Author Archives: Commander Zero

The new PTR-91 rifles

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If you feel the 7.62×39 meets your anticipated needs, then the rifle to go with is an AK. If you think your needs are best met with .223, then getting anything other than an AR variant puts you at a logistical and economical disadvantage. Things get weird when you hit the .308, though. No particular platform has the overwhelming advantage of numbers like those other two have within their respective calibers. The AR in .223  is in first place and whatever is in second is probably outnumbered by an order of ten. The AK is in top place in 7.62×39, and beats the second place gun by a pretty heavy margin as well.

And the .308? Well, just off the top of my head: AR, AK, HK, FAL, M1A, and a few other platforms are out there. And whichever one is in first place has the next-ran pretty close behind.

Years ago, I bought a copy of the HK91 made by JLD (now PTR). HK-style rifles are notorious for being tough to clone well. PTR makes one of the best, and the most affordable, clones out there. A couple of detractions about the HK platform were it’s unsuitability for optics and it’s magazine release. PTR brought out a new version of their PTR-91 line that specifically addresses those issues.

The new PTR-91 rifles have, as an option, a Picatinny rail mounted to the top of the receiver. This eliminates the need for the old style ‘claw mount’ that put the scope waaaay above the bore axis. This is a nice improvement, but not nearly as nice as the next improvement: paddle mag release.

Real G3 rifles (the basis of the HK91) have an AK-style paddle mag release. But, to be approved by ATF for import, the semi-auto versions required some modifications to prevent the use of full-auto parts. One of the easy ways to do that was to modify the area of the gun where that paddle release was. As a result, the semi-autos just have the button mag release, whereas the G3 has the button and a paddle release. Now, you could gunsmith a paddle release if you were careful, and some gunsmiths did offer that service. But now you can get it straight form the factory.

That’s two of the greatest complaints about the HK platform resolved. Still present is the rather brutal recoil from the roller-locked system that operates the gun. There’s no free lunch in physics, and the awesome reliability of the gasless system is paid for with a bit more pronounced recoil.

A couple other changes PTR has made include changing the muzzle threads from the original metric 1×15 metric pitch to the more common 5/8×24 that will allow virtually any aftermarket .308 muzzle device to be used. Additionally, in the last year or so, PTR changed the fluting back to the original HK-style after people complained about issues with tar-sealed ammo gumming up the flutes and causing problems.

And, finally, while they still offer the ‘Navy’-style polymer lowers, the “GI” series is available with the traditional steel lower…making for slightly heavier but more robust firearm.

Although the days of ninety-seven cent mags from Cheaper Than Dirt are behind us, you can still find HK91 mags for less than $5…which puts them leaps ahead of most other .308 rifle mags.

So, if you’re in the market for a .308 battle rifle, and you need to watch your pennies, the PTR is an outrageous bargain.

Which is why I have one sitting here……let’s check it out.

IMG_2208 Here’s one of the biggest differences that immediately catches the eye: the newer GI model appears to use surplus steel lower receivers whereas many of the earlier PTR’s had the polymer ‘Navy’ receivers. And, yes, the lower is marked S-E-F..which, along with the paddle mag release, makes this thing a dead ringer for a real G3 if you ignore that rail. Naturally someone will chime in with something about how you’ll get popped by overzealous cops who think you’re toting a real full-auto G3. :::eyeroll::: First of all, how many cops have you met that know gun minutiae enough to tell the difference at a glance between a G3 and an HK91? Second, if you’re waltzing around with a .308 battle rifle and draw the attention of a cop, odds are pretty good he’s going to come up and have a conversation with you anyway…full auto or semi auto. So..non-issue.

Notice the newer style has the paddle magazine release whereas the older style does not.

IMG_2209 IMG_2210The picatinny rail….

IMG_2212 IMG_2213And the new 5/8×24 threaded muzzle device. This rifle will now take any muzzle brake or suppressor that takes the far more common Imperial thread.

IMG_2211And about a year or so ago, they went back to the original HK-style chamber fluting…for those of us who still have tar-sealed ammo floating around.

20160812_170318

Older style chamber fluting on left, current chamber fluting

PTR moved their factory from Ct to SC a few years back and I was worried about that move creating some quality issues. There are a few things on this new PTR I’m not liking.

