New Old Kid on the Block - Article from Patriot Ex Machina

I've been curious about what would happen with the takeover of the old Bushmaster factory by the former private owner. Below is a great write-up from Patriot Ex Machina of the transition and a brief product review about one of the 5.56 options available from Windham Weaponry

Windham Weaponry is the "New Old Kid on the Block"

Nike Galaxy - Riots? Really?

Nike just released a new, even more hideous pair of shoes to the public with a price tag of $220, the Nike Galaxy Foamposite.

Chris Richardson at Webpronews.com has posted 2 videos and some enlightening twitter comments on the "Nike Foamposite riots". Check out those videos in a bit. But the bottom line is 100s (perhaps 1000s) of people went out to buy a $220 pair of shoes that look like something I'd get for the kids at Stride Rite. Now I cannot really comment on the fashion of these shoes. After all, my brother and I had matching Converse X-High tops that were two-tone flourescent - mine orange and his turquoise both with yellow insides - and we wore them folded down like this (you gotta love the 80's):

So let the kids wear what they want to wear from a fashion perspective. They will, like me, look back on it fondly but laughingly regret it when they are in their 30s. But if we have overall unemployment at near 10% and youth unemployment significantly higher - near record levels - in the younger demographics, I have a few questions.

1. First, where are they getting the money to blow on these shoes?
   
2. Second, why would you want to get involved in civil unrest over these shoes (or any shoes so long as you have a pair on)?
   
3. Finally, is it just me or has our country gone completely and utterly insane?

Project: Build rifles for the boys with granddaddy

Now that I've been back home in Mississippi for a few years, I am getting back to my roots a bit with respect to gardening, hunting, and other skills that I let founder over the course of my college and Navy career. When I was 8 I started with a single shot .410 shotgun from Harrington & Richardson. From there, I moved up to a rimfire rifle with my Marlin 75C .22 caliber rifle (the old carbine version of the Model 60, which now IS the model 60). Both of these were squirrel terminators. Neither kicked to speak of and were easy weapons on which to learn marksmanship and firearm safety. I later moved up to a 12 gauge identical to my 410. There is a great set of videos from Dave Canterbury (of Dual Survival) about the H&R 12 gauge and its versatility. My sons are old enough that they & their friends are starting to get BB guns and at an age close to where I got my 410. But now I look back and think of how I would have made different purchases if I was doing it now to end up with weapons that are more versatile long term but just as simple to learn and use as a kid. My dad always wants gifts to be meaningful. Between his desire to be meaningful and our shared goal to teach the boys lots of skills that everyone used to know, I think the next couple of birthdays/Christmases are going to focus on building up the boys sets of long-term tools like firearms and knives.

That leads me to starting them out on a 22 and letting them use my 410 until they can handle a 12 gauge and centerfire rifles. I've looked around at 22s and I certainly considered buying a couple of Marlins. After all, 2 is 1 and 1 is none. So 3 Marlins is like having 1.5 or something like that. However, that means I would spend somewhere north of $100 per rifle and be limited to 14-shot 22s. A little more digging and review reading led me to drop in conversions of AR-15s chambered in .223/5.56NATO to allow shooting 22s (25-round magazine). It provides an affordable alternative to shooting .223 or just a reliable platform from which to shoot 22s that can grow up to a 223 as the boys grow. To end up with a working AR-15, you need either 1 -OR- 2 AND 3 (more customizeable and cheaper) below. I threw in 4 below just for fun. It's a good little gun, best pump 12-gauge for the money, though admittedly is basically a copy of the Remington 870. To get the working AR-15 to become a 22, you also need 5 (or something similar from their comptetitors).

1. Whole Rifle: $650 & up You can literally spend as much as you want on these things. But if you spend $1000 or more, you're paying for the label. Mil-spec is mil-spec. Almost all of these rifles will be better than the marksman pulling the trigger.
Olympic Arms "Plinker Plus" flat top ("A4") with collapsible stock and railed gas block. This is kinda the bottom end of what I'd want to get for them. It has no customization and would require optics/backup iron sights to function.

