Category Archives: Uncategorized

Prices going up

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The weekends are my usual shopping days…WinCo, CostCo, gas, and maybe WalMart. This means that weekends are the time when I look at the price of things and go “Hey, wasn’t this cheaper last weekend?” For example, gas was up another dime to around $4.18/gal. Ground beef 85/15? $5.25/#. CocaCola? $0.388 per can in a 35-can case….that’s almost 30% higher than what i used to pay about a year or so ago.

I feel bad for people on fixed incomes. For them, their only choice is to find ways to get more income or start cutting things out of their budget.

And, as if inflation wasn’t bad enough, we still have the Wuhan Flu hangover, ‘mostly peaceful’ demonstrations, a heightened possibility of WW3.1, and whatever nonsensical activities the goobers in Washington have planned.

I’m starting to think there will never be a point in my life where I look at a lifetime of being a survivalist and say “Wow, that was a waste.”

So what’s on tap these days for yours truly? Well, not much really. Other than working on financial resources, I’m mostly comfortable with what I’ve got. And, honestly, I’ve virtually no room for more stuff. I guess now is the time to start polishing what I’ve got and refine the small details.

.Gov is upping the interest rates a bit in hopes of slowing down the economy and thereby putting the brakes on inflation. But that has it’s own separate problems. It’s like chemotherapy – it targets the bad stuff but there’s a buncha collateral damage. So you better shrink that tumor fast because if you keep up the treatment for too long you’ll kill off the healthy stuff. And that’s about the extent of my oncological background. But, you get my idea, yes?

So what are you doing to get ahead of this inflationary episode? Cutting back? Buying bulk in advance? Locking in prices?

Magpul Backpacker for PC Carbine

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I loves me some takedown gun action. I’ve a Model 12 Winchester that fits in my backpack so i can keep it handy for close encounters, and I’ve always liked the idea of a takedown 9mm carbine. When Ruger came out with their PC Carbine in 9mm that took Glock mags…well!

And now Magpul has sweetened the deal.

I know, I know…there’s always that contingent in the comments who feel the need to pontificate about pistol caliber carbines are worthless, etc, etc. Look, dude…Springfield’s Evac has, apparently, become vaporware and Ruger discontinued their takedown AR as well. So except for some boutique shops, there’s not a lot of mass produced takedown semi auto guns in .223 or 7.62.

Besides, I like the streamlined logistics of one caliber and one magazine between pistol and carbine.

Regardless, I just ordered the stock off Brownell’s. Let’s see how it works out.

 

A leverific day

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Well….that happened:

A Winchester 94 in .44 Mag. (Pre-safety version), and a somewhat rare Browning BL92 in .44 Mag. Gotta say, that Browning is a smooth and slick action. Unfortunately it was only made for about eight years so if I need spare parts, I might have some issues. On the other hand, the Japs built some pretty solid guns in that Miroku brand.

For lever actions, I prefer Marlins (real ones, not that Remington-era crap). Don’t know if I’ll keep the BL92 or not yet. Probably not. I’ll have to see if I can trade it off for a nice Marlin .44 or .357.

But..yay leverguns.

Feels like its never enough

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Intellectually, I know with utter certainty that I’m fine. I have money, gold, food, ammo, fuel, redundant income streams, a paid-for house, no debt, reasonable health, marketable skills, and a pretty good mindset. And yet everytime I go to a gas station, CostCo, WinCo, or Murdoch’s I feel like “must buy all the things!!11!!11!”. My brain knows that I’m going to be fun, but my gut keeps feeling like I’m wildly vulnerable.

And, I have learned from experience*, that when its a choice between guts vs. grey matter…. trust your gut.

But, wow, with the media barrage of potential WW3.1, inflation, and a host of other things…well, it can make even the most prepared person start to second-guess their level of preparedness.

The obvious answer from the crowd is “Well, stop watching the news.” Uhm..no. Thats like saying ‘if youre worried all the time about getting hit by a train, stop looking down the tracks to see if a train is coming.’

On the other hand…I f was Joe Average, with less than $500 in the bank , a car payment, a student loan payment, a mortgage, and a family…well, I’d be pretty anxious these days.

So, whats a survivalist to do when , despite the evidence in front of them, they still feel vulnerable and unprepared against the uncertain future? Well, I find sitting down and reviewing the numbers on the spreadsheets to be a bit calming. When you have hard numbers in front of you that say “Yeah, you’ve got enough food for XXX days”, “You have enough money to cover you for X months of unemployment”, “you have enough stored fuel to keep you going for X months”, and that sort of thing…. that takes a lot of the anxiety away.

