Tag Archives: DIY

Sealer replacement

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Years ago, I picked up a heat sealer and a selection of mylar bags in various sizes. One of the ideal uses I found for them was to create small, environmentally-impervious first aid kits that could be slipped into a pack, pocket, or pouch unobtrusively. It worked quite well. So well, in fact, that I loaned out the heat sealer and a supply of bags to someone and…never got it back. I’d remind them periodically about it and they’d ignore me. So…lesson learned. It occurs to me that since I have these new small bags to test out I need to put together another few of those small FAKs to put in them. So..since I’m apparently never getting my other heat sealer back, or being compensated for it, I’ll have to order a new one. So..this arrived today. I still had a stash of bags from my last experiments, so I’m good there although if I need more the go-to guys seem to be Sorbent Systems.

Absolutely you cold do something similar with the vacuum sealer but the bags used for that are, in my opinion, not as durable and rugged as the Mylar. However, if you’re not worried about having difficulty opening a layered package, you could achieve great results by vacuum sealing the contents to reduce space, and then sealing the vacuum sealed package in a mylar pouch for protection. Suspenders and a belt…but if you only have one hand you’re gonna have a heck of a time one-handing your way though all that packaging. Gotta weigh the pros and cons, I suspect.

Anyway, to thats my project for the next couple days – put together a few decent small FAKs and seal them up for carry in the new bags. Nothing fancy, but certainly something more comprehensive than just some bandaids and bactine.

FlexSeal and gas cans

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This is turning into quite the series of posts, isn’t it? I’d mentioned that I’d used a spray-coating on the bottom of my gas cans in order to protect the base of the cans from paint-removing scrapes and the resultant rust that would occur. I had done this before the arrival of Flex Seal which is, basically, spray on rubber coating. Seemed logical to go ahead and try it out on the new cans.

So, we take a new can and do a poor job of taping off the edge of where we want to spray:

Hit it with a goodly amount of FlexSeal and let it dry:

Seems to be just what the doctor ordered.

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.

Light work

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About three years ago, I picked up some AGM batteries off Craigslist. My original intent was that I wanted to rewire a common house lamp to use 12v LED lighting. The idea being, naturally, that in a power outage I would have a ‘normal’-looking source of light, rather than the stark and brutal harsh lighting that we get from just standing a battery lantern on top of the refrigerator or something.

So, my initial forray was…meh. I wound up buying an adapter to let me use a bayonet-type socket in place of a normal screw-in bulb socket...basically following these directions. But, in that case, it turned out there was a much easier way to do things – simply buy an LED desk lamp and remove the ‘wall wart’ AC-to-DC inverter and simply run it straight off 12v. Which I did…and it worked awesomely.

And that’s fine. My own testing showed that off of a battery jump pack the lamp would run non-stop for over a week. But try lighting an entire room with a desk lamp…it’s not really up to the task. So, I had a cheapo ‘dorm quality’ lamp sitting in the corner that I decided to experiment on.

First thing was to cut off the existing plug, determine where + and – were (you have a 50/50 shot of getting it right on the first try), and attaching some method of connecting to the battery. Bare wires work, but if you can make things neater, why not?

Next step was the bulb. Here you can see the previous bulb, and the bayonet adapter, that I had used. It worked, yes…but it didn’t put out enough light to seem like the lamp was ‘normal’ in its output. The other bulb is a Made-in-China (just like Covid!) bulb ‘designed’ for low voltage 12v systems. A somewhat more elegant solution than a bayonet adaptor and odd-attachment bulbs. All this required is a) bulb and b) changing the plug on the wire.

So, hows it look? Not bad.

(Yes, I have Archer on DVD. Do you not?)

Thank you for smoking

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Johnny Trochmann,, he of Militia Of Montana fame, puts in an appearance at the larger gun shows in these parts. He has about a dozen tables covered with what could best be desscribed a ‘survivalist’ gear…potassium iodide pills, surgical kits, QuickClot, books on everything, specialty ammo, and that sort of thing. At some point he must have found an in with someone in the cruise line industry or a subsidiary thereof because he always has parachute flares, hand flares, and smoke generating devices for sale that clearly came from someone’s lifeboat emergency kits. These items are usually a couple years ‘out of date’ but that doesn’t really mean much in materiel like this.

Invariably, I pick up a buncha parachute flares and smoke cans. Why not? Both can come in handy if something goes wrong in the boonies and you need to indicate your position to the ‘copter people, and, honestly, there are some tactical applications as well.