  • The parkerizing is great, but they parked everything. Parts that move against each other are a bit gritty and will need to wear in. The paddle mag release, for example, is pretty stiff and I think thats because the contact surfaces were parkerized as well.
  • The takedown pins are tight in those holes. Again, I think thats the parkerizing. Should loosen up a tad over time.
  • Same story for the charging of rifle. A little gritty. Not as smooth as my old PTRs.
  • Surplus furniture doesn’t fit perfectly. Forward handguard is a little loose. Easily remedied with a shim. However, when you use surplus parts you should expect some issues like that. I’m not going to fuss.

Rifle shipped with one mag. No sling. No instructions. No nothin’. Just a surplus (ca.1969) aluminum mag.

Many vendors are discounting the older style of PTR to move them out and make room for these newer versions. If you can live without the rail, thread change, and paddle (which many people do on their $3000 original HK91s) go snap some up at the closeout prices. When you order, make sure you find out which model of PTR youre getting…the older or the newer. The newer models have different model numbers than the older style. The newer guns are PTR100, PTR101, etc. Older style use completely different SKU’s.

One other thing, may people like to say that the HK rifles eat up the brass so it can’tbe reloaded. Nonsense. The case mouths get dinged sometimes but they are easily un-dinged with a bullet or other tool. And those distinctive flutes do nothing to keep you from resizing the brass and re-using it. It’s a non-issue.

Links:

 

Article – The last big frontier

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An article about folks moving into the neighborhood. And a nod to Friend Of The Blog ,Rawles.

ASKED by an out-of-stater where the nearest shooting range is, Patrick Leavitt, an affable gunsmith at Riverman Gun Works in Coeur d’Alene, says: “This is Idaho—you can shoot pretty much anywhere away from buildings.” That is one reason why the sparsely populated state is attracting a growing number of “political refugees” keen to slip free from bureaucrats in America’s liberal states, says James Wesley, Rawles (yes, with a comma), an author of bestselling survivalist novels. In a widely read manifesto posted in 2011 on his survivalblog.com, Mr Rawles, a former army intelligence officer, urged libertarian-leaning Christians and Jews to move to Idaho, Montana, Wyoming and a strip of eastern Oregon and Washington states, a haven he called the “American Redoubt”.

Article – Armed men in body armor at Walmart tell police they were preparing for doomsday

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A report of a car full of men in body armor with semi-automatic weapons brought Lexington police to the Walmart on Richmond Road on Saturday night. Officers found two men, one in body armor, a 20-year-old woman and a six-month old baby.

Lt. Jackie Newman said that when Lexington police officers got the three people out of the car about 11:15 p.m., they said they were preparing for doomsday and needed supplies. A 26-year-old man and a 20-year-old woman were in the car with their 6-month-old baby and a 19-year-old man, police spokeswoman Brenna Angel said Monday.

And that, my friends, is how derpes is spread.
Now, sure, other than the marijuana these guys didn’t do anything illegal…but, for the love of Crom, there’s a time and place to be kitted out and the parking lot of WalMart isn’t that place…(unless it really is the end of the world. In that case, carry on.)
It’s hard enough to survive the end of the world, its even harder to survive it when you’re locked up in a holding cell while the cops try to figure out if you broke any laws.
If you just bought a shiny new “black rifle” and some body armour, invite Cletus and Jethro to your doublewide to look at it…don’t meet them at the WalMart parking lot where the whole Jihadi-sensitized world can see you. Think, people, think!

Streamlight Siege

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You guys remember Hydrox cookies? If you couldn’t pop for real Oreos, you bought Hydrox. Much like how if you’re on a budget, you don’t buy Frosted Flakes but rather the generic store brand ‘Frostie Flakes’ or some such (Slogan: “Theyrrrrrrrre….okay”.)

To me, Streamlight has always been the working-class version of SureFire. Yes, Streamlight has, as I read it, been around a tad longer than SureFire but SureFire gets the rep as the ‘high end’ tacticool product. (Interestingly, Hydrox came out before Oreos, as well.)

