G3 upgrade

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I have a handful of G3-style rifles. I got them because I wanted a proven .308 platform and because, at the time, magazines were less than $1.00 each. However, the G3 platform is a mixed bag. It has two tremendous advantages in its favor: brute ruggedness and no gas system to screw with. After that it has a couple disadvantages…one of the biggest is that the design of the gun makes mounting an optic very difficult. The problem isn’t as easy as simply slapping some pic rail on top of the receiver. No, see the problem is that the stock that is used has a length of pull that is a bit longer than it needs to be, and there’s a bit of a dogleg drop to the stock to bring your eyes into line with the iron sights atop the rifle. If you mount an optic, you have to literally give up your cheek weld to get your face high enough to see through the scope.

Gun Jesus, a long time hater of the G3 platform, made a video about a ‘modernization’ project he did to a G3-clone. Among other things, he made it left-handed-friendly, added an extended safety, changed the cocking handle out, got a trigger job, and most importantly swapped the stock for one made by the Swede firm of Spuhr.


I’d been wanting to add an optic to my pet PTR-GI rifle but did not want to have to go through the awkwardness of a bizarre cheek riser kludge. Gun Jesus’ experiments, and successful experiences, with modifying his gun prompted me to go ahead and drop a rather healthy chunk of change on what is essentially an M4 stock for the G3.

I ordered the stock from Mile High Shooting and, yes, it really did cost that much. Got the stock in about a week. It would have been nice to have an instructional video on the stock changeout, but the one-page printed instructions were adequate. There is virtually no way you are going to use iron sights on the rifle with this thing in place…you simply cannot get your face low enough to get a sight picture. But….your face sits perfectly where it needs to be to look through a LPVO or dot optic. Since I had a couple extra Leupold Patrol scopes and mounts sitting here, thats what I went with.

Loaded up some 150 gr. softpoints and went to the range. Recoil mitigation? Oh yes….the recoil is nowhere near what it normally is with the issue stock. The stock puts my face in the perfect position to acquire the scope quickly. First round off the magazine tended to print about an inch away from the others, but if you discount that it was turning in 1.5″ groups at 100 yards. Getting a trigger job probably would make a big difference. However, for going out and dropping the hammer on Bambi this thing should be just fine.

If you have a G3 pattern rifle, and you want to make it a bit more native to optics, this stock (if you can stomach the expense) is everything youre looking for. And since TPIWWP, here you go:

By the by, if I had to do it all over again I probably would just go with an AR-10 for the superior ergonomics. Magazines would have been several orders of magnitude more expensive, but I think that might have been a worthwhile tradeoff. One of the reasons I didn’t go with the AR-10 originally is because, at that time, there was no ‘standardized’ magazine…some outfits used modified FAL mags, some used modified M14 mags, some used proprietary mags, etc, etc. Nowadays it looks like thats all shaken out.

It approaches

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Regardless of the election results, you’ve got until January 20 until the current Presidential term expires. You’ve got a little over two months… ready, set, go! Here’s a reminder of what you might (or might not) be facing:

Guys, panic buying comes in four waves:

  1. Right before the election – “This idiot might win”
  2. Right after the election – “Crap, he won. I better get busy and buy…”
  3. Right before the inauguration – “That idiot takes office next week. I better buy…”
  4. Right after the inauguration – “Frak, he’s President now. I better buy while I can..”

This happens every four years. All this has happened before, and all this will happen again.

 

Equanimity

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If you ignore the election results (whenever they finally get around to finalizing them), there’s still plenty of other things to worry about. Don’t spend all day obsessively refreshing your browser to see what happened. There’s still a superflu, economic uncertainty, race-related disturbances, and the usual nonsense out there to prepare against.

As Frank Castle says…the battle may be over but the war goes on.

