Still searching

Posted on by
2

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

Posted on by
16

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.

Article – Refrigerator-sized machine makes gasoline out of thin air

Posted on by

TL;DR company claims to have invented a machine that makes gasoline from air. Elizabeth Holmes could not be reached for comment.

Earlier this month, the company announced it had created the world’s first functional machine capable of generating real, usable car gasoline “directly from the air.” Aircela’s new device, roughly the size of a commercial refrigerator, combines direct air capture (DAC) with on-site fuel synthesis to create gasoline using just air, water, and renewable energy. No fossil fuels, they say, are required.

Ok, a couple things here. First of all, in physics, as we understand it today, there is no free energy. As I understand it the amount of energy it takes to make the gasoline-from-air cannot be less than the energy you get from the gasoline-from-the-air. In other words, youd get more miles driving the electricity it toook to make the gasoline than you would from the gasoline. But, thats probably an oversimplification.

Also, the more conspiracy minded will now comment about how the .gov will never let these guys bring such an item to market and instead will teach them the meaning of defenestration. And, don’t forget, the 70MPG carburetors that supposedly “Big Oil” has been suppressing since forever.

In one sense, there’s an even bigger question – if you have the technology to create gasoline out of the air, then you have the technology to not need the gasoline in the first place. But, as the article states, many people aren’t willing to give up their gas engines so the next best thing is to make the gas more abundant.

This reminds me of the atmospheric water generators (AWG) that are out there…with enough electricity, you can drop one of these in a desert-environment somewhere and start producing water out of the air. The lesson being that with enough electrical power you can pretty much do anything. (Which was one of the big messages of ‘Lucifers Hammer’ … electricity=civilization.)

This sort of technology is interesting, and certainly thought provoking, but for your average garden-variety survivalist it seems to be of interest mostly for the trickle-down effect of the research and technology, and the societal impact of it working on a large scale.

BRN-180 stubby

Posted on by
8

One of the things I like about the current crop of Palmetto JAKL and Brownell BRN-180 guns is that they use a 99% bog-standard AR lower. (The JAKL requires you to swap to a slightly modified bolt release paddle.)

Anyway… since both of these platforms use unmodified AR lowers, it’s convenient to keep an eye open for SBR’d lowers that come up for sale. Then I can just pull the upper off of the ‘pistol’ it sits on and mate it up to the SBR’d lower giving me the ability use a real stock and not have to look over my shoulder at the range.

While I do have a couple SBR’d AR’s, one of the drawbacks to the AR design is the buffer tube that does not lend itself to a folding stock. Do you really need a folding stock? Depends on who you ask. Personally, when I buy a firearm it almost always is with an eye towards how it would be used ‘in a prolonged crisis of some kind’ (cough*EOTWAWKI*cough). If, Crom forbid, I have to throw my gear in the back of the truck and head off to the beta site, space will be at a premium and being able to tuck a .223 carbine in my backpack will have some value.

Lately I’ve been playing with the Gen2 Brownell BRN-180. It’s modernized version of the AR-180 and has all the same benefits and drawbacks of the original AR-180’s from way back when. What the AR-180 brings to the table (and so does the JAKL) is a more ‘hygienic’ operating system. The JAKL and BRN-180 both use designs that keep operating gases out of the action. The JAKL through the use of a long-stroke gas piston, and the BRN-180 with a short-stroke gas piston system. Or, put another way, the AK system and the M1 Carbine system. The direct impingement system of the AR15 is great, and makes for an accurate semi-auto rifle but there is, in my opinion and experience, a bit of a reliability issue in the AR system because of the operating gases being vented into the action and bolt. Some people shoot a thousand rounds from the AR with no cleaning and no issue, some fire 200 rounds and have things get gummy. Your mileage may vary. But with the non-direct impingement guns it isnt even on the map as a potential problem. Sure, keep on top of cleaning, squirt some lube into bolt from time to time, and you can probably go forever without cleaning. But, some day you may not have the time, resources, or ability to clean your rifle after a couple hundred rounds and thats when things like ‘ability to endure neglect’ become important.

Again, your milage may vary…I’m only speaking about my experiences.