20160731_142828I’m kind of a gear snob, but I’m a pragmatists even more. A few years ago Streamlight came out with a product that, as far as  I know, has no comparable version from SureFire…the Streamlight Siege. (Although, to be fair, Eveready and a few others make a similar product but I don’t believe it to be as rugged and well thought out as the Streamlight product.)

The Siege is an LED lantern for area lighting. Nothing remarkable about that, but as you look the product over more closely you get the idea that it was designed for a very particular demographic….we happy survivalists.

20160731_143108The Siege runs on three D-cell batteries….one of the most common sizes of batteries around. Just about everyone has a couple D-cell MagLites floating around the house or car..the Siege takes advantage of that common battery. If you really want to streamline things, there are battery adapters that allow you to run one size of battery in devices meant for a larger size. Most often we see this with adapters that let you run AA-batts in devices that were meant for D-cells. But, my logistics revolves around three battery sizes (AA,D, and CR123) so I have plenty of D-batts laying around. (Interestingly, it seems like virtually the only thing I have that runs on D’s these days are flashlights. The days of radios and other devices running on D-batteries is coming to a close. )

20160731_142908The light source for the Siege is four white LED’s, and a fifth red LED. Holding down the one control button toggles between red or white. When the white LEDs are selected you have a choice of three brightness levels, starting with the highest. When the red LED is selected you have one brightness level, but double-clicking the button puts the red LED into SOS blinky mode.  The plastic ‘shade’ of the Siege diffuses the glow of the LEDs and is removable if you want more harsh lighting.

The top and bottom of the Siege has rugged rubber ‘bumpers’ making the light pretty resistant to being dropped, knocked over, or just banged around. Theres a foldaway clip on the underside of the light for hanging it upsidedown when you have the shade removed, and there’s a bail handle on the other end to hang it from whatever is handy when you do have the shade on.20160731_143039

The non-skid tread on the bumper-like bottom of the light keeps it from sliding on slick surfaces and provides an excellent grip for unscrewing the base to change batteries.

Light output on low is enough to illuminate a room so you don’t trip over anything, on high it’s bright enough to get things done but you’ll still feel like you’re in a power outage. Where this light seems to really shine (as it were) is as an emergency ‘area light’. When the power goes out its the light you turn on and stick high up in a corner of the room, hang in the stairwell, or put in your emergency gear storage area. It’s an awesome emergency light for when the power goes out and you need some light to get your gear together or start up your secondary systems (generator, transfer switch, etc.)

I haven’t beaten the crap out of it yet, but it has rolled off my desk a few times, and once bounced out of the truck….seems to still be doing just fine. Your mileage may vary. Personally, I’ve been very pleased with mine and will be getting three or four more as spares/backups/loaners.

They’re available at the usual sources, like Amazon, but once in a while you can find an outdoors-gear vendor having them on sale. Even at regular price, though, they’re a good purchase.

Tab clearing

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Oh merciful Crom, it is *hot* out there…. someone get Putin on the phone and tell him to dial down the weather machine.

Some interesting tidbits from around the interwebs…….
When Dyeing PMAGs, Liquid Or Powdered Dye? – An interesting piece from TFB about dyeing sand-colored pmags to whatever color you happen to need. I generally don’t use plastic mags but color-coding magazines has some appeal to me. I’ve always liked bright orange magazines for range practice and this would be a good way to readily segregate ‘practice’ mags from ‘critical’ mags.

Citizen science takes on Japan’s nuclear establishment -DIY nuclear background monitoring. I’m a fan of empirical data over government supplied data. What’s interesting is that some placesdont want you to own early warning systems because you might misread them and cause panic. And, of course, you might stray from the ‘official’ reports.

The new Microgun – Smaller than an M4, but with a cyclic rate of about $1400 rpm. This really might bring the man-portable Jesse Ventura backpack electric gun into reality… these would make amazing suppressing-fire weapons for light vehicles and temporary facilities. I thought I read somewhere that someone was working on a version that ran off a cordless drill…..

And just for fun…rubber-band MP5 – Because.

Building for sale. Location: 14 miles off the coast of Virginia Beach.

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Building for sale. Comes with: helicopter deck and 360-degree view of the Atlantic Ocean.

Wait, what?

The Chesapeake Light Tower – 14 miles off the coast of Virginia Beach – has both, and it hit the auction block last month.