Despite having a pretty large store of these items squirreled away, I’ve never actually gotten around to trying the smoke devices. The reason was simple…I can’t very well touch one off in town without attracting a  large amount of attention (thats what the dang things are designed for, after all) and I never seem to have the time to head to anywhere remote to try them. Until today.

I was scouting out some hunting areas that I have not been to for many, many years and since they were hell-and-gone from prying eyes I figured I’d try one of those smoke cannisters. Pop the top, pull the igniter, and toss it for distance. It sputtered and then started spitting out a rather impressive cloud of smoke for a good three minutes. I didn’t take any pictures or video because YouTube has plenty of them showing this exact version, but it lived up to the expectations. Does it have, shall we say, ‘non-rescue applications’? Well, just from what I observed, you throw three of these down a stairwell or hallway and you’re pretty much going to reduce visibility to zero in a hurry. Maybe you have a use for that sort of thing, maybe not. But…like many tools, it’s a multitasker when you have the right mindset.

Johnny T. sells these at the gun shows for about $4 ea although if you buy enough he usually cuts you a deal. I’ve got a couple dozen in storage and I keep a few in the vehicle at all times ‘just in case’.

Buy them new? Man, I’d hate to have to…but, maybe I wouldn’t have to:

When I was a kid, my high school science teacher whipped up a sugar smoke bomb for a class movie project they were doing. He rather…underestimated…the amount of smoke his little device would generate and the fire department rolled up to the school thinking the roof was going up like Dresden. (Protip: instead of a coloring agent, mix in fine ground red pepper or cayenne to create an irritant effect.)

Anyway…if you’re in Montana and happen to run across Johnny Trochmann and his Tables Of Fun, be sure to grab a dozen or so of those things. And tell him Commander Zero sent you.

Not an expert

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When it comes to guns, I’m not ashamed to say that I think of myself as a bit of an expert on most things…history, function, disassembly, etc. Oh, sure, you bring out something esoteric enough like a Gewehr41 or a Rast-Gasser and you’ll probably stump me on something like disassembly, but by and large I’d say I’m pretty darn good.

At least, that’s what I thought until working on the rather plebian Beretta 92. As a good survivalist, I figured I should have at least a couple 92’s laying around since the military uses/used them and therefore there’d be surplus (or ‘liberated’) parts and mags aplenty. But, I don’t like manual safeties on a double-action gun. There’s no need, since the gun is DA and usually carried with the hammer down.

Beretta eventually recognized this and has a variant, designated as ‘G’, where the safety acts as a decocker only. (Much like my dear Ruger P95DC pistols.) Beretta makes the conversion available as a kit for about $55. So..I ordered one. Step one was to disassemble the existing safety from the slide. I did so and as I looked at the back of the slide I saw this:

Well, bloody hell….the slide is cracked. And I kicked myself for not inspecting the gun more closely when I bought it years ago. Alright, let’s go to Beretta’s customer service and see if we can wheedle a new slide from them since this one clearly is broken. Their reply:

It’s supposed to look like that. I have to give kudos to Beretta CS for a) replying within 48 hrs and b) not calling me a dumbass.

I’ve taken apart a lot of pistols in my years of gun fondling. You look at the back of a 1911, Glock, Sig, HiPower, Ruger, etc, etc, and that hole for the firing pin is always solid. I’ve never seen a relief cut in that area of a pistol. But..I’m not a machinist, not a mechanical engineer, and not a metals stress expert. So, if the guys at Beretta, who have been making boomtoys for several hundred years, say “No, no, dude….it’s supposed to look like that”, well, I guess that’ll have to do.

But….it sure looked like a stress fracture to me.

Clearly I need more time tinkering with Berettas. But it was a bit sobering to realize that, maybe I don’t know it all after all. Maybe I should have read the warning printed on the slide:

By the way, the G conversion was a breeze if you ignore Beretta’s incredibly complicated online instructions and just YouTube your way through it. (ProTip: watch video, watch video again.) Took me about ten minutes to get it installed and it works like a champ. A lot of folks carry guns like this with the hammer down and safety off, which is reasonably safe. However, those same people are usually concerned about the safety accidentally becoming engaged as the gun is bumped around or brushed up against things…last thing you want is to grab your gun, bring it up, pull the trigger and have nothing happen because the safety you left in the off position has somehow engaged itself. This G conversion prevents that.

