Monthly Archives: July 2025

Gold at spot

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I’ve mentioned in the past that I sometimes can get gold at spot price, no premium. How does that work? Can it work for you? Depends. Its all about self-interest. Today, while I was jawboning with a local dealer, a fella came in and wanted to sell some 1/4 oz. gold coins. My buddy explained that he would buy it for melt at 95%. He’ll then send it to be melted down and they’ll pay him 97% of spot. That 2% difference is his profit. Now, I enter the picture and tell the dealer, I’ll pay you 100% of spot. So he goes from 2% profit to a 5% profit* (2.5x what he would otherwise have gotten) and I get gold at spot price. Pretty straightforward.

The most obvious question is why wouldn’t he just buy the gold at 95%, throw it in the display case, and sell it at spot (a 5% profit) plus the premium (which can get fairly high depending on the form the gold is in…the smaller the piece, the higher the premium.)

Well, the answer is: risk. If he buys the gold and throws it in the display case with 25 other gold coins, every day it doesn’t sell is a day where the market could go..anywhere. Sure, maybe in a month he makes a $100 profit from the change in metal prices. But he might also lose $100 if the price goes down. Why take the risk when you can get the sure thing, and get 5% all day long, all week long, from someone like me?

Will that work with everyone selling metals? Probably not. But if you say “Hey, any gold you were gonna send off for melt and take less-than-spot for, I’ll give you spot. Cash.” Again, won’t work with everyone but if you have a relationship with a seller, maybe someone you’ve done business with a bunch of times over the year, they might take you up on it.

Having said that, I almost never buy gold at anything other than spot. Gold is already expensive..paying spot and then an additional $50 for a Krugerrand or Gold Eagle just doesn’t make financial sense for me. And it doesnt make sense for the dealer to leave money on the table by selling to a melter at below-spot when someone is there, cash in hand, willing to pay spot.

So, go ask. Might work, might not. If he says no, there’s no hard feelings and if he says yes you’ve gotten a deal.

As an aside, I was there in the shop talking to my ‘gold guy’ when one of you savages called and asked if they could get some metals at spot like that Zero guy on the blog did. Nice try. As I said, it really helps if you throw this idea at a dealer you’ve done business with in the past who knows that a) you’re a good guy and b) you pay in cash immediately. Dont ever for a moment think that “can you hold onto it for a week until my SSDI/VA/SS check comes in?” is going to do you any favors. Always have the cash in hand when you make an offer like this. What the dealer wants is to make a ‘turnaround sale’. He buys it for 95% and six minutes later turns around sells it for 100%. Deals like that are fast money in the pocket for him, his risk exposure is barely measurable, and he did better than he originally planned when he was going to send it to be melted down. And now he doesn’t have to deal with the hassle of packaging, shipping, wire transfers, etc. Everybody wins…and when youre trying to make a deal, thats the kind that will fly. Also, this is very much a face-to-face kind of transaction… the deal looks better for the dealer when he can just hand you the gold and you hand him the cash. Playing phone tag, doing payment over the phone or online, packaging, insuring, shipping, tracking, etc. are all ‘friction’ that makes the deal less and less attractive.

Good luck.

* Mathematically, its not 2%. For simplicity, lets say gold is $3000/oz. He buys it for 95% of spot ($2850). He sells it for 97% of spot ($2910). Thats actually, not a 2% profit, its a 2.1% profit on $2850. Selling it to me at spot isn’t a 5% profit, its a 5.26% profit. Why? because the profit is based on what he paid (return on investment, if you please), and he didnt pay spot, he paid less than spot…$2850. Math.

Video – Exploring the Paranoid Country with 374,142 Bunkers to Hide Everyone (how is this possible?)

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I’ve made a few posts here and there about the Swiss and their lovely bunker fetish. Here’s a pretty cool video of some folks touring privately-owned former-government bunkers. I really have to hand it to the Swiss, they really don’t do anything halfway in regards to these holes in the ground.

The gun collections shown are rather impressive as well.

1am outage

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Its summer, so theres always something burning somewhere. Therefore, I didnt think anything unusual about the slight tinge of smoke in the air last night. When I finally trundled off to bed, I noticed that there was some unusually bright lights outside. I peered at the security cams and, surprisingly, theres a fire truck next door. Hmmm. I step outside and ask a basement flooding, hose-dragging, ladder monkey whats going on. Turns out a power pole down the alley was on fire. He said the power company was on its way.