I wonder if it’s far enough out there to be considered out of the US’ jurisdiction. History has several sea-stead attempts at creating sovereign micronations….I wonder if this would be another one.

Less-than-dependent

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You know that things like plastic bullets, beanbag rounds, rubber buckshot, etc. are called “Less-than-lethal”, right? It used to be they were called “non-lethal”, but the problem was that sort of title implied that you couldn’t kill anyone with itg. Sixty seconds on Google will show plenty of episodes of people getting brained with ‘non-lethal’ baton rounds and that sort of thing and winding up dead. So…the moniker “Non-lethal” was changed to less-than-lethal meaning that usually it won’t kill someone if you use it properly. A lot of distinctions there.

Many of the blogs I read advocate ‘self-sufficiency’ as a goal. They propose the dream house that is ‘off the grid’ and independent of the umbilical cords that connect us to the major infrastructure. This is all great if you can do it, but it’s a tall order. It seems that the choices are binary…you are ‘off the grid’ and ‘self-sufficient’ or you’re ‘on the grid’ and screwed. There hasn’t been a term for that in-between stage. I think that term is ‘less-than-dependent’. It implies that you aren’t self-sufficient, but you are more resilient to an infrastructure failure than those who are 100% dependent on that infrastructure. Let me give an example…

X has a house in town that has city water, city sewer, grid electric, natural gas, gets his groceries from the market, and that sort of thing. Z has a farm in the hills with a well, septic field, solar/wind generators and batteries, livestock and a huge garden, and all the other gee-whiz that we dream about. X is dependent and not self-sufficient, and Z is , by pretty much most definitions, independent and self-sufficient. Lethal vs. non-lethal. But is there an unrecognized or unacknowledged ‘in-between’? Take Y, who lives in the burbs or on the edge of town. He has his home set up just like X with it’s tie-in to ‘the grid systems’, and he doesn’t have the dedicated systems like Z….but he has backup generators, a cistern and pool full of water, a pantry loaded with food, a large propane tank to run his emergency heater and stove, etc, etc. He’s not 100% dependent, but he’s not 100% independent either. He is, I think, ‘less-than-dependent’.

I bring it up because sometimes I think we forget that it isn’t a binary choice…you’re either dependent or independent, self sufficient or not self sufficient. I think there’s a grey area in there and that grey area is where most of us are. I’m certainly not self-sufficient, in this context, but I’m far from dependent. I may not last as long as the guy out in the hills with his self-sufficient setup, but I’ll far, far outlast my totally dependent neighbors. We all want to leave the dependent stage, and I think we all want to reach the self-sufficient/independent stage, but we should recognize that less-than-dependent is still a huge step in the right direction. Some people may be okay with less-than-dependent, some people may see it as just a stop on their way to independent/self-sufficient, but…if you cannot get to that independent/self-sufficient stage, at least try to get to the less-than-dependent stage.

Article -Confessions Of A Former Apocalypse Survival Guide Writer

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This is like finding out the call girl doesn’t *really* love you…..

The first time I bid on a freelance job to ghostwrite a doomsday survival guide, I was only asked one question: Did I have experience writing for middle-aged Republican men? I told the client that I had experience writing for a wide variety of ages and political affiliations, which was noncommittal enough to be true.

 

The client said, “Sounds good, bro.”

 

We were off to the races.

Article – Pokemon Go T&Cs strip users of legal rights

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I highly doubt anyone here does this but:

As previously noted, Pokemon Go also requires extensive app permissions to run. And the Pokemon Go privacy policy states the company may share aggregated data with third parties, and identifiable user data with law enforcement agencies and other parties for a range of reasons it deems appropriate.

It isn’t hard to imagine that somewhere, “someone” wanted a way to bring millions of people into a program where they could be tracked, have their phone mined for data, and have who knows what other ‘third party’ stuff slipped into their phone. Disguise it as a game and people will line up to hand over their digital keys.

Or, perhaps it’s just a game.

But, to me, it’s just an unnecessary risk. If someone were to really want to play this game, I’d suggest buying a burner phone and using it instead. Expensive as hell, but you probably shouldnt be wasting your time playing this modified and rebranded version of geocaching anyway.