anyone being a Socialist…or a Communist. Or a Democrat, Muslim, Nationalist, Racist, Sexist, or any other affiliation or belief. After all, you are a sovereign individual and can believe whatever you want. I have no right to tell anyone what to believe in the privacy of their own skull. It’s when you try to impose those beliefs on those who don’t share them…..well, thats when the violence starts. You wanna be a Socialist, go be a Socialist. Get all your Socialist buddies, set up your Socialist commune, and live your Socialist lives. Just don’t force me to live by how you think I should live. And that goes for politics, religion, etc. Ron Paul summed it up nicely as such….

So, no…I don’t think you should shoot people for being Socialists. I think you should shoot people for trying to force Socialism onto people who don’t want it.

Onion storage

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Perhaps I haven’t looked as intently as I should, but doesn’t it seem like that among all the canned vegetables out there in the supermarket there is a notable lack of canned onions?

Oh, you can buy a bottle of itty bitty cocktail onions. And you can buy onion powder, onion salt, onion rings, freeze dried onion, dehydrated onion, and that sort of thing…but…no actual canned onions. I can walk down the vegetable aisle and find canned potatoes, canned tomatoes, canned peas, canned green beans, canned corn, canned beets, canned everything…but not onions.

When the apocalypse comes, I need to be able to put some onion on my cheeseburger.

Now, I’m not exactly sure why there seems to be a lack of canned full-sized onions out there but I have some theories. I wonder if, since a whole onion is layers and layers of material, onions are unsuitable for canning because bacteria or air can be trapped inbetween those layers? But…the pressure canning should bring the temperature up high enough to kill anything in the onion, right? Or perhaps the onion loses its flavor as it leeches out into the water used to fill the canning jar, leaving you with a flavorless vegetable.

I suppose I should just break out the All American and some canning jars and see what happens if I try canning a whole onion. But, it is an interesting mystery to me.

So, while I suspect my post-apocalypse cheeseburgers and stir fries will be devoid of onion slices, I can still make my various sauces and whatnot with the dried chopped onions the folks at the LDS cannery so generously make available.

And, for your own edification and amusement, a fairly comprehensive treatise on how to store onions…note that while pickling is mentioned, regular canning is glossed over almost to the point of being not even mentioned.

Range time

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‘Tis a sad state of affairs I find myself in. I used to make fun of people who bought guns and never took them out to shoot. And, now, I have become that which I ridiculed. I have, at the moment, no less than a dozen guns that I have not yet taken to the range and function checked. That’s alot of guns sitting around in an existential state of limbo… can’t pack ’em away if I don’t know for a fact that they work just fine.

Im going to try and get my act together and pack up some range gear and head out tomorrow. I’m hoping the weather will be at least somewhat amenable.

What to shoot? I desperately want to get the .44 Redhawk and .44 Marlin on paper so I can clean ’em up, oil ’em down, and tuck ’em away. I also very much want to shoot the new Ruger 9mm carbine and see if it lives up to the hype. And, I think theres at least a couple 9mm’s that need to get a few hundred rounds through them before they get packed away for the Deep Sleep.

Fortunately, because of my enjoyment of shooting guns this will be more like fun than work. But…it does need to get done. I’ve been remiss in keeping up on regular range trips.

Cheap eats and stored food

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As somewhat regular readers know, one of my culinary staples around here is ‘the meat tray‘. Succinctly, the local Albertsons takes four meat products that are either slow movers or closing in on their ‘must use by’ dates and bundles ’em up in a tray and sells it for $20. It’s almost always a 3# tube of ground beef, some cut of chicken, sausage of some kind, and some pork. One tray, and a modest amount of cooking talent, can cover a weeks’ worth of dining.

Also, I patrol the meat aisle once (or twice) a day looking for stuff marked down 50% that can go in my freezer. Yesterday was a case of the stars lining up just so:

Meat Tray at 50% off. No matter how you cut it, ten bucks for a meat tray is a good deal. So, time to cook. Needed some canned tomatoes so I trotted to the basement and pulled these off the shelf:Canned tomatoes that have been sitting in the classic ‘cool, dry place’ since 2015. Two years past the ‘best buy’ date. Status? Just fine. Tomato products, because of their acidity, are notorious for having can failure in medium- to long-term storage. This also happens with any other food product with high acidity…pineapple, for example. (By the way, to my way of thinking, five-to-ten years is pretty much where I catalog things as ‘medium-term storage’. More than ten is what I consider long-term storage.) So, as a precaution, I check the cans for any bulging or that sort of thing and give the contents a careful eyeing. But…thats a good practice for any canned food.

This is what that whole store-what-you-eat-and-eat-what-you-store thing looks like.

It’s the beginning of the year so this is probably a good time for me to go inventory the stored food and replace whats been consumed over the year. Just refilled one of the rice buckets the other day, so i need to pick up at least anouther couple 25# bags of rice. The deep freeze, especially, got a workout this previous year and I need to top it off. Too bad those 50% deals on the meat trays are so scarce.

 

 

Moar Ruger

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Minding my own business the other day and I stumbled into a Ruger 77/22 Hornet that had been rechambered to KHornet. Price….oh, you’re gonna hate me…..$250.

Im a Ruger guy, and I love me some Ruger 77, but the KHornet was useless to me…except for turning it into something slightly more useful. So…a little poking around, some creative pricing, and I flipped it for a lot more than I paid for it. Now, what to do with that money. Well, let’s go check ArmsList and see if anyone local is in the mood to take a beating. Sure enough….found one of these, a BX-25 mag, with a gun case and a Chineseium red dot scope for $150. And no paperwork. So I got back all my money that was outlaid for the KHornet, picked up another 10/22, and had a few bucks left over.

That’s how it’s done guys.  Started the week with $250…ended the week with $250 and a 10/22 and some cash.

I’ll probably tear off all that furniture and put the barreled receiver into one of the several normal 10/22 stocks I have laying about. If I need a .22 AR simulator I’ll just drop my CMMG kit in one of my ARs.

This was 10/22 #8. Two more and I’m done on 10/22’s.