Author Archives: Commander Zero

Hamilton Gun Show

Posted on by

Went to the Hamilton gun show this last weekend. Didn’t really see much that jumped out at me. Really, I’ve got everything I need and most of what I want. At this point, it’s just gilding the lily to pick up another AR or Glock. And, honestly, I’d rather take that $400 and drop it into something that’ll generate a consistent return down the line.

Prices were fairly reasonable at the show. Primers were in the $75/brick range whcih, to my pre-Covd mind, is still an amazing ripoff. Plenty of ARs and AKs out there, as well as mags and ammo. There were the usual tables of ‘survival gear’ but, sadly, no Johnny Trochman. I guess if you go to a gun show and don’t see him it means were going to have another six weeks of nuclear winter.

I also swung by Trader Bros. on the way back to see  how their massive storage food acquisition is going. It had definitely been whittled a bit, but any sales were offset by additional pallets (yes, wrapped pallets of buckets of food) that had been added since my last visit. Apparently they hit the PPE part of this guys stash because there were N95 masks, Tyvek suits, goggles, and gloves aplenty. I gotta hand it to the deceased survivalist….he definitely was walking it like he was talking it. I didn’t pick up anything because, honestly, I’m pretty squared away and don’t really have room for more.

Speaking of space, I’m still looking for that chunk o’dirt. I found a place that ticks off a great many of my little tickyboxes except…it’s too bloody far away. But, oh, its got some sweet features…biggest of which is that it butts up against BLM/state land which, in turn, butts up against a million acres of national forest. If only it wasnt so bloody far from here. So, the search continues on that front.

Link – Let’s Revisit The SHTF Med Kit From 2014, Shall We?

Posted on by

Friend Of The Blog(tm), Aesop, over at Raconteur Report has a couple posts up that I think are worth going over there and reading. Everyone had their own ideas about what is and is not worth having in terms of medical/firstaid in a crisis (whatever your crisis may look like), but I would give his suggestions and recommendations some weight. He also has a followup post on med texts. Good stuff, kids.

Universal currency

Posted on by

So that happened……..

Normally I don’t buy these little divisibles because the premiums are way high. But, like the little 1-gram gold I bought a few months ago, these had a stupidly low premium … 1.25% over spot. And, thats actually a worse deal than I got on those 1-gram bars a few months back.

I have absolutely no doubt that someone is scrambling to make a post about how I shouldnt be spending money on this sort of thing and should instead be focusing resources on the land acquisition. Dude..use your head: this gold is part of those resources for land acquisition. If a deal like this comes up, I’ll convert some of that cash into gold. Net effect? $0 difference. $200k in cash, and $150k in cash and $50k in gold is still….$200k. Except theres the likelihood of the gold being worth more by the time its time to make the purchase. And, yeah, could go down too…but thats not really something I’m worried about these days.

Range Day

Posted on by

Picked up an Eotech XPS2 to throw on my ‘green machine’ AR. Unlike the one that is sitting on my FN, this one is by itself with no magnifier. Just a simple, unmagnified red dot. To my surprise it shot quite well at 100 yards, keeping three shot groups within a couple inches. Considering this is 1x and there is no magnification, thats not too shabby. I expected good accuracy from the SIG upper, but I didnt expect my eyes to be able to keep a red dot, in bright daylight, on a light background at 100 yards. But..here we are.

Thats a SIG upper on a KE Arms poly lower with their target trigger, 45* safety, and ambi mag release. It’s pretty light for what it is, and as age comes on apace I find that lighter guns have an appeal (says the man who owns a Barret 82A1).

One thing that is wildly pissing me off is that the front rail has no picatinny on it. So, I had to add a segment of pic rail to the front top to accommodate a set of backup sights…but that raise the sight to the point it shoots a bit low, even with the front sight post bottomed out. The solution is going to be to find a thinner pic riser.

I mounted the Eotech on the gun and fired it at 100 yards. Windage was spot on and only elevation needed adjusting. I’m coming around to enjoy the speed and utility of these red dots. Ive learned the hard way that if youre going to need a gun, you need it in a hurry and anything that speeds up getting the bullet into the backstop is a good thing. So, I’ll let my wallet be my endorsement…I liked the first XPS2 I bought so much that I bought another.

While at the range, I also pulled out the SBR’d BRN-180. I recently purchased a Meprolight M21 as an experiment with non-illuminated scopes. The M21 uses just ambient light, like an ACOG, but unlike the ACOG has no other light source (unlike the ACOG’s tritium backup). So…a batteryless optic for the end of the world. Howd I like it. Its…ok. Build quality seems good and I expect it to be brutally rugged. But it suffers the same problem all fiber optic sights have – shooting from light into light, and light into dark is no problem. But, if youre in a darkened area shooting into a lighter area, the reticle may not be bright enough. Meprolight does make a version of this optic that has tritium, which Ill probably try, and another version that uses batteries. Considering this is an Israeil offering, and it tends to be sunny all the time over there, I suppose its not an issue over there. Here, however, its another story. Then again, this stubby little wanna-be-PDW is mostly an indoor/car item, so perhaps its not as much of an issue as I think. And, of course, backup sights which cowitnessed beautifully.

