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

I got an email from the evil genius at Allied Armament. They now have magazine pouches for their awesome drum mags. Dont feel left out if you dont have an HK-91 clone, theyre making ‘em for the AR-10 clones and the FAL these days too. I got one of the HK drums last year and found it to be an excellent product, definitely a force multiplier.

Link to the pouches
Link to Allied Armament

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

Im a terribly nosy person. It is not enough for me to know that something happened..I need to know why it happened. How it happened. I suspect if I had stayed in journalism school I would have made an excellent investigative reporter…right up to the point when the Russian mob would shoot me in the back of the head.

I went back to Rosauers to pick up a few more cans of eggs the other day and decided to people watch. Who was buying this stuff? How were they buying it? It was an interesting thing to watch.

First off, the overwhelming majority of people buying it, at least while I was there, were middle-aged and older women shopping by themselves. I didnt get close enough to see what it was they bought…they could have simply been buying the bread mix for everyday use…but the majority of people were women. They would see this pile of food, walk up to it, look at the cans, pick one up, read the label, and put one or two in their cart. Guys, though, were a different story. They would walk aroudn the whole display, looking at everything, and, much like buying porn, they seemed wary of not standing too close to anyone else and not examining anything if there were more people standing around doing the same thing. It was a very…surreptitious…form of behavior.

I asked one of my customers if he had gone and purchased anything. He said yes, he had spent two hours in there. How, I asked, does it take you two hours to buy some canned food? He was standing there examining one of the cans and another guy came up and was doing the same. They got to chatting and next thing you know theyre standing there talking about the upcoming apocalypse. For those of you who wonder how to meet like-minded individuals there is a perfect example.

As I’ve pointed out before, preparedness is going mainstream. It may go under different names…’disaster planning’, ’security moms’, ‘ready.gov’, ‘zombie apocalypse’…but it isnt looked upon with as much disdain and mockery as it used to be. (Yes, theres still plenty of folks out there that carry it a bit far and get pointed at and laughed at. That will always be there.)

The biggest example of this is simply that the term ‘preparedness’ has moved into common usage. I still find the term ‘preppers’ to sound stupid and contrived but the poisoned term ’survivalist’ wasnt exactly helping the cause. As an aside, I’m thinking that in the eyes of the media ’survivalist’ is a ‘prepper’ with guns.

Ever run into one of those aging hipsters who, when you tell them about a band you like, will immediately tell about how they liked that band before they were cool and before everyone else was listening to them? Yeah, I kinda get that way sometimes about preparedness. Of course, back when I was doing it I got looked at as a sterotypical right-wing militia-type from Montana. But now when you do it it’s ‘taking sensible precautions’. I tell you, sometimes its all I can do to yell “I told you so” at those people. On the other hand, I take a great deal of satisfaction from knowing that I paid a huge amount less than they are for the same preps because I’ve been doing it so long. ($85 cases of 7.62×39 springs to mind.)

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

(A little murky about where that apostrophe should go, but thats not the main issue…..)

Friendly reminder: Tuesday (April 19) is Patriots’ Day. There is but one ideal way to celebrate it and that is by going to the range and shooting a revolution-worthy firearm. What is a revolution-worthy firearm? If they were re-enacting ‘Red Dawn’ in your neighborhood, its the firearm you would take with you.

As an aside, April 19, in many law-enforcement circles, is a ‘heightened awareness day’. April 19 is Patriots Day, Burn The Davidians Day, and OkBomb Day. Lotta stuff happens around the third week of April.

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

Oh great googly moogly….the stars must have lined up for me today. I was at a competition shoot, supporting the missus in her re-immersion into the world of ranked shooting, when one of the competitors, whome we know, said “Did you see Rosauers is selling #10 cans of freeze drieds?” Huh wha…? I could not get back from the range fast enough. Headed over to my local Rosauers supermarket and beheld this:

Prep-gasm.