I asked him, should I expect the power to go out? He said he didnt know. Alright, fine. Head back in the house, climb into bed, and about three minutes later theres a sound like a shotgun going off as, I’m guessing, the transformer or junction at the top of the pole explodes. This is followed a few seconds later by the cacophony of UPS alert sounds going off in my house as my computer and security system power supplies start letting me know theyre running on batteries.

Now, really, I could have just turned off the alarms and gone to sleep secure in the knowledge that Northwestern Energy would have the issue resolved in an hour or so. Or….I could see how my preparations for such an event were working.

I appeared that only mine and about four other houses were directly affected. Most people would have slept through it if not for that gunshot-like explosion earlier. First thing I did was turn on the floor lamp in the living room. I had bought it years ago, rewired it to DC, stuck in a 12v LED light bulb, and stuffed a large AGM battery in its base. With my living lit with a ‘normal’ looking amount of illumination, it was time to check the UPS’s. I had replaced the security camera ones about two years ago. The security camera UPS’s did fine and lasted through the duration of the event. The UPS for my router and modem, however, did not. It gave up the ghost after about forty minutes and it should have lasted much longer than that. That particular UPS is due for replacement, it seems. I need to start noting dates of purchase on my UPS’s as I replace them. I’ve just been buying them at Costco for about $125 ea. In fact, maybe I should just return the weak one for an exchange…Costco is ususally pretty good about refunds.

I had no intention of dragging out the generator unless things went on until daybreak. The freezers were full enough of frozen bottled water that I wasnt worried about their contents for at least several hours.

The various flashlights I had around the house were handy and the glow-in-the-dark tape that I had applied to things like door handles and light switchplates were also handy. Only thing I’d have done differently is perhaps just build my own UPS from scratch with a couple more durable AGM batteries.

But, always eye-opening and reaffirming to have moments like this to test out theories and systems.

Seven years in the deep freeze

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Time for another round of “Will It DIgest”.

Todays contestant is a couple pork tenderloins that went Shackleton back in 2018. Stuffed in the deep freeze for the last seven years, its time to being it back to life and see how it went.

Is anyone terribly surprised that the results are savagely anti-climactic? No weird smells, no weird textures, no alarming gastric consequences. And this isn’t surprising. Packaged properly, which means wrapped tightly in plastic to exclude as much air as possible, and kept around 0-degrees, frozen meat will keep pretty indefinitely. I think the record around here is 11 years.

The really fascinating thing about these archaeological digs is noting how the prices of meat have changed over the years. I remember when I sometimes got 85/15 ground beef for a buck and ahalf a pound when it was on sale. Nowadays its around $5-6 a pound. Thus, when you see a sale….jump on it. Also, this is why a freezer and a vacuum sealer are must-have items.

Video – I ate Survival Food Rations for 30 Days – Here’s What Happened

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I very much like when someone actually real-world tests a piece of gear or a system and goes all Mythbusters on it. Whats it like to live 30 days on one of those 30 day emergency food kits? Well, this guy did it and documented the results. And, yes, the digestive results were as bad as you might have guessed.

This video is really quite informative and I highly suggest watching. Skip it to 1.5x speed if youre in a hurry. The short version is that appetite fatigue is real, even at 2000 calories a day he lost eight pounds, and you’re going to use a lot more water than you might think. In the spirit of good science, he also documented the time, fuel, and water consumption involved in the cooking and cleaning process as well. Excellent material.

Most of us, in a crisis, wouldn’t, I think, be living exclusively on pouch survival food. We’d supplement it with offthe-shelf everyday foods that have fairly good shelf life…canned meats,canned fruit, jarred sauces, etc. BUT….those don’t have thirty year shelf life.

Youre mileage may vary, of course, but this video, in my opinion, is very much worth watching. Watch it, and then think how you’d adjust your long-term food storage inventory appropriately to make your experience better than his.

AP53 – Cant get the real deal HK93, but darn near a.k.a. The HK Hat Trick

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The list of guns that I regret selling is actually pretty short. Probably because I tend to buy and hold. But, there are a couple I really wish I’d kept. Probably the number one is an HK93A3 that I bought in 1986 for the princely some of $600. I was a poor 19-year-old college kid and this was a major purchase. It was the best 5.56 gun I’ve ever owned. It was accurate, utterly reliable, ate even the crappiest ammo, and was fun to shoot. Unfortunately, even in 1986, spare mags were spendy and I eventually traded it off for a CAR-15 which could be fed with $5 magazines. I have regretted selling it ever since.