I have every intention of enjoying my life and not living a life of 24/7 doom-n-gloom. But, when things reach the levels that they have as of late it is pretty hard to not have your head on a swivel all the time.

 

 

 

* = As Mark Twain said, Good decisions come from experience. Experience comes from bad decisions.

Roof Korea 2022

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I missed it, but yesterday was the anniversary of the 1992 LA Loot-n-Scoot Championships… aka The LA Riots. This was the event that gave us the legendary Roof Koreans.

This was before the 1994 Assault Weapons ban, so there was a decent amount of non-neutered hardware around but there wasn’t the emphasis on tactical gear and accoutrements that we see nowadays. What would ‘Roof Korea 2022’ look like?

Well, first off, there’d be, IMHO, a metric crap-ton more AR-15s than were seen back in ’92. I also think youd see a lot more tactical vests, plate carriers, communications, and that sort of thing. I suspect there’d also have been a lot more small-unit activity than just a buncha guys lined up like Alamo defenders.

Although the Roof Koreans did a fabulous job, I maintain that the championship award for Defending His Business Against All Comers should go to gun dealer Harry Beckwith who used an M16, S&W76, shotgun, and revolver in a 105-round bullet party that turned a crash-n-grab gun store burglary into a statistical outlier.

But, thirty years ago the Roof Koreans created a name for themselves and,. I suspect, might have created enough of a legned to temper would-be rioters even today.

 

 

Getting paddled V

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The guns I sent to Bill Springfield came back last week. Sorta. There were several rifles shipped in two separate boxes and somehow FedEx managed to screw things up to the point that it took an entire week for box #2 to arrive.

But, I’m pleased. I’m less than pleased wit FedEx, but I’m quite pleased with Mr Springfield’s work.

And, since TPIWWP:

The paddle mag release really overcomes one of the biggest headaches about the semi-auto G3-type rifles. I had taken to not shooting the non-paddle guns just because they weren’t as convenient as the paddled ones. As a result, I have a couple of the PTR rifles here I haven’t shot in probably seven years. Now that they are all functionally identical, I’ll probably shoot them more.

If I had to do it over again, I’d get the AR-10 from S&W and go with that for my .308 needs. But, I’ve already got a goodly amount of these, a huge amount of mags, and a decent amount of support gear.

Anyway, I feel more at peace now that the incompetent goobers at FedEx finally(!!!) got me the rest of my guns.

Lifestraw video

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This is rather interesting, if true:

Again, I have no idea if this is true or not. But if it is, then it seems to suggest the LifeStraw is living up to it’s advertising.

These things come up on sale at Amazon once in a while and I always keep one in my bag when I’m out in the woods. While it’s true you can “last three days without water” you’ll really, really wish you died on that first one when you drink bad water. Being in a ‘survival situation’ is already fraught with hazards…why add ‘dying of a terminal case of the runs’ to it?

Advertised as being good for 1000 gallons of water, that would mean you could drink about 2.75 gallons a day for a year outta this thing. But, be real…most emergencies that require this sort of device are going to be of much shorter duration…a few days or a week. At which time, with a replacement cost of less than twenty bucks, toss it and get a new one.

As I said, I’ve seen these come up for sale on Amazon every so often and I think they’re a piece of gear thats worth having around in quantity. For real convenience, they make a water bottle with the filter built in…which means when youre on the run you just scoop your bottle through the creek or river, cap it up, and start drinking. I can see that as being a very handy thing.

I usually wait for a sale on Amazon but, geez, with the way things are going these days you have to juggle ‘supply chain issues’ (Read: shortages) against saving a few bucks.

 

 

Heinlein’s “Friday” on sick societies

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One of my favorite Heinlein books is ‘Friday’. It usually gets short shrift  from a certain quarter because of a gang rape scene in which the titular female character is raped and tortured but ‘deals with it’ and minimizes it’s impact on her. She is a trained assassin and soldier, and she simply compartmentalizes it as a normal risk of the trade, commenting on how it’s a rather unprofessional behavior by the other side. Its in Chapter Two, in case youre curious, and it doesn’t warrant throwing out the rest of the book.