Article – How to Make a 5,000-Year-Old Energy Bar

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Perhaps 5,000 years ago this sort of thing was the pinnacle of food portability, but I suspect that with modern techniques, materials, and technologies we can come up with something better. However, when those things are lacking it’s nice to know the fallback position will work.

In Secrets of Polar Travel, explorer Robert Peary spends several pages waxing poetic about the merits of a ration he brought on his expeditions to the Arctic between 1886 and 1909. In addition to ranking it “first in importance” among his supplies, he genuinely enjoyed the food, writing that it was the only meal “a man can eat twice a day for three hundred and sixty-five days in a year and have the last mouthful taste as good as the first.”

Peary was talking about pemmican, a blend of rendered fat and powdered, dried meat that fueled exploration and expansion long before his attempts to reach the North Pole. Archaeological evidence suggests that as early as 2800 BC humans hunted the bison that roamed North America’s Great Plains and blended their meat, fat, and marrow into energy-dense patties with a serious shelf-life. A single pound of pemmican lasted for years and might’ve packed as many as 3,500 calories.

Food certainly does give energy, but I’m not sure if I’d call these ‘energy bars’ rather than ‘food bars’, anymore than beef jerky is ‘energy strips’.

It might be interesting to experiment with. Be kinda nice to make, essentially, some Purina People Chow.

Link – DIY Panzerfaust

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Well, crap….there’s another project I’m going to have to pencil in some time for.

The niche market for legally registered disposable anti-tank weapons may soon experience a well overdue boom with the introduction of a historically accurate Panzerfaust 60 copy you can make at home. Jonathan Wild started the project last year which will eventually culminate in a book detailing how to build one yourself from scratch.

Capable of firing over 100 yards, the warhead (in this case is a practice dummy) uses a propelling charge of Goex cannon black powder housed in a cardboard tube attached to the rear of the fins. Like the original Panzerfaust design, initiation is provided by means of a primer (in this case commercial muzzleloading primers) fitted into an external nipple that is struck via the sheet metal trigger mechanism. The launching tube is simply a length of commercially available steel tube onto which the trigger mechanism is welded.

The potential seems…interesting.

Ammo Security VI – Economics of reloading

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There’s not a lot of things I consider myself an expert on. But, one thing I genuinely do think of myself as an expert on is reloading ammunition. I’ve done it all from .22 Hornet to .50-140, using every brand of press, jacketed and lead bullets, cast my own bullets, reformed my own brass, etc, etc.

I am also a tightwad with a streak of money nerd. Is reloading cost effective? Well, when you reload the cost of your ammo goes down so you wind up shooting more…so, in that regard it’s mostly a wash. But, on terms of shooting the same amount of ammo, it’s a different story. What I mean is, if you buy a box of .300 Win. Mag and then you reload that box of .300 Win. Mag. one is going to be a buttload cheaper than the other. Cheap enough to make it worth it? Let’s find out.

Let’s go with one of the belted mags……300 Win, 7mm Rem, .338 Win, .257 Weatherby….whatever. They all track around $2-$4 a round. Let’s buy 20 pieces of new brass, 100 premium bullets, a brick of primers, and a pound of powder.

I’m just gonna run over to GunBroker and get some prices….

  • Federal .300 Win Mag 165 gr. Nosler Partition, 20 rounds for about $40
  • Nosler Partitions, .30 165 gr, 100 bullets is about $45
  • New brass from Winchester is about $30/50
  • And we’ll use a load of 70 grains of IMR 4350 (There are 7000 grains of powder per pound, so under “Qty” one pound would be ‘7000’)

Factory ammo is $2. We can reload it for $1.39. But, once we fire it off and re-use the brass our cost per round drops to $0.79.

What if you reload something really spendy like .338 Lapua.

  • Federal Premium 250 gr. Sierra MK 20 rounds for about $90
  • Hornady brass at $3 each
  • Sierra 250 MK at $40/50
  • 76 grains of powder

Factory ammo is $4.50. We can reload it for $4.16. But, once we fire it off and re-use the brass our cost per round drops to $1.16.

If you buy a good reloading kit, like RCBS RockChucker kit, thats about $400. You would have to reload 120 rounds of .338 Lapua for it to pay for itself. Or reload 329~ rounds of .300 Win Mag.