However… I did not regret it enough to buy another one. These days, a clean HK93A3 with a few mags is easily north of $4-5k. While the .308 version, the HK91, has been cloned by various makers, some good and some really ungood, the HK93 was never really copied as much. Special Weapons, Vector, and Century have dabbled with them in the past, but they are rarely seen. And…most HK clones are just not very good. It’s tough to match the German stuff when theyve amortized the startup costs years ago and have literally decades of experience, versus some little shop that has to start from scratch.

How did PTR do it? Well, in Victor Kiam fashion, they bought the company. See, when a country adopts a weapons system like a rifle or pistol, they often require it to be made in their country. (Waves at SIG USA) Portugal wanted to arm itself with G3’s, so HK built a plant in Portugal. When the G3 was no longer used or supported by Portugal, some guy went in and bought the factory, boxed it up, and shipped it to Connecticut…HK tooling, HK parts, HK everything. Thats the easy way…don’t re-invent the wheel; buy the wheel factory.

Thing is, no military ever really adopted the HK93 ( or its various guises….43, 53, 33, etc) in any major numbers, so there was no big factory to switch to consumer production. But…the Turks managed it, apparently. MKE produces MP5 clones and is out there with a ‘pistol’ version of the HK93.  See, you cant bring in the rifle version because of import bans…but you can bring in a ‘pistol’. What you do with that pistol, regarding a stock or arm brace, once you get it in the US…well, thats between you, your credit card, and HKParts.net.

One of the big headaches of the HK93 was magazines. Few and far between. And expensive when found. Well, MKE makes the gun so they may as well make mags. As a result there are polymer mags out there that are very derivative of the G36 mags in style and appearance. And AC Unity, who seemingly came out of nowhere a few years ago, makes a whole range of HK items including HK93 mags. So with mag availability out of the way….maybe it was time to get back into the HK93 game…just for the nostalgia of my misspent youth.

Eforms are faster these days and the SBR on this jewel came back pretty quick. A quick trip to the engraver and it was done.

Its not 100% faithful to the HK93. For one thing, there is a paddle mag release which the original HK93 rifle that was sold in the US never had. And the lower is ‘push pin’ rather than ‘shelf’, which is true to original full-auto HK rifles but definitely not something you see on semi-auto versions. Thread pitch on the muzzle is also different than the metric used by HK. But other than that, its pretty much a clone.

Its purpose? Well, same as any other SBR’d .223…..fun gun and a one-in-a-hundred time when an SBR is exactly what you need over a carbine full size rifle. It is, in fact, virtually identical in size to my MP5 clones. In fact, quite a few MP accessories will work on this thing..most notably the forends.

Honestly, for me, this is mostly just a ‘fun gun’. Even if it were an original 93 it wouldnt be my first choice for fighting the invading zombies…its a logistical outlier. It may be better, in my opinion, than an AR15 in some uses but at the end of the day I can find mags and parts for an AR quite easily whereas it would be a long and often fruitless search to find parts and mags for the HK if I had to.

By the by, this ‘pistol’ is marketed as the MKE AP53 (imported, but not made, by Century). It scratches an Itch I’ve had since I was 19-years-old and so far its been fun to shoot. I’ll be replacing the tuning fork muzzle device ASAP, though. Accuracy? Once dialed in, I could hit the steel at 100 yards which is about as far as I’d really expect an 8.3″ barrelled .5.56 to be used. (To be used at? To be used for?….English, man.)

I would be remiss to fail to mention that PTR makes a version of this (the so-called HK51) in .308. Thats right, a .308 in an 8.3″ barrel. Sometimes referred to as ‘the semi-auto flash bang dispenser’. Not for me.

I do believe I’ve now hit the roller-locked trifecta – 7.62×51, 5.56, and 9mm…call it ‘the HK Hat Trick’.

A real estate ad tailored to me

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A friend sent me this and I thought it was worth sharing.

You can watch the world burn in perfect silence….no one will ever find you

Really, it isnt exactly what Im looking for (but pretty close, actually) however the marketing is pretty spot on for someone like me. “Sit on my porch and watch the world burn” is, literally, one of the phrases I use in describing what I’m looking for.

Real estate – 32 acres with 60,000 sq ft bunker

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If I found a place like this in Montana, I’d be very tempted to rob a bank or two and buy it….