Yeah, it was kinda like that. Thats a couple thousand or so #10 cans of various long-term storage food. Now, I know that there are other vendors than Mountain House…the guys as Thrive are cutting into their market somewhat. However, freeze drying is a huge capital investment since youre basically shoveling pallets of food into a pressure vessel and sublimating your way through a couple forms of being. Dehydrating is cheaper, although the results arent as good. This stuff is from these guys. Some interesting stuff…some freezedried, some dehydrated. Prices were very good though. More importantly, they had a few things that Mountain House does not normally carry such as butter powder, honey powder, and a few other things. Here’s what I wound up with and what they cost:

Banana Chips- 2.25# – $6.99
Butter Powder – 2.75# – $18.99
Scrambled Egg mix – 2.25# – $14.99
Honey powder – 3# – $8.99
Whole Egg Mix – 2.25# – $12.99

I’ll do the math later and see how it stacks up per ounce against the Mountain House stuff. The selection at the store was fairly small. The guy working there told me that when they try a new product line, and this was a big departure for them, they restrain themselves a bit from getting everything. In addition to what I listed there were several soup mixes, baking mixes, three different kinds of milk/milk substitute, and some other goodies. The company that makes this stuff has several other items Id be very interested in and Im going to check with the supermarket’s special order guy to see if he can maybe order in some things for me.

For you local LMI, this is a huge honkin’ deal. The prices are below the website prices and although I would probably stick to getting things like the lowfat milk from the Mormon cannery at a lower price, theres some very good stuff here (esp. the egg and butter mixes). I have no idea if this will be a regular item that is carried..I doubt it…but for now, while they have it in stock, if youre local to the area it’s the Rosauers on South and Reserve.

While I was content with what we had in long-term storage, there were a few gaps…most notably egg, cheese, butter, and similar products….this might be the big opportunity for me to fix that.

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

As it turns out, Cabela’s has the SR primers I need on sale and, as fate would have it, an LMI buddy of mine will be passing by the Idaho store today on his way here. So…I’ll have him pick up a case and call it good.

It may be before the time of some of you, but back in the Clinton years there was what came to be called The Great Primer Scare. This is an excellent example of a self-fulfilling prophecy (of sorts) and a standout example of panic buying and supply/demand.

Gather ’round, youngsters…’Ol Uncle Zero is telling stories from the olden days.

A rumor went around that the Clinton cabal were going to pass an edict making it so that newly manufactured primers would ‘go bad’ or become inert within six months of their manufacture. The idea was to prevent evil militia-types from stockpiling ammo. As it sturns out, according to the ammo companies, such formulations and technology did exist but you couldnt accurately use it. What that means is that while they could make a primer that would go inert after a set amount of time, they couldnt really narrow it down to six months. It might go dead in six days, six weeks or six months…the precision timing wasnt there. Part of this rumor had a small basis in fact…a couple manufacturers had been experimenting with lead-free primers and the results had been spotty, and this may have led credence to the rumors about primer reformulation being in the works.

Anyway….

This rumor started gaining traction on the interweb and pretty soon you couldnt find primers for sale anywhere. People ran out an stockpiled tens of thousands of primers. Naturally, when Joe Blow went to the store and found they were sold out of primers he figured there must be something to that rumor and he went to another store and cleaned them out of primers. And in this way these rumors gain traction and become self-fulfilling…this despite the fact that, primer-wise, nothing had changed.

Think youre having a hard time finding Federal bulk .22 now? This was a zillion times worse. Guys who normally bought a brick of primers were buying entire inventories. The ammo companies were quick to point out that there was no mandate coming to make self-inactivating primers but no one really listened. It was some serious panic buying. Eventually it all slowed own, the rumor was forgotten and people calmed down. However, like many panics, it left an impression on some people. There are a lot of folks out there, and I mean a lot, who took a lesson from the experience and keep stockpiles of primers on hand to ward against any future shortages. Personally, I try to keep 10k of each kind on hand – SP,SR,SRM, SPM, etc, etc. If you store them properly, in an ammo can for example, they’ll keep for decades. See, while you can fab up bullets from wheelweights, mix up black powder from a few sources, and reload your fired brass cases, there is no practical way to reload your own primers. (Yes, I know you can reload your primers with compounds taken from match heads…but thats a spotty method and not very practical in large quantities.) Without primers, your back in the world of the rocklock.