2. Complete AR-15 Kit EXCEPT Stripped Lower Receiver $400 & up. This is all of the parts necessary to build a rifle except the lower reciever, which is the part of the rifle that is actually classified as the firearm by the feds. Similar to the entire rifle, you can go anywhere on the price spectrum from Yugo to MacLaren with these parts. The kit linked below gets you into a functional rifle with an adjustable length of pull (so the kids can use it) as well as a flash hider to which a suppressor that my family is considering can be mounted. J&T Distributing
- LW (lightweight) Barrel
- 6-Position DS-4 adjustable stock
- Picatinnny Rail Gas Block
- CAR Handguards
- Standard carrier, charging handle, trigger, trigger guard
- Hogue grip +20
- Phantom A-2 flash hider +$25

3. Stripped Lower Receiver: This is the only part of the rifle that has to be bought/picked up from a firearms dealer locally. Can't ship to your house, etc. But there are multiple options here and if it's mil spec it truly doesn't matter that much which you go with. Just find one you like, click, buy, pick up at local federal firearms licensee.
Mega Arms "Gator" with atom logo $109 (What nuke shouldn't have an atom logo reciever?)
Spikes Tactical SP-15 with spider logo $99 (The spider is just bad news)
Aero Precision $79
CMMG $79 (If sold out, there are others like DPMS for +$10-20)


4. 12-gauge Pump Shotgun for Home Defense/Hunting
New England Firearms "Pardner Pump" NP1-P18 (18.5" barrel, black synthetic stock, 5+1)

5. Drop in 22LR Conversion Kit from CMMG. You literally open up the rifle, remove the bolt carrier group, insert the kit and insert the 22 magazine... poof! You have a 22 on the AR platform.

Once you have 2 and 3 in your possession, it's a relatively simple matter to put all of the parts together assuming you have a couple of tools around like a strap wrench, vice, and some punches. Assembling your own rifle allows you to be familiar with its inner workings and I think letting my sons help assemble their rifles would be both a great learning experience and a fantastic memory with their dad and grandfather.

Thanksgiving Hello from Deployment

I just ran across this video of myself and wanted to link to it before it disappears...

It's my message home for Thanksgiving 2009 when I was deployed to Joint Task Force Bravo in Central America. Watching and listening to myself makes me feel like a goofball. But I think everybody feels that way a little.

It does bring back some memories of a wonderful group of people and beautiful places. I will try to get some pictures from my stay there uploaded either here or over on my photography blog while I am off over Christmas.

Commuting Sucks - But Mine Sucks Less

In 2008 I left my job in the Navy to build new nuclear reactors in Mississippi at Entergy. Beyond all of the great reasons to transition back to my home and work on an awesome project, there was a MAJOR tangible benefit - time. In Jackson, I would have ~10-15 minute commute, leaving me an additional hour and a half EVERY DAY with my wife and kids. PRIMO! For many reasons, we cooled our jets on that project and I shifted to the Extended Power Uprate program office. Shortly thereafter I was deployed to Central America on an active duty individual augmentation assignment with the Navy. On my return, I was offered the opportunity to jump into the meat of an ongoing extended power uprate project at Grand Gulf Nuclear Station. This was a good move career-wise, but it certainly brought back a lot of the cons that we took off the list by leaving DC. Namely, my commute sucks. While it is longer than my DC commute was by about 20% and longer than my initial commute in Mississippi by about 700%, it has some upsides. Here are the stats:
DC:
10 miles, 1 hour, 1 National Park visited

Jackson, MS (where I was recruited):
8 miles, 10 minutes (15 with heavy traffic), 1 National Park visited

Port Gibson, MS (where I'm temporarily stationed, they actually have a website...):
75 miles, 1 hour 15 minutes, 1 National Park visited

Why, oh why, would I say that a longer distance and duration commute to approximately the middle of nowhere has upsides? Well, it is less than pleasant averaging 10 mph on the George Washington Parkway (The "G.W.") staring at a bunch of other cattle lining up for the morning cattle drive through the chute (the 14th St Bridge) into one of our country's least productive corrals (Downtown DC). It is way more pleasant to be out the door of the house and in the door of the office and vice versa in 10-15 minutes. Commute #2 was via the Natchez Trace Parkway. But I only hit a 3-mile stretch of it filled with Mississippian cattle vice beltway cattle. Now I will not say that it is super fun to drive 3 hours round trip each day, but I will certainly say that getting south of Mile Marker 85 (Clinton/Raymond) takes you into an area that reminds you how this country became what it was at it's greatest. There are farms with livestock; crops like corn, cotton, beans; historic sites that consist of country churches or the stories of battles fought and lessons learned; and wilderness - at least the first couple of layers of it after you get out to rural america. The people that live here work hard for what they have and they provide a lot of the things that I have and don't even know it. By the time I get to around Mile Marker 80, I stop counting the minutes and start counting the deer, turkey, hawk, owl, fox, raccoon, opossum, and armadillo. I even saw a Florida panther one night - Wildlife & Fisheries doesn't acknowledge them, so are offering a $15,000 reward for verifiable evidence their territory now includes MS. Bottom line, the word commute brings ugly visions of gridlock into many folks' imagination. I'm on the road a bunch, but you do have to appreciate the good parts of something that isn't all that good on its face.