Nestled in Southern Bedford County Tennessee – Fabulous Homestead with 32-acres, additional building sites, 60,000+/- square-foot Underground Cavern System and modern luxury located in southern Middle Tennessee. ….. In addition to the main home, there is a spray-foam insulated garage / shop / ADU featuring 1 bed / 1 bath equipped with RV hookup with septic, electric, and water hookups. Perfect for extra income or multi use functionality. Enjoy the security of the whole-house generator and water filtration system. The property is 90% fenced – cattle-ready with rolling hills and a perfect mixture of pasture and mature woods including 2 cabins (one used as a chicken coop and the other as a shooting lodge), shooting range, water storage system and solar-ready setup. Cavern System – 60,000 square feet of private caverns, entry points are sealed with over 10 tons of steel, ceiling heights up to 30 feet, generator included, and natural spring water system that flows non stop 24/7/365. Potential uses are endless – safe haven, private retreat, underground event space or revenue generator. This is more than a homestead, it is an opportunity to own something truly rare. This property is offered fully-furnished with equipment and will include a Humvee shown in the media section as well. Schedule your private showing today!

Reminds me very much of this.

Price reduced

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You guys remember this group of properties? The realtor dropped me a line to tell me that the sellers have become ‘more motivated’ with some of the lots reduced by $50-60k. Buddy, you could drop it to $0k and I’d probably still not be interested. Too much going on with these properties that make it a hard pass for me.

So, still looking for a chink of dirt. Interestingly, Im seeing more and more properties getting marked down as I read various news articles about how the housing market is slumping. Perhaps theres a buying opportunity coming up? It’d be nice.

I fully recognize that ‘perfect’ is the enemy of ‘good enough’…but honestly, I haven’t seen ‘good enough’ yet. There’s always “Yeah, its perfect except for…” and some things, like a public road bisecting the property, are just not things Im willing to compromise on. So…search continues.

KEArms and Angstadt 9mm carbines

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Lovely weekend here in the mountain west. Hotter than a two dollar pistol, but, so far, no major fires.

Last year I picked up a pair of 9mm carbines that take Glock magazines. One was an Angstadt and the other was from KEArms (the guys who make the poly lowers). I’d posted about the Angstadt and , I must say, it’s a really nice gun. Strong recommend.

The KEArms gun was also quite nice, but it was giving me fits. I could never get off more than five or six rounds before I’d have a wild failure to eject. Since the 9mm cases are so short, and there’s plenty of room for bolt travel in the gun, a case would fail to eject, the bolt would cycle all the way back, and upon return the bolt would slide forward with the unejected case held firmly to it, and the empty case would actually push the next round out of the mag and into the chamber….creating a hellish doublefeed.

I tried swapping springs, changing ammo, etc, etc. Nothing worked. Since I had a lot of guns here to play with I kinda set the KEA gun back and forgot about it. Last month I finally contacted KEA and explained the problem. They emailed me a paid shipping label and sent it back. Took ’em about two weeks to get to it. There was some problem with the bolt and they replaced it. Got the gun back yesterday and headed to the range. Shoots fine.

One thing about those KEA poly lowers is their claim to fame is that they are lightweight. The 9mm is no powerhouse of recoil, but in a lightweight gun like the one I have it was interesting that the recoil almost seemed the same as what you’d get from a .223. I’ll throw a tri-lug on the end of the barrel and see if a suppressor makes any difference.

Once you’ve played with roller-delayed 9mm guns, you become a little spoiled and a straight blowback 9mm seems ker-chunky and brutal.

Invariably, any time someone brings up the topic of pistol-caliber carbines there will be someone who chimes in with “Ive never seen the point of carrying a full size carbine in a less than full-size caliber” or “You might as well just have it in .223 for the same size and weight”. Arguments that completely ignore everything except caliber. Would I rather run out the door with a 5.56 carbine than a 9mm one? Absolutely. So why would I have a 9mm carbine? Very streamlined logistics for situations where you don’t have the luxury of carrying two different types of magazines and two different types of ammo. If all you can take with you is what you can carry, there’s an advantage to streamlined logistics. Additionally, I can suppress a 9mm carbine a lot easier than a 5.56.

To carry the pointlessness of this argument even further, someone will say either:

a) If portability is a factor then you should just grab a 10/22 and a .22 pistol
or
b) Get a 5.56 ‘pistol’ AR

Firstly, Im not going though the apocalypse with just .22 . As it is, I’m already compromising on terminal ballistics by dropping to 9mm. Secondly, no AR ‘pistol’ is really a pistol. A pistol fits in a holster on your belt or tucks under your shirt for compact and concealable purposes. “Get 5.7 then”, will be the retort. Sure…I’ll get right on that when I can find 5.7 just as easily as I can 9mm.

First choice for Der Tag? Nah. But if I had to run outta here with just a backpack and what could fit in it, I’d probably grab the 9mm Glock, 9mm carbine, 9mm suppressor, a dozen Glock mags, as much 9mm as I have room for, and call it a day.