Closeout Blackhawk pouches

ETA: Well nuts….looks like they won’t deal with anyone without a resale certificate or FFL. My suggestion is to trot down to your local gun shop and see if, in exchange for turning them onto this deal, they’ll let you piggyback on their order.

Someone asked if I’d be doing some sorta group buy on this…nope. Too much work, not enough profit. But if you look hard enough I’m sure you can find someone to order for you.

One of my vendors is having a sale on some closeout Blackhawk gear. You know…Blackhawk…the guys that brought you such classics as the Derpa Serpa holster.

Since the pouches are non-FFL items, and on a closeout which means they probablt are happy to unload them as fast as they can, perhaps you can order without an FFL.

I ordered the M4 pouches, upright GP pouch, medical pouch, Nalgene bottle pouch, and utility pouch in…uhm…’quantity’.

It’s not just for breakfast anymore

I was going to say that deep down, I’m really just a big kid. But, if you knew me, you’d say that its really not that deep down since my immaturity and ‘boyish charm’ are quite readily apparent on the surface. I mention this because when I saw that breakfast cereal was on sale, I went deep. What breakfast cereal, you may ask? Why none other than the palate-shredding extruded waist-expander that is….Cap’n Crunch (Although to be fair, I knew him when he was Lieutenant Crunch back in Basrah).

I love a bargain, and I love food. Mix the two together and you get a happy Zero. So, when they had cereal marked down to $0.99/box I figured “Ok, lets get our crunch on.”

Normally $103, paid $27, saved…a bunch.

I actually don’t usually eat this as breakfast cereal. Neither, I suspect, does anyone else. Its more of a eat-it-out-of-the-box-while-playing-on-the-computer thing. But, no matter how you do it, I  apparently have at least a years worth of the stuff on hand. And, yes, it’ll keep for a year.

In case anyone is curious, what is my favorite breakfast cereal to actually eat as breakfast cereal? Surprisingly, on of the most boring things you can imagine – plain Kellog’s Corn Flakes. (But it’s best not to delve too deeply into the rather…NSFW?….origin of corn flakes.)

So, there’s a couple of cases of kid’s cereal sitting on the shelves in the basement. I suspect they’ll last until about this time next year. Unfortunately, milk does not. And, yes, I’ve tried the shelf-stable milk and it just doesn’t taste very good to me. So..if I want to actually eat breakfast cereal qua breakfast cereal, I’m gonna have to run to the store once in a while for a half gallon of moo juice.

But..hey..bargain!

Estate sale

Minding my own business…not hurting anyone…just trying to go about my life without interference and pain. And I get a text message:

“Estate sale near your place with lots of gun stuff…” and an address.

Okay, maybe it’s worth checking out. Hop on my bike and ride over.

So here’s how you know the decedent was a serious gun guy.. he had cleared out his dining room, shored up the floor, and parked a four foot bed lathe and a milling machine in there and made it his machine shop. I got there in time to see a guy buy it for a ridiculously low amount of money and then come back with a flatbed and a forklift.

Indeed there was a  lot of reloading stuff…Berger bullets, Lapua brass, etc, etc. Heck there was freaking quiver of Dewey cleaning rods. I started chatting with the gal selling it all. Her dad passed away in February. Turns out, it was someone I knew. I hadnt seen him in about a year and his diabetes finally got the better of him, but not before cruelly making him a semi-blind, fuzzy-headed, nursing home candidate.

Since it was someone I knew, I had a good idea of what would and would not be there. Lotsa 6.5 stuff, plenty of .223, and lots of expensive reloading gear. The kids were up from Florida and wanted to get everything sold and outta there. Pretty much the perfect storm of motivation to allow one to make some…somewhat profitable…deals. So..yeah..I bought it all. Some of it I’m keeping, like the Lapua brass and a fw of the micrometer dies, the rest Im going to try and flip for quick cash.

And I gotta buy some beer for the guy who turned me onto the deal.

And I was trying so hard to not spend money this week. Mmmph.

Achievement unlocked: Bargain AR

Last week I made the mistake of stopping in a gun store and found a complete PSA AR-15 lower, w/ Magpul furniture for $65. Well, shoot….wouldn’t you have snagged it too? There was some confusion on the paperwork and I complained a bit and they knocked $5 off the price. So, complete Magpul’s PSA lower for $60.