Since I was wanting a carbine that could be made into the smallest footprint possible without compromising too much performance, I needed something that didnt require the buffer tube. Thats pretty much every non-AR out there – JAKL, AK, AR-180, HK93, Mini14, etc. So, I ordered up an 11″ BRN-180 upper , picked up a stripped Poverty Pony lower that had been SBR’d by the folks at Iron Mountain, slapped a CMMG parts kit in it, added a Midwest Industries folder, put on some Magpul BUIS and a sling, and got this:

Pretty fetching, dontcha think?

Took it out to the range and it ran just fine. Threaded a Gemtech Abyss onto the end and it shot well enough but I had a few failures. Didnt realize that I had forgotten to change the setting on the gas block to ‘S’ (suppressed) from ‘U’ (unsuppressed). That cleared it up. With the can on the end the thing is just at the same OAL as a unsuppressed AR carbine. I also have a 16″ BRN-180 as well with a Leupold 1-4x Patrol scope on it and it’s a light, handy gun.

Theres the saying that when all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. Is a compact folding-folding-stock SBR my first choice for running out the door? Not if I can get away with a 16″ barrel AR, AK, or similar arm. But for the circumstance where high portability and compactness matter? This might not be a terrible choice.

Addiction

Posted on by
4

For no other reason than because, apparently, Im an idiot with more money than common sense:Although…if I do get the piece of property I want, I’ll be sticking a six-pack of these somewhere hidden and out of the way for that upcoming Rainy Decade, so it’s not like I won’t have a ….you know what, never mind…the rationalizations sound lame even to me.

On thebright side, at least i didnt impulse buy an HK93/53 clone…which is actually high on my want list these days.

Weekend

Posted on by
3

Still here. Just that sometimes ‘real life’ intrudes enough that I just don’t have time to fire up the free ice-cream machine.

Since it’s a three-day weekend, Im taking advantage of it by going on a housecleaning/yardwork extravaganza. I tend to let stuff kinda pile up and eventually I just get disgusted with myself and force myself to act like a grown up and straighten things up.

Otherwise, life continues apace. Still looking for a piece of property and I’de really like to find something before the end of the year.Is that realistic? Maybe. Found a 20 acre piece that I need to do some investigating on. What do I need to do? Well, first and foremost, locate the county property maps and compare them against a Google Earth image to find just exactly where the lot edges are. Precise enough to tell me if there are neighbors and where their structures are in relation to the piece I’m looking at. The first two things that queer the deal are a) neighbors immediately nearby and b) a road cutting through the property. That puts the kibosh on about half the stuff I look at. After that it becomes distance, access, features, terrain, size, price, etc, etc.

So, the search continues. In the meantime I need to make sure that my focus on this particular aspect of preparedness doesn’t pull me away from all the other ones that require my attention. Still gotta rotate gas, still gotta run the generator, still gotta top off whatever supplies need topping off, etc, etc. I can spend hours in front of my keyboard tweaking the numbers to try and see what sort of deal can be made to work, and I can then spend even more hours looking at prefab cabins, PV systems, water management gear, etc, etc. But I need to make sure not to get so starstruck with a potential land purchase that I may have, that I neglect what i do have.

Or, in other words, I need to make sure that the two in the bush don’t distract me from the one in my hand.

Not this one

Posted on by
14

Okay, so the short version is – no sale.

The biggest issue was that once you made your way through all he other lots that were for sale to get to the one of interest, you were pretty high up and the road was the only flat spot to be had.

On the bright side, there was plenty of elevation drop for the creek to facilitate minihydro, and the property was bordered on three sides by national forest. Also, the main access from the public road had a nice small bridge that could easily be removed to limit access.

It was approximately 40 miles from town, so not too far for convenience, but it was far enough up Ninemile Creek that you weren’t going to get a lot of traffic up that way.

Since I’m not going to grab it, here’s the details for those of you who are curious.

This lot was part of about a dozen that were for sale,  but this was the only one that was surrounded by national forest. The other lots were interesting, but they didnt offer the privacy I wanted.

So, the search continues. Im not bummed out by t, I expect there to be a lot of ‘not quite’ before I find the right one. And although I would like to get it done sooner rather than later, every week that goes by gives me more money for a purchase.

So…still looking. This piece was the one closest to my location that I’ve come across so far.

 

The quest continues

Posted on by
14

Okay guys, I’ll get right to the point since I know thats what you guys are after: pass.

I’ll go into detail and have pics later, but I am totally wiped out from the miles long hiking adventure. My feet are absolutely thrashed, I’m exhausted, and I still need to put all my gear away. So,,,details later, but the quest continues.