Author Archives: Commander Zero

The circus comes to town..but it never really left – Redux

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“…and somewhere at Cheaper Than Dirt headquarters, they are readying the pricing algorithms on the website for $100 Pmags.”

CTD is notorious for used GI aluminum mags for $100 each during the last panic, PMAGs weren’t far behind.

Well, not yet. CTD still seems to have AR mags at ‘normal’ prices listed on their website. I suspect that they’ve simply not gotten around to jacking ’em up by several hundred percent yet because it’s a weekend.

I give CTD a ration of crap because they really should have had a much more long-term outlook on what this sort of thing would do to them. But maybe they did…they are still in business after all, and it seems theres no shortage of customers for their wares.

How does a $99 PMAG happen?  Actually, its pretty simple. As the supply of inventory dwindles, the software keeps raising the price to slow down the sales so they never go out of stock. This normally works because most items are a) replaced in inventory fairly quickly and b) most items aren’t suddenly flying off the shelves like they’re free gold bars.  So, a couple hundred thousand people hit the website looking for PMAGs and maybe CTD has a few thousand in stock. The things are flying off the shelf at a furious clip (heh,,see what I did there?) and any potential resupply is an unknown. So, with no anticipated restock date, a limited inventory, a metric buttload of customers, and a software-driven mandate to not let things get out of stock….the price automatically goes up to apply the brakes. But demand is so high that the software has to stand on those brakes like a pilot landing on a tennis court. Result? Price changes that keep going up, up, up. And finally someone at CTD takes a moment from checking their Facebook account to see that social media is excoriating CTD and someone runs into the IT department and says “Fix this!”

But CTD should have dropped human intervention in there long before people screencapped the outrageous prices and saved them for posterity.

I’ve been to this dance before.

Watergun: coating

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You guys remember the Watergun?

Found some folks at the gun show who do cerroko…cerok..cerrocoa..cer…screw it….they ceramic coat firearms. Their prices were very reasonable and the examples of their work looked pretty good. So…I left the Watergun with them and in a few weeks we will see what it looks like. For those who don’t recall, the Watergun is a HiPower brought up from the bottom of Lake Michigan. I purchased it as a box of parts and was surprised to find 90% of the parts were present and usable. Shoots fine, looks hideous. SO…in a couple weeks, we’ll do a grand unveiling. Stay tuned.

Lights out

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So, as I mentioned, the gun show is being held in the ballroom (for lack of a better term) at the Hilton here in town. Ballroom. No windows. Large room. And i’m standing there chatting with a vendor when the lights go out. Now, the emergency lights did not come on, so that tells me the lights going out was not a function of a power outage or other unexpected event. Rather, someone simply must have turned the wrong switches down in the basement. Here’s the interesting part….as several hundred people are standing around in the dark, a handful had the presence of mind to use the flashlight function on their phones. But a very, very small handful of people had personal flashlights on them…myself included. Thus, it was easy to see who was drinking the same flavor of Kool-Aid as me and who wasn’t.

It was…amusing.

Missoula gun show

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Oh, it’s bloody hot.

This weekend is the Missoula Gun Show which is, as I understand it, the oldest and largest gun show int he state. And it happens darn near in my backyard. Or, at least, it used to. This year, for the first time since I’ve been attending it (30 years), they have changed the venue. Why? Mmmm. Not sure. I’ve heard two competing rumours and both probably have some merit. The first is that our illustrious alcoholic, obese, philandering, statist mayor’s (“The Biggest Boozer”) pet project – a “no private gun sales w/o background check” law – would make the gun show impossible and the University, who hosts the show, didn’t want to get caught up in that potentially legal morass. The other rumour I heard was something about the University charging exorbitant fees for air conditioning. The reality? Who knows? Maybe both. Eithe way, it’s going to be at the Hilton Garden Inn up on Reserve St.

I keep saying Im going to try not to spend money at these things and every bloody time I wind up ….spending money.

And, of course, the gun show is an opportunity to catch up and visit with people I almost never see except at these sorts of things…so thats pretty cool.

Speaking of cool, when the end of the world gets here I a going to have a heck of a time putting up with summer heat without an air conditioner.

Guns of Wisdom

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Went alllllllll the way out to the Wisdom gun show today. Wisdom is a really small town. In fact, it is so small….

“How small is it!?”

Its so small the “You are now entering..” and the “You are now leaving…” signs are on the same post. :::Rimshot:::

Ah, but seriously folks……..

I was there for the gun show which is pretty much the biggest function the town has during the year. In the evening they have a street dance, there’s BBQ, and you can pretty much camp in your truck by the side of the road. It’s quite nice. I hadn’t been there in a few years because, honestly, its a bit of a haul. Its in the middle of this enormous valley. An island in a sea of green hay. Seriously.

But, because of its isolation and the bucolic demographic, you get a lot of used and old guns. Me likey used and old guns. And, while I was planning on not spending more than a few bucks on some reloading gear I walked away with this:

A pre-Remington Marlin 1894 in .44 Mag. Has the crossbolt safety, unfortunately, but it also has this:

The “JM” stamp showing this gun was made before Remington bought the company and destroyed it’s reputation with crappy quality. Go look on GunBroker…the JM stamped guns bring markedly higher prices over the REM stamped guns. Price? Well Old Dude wanted $500, I wound up getting it for $400. Honestly, if it didnt have the safety I would have been okay with $500.