Seems like a good deal, right? It is…until you get into economies of scale. Federal cranks out a bazillion rounds of 5.56 every year for the military. As a result, they’ve got the whole thing dialed in…they’ve got their costs down, their equipment amortized, production streamlined…as a result they can make 5.56 so cheap that you almost don’t want to waste your time reloading. Let’s check out some 55 gr. FMJ Federal ammo:

  • Federal 820 rounds for about $350 (From Midway)
  • Hornady brass at $0.29 each
  • 55 gr. FMJ at $.0.13
  • 25 grains of powder

Admittedly, almost no one uses new commercial brass to load .223 since fired brass is available at virtually no cost. But, for consistency….

You’re at $0.56 per round for your first loading…thats actually more than what factory ammo costs. However, once you fire that off and reload it, you drop down by sixteen cents per round. Put another way, you paid Midway $350 but once you fire it off that ammo can be reloaded at around $227.

When you get into stuff like 9mm and .223 the savings really become negligible when you factor in your time and whatnot. However, when ammo isn’t available at any price, then the advantages become readily apparent.

If you want to play “what if”, I’ll give you a copy of the spreadsheet. Anything in green is a variable that you can tinker with. Crunch some numbers. You’ll see that if you’re a guy who shoots oddball calibers (Weatherby, Ultramag, Lapua, etc.) you can save some serious coin. Explore your options – what if you get a really good deal on powder? What if you use inexpensive cast bullets? What if you use cheap once-fired brass?

If you find this info useful….

 

Marlin surgery

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Pistol caliber carbines (PCCs) are all the rage today. Why not? Yes, you lose ballistics performance but you gain streamlined logistics. Anyway, let’s recall that the original idea behind PCC’s was not to have a carbine that took the same mags as your Glock. No, the original idea was to have a carbine that took the same ammo as your Colt revolver. The genesis of the PCC goes back to the Colt Single Action and the iconic Win. ’73. A fella with a saddlebag full of .44-40 ammo could keep his rifle, pistol, and himself fed. Leverguns: the OG PCC.

I have a lovely Marlin 1894 in .357 and it’s a perfect companion to my GP-100’s. But…I wanted a little more horsepower. Time for a .44 Mag. And then I came across a nice Marlin in .44 Mag but it had one glaring little problem:

This … abberation… has no place on a rifle as otherwise magnificent as this old-style Marlin

A crossbolt safety on a hammered lever-action rifle is an affront to Crom, nature, and pre-litigious society. If you run around in the woods with a cocked hammer on your levergun you are, sir, a fool. It is no less and no more work to cock the hammer when ready to fire than it is to push an ugly, obtrusive crossbolt safety. This is why Marlins (and Winchesters) without the crossbolt safety bring more money than those that have them. So, you have an otherwise excellent, high-quality, Marlin rifle but it has the absurd crossbolt safety. Do you live with it? Slap an itty bitty o-ring on the ‘FIRE’ side of it to prevent accidentally setting it to SAFE? Or….do you….remove it.

Duh and/or hello…..you remove the worthless thing.

Several outfits offer replacement ‘plugs’ to get that stupid safety outta there. I went with this one which was suggested to me by fellow blogger Ryan. (How ya doin’, buddy!) It arrived today. Time for gun surgery.

First, know your enemy:

Know your exploded diagram as you know yourself and in a thousand disassemblies you will never be left with ‘extra’ parts. In this case, that v-groove is what keeps you from pushing the crossbolt completely through and out the other side of the receiver. There is a set screw, spring, and ball bearing that keeps it in place. Let’s get the stock off and find that set screw.

I think I can guess where to start looking. Under whatever crap that yellow stuff is, there lies our starting point. Let’s clean that crap out with a dental pick and get rolling.

Alright…back that thing out and be careful not to lose it. It’s tiny. There’s also a ball and spring in there. Get those too and don’t lose ’em. Once it’s out, push the crossbolt out the ‘SAFE’ side of the receiver (right side). You’ll be left a with a glaringly large hole in the side of your beautiful Marlin.

Take your replacement crossbolt and slide it in. You need to line up the little dent for the detent on the crossbolt with the hole for the set screw. Easiest way? Get crossbolt in place, look down set screwhole with bright flashlight, rotate crossbolt until detent lines up with hole. Firmly hold crossbolt in place and replace set screw tightly. Put stock back on gun and bask in the beauty:

And there you go. Not as pretty as if it had never had the stupid crossbolt safety, but miles better than still having it.

Hey, if you find this imformative or useful howabout kicking back a little something to yours truly?