Then today, PSA sends me an email about this. A complete upper, with bolt carrier group and charging handle, for $199 delivered. Ok, that’s not gonna be easy to beat. Order up.

Final total? A brand new, ‘economy’ tier AR15 for $260.

What a… (wait for it)….bARgain.

:::drops the mic:::

Link – Police surplus….M249S?

Before anyone gets their panties in a bunch and starts chest-beating about how police departments have no need for a semi-auto M249, it is worth noting that this is advertised as new condition and never been unboxed. Likely some department ordered these at the 11th hour to use up their budget so it wouldn’t get cut the following year.

But, if you have $7k to spend….although dealer on a new one is $7700 so its really only a 10% discount.

However, it is also worth pointing out that some departments actually use the M240…most notably, some Texicans.

Blasts from the past

Here’s why my Roth is underfunded:

But, with most .223 running around $0.32/@ it seemed like a nice way to get some blasting ammo. For you young bucks who are too young to remember, back before Slick Willy was flavoring his cigars with brunettes we could buy cheap Chinese guns and ammo. How cheap? You could get an SKS and a case of 7.62×39 for about $125-150. Seriously. My UPS guy hated me. Quality-wise it was…interesting. At one point even Chinese gunpowder (hey, they invented the stuff, right?) was on the market very briefly until it turned out that it was basically fireworks powder..it had a burn rate measured in Planck time. Their ammo was a mixed bag…always dirty, often underpowered, but always cheap. Kinda made Wolf look like Federal. All those SKS rifles you see these days were purchased because ammo was nine cents per round.

But, if you were just going to the range to break rocks and make noise…well, it was a pretty good deal. I know a lot of people who salted away cases and cases of this stuff. Not my first choice for Der Tag, but some ammo is (usually) better than no ammo.

This stuff? I’ll probably just use it for playing around with the Mini-14’s.Box says brass case but believe it when I see it. As Uncle Duke says…

That Tapco deal

Sadly, will not come to pass. While I was able to get a good deal on the mags themselves, the vendor wanted, and I kid you not, $314 to ship. Now, I ship stuff for a living so I know how much it costs to ship things and it does not cost that much to ship a couple hundred plastic magazines across the US. So, with the shipping charges wiping out any gains from the discounted mags, it’s pretty much a non-starter. But….I’ll keep my eyes open.

Swine dining

I don’t mean to blow my own horn here (and, really, who amongst us is flexible enough for that anyway?) but sometimes I do like to brag…. thus:

So..I’m in Albertson’s and I do my usual patrol through the meat department. Sitting on the shelf are four pork whole tenderloins, marked down from $4.99/# to $2.99/#. Now, that’s all well and good, but Zero can do better. Those four (and keep in mind that number ‘four’) tenderloins are also marked down an additional 30%, knocking it’s per pound price down to about $2.09/#. Thats not bad for animal protein. But…Zero can do better.

Me: “Hey, you’ve got these pork tenderloins marked down 30%. If you mark them down to 50% I’ll take ’em.”
Him: “They’re already on sale at $2.99 from $4.99.”
Me: “I know, but Im the kinda guy who needs to feel like he’s really getting a deal, you know? Mark ’em down to 50% and I’ll take all of them.”
Him: “All of them?”
Me: “Sure. All of them.”

Here’s where the wheels flew off my grand plan. Remember that number four from earlier? Well, there were, in fact, four pork tenderloins sitting on the top shelf marked down to 30%. What I did not notice, were the other twenty packages sitting below it, also marked down to 30% off. And…I just committed myself to taking them all.

Uhm. Well.

The happy ending is that in the final analysis I wound up paying $1.50/#. The more interesting part is I wound up with almost 60# of pork tenderloin. The really interesting part is that I had one hell of a time re-arranging the stuff in my already overloaded freezer to accommodate it. I literally cannot fit any more food in my freezer. And, yes, I’m thinking about purchasing another freezer.

Can NOT be re-assembled to make a complete pig.

My normal procedure is to line a baking tray with foil, season one of these things with some sort of spice blend (Old Bay is actually rather nice), cook it up, slice it thin, and snack on it cold. But, lately I’ve noticed that glazing it with sweet chili sauce is actually pretty darn good.

Anyway, I think this counts as a pretty sweet score. I could literally stop buying meet for the next several months and be just fine. Oh, and mind you, there are two tenderloins in each of those packages. Yum.