As I have said before, I think guns.com has the potential to be a great website. They have some good articles on guns and some pretty cool staff members (besides myself).
I do worry that they are headed toward a little more fluff than substance. However, even if guns.com does go fully entertainment, there is still worse entertainment than gun based reading.
I think that if you want to start writing for a living, this is a good place to start. Guns.com have a pretty easy setup, and a great set of editors.
If you know guns and can string a couple of sentences together, then you can probably get published here.
I mean, I am no Hemingway myself, but I do like to see my stuff in print. Because of this I have also started writing for the Examiner.com for local issues dealing with sustainable agriculture and firearm rights.
However, with the project load I have, as well as the full time job I have, I am starting to feel the strain. I may end up dropping a project or two in the future. Especially if I have to make hard choices about my time.
I am a firm believer in redundancy. If the unprocessed manure ever is flung into the air oscillating device its going to be a bad day. As such, it’s not a stretch to think that some of your safety net may acquire some holes.
While I do have canned food in my pantry. Canned food is heavy. It takes up space. Additionally, most canned food contains lots of sodium. I do have some frozen food, but if I loose power, that food will spoil first. Besides, my freezer isn’t that big and I would rather fill the space with ice cream than frozen peas.
Why Dehydrate Food
Food dehydration is a good way to store excess food without a lot of waste or weight.
Dehydrating vegetables allow them to last longer, take up less space, with less weight. You can dehydrate your own vegetables with minimal processing or expense. 4 bags of frozen vegetables dehydrate down to fit in a single mason jar, ad water and they plump back up to almost the original size. In an emergency, a pack filled with dehydrated food and access to water can be a lifesaver. In later posts we will be making a solar dehydrator and working with meat to make jerked meat and possibly Biltong which is a special slightly fermented jerky from Africa.
Some Essential Steps Before Dehydrating
The problem with dehydrating vegetables is that some vegetables need processing, either by blanching, or by adding acid or some other solution to keep them from oxidizing. If you have ever ate an apple and looked disgustingly at the brown spots you have seen oxidization. By soaking or dipping your potato or apple slices in lemon juice you can prevent the unsightly discoloration.
Some vegetables like corn or beans need to be blanched before dehydrating. Blanching is an essential process for dehydrating or freezing any vegetable except onions, peppers, and mushrooms. To blanch vegetables, you cut them into the size you need, then briefly boil them until they are just cooked, then quickly dip them in ice water to stop the cooking process. Blanching kills the enzymes in the vegetables so they do not loose flavor or texture.
Tip for Dehydrating Cheap Frozen Vegetables
A tip you will see in the video below is that if you dehydrate commercially frozen vegetables they are already prepared by blanching so you can throw then straight from the bag into a single layer on your dehydrator.
Once the vegetables are dry, you can then store them in mason jars or other air tight container. It is important that there be NO moisture allowed in the jar, as the dehydrated food will readily spoil if allowed to get wet. Botulism spores present on your vegetables can also begin to grow and produce their deadly toxin if they are vacuum sealed in a moist environment. Make sure you have thoroughly dried your vegetables at 130º. Beans, Broccoli, Carrots, Cauliflower, Corn, Mushrooms, Onions, Peas, Potatoes, Tomatoes, and the like should be dried until brittle. Beets and Sweet Peppers can be dried until leathery.
Uses are almost limitless, if you have some imagination. Tomatoes can be ground after dehydrating, and then depending on the water added can be used to make a paste, a sauce, or a soup. Paprika is a variety of pepper that is then dried and ground to make a spice. Feel free to experiment with your dehydrator and see what you like and what you don’t.
At our house we cook a lot of stews, soups, and chili’s which is provides the perfect environment for cooking with dried vegetables.
Use these dehydrated vegetables, cut down gallon Mylar bags sealed with a homemade bag clamp to make meal mixes that can be cooked straight from the bag with water as the only additional ingredient. This is perfect for emergency rations, and simple meals during the work week.
One of the first guns I ever bought for myself was a Springfield Armory M6 scout rifle. Like almost all owners of the M6 scout, I really like the concept, but I find it needs a sling swivel to really fit my needs.
What is the M6 Scout
For the uninitiated, the M6 scout started life as a survival item for Air Force pilots. It is a hinge action over under that breaks into two parts for storage. The air force version is normally a .22 hornet over .410, but mine is a .22 long rifle over .410. The actual military model’s barrel is shorter than the National Firearm Act allows for unregistered firearms, so the civilian barrel is about 4 inches longer. It has two cutouts on the sheet metal stock that are supposed to be improvised wrenches, but I have never attempted to use them. In my opinion, other than the size and weight of the gun, the best feature is that the butt-stock opens to hold 4 .410 shells and 15 .22 (only 9 if it’s a .22 hornet).
While I am an unreconstructed tinkerer that loves messing with things, I am pretty conservative with my firearms, and do not modify them without having a clear and specific goal in mind. I don’t own any “safe queens” or Barbecue guns, all of my firearms are tools, primarily for my family’s or my own self defense. Over the years I have seen too many overly modified guns lose reliability with each “improvement” to the designer’s specifications.
A Few Nice Modifications
However, there were four areas that my scout needed improvement, and none of them modified the actual mechanical function of the firearm in anyway. Since the purpose of this gun is to forage in a E&E (escape and evasion) scenario its intended use makes it perfect for a GHB (Get Home Bag) kept in a car trunk. My first addition addressed this and was the purchase of the optional blue plastic case to hold both the gun, a 100 round box of .22 long CB caps and two .45 caliber bianchi clips that I stretched and forced 12 .410 shells into (an appropriate mix of 6 #6 shot, 4 slug, and 2 00 buck).
Remove the Trigger Guard and Add Para-cord
My next mod was to remove the trigger guard from the “trigger” which is actually a bar that you can squeeze with you entire hand if needed. All I did was pry the stock apart slightly and pull the guard out (its stamped steel).
Next, I wrapped a long length of para-cord along the barrel as the gun does not have any furniture on it. This provides me with a cool place to put my hand if I somehow shoot enough to heat the barrel, and it gives me some cordage for emergency use. According to some, crewmen were taught to do this using paracord from their chutes if they ever bailed out.
Adding a Sling Swivel
My last modification, and the subject of the video below, was the addition of a sling swivel on the butt-stock. For years I have tried to find a factory sling swivel to attach to my scout. The barrel has a hole at the muzzle for attachment, but the butt-stock does not. The only furniture on the gun is a small rubber pad on the butt-stock, but the screw that holds it in is not substantial enough to do its designed job and hold a sling.
While at the reloading store the other day, I saw a sling swivel for an AR-15 hand guard. I knew immediately that it would work. It was a normal QD swivel on a stud, a round spacer/washer, and an aluminum nut with a round base.
Basically, I used a drill press to drill a hole the aluminum nut could fit into, then screwed the swivel stud into it through the washer. Later I may trim it up a little with my Dremel, but for now it works well enough for my purposes.
I am a firm believer in redundancy. If the unprocessed manure ever is flung into the air oscillating device its going to be a bad day. As such, it’s not a stretch to think that some of your safety net may acquire some holes.