So, anyway, I’ll get 5k of the SR primers today and I’ll be back at a happy threshold that keeps me confident in my ability to make ammo as I need it.

(Tangentially, theres a whole ‘nother issue present which is – why stock components to make ‘x’ amount of ammo instead of just keeping ‘x’ amount on ammo? But, as Alton Brown would say, thats another show…….)

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

What is it with the Japanese and their seeming talent at being the last guy to leave the party? The record for sheer unbridled stubbornness goes to Hiroo Onada who kept fighting World War Two right up into the 1970’s. I’ve no doubt that right now theres a duplex drifting off the coat of Japan with some guy sitting on the roof fishing for his meals and patiently waiting for rescue. These guys just don’t give up.
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Went to a shooting match with the missus the other day. It was a steel match, which I have always thought were much more fun than paper, and it made me think about getting back into it. I dabbled in it with some college dorm-mates back in the late ’80s. My only question is what gun to use. I have a very nice 1911 that has all the necessary enhancements, but I also have a G17 thats been tweaked out for that sort of game too. Personally, Id like to shoot the High Power and it would be a great excuse to try and find a GB Competition model. The obvious solution, though, is to take all three guns to the range, run a few drills, and see which one I do best with. The P35 or 1911 would be cheapest to shoot since the Glock would require me to get a new barrel to shoot cast bullets through. Jacketed bullets aint cheap these days but I can get 9mm and .45 lead bullets for $60/1000 so it would make good fiscal sense to shoot them.

I like shooting the courses of fire that they use at these competitions but I dont like the actual competition itself. The competitive part of the game takes some of the fun out of it from me. I’ve always been a very informal shooter in terms of competition. I like the simple “Hey, I’ll bet you lunch I can shoot a tighter group than you can” sort of competitions rather than some huge, official function where thirty people are watching your every move.

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

Local gun show this weekend. About the only thing that I was looking for were some small rifle primers. No luck. Or, more precisely, no luck at less than $30/m. Sorry, Im not paying that. My usual vendor had primers at $25/m but no small rifles. Once I accepted that defeat it was time to look around for the stuff that I just absolutely needed to have but just didnt know I needed. First up, and this was fate having a laugh at my expense, was a Filson Double Mackinaw Cruiser for $125. Size? 44-46. Okay…shrug outta my jacket…try it on …and…..just a tad small in the shoulders. Dammit, a 48 woulda done the trick. And it didnt help that when I started trying it on the guy said that he’d take $100 for it. I called a buddy of mine whom I thought it might fit and told him about it. He said to pick it up for him but, alas, when I went back the next day I had missed it by just ten minutes. Not meant to be, I suppose.

Firearms-wise, I didnt see much I couldnt live without. There seemed to be less ARs and AKs than at previous shows and magazines were a little thin too. Plenty of hunting arms of various calibers and configurations. In a sign of the times, there was a fella walking around with an ALICE pack on his back and a cardboard sing taped to it that read “BUG OUT BAGS $20, $40 WITH FRAME”. I wanted to get a picture of it but its always a dicey thing to start snapping pictures in a gun show.

Johnny Trochmann wasnt in attendance which was kind of a letdown since I wanted to pick up a few parachute flares and some other specialty items. This was a smallet-than-usual show so perhaps he was attending a larger one elsewhere.

Ran into a handful of people who I knew from the shows. A lot of these guys are up in their years and invariably the conversation turns to ‘did you hear about…’ and I learn that onel of the old timers has passed on. Gun shows, at least attending them habitually, is an old mans game. A lot of these guys are retired and gor them its a fun social thing to do, travelling to a different town every weekend to sell guns and swap stuff with each other. I remember when I started doing gun shows I was the youngest person at the show with a table. That was …hmmm….about 20-someodd years ago. Of course, gun shows were a bit different then. For one thing ours was held in a Fraternal Order of Eagles lodge so, since they had a liquor license and bar, as the evening wore on the deals became more and more interesting as the constituency became more and more tipsy. Good times.