Unfortunately, this little gun is giving me some ejection problems. Every so often a case extracts, but fails to ehect, giving me a stovepipe and double feed. Rather than go overboard screwing with it, I’m just going to swap out the ejector, ejector spring, extractor, and extractor spring for some enhanced one from JP Customs. I really want to like this little gun, and I want to have faith in it’s reliability, so a little work is called for.

Interestingly, in the same size I can get the JAKL pistol/SBR whcih gives me the same size package but has proven itself well so far.

So, overall, a productive day at the range. Beats sitting at home doing weekend laundry duties.

Still searching

Posted on by

Still looking for a piece of property. No takers yet, but I’m confident that its going to happen at some point in the relatively-near future. I like to think a year or less. As such, I’m starting to think that I need to start staging things for the eventual acquisition. My basement, although capacious for most of my needs, is getting a wee bit cluttered since it is currently containing what I feel I need to stay where I am, and containing enough to stockpile the (eventual) alternate location.

Since Im pretty confident (not 100% but definitely north of 85%+) that this acquisition is a real thing, I’m contemplating renting a secure storage unit (or at least as secure as you can get) to pre-position some gear for the eventual move and clear up some space in my current home. I’d never stockpile stuff like ammo, guns, expensive electronics, etc, in a storage units but other things…sleeping bags, barrels of freeze dried pouches, spare epmty fuel and water jugs, hand tools (shovels, axes, etc), etc, might be good candidates for storing away off-site until the new place is mine.

It would be nice to free up some space at the primary location and have a bunch of the secondary-location-gear in one place for easy relocation. The risks, of course, are obvious – storage units, even in fenced and monitored locations, are not the most secure places. Ive a friend who rents a storage unit here in town and the place seems pretty secure – fenced, cameras, gated keycard access, etc. As I said, I wouldnt be comfortablle putting a footlocker of AR-15s there, but the bulky, fairly-low-value, and fairly-low-attractiveness items might be a good choice for that.

Of course I may be getting ahead of myself here.  I still havent found something that checks off enough boxes on my ‘want list’ to pull the trigger. And, before you start in with the whole ‘perfect is the enemy of good enough’, I’m smart enough to realize that while Id like to get 100% of what I want (who wouldn’t?), I can probably be happy enough with ‘pretty close’. But..even ‘pretty close’ hasn’t quite surfaced yet.

So..as the world slides into the unknown of potential World War III and/or economic malaise, I’m still looking and still trying to find the bolt hole to run to before it all falls apart too badly.

Literally tons of storage food

Posted on by

Ive mentioned in the past that when survivalists die, the yard sales tend to  be quite interesting. So, what does it look like when a well-financed prepper dies and all his storage food goes on the block? Well, alot like this:

I’ve been prepping for almost forty years and this is the most storage food I’ve ever scene in one place.

There were literally thousands of buckets of cornmeal, oatmeal, roled oats, wheat, rice, barley, beans, tvp, soup mix, etc, etc. And thats on top of the hundreds of thousands of rounds of ammunition, the dozens of AR rifles, primers, powder, bullets, all the mags, parts kits, armour plates, toiletries, and other supplies. The story I heard from two different people was that this guy worked for one of the large supermarkets in his town and decided he was personally going undertake the task or prepping for his enter church/town (two different storeis…one said church, one said town.)

So, if youre local in the Bitterroot Valley, head over to Trader Bros and score yourself some long=term storage food at giveaway prices. I was given to understand they are still not done transporting it all in. Opportunity here, m’friends.

Article – Refrigerator-sized machine makes gasoline out of thin air

Posted on by

TL;DR company claims to have invented a machine that makes gasoline from air. Elizabeth Holmes could not be reached for comment.

Earlier this month, the company announced it had created the world’s first functional machine capable of generating real, usable car gasoline “directly from the air.” Aircela’s new device, roughly the size of a commercial refrigerator, combines direct air capture (DAC) with on-site fuel synthesis to create gasoline using just air, water, and renewable energy. No fossil fuels, they say, are required.

Ok, a couple things here. First of all, in physics, as we understand it today, there is no free energy. As I understand it the amount of energy it takes to make the gasoline-from-air cannot be less than the energy you get from the gasoline-from-the-air. In other words, youd get more miles driving the electricity it toook to make the gasoline than you would from the gasoline. But, thats probably an oversimplification.