Anyway…in the book, Friday is given the task of, basically, data mining to try and pinpoint when and where the calamitous event that will throw mankind into the dark ages will occur. As she reviews all her data sources, there is this:

“What are the marks of a sick culture? It is a bad sign when the people of a country stop identifying themselves with the country and start identifying with a group. A racial group. Or a religion. Or a language. Anything, as long as it isn’t the whole population. A very bad sign. Particularism. It was once considered a Spanish vice but any country can fall sick with it. Dominance of males over females seems to be one of the symptoms. Before a revolution can take place, the population must lose faith in both the police and the courts. High taxation is important and so is inflation of the currency and the ratio of the productive to those on the public payroll. But that’s old hat; everybody knows that a country is on the skids when its income and outgo get out of balance and stay that way – even though there are always endless attempts to wish it way by legislation. But I started looking for little signs and what some call silly-season symptoms. I want to mention one of the obvious symptoms: Violence. Muggings. Sniping. Arson. Bombing. Terrorism of any sort.”
In the book, Friday comes to the conclusion that mankind will succumb to a new version of the Black Plague and that steps need to be taken immediately to prevent it’s occurrence. The book then goes on into it’s usual Heinlein space opera adventure.
But, the notion that a ‘sick, or declining, society shows particular symptoms is pretty interesting. Not sure if I agree with it, but if you read that excerpt above, it’s pretty hard to find something in there that isn’t going on in some quarter.
But…Heinlein was just an author with no particular grounding in social science, epidemiology, or clairvoyance. But…always a ‘but’….but, he was a pretty smart fella and a appreciator of history. So, perhaps he noticed patterns that we don’t.
:::shrug::: Beats me. But dang if pretty much everything in that excerpt isn’t going on right now.

Getting Paddled IV

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TL;DR version: Worth it. Satisfied. Recommended.

So a week or so back I sent of a bunch of PTR rifles to Bill Springfield for some work. Specifically, I wanted these PTR rifles to have the paddle magazine release installed. PTR rifles of newer manufacture now come with this paddle release, but prior to that pretty much all HKlone rifles did not have it. The reason why the paddle mag release was left out on semi-auto guns is covered elsewhere.

So when looking for someone to do the paddle release conversion, Mr Springfields name is the one that came up the most. He had a reputation for good work and quick turnaround time. (And in these uncertain times, the last thing I wanted was a handful of useless PTR halves that used to be complete and functional rifles because someone was taking their time doing the work on them.)

So I contacted Mr Springfield, told him what I had, what I needed, and was he in a position to take in a buncha PTRs and get them back to me in a timely manner? He replied in the affirmative and the deal was struck.

So, I got them back today and it’s time to see how they came out. This is really not something I’m and expert at…I know very little about machining and welding. But..I can tell if a gun is working properly or not, so I’ve got that going for me…which is nice. How do they function? Seem to function just fine. Mag locks in, mag comes out. Of course I’ll take them to the range and fire a few mags out of each one just to be sure, but so far it seems like a pretty solid job.

I also had Mr Springfield send along a trigger pack that has his trigger work done on it. The G3 series has a fabulously unpleasant trigger. It’s my understanding that this was because the German military had, as part of its testing requirements, a drop test where an un-Safe’d gun had to be dropped from a height of 12′ and not go off. The designers of the G3 apparently decided to build in a bit of safety margin and as a result we get a trigger that is not conducive to terrific marksmanship.

I pulled the trigger pack out of my ‘hunting’ PTR and dropped in the improved trigger. A very welcome and very noticeable change. Barely any take up, no creep, and a nice clean(er) break. Definitely a more advantageous trigger to have on the scoped gun.

A word about economics: a new paddle mag release PTR dealers out at around $1100. This means that if you purchased your PTR several years ago when they were in the $700-800 range, it makes more sense to send the rifle out for a week and have the paddle conversion done than buying the newer rifle. (Unless your PTR is old enough that it has the older style chamber fluting as well, in which case then it makes more sense to buy the newer.) All of my paddle-less PTR’s were in the sub $850 range, with my last one being $400 which really makes the conversion a no-brainer. If you really want a PTR, either buy a new one with the paddle release OR get an older one at a cheap enough price that the $200~ for the conversion still puts you ahead of the game.

All in all, I’m pleased. Communication was good, turnaround was good, and quality of work seems good. I’ve nothing to really complain about. If you have an older PTR that doesnt have the paddle mag release and you want to upgrade to something much more convenient to use, I can recommend Mr Springfield based on my experience thus far.