I have the .357 version of this gun sitting in the safe. Paid $300 for it ten years ago. I see them on GB for about $500 more than that now. :::sigh:::

Anyway, this’ll go in the safe until I pick up a Ruger .44 of some flavor to match it with.

I Sold a Glock 30 last week that had been sitting in the safe since last September, so I’m going to consider this a zero-sum game. Basically just transmuted the G30 into the 1894.

 

 

 

“Boogaloo” – news to me

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I’ve become old enough that I am apparently now out of the loop in regard to ‘those crazy kids and their slang’.

Apparently, when I wasn’t looking, the term ‘boogaloo‘ has come to mean a fighting-in -the-streets type of national-level (or global-level) bullet party. Who knew?

Come to think of it, we have had some interesting euphemism for the day it all comes crashing down, haven’t we? Lets see: Collapse, EOTWAWKI, Ragnarok, the aopcalypse, Armageddon, World War 3, Judgement Day, TSHTF, etc.

I kinda like “Der Tag”, from Heinlein’s ‘The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress’. In most survivalist fiction the day the world comes to an end is often simply called “The Day”. No surprise there, hm?

But ‘boogaloo’? Mmmmm….thats gonna take some getting used to.

It’s not just for breakfast anymore

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I was going to say that deep down, I’m really just a big kid. But, if you knew me, you’d say that its really not that deep down since my immaturity and ‘boyish charm’ are quite readily apparent on the surface. I mention this because when I saw that breakfast cereal was on sale, I went deep. What breakfast cereal, you may ask? Why none other than the palate-shredding extruded waist-expander that is….Cap’n Crunch (Although to be fair, I knew him when he was Lieutenant Crunch back in Basrah).

I love a bargain, and I love food. Mix the two together and you get a happy Zero. So, when they had cereal marked down to $0.99/box I figured “Ok, lets get our crunch on.”

Normally $103, paid $27, saved…a bunch.

I actually don’t usually eat this as breakfast cereal. Neither, I suspect, does anyone else. Its more of a eat-it-out-of-the-box-while-playing-on-the-computer thing. But, no matter how you do it, I  apparently have at least a years worth of the stuff on hand. And, yes, it’ll keep for a year.

In case anyone is curious, what is my favorite breakfast cereal to actually eat as breakfast cereal? Surprisingly, on of the most boring things you can imagine – plain Kellog’s Corn Flakes. (But it’s best not to delve too deeply into the rather…NSFW?….origin of corn flakes.)

So, there’s a couple of cases of kid’s cereal sitting on the shelves in the basement. I suspect they’ll last until about this time next year. Unfortunately, milk does not. And, yes, I’ve tried the shelf-stable milk and it just doesn’t taste very good to me. So..if I want to actually eat breakfast cereal qua breakfast cereal, I’m gonna have to run to the store once in a while for a half gallon of moo juice.

But..hey..bargain!

Article – How To Read A Map

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The next idiot that has to get hauled out of the woods horizontally because he blindly trusted his GPS, or worse, his celphone, will not be the last. Natural selection in action. There’s plenty of good books on the subject, but here’s some basics.

“Once you’re outdoors, you can’t rely on technology anymore,” says Christiaan Adams, developer advocate for Google Earth. Being able to read a good old-fashioned paper map is one of the most fundamental outdoor skills. In case you never learned or need a refresher, here are the basics.

Nuts with bolts

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The $199.99 upper I ordered from PSA to go with my $60 lower arrived yesterday. As I was looking it over, I noticed that they apparently use M16-style bolt carriers. That is to say, the back of the bolt carrier is not ‘cut out’ like on an AR-15 bolt. You know what, its easier to just show you…

I recall way back in the 80’s/90’s, the prevailing wisdom was that any machinegun part, regardless of whether it actually made the gun full auto or not, was a no-no. Apparently nowadays an M16 bolt in your AR is not a cause for concern (perhaps it never was, but with ATFE they tend to write their own rules depending on how the coffee was that morning). The M16 bolt by itself doesn’t make your gun full-auto…you still need a handful of other parts and the magic little DIAS.

I have no love for ATFE. (Heck, I don’t even have a ‘but I don’t DISLIKE you’ for them.) But I also have no love for spending years in a federal rock-hockey farm. To avoid any ‘grey area’ issues I usually just keep far away from things that might cause problems with overzealous or ignorant enforcement types. (And, over the years, I have had plenty of people try to offer me parking lot deals on things that were definitely of a shady nature.)

So, even though apparently its cool to have the M16 bolt in the AR, it still kinda caught my eye.

Anyway, regardless of M16 bolt legalities or non-legalities, the upper showed up yesterday and I now have a little AR that I am into $260. And I can remember back when Obama took office seeing someone in my shop sell an AR to some panic-buying kid for almost two grand. How the market changes!