Monthly Archives: June 2025

Range Day

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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

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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

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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.