Just In Time

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These arrived today:

Thats a lot of 9mm Glock happysticks

Fifty of them will go into the Deep Sleep, a few will get stuffed in the bag with my PC Charger, a few will get cycled into the Bag O’ Tricks, and the rest will be sold at sphincter-numbing prices to panic-driven people who really should have seen the handwriting on the wall a long time ago and need to be reminded that there are consequences to waiting until the last minute.

Vote early, vote often

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No in-person voting here in my neck of he woods. I do not like that. I like ritual and routine, I like the standing in line, signing the forms, the little rickety privacy cubicle, etc. I cannot shake the feeling that vote-by-mail or absentee ballot is ripe for chicanery of the most vile kind. Yes, you could argue that the in-person voting methods are just as susceptible to fraud but it doesn’t feel like that to me nearly as much as this other method does.

This time next week

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I am utterly fascinated and anxious all at the same time to see what the world (and markets) look like at this time next week. Its like a cross between watching them draw the Powerball numbers and waiting for a grenade to explode.

Battery-in-a-box buffoonery

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I was up at CostCo the other day and saw this:

The semantic part of me recoils at the advertising calling this a ‘gasless generator’. A generator…generates…electricity. This thing stores electricity, it doesn’t make it. Calling it a ‘gasless generator’ is at best a stupid mistake and, more likely, at worst, misleading. Its like calling a 55-gallon drum of water a ‘portable well’.

What is it? Basically its a big lead acid battery with a built in inverter and some bells and whistles. What does it do? Absolutely nothing, as far as I can tell, that you can’t do for a fraction of the price with some wires, a couple AGM batteries, and a battery charger.

It’s 55Ah, which is, really, kinda puny. What it does have is a built in ‘solar controller’, the ability to be used as a UPS, visual metrics, and a few bells and whistles. But, really, it’s just this with a nicer casing:

If you zoom in on the packaging you can see it boasts that it’ll run an LED lamp for 48 hours. Color me unimpressed. I ran one for almost 4x that long with the battery jump box and it cost 1/5 the price.

While I like the turnkey plug-n-play approach this thing represents, the frugal part of me is aghast thinking what I could (easily) put together for $500 that would perform the same basic functions (albeit without the bells and whistles of automatic low-discharge shutdown and solar controller) at an exponential increase in capacity/runtime.

Article – The American Government’s Secret Plan for Surviving the End of the World

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This led to a key recommendation: five 50-person “interagency cadres” that would be pre-positioned or pre-deployed during emergencies to support would-be presidential successors. These “presidential successor support teams,” codenamed TREETOP cadres by the Pentagon, would deploy randomly to any one of “several hundred sites, perhaps 2-3 thousand, that would be pre-selected,” allowing for a relocation of institutional knowledge that was “highly flexible and adaptive.”

A fascinating little piece about a government-continuity program that came out from, of all things, the Carter administration. Presidential successor support teams? Secret hideouts spread across the land? Agencies tasked with teams to transport and protect possible Presidential successors? For those of you who remember your apocalypse fiction, this seems mildly reminiscent to the old ‘Guardians’ pulp novels from back in the day.

Make no mistake, there’s probably some sort of “Crystal Peak”-type facility out there that we don’t know about (as opposed to the ones we do know about, like the Greenbrier.) Are there special ‘cadres’ of .gov out there whose sole purpose is to navigate political VIPs through the imagined chaos to concrete-reinforced safety? Maybe. It’s certainly an interesting thing to think about. I want to say I recall reading somewhere that there were elite military units that were trained and tasked with just that sort of duty but I can’t recall where.

A quick search on Google for “Treetop” and “Continuity of government” turned up a few more results, but this one was interesting.: It mentions “… supplemented by more than 100 other bunkers, sprinkled around the country, as well as numerous mobile units, that have included two ships”

Interestingly, there was a recent article I read about how during World War Two the Brits had a special plan, team, and real estate specifically for hauling the monarchy to safety in the event of German invasion. And, buildingo n that, a Cold War evacuation plan as well.