Totally absent from this show was the guy who was here last time with the FN-made FAL that he wanted $2500 for. Sure it was in great shape and all, but $2500 was pushing the envelope. Nonetheless, a friend of mine, who loves him some FAL action, offered the guy a 100 oz. bar of silver. At the time silver was right around $24.75 an ounce, I think. The dealer, who really was a bit of a jerk, declined. Had he showed some brains and accepted my buddy’s deal he would have about $4000 right now for that FAL that is still worth ‘only’ $2500. I was hoping to see him there so I could remind him of this but it was not to be.

Anyway, I wound up with an 8# keg of powder for $45, a new Safariland paddle holster for my Glock for $20, a few shellholders and some other sundry items. Anytime I get out of a gun show without spending more than $100 I chalk it up as a win.

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

There’s a lot more than five, but this hits some of the highlights.

Finished up an inventory the other night. I was mentioning to the missus exactly what we had in the way of long term food storage (which is completely different from the short- and mid-term storage we have) and she nodded approvingly and said “Sounds like we’re done on the long term food”. I blinked a couple times and for some reason my brain seemed to have a hard time getting into gear after that. She was, for the most part, right and it had never occurred to me that there actually might be a point where you could say “We’re done”. So I mulled it over, looked at the numbers, did some sample menus in my head, and it looks like it actually might be at the stage where its ‘enough’. I would like to round off a few ‘broken’ cases where a box of six only has five in it, but otherwise…. Of course, more is better but I think we’d be okay with just what is on hand at this moment. How odd…I’d never thought that there’d be a point where I could wrap up this particular aspect of preparedness and move on to another. I knew that, in theory, theres a point where you sit back and say “Ok, now we’re good to go” I just didnt think I’d actually hit it.

Of course, this is just on long term foods. Theres still plenty of other things to work on, and some stuff is always ongoing, but the most urgent and obvious ones seem to be taken care of to the point that they are at a level I can feel comfortable with.

Now, I bet youre just chomping at the bit to ask what the duration of that food supply is…six months? A year? Two years? Five? Something I’ve noticed is that no matter how much of something you have, there is always someone who wants to bust your stones about it. If I said I had two years supply of food someone will say ‘but what are you going to do after two years?’. If I said I had a five year supply theyd ask ‘what are you going to do after five years’. And, honestly, I think its a pretty annoying game of one-upmanship and I don’t want to get into it. Theres a point where you have to figure that civilization will get back on track and the stores will have food on the shelves again. We have enough that Im comfortable that if the wheels fly off of civilization in a major way we’re going to be just fine for quite some time.
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How do I do inventory? Usually its pretty simple. I grab a clipboard, pen, paper, and start making lists. I find it to be a relaxing activity. Its usually late at night, I have a small radio tuned to Coast-to-Coast or some other bizarre talk format, and I go through boxes and shelves making lists as I go along. When its done I usually transcribe everything into spreadsheets and print out copies to keep and use as checklists as things get used up. At a glance, I can tell you how many AA batts, packages of freeze dried chicken, or paper towels we have tucked away. If youre going to take your preparedness seriously, you really have no choice but to keep inventories…otherwise you waste resources buying things you dont need any more of.
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Ordered a bunch of the Korean Glcok mags for the wife’s ‘new’ .40 competition gun. I’d tried the 9mm mags in the past and found them to be virtually indistinguishable from the factory Glock magazines in use and construction. So much so, in fact, that I have several dozen of them tucked away. So when we needed some .40 mags it seemed like a good idea to get the Korean ones for about $7 each. Unfortunately, while the 9mm ones were great the .40’s are all getting returned. Quite simply, they dont fit in the magazine of the gun…oh, they’ll go in if you really work ‘em in with some elbow grease but any idiot can tell from the exertion that there is something Not Right. Tried several of the mags in three different guns. All were lousy fits. Not a really big deal, they’ll be returned with no problem; but theres an important lesson here – try any new magazine in the gun before you tuck it away somewhere. I have a huge(!!!) pile of G3 mags and I sat there and ran every single one through the rifle to make sure they fit the magazine well. Tedious process, oh yeah. Worth it for the peace of mind? Most definitely.

So, the Korean mags, which are at various times referred to as Kang or KCI or Korean contract mags, are, in my experience, just fine in 9mm but should be avoided in the other calibers.