Also, the more conspiracy minded will now comment about how the .gov will never let these guys bring such an item to market and instead will teach them the meaning of defenestration. And, don’t forget, the 70MPG carburetors that supposedly “Big Oil” has been suppressing since forever.

In one sense, there’s an even bigger question – if you have the technology to create gasoline out of the air, then you have the technology to not need the gasoline in the first place. But, as the article states, many people aren’t willing to give up their gas engines so the next best thing is to make the gas more abundant.

This reminds me of the atmospheric water generators (AWG) that are out there…with enough electricity, you can drop one of these in a desert-environment somewhere and start producing water out of the air. The lesson being that with enough electrical power you can pretty much do anything. (Which was one of the big messages of ‘Lucifers Hammer’ … electricity=civilization.)

This sort of technology is interesting, and certainly thought provoking, but for your average garden-variety survivalist it seems to be of interest mostly for the trickle-down effect of the research and technology, and the societal impact of it working on a large scale.

BRN-180 stubby

Posted on by

One of the things I like about the current crop of Palmetto JAKL and Brownell BRN-180 guns is that they use a 99% bog-standard AR lower. (The JAKL requires you to swap to a slightly modified bolt release paddle.)

Anyway… since both of these platforms use unmodified AR lowers, it’s convenient to keep an eye open for SBR’d lowers that come up for sale. Then I can just pull the upper off of the ‘pistol’ it sits on and mate it up to the SBR’d lower giving me the ability use a real stock and not have to look over my shoulder at the range.

While I do have a couple SBR’d AR’s, one of the drawbacks to the AR design is the buffer tube that does not lend itself to a folding stock. Do you really need a folding stock? Depends on who you ask. Personally, when I buy a firearm it almost always is with an eye towards how it would be used ‘in a prolonged crisis of some kind’ (cough*EOTWAWKI*cough). If, Crom forbid, I have to throw my gear in the back of the truck and head off to the beta site, space will be at a premium and being able to tuck a .223 carbine in my backpack will have some value.

Lately I’ve been playing with the Gen2 Brownell BRN-180. It’s modernized version of the AR-180 and has all the same benefits and drawbacks of the original AR-180’s from way back when. What the AR-180 brings to the table (and so does the JAKL) is a more ‘hygienic’ operating system. The JAKL and BRN-180 both use designs that keep operating gases out of the action. The JAKL through the use of a long-stroke gas piston, and the BRN-180 with a short-stroke gas piston system. Or, put another way, the AK system and the M1 Carbine system. The direct impingement system of the AR15 is great, and makes for an accurate semi-auto rifle but there is, in my opinion and experience, a bit of a reliability issue in the AR system because of the operating gases being vented into the action and bolt. Some people shoot a thousand rounds from the AR with no cleaning and no issue, some fire 200 rounds and have things get gummy. Your mileage may vary. But with the non-direct impingement guns it isnt even on the map as a potential problem. Sure, keep on top of cleaning, squirt some lube into bolt from time to time, and you can probably go forever without cleaning. But, some day you may not have the time, resources, or ability to clean your rifle after a couple hundred rounds and thats when things like ‘ability to endure neglect’ become important.

Again, your milage may vary…I’m only speaking about my experiences.

Since I was wanting a carbine that could be made into the smallest footprint possible without compromising too much performance, I needed something that didnt require the buffer tube. Thats pretty much every non-AR out there – JAKL, AK, AR-180, HK93, Mini14, etc. So, I ordered up an 11″ BRN-180 upper , picked up a stripped Poverty Pony lower that had been SBR’d by the folks at Iron Mountain, slapped a CMMG parts kit in it, added a Midwest Industries folder, put on some Magpul BUIS and a sling, and got this:

Pretty fetching, dontcha think?

Took it out to the range and it ran just fine. Threaded a Gemtech Abyss onto the end and it shot well enough but I had a few failures. Didnt realize that I had forgotten to change the setting on the gas block to ‘S’ (suppressed) from ‘U’ (unsuppressed). That cleared it up. With the can on the end the thing is just at the same OAL as a unsuppressed AR carbine. I also have a 16″ BRN-180 as well with a Leupold 1-4x Patrol scope on it and it’s a light, handy gun.

Theres the saying that when all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. Is a compact folding-folding-stock SBR my first choice for running out the door? Not if I can get away with a 16″ barrel AR, AK, or similar arm. But for the circumstance where high portability and compactness matter? This might not be a terrible choice.

Email wonkiness

Posted on by

My email is acting up again, for reasons known only to Crom, so if you and I were exchanging some emails and you havent heard from me … dont panic. Just gimme a day or two to see if I can straighten it out.