Interesting article, though, and it raises interesting questions. To me, that  made it worth the short read and inclusion here. Who knows what sort of poured concrete palaces hide ‘neath the deserts and prairies?

 

 

Lego guns

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Someone asked me in email about gunsmithing/armorer courses. I thought about it a minute and realized that, for me, while I know enough to (usually) get a gun apart, back together, and diagnose problems, I try to avoid the issue altogether by selecting guns that don’t usually require ‘gunsmithing’.

If the end of the world happens to occur, the odds are pretty good that taking your malfunctioning thundertoy to the services of a competent gunsmith will not be an option. So, whats a survivalist to do? Well, the most obvious thing is – don’t break your gun. Some guns are more prone to breakage than others. But since we can’t always be confident our gun won’t break, the next reasonable step is to have a gun that, if it does break, does not require gunsmithing but rather a simple parts swap. For that, two guns spring to mind – the typical survivalist pairing of a Glock and an AR. (Yes, an AK wins on durability, but when it does break youre going to need a welder, rivets, a mill, or other specialized treatments.)

Starting with the AR, it’s hard to think of any other semiautomatic non-pistol-caliber carbine that doesn’t require the services of a full-service gunsmith to tweak, maintain, or repair (note I am not talking about making a match-grade target AR..I’m talking about just a rack-grade hand-it-to-a-grunt level of AR.). FAL, G3, AK, whatever…most of the common ‘battle rifles/carbines’ require some degree of professional skill to swap a barrel, or fit internal parts that need replacing. The AR is pretty much plug-n-play. I suppose the metric to be used is ‘can I repair this without needing a lathe or a milling machine’? Bad barrel on the AR? Swap the upper or change out the barrel. Broken sear or somesuch? Trigger group parts drop in. There seems to be, in my experience, very little, if anything, that requires hand-fitting or machining to be done to keep, or return, an AR to functionality.

Even more so with the Glock. If you’re building some type of uber Glock for competition, maybe theres things you want to polish or hand-fit. But for running around during a crisis I don’t believe theres a single part on the Glock that wont just drop in and function. To be fair, virtually every modern polymer gun is like that, though. Glock seems to have gotten it right first, though. The antithesis of this would be the 1911 which, with modern machining specs, has improved in terms of drop-in parts but I would bet you money that you could take a stripped frame, order a buttload of Wilson parts from Brownells, put it all together, and it won’t run because something, somewhere needs a bit of stoning or metalwork. Not so with the Glock.

Typical Glock repair kit

Typical 1911 repair kit

So, for me, my need for learning advanced gunsmithing skills is obviated a bit by selecting guns that, broadly, don’t require them…or require so little of them, skillwise, that it isn’t a challenge (or expense) to develop those skills and acquire the tools.

Shotguns? A bit trickier, but I have taken apart a lot of Mossberg 500-series and they’re pretty plug-n-play as well. Not as much as an AR, but Id say they are the least ‘skill intensive’ shotgun in terms of repairs.

When you get into things like hunting/’sniper’ rifles, all bets are off. The Savage series of rifles are probably the easiest to deal with since you can headspace and remove/install barrels with simple tools and not need a mill/lathe operation.

By the by, even if youre not a tinfoil-hat-type like yours truly, there are still some scenarios where you won’t have gunsmithing as an option even without bombs falling and boogaloos in the street.

Under a Biden administration, for example, your AR or FAL becomes a ‘Turn them all in‘ sort of item and then your option of taking it to a gunsmith is about as viable as taking your unregistered machinegun in for a tune up. You’re either stuck with a broken gun, have to find an ‘underground’ gunsmith, or DIY. And DIY is a lot easier with a Lego gun.

Whatever you get for that upcoming uncertain future, keep in mind how easy (or not) it will be to repair and maintain. For now, I’d say the Glock and AR kinda sit at the top.