Rifle Gunpowder: Ball vs. Stick

When it comes to reloading rifle ammunition, the first choice to be made is whether to use stick or ball gunpowder. (Handgun ammunition is nearly always ball powder as we generally don't reload for long range pistol accuracy.) What follows is my own opinion, based on my decades of reloading rifle ammunition.

Why Two Kinds?

There are actually more than two kinds of gunpowder shapes, but stick and ball are the most common and effective for reloading. These powders have different burn characteristics due to varying compositions and grain sizes. 

• Stick powder, aka extruded powder, has larger rodlike grains. Think of how a spaghetti noodle is made, but chopped very short. Because of its surface to volume ratio, it needs fewer burn retardants to produce a smooth pressure curve. 
• Ball powder is made up of small, roundish grains whose volume are easily measured. Ball powder has more surface area that stick powder, so to mitigate its faster rate of combustion, powder manufacturers vary the amount of burn retardants to make the powder's pressure curve suit its final application. For an AR-15 this includes a maximum chamber pressure and a maximum and minimum gas port pressure. 

Image found on Reddit

Cost

When I started reloading decades ago, the cost difference between stick and ball powders for use in rifles was fairly close. However, current market conditions have made ball powders the “economy” option. For instance, an 8 lb jug of Winchester StaBall 6.5 Precision Rifle Smokeless Powder is currently $323 at Powder Valley Outdoors, while stick powder costs hundreds of dollars more: Shooter’s World 4350 costs $510 and IMR 4350 costs $462. This is primarily because of exchange rates and import costs. Ball powders are manufactured in the United States by the St. Marks factory in Florida, as well as around the world, such as Ramshot TAC from Belgium. 

However, stick powders aren’t manufactured in the United States at this time. The IMR line of powders comes from Valleyfield in Canada, and Shooter’s World Powders comes from Lovex in Europe. Other European powder companies include Norma, Vihtavuori, and more, and the Hodgdon Extreme line comes from ADI in Australia. 

This means that prices on stick powders will always fluctuate quite a bit with exchange rates between the Dollar and the Euro or the Australian Dollar, but only some ball powders will feel the impact of exchange rates. Exchange rates aside, the cost increases due to “supply and demand” seems to hit all powders equally. 

Accuracy

While ball powders are generally more cost-effective, stick powders tend to be slightly more accurate. The accuracy improvement isn’t  enough to matter for hunting, but may be just enough to score a few more points at shooting competitions.

For hunting, you want a rifle that will consistently place five shots under two inches at 100, and ball powders can easily achieve this with a standard workup. I know that a two Minutes Of Accuracy rifle and ammo combination sounds pretty lousy here in these days of “Sub-MOA Guarantee!” written right on the box holding your new rifle, but hunting bullets are designed for controlled expansion to provide good terminal performance, whereas match bullets are designed to make nice round holes in paper. In other words, they’re just built differently, so it’s useless to compare their performance. If your rifle can hit two MOA all day long with your hunting load, then you can make a “boiler room shot” on a deer out to 300 yards with confidence. 

Temperature Stability

Stick powders will generally be more temperature stable, meaning they exhibit less velocity shift with ambient temperature changes than ball powders. 6.5 StaBall is advertised as temperature stable, but in testing I found that it had significantly more velocity shift than Hodgdon’s H4350. However, 6.5 StaBall is more temperature stable than Reloader 15, a stick powder used in match ammunition, including M118LR sniper ammunition for the Department of Defense.

Final Recommendations

If you’re just starting in reloading, I recommend beginning with an economical ball powder as it’s easier to use with powder measures to get consistent charges. I’d be very surprised if you didn’t end up with a load that can consistently put five shots under 1.5 MOA after a normal load workup.

The time to spend the money on a premium stick powder is when you start winning competitions and still want to get better, or you’re going on that “hunt of a lifetime” in Africa or Alaska where you want your ammunition to perform more consistently across wild temperature swings.

Portable Propane Heaters

Winter camping can be miserable, and I’ve winter camped in Washington State in the snow and the wet and the cold as a Boy Scout. Now I’m camping in Georgia year-round with my son’s Trail Life Troop, and “below freezing in Georgia” is just as miserable as “below freezing in Washington.”

There are two schools of thought among the adults who provide some level of safety for our troop. One is “I need to be able to carry all my kit long distance,” and the other is “What the heck, I own a truck, and I’ll carry my gear from the truck to the campsite.” The first group doesn’t use any artificial heat sources, and the second group does. At the last campout, the second group was more comfortable than the first group because they had bigger, roomier tents. In two of those tents were Mr. Heater Portable Buddy Heaters, and I got to enjoy them simply by being there.

https://amzn.to/4hJdxY7

In Use

First observation: even the smallest Mr. Heater product is plenty for a tent that a single person can pack. The advertisement says “up to 225 square feet” which I think is a bit generous for most tents, but in a well-insulated room or small cabin it would make sense.

Second: plan to use one 1lb bottle of propane per night, or six hours of burn time. You can get an adapter to use any size of propane bottle you want if you need more than six hours of heat production. 

Note: while commercial locations won’t refill most 1lb propane bottles, you can buy adapters to refill them yourself.  This is obviously discouraged by single-use propane vendors, but there are  refillable bottles on the market.

Pros and Cons

A Mr. Heater is a bit of a luxury item for camping in Georgia or Washington, even in the winter time. But as a survival/resiliency prep it has a few things going for it. 

1. If you have a gas grill and adapter hose, or a few 1lb propane bottles on hand, you have a safe indoor heating in a pinch. 
2. A heat source can be used to heat food. One YouTuber I watch routinely opens canned food and gently heats it using his Mr. Heater in the depth of Canadian winter, and toasting frankfurters or marshmallows is very similar to using a campfire.

Is it perfect? No, not really.

1. It takes up space when not in use. Not much, but some.
2. Unlike a rocket stove or Solo Stove or Kelly Kettle, it uses a fossil fuel that may or may not be easy to get in an emergency. If you live in an apartment where wood or twigs aren’t plentiful, that might be a positive rather than a negative.
3. It’s big enough that I wouldn’t bother keeping one in a full size van unless the van had been converted into a small camper. In a large camper, a Mr. Heater makes quite a bit of sense.

Should You Get One?

I’m not in a hurry to go out and buy a Mr. Heater of my own, but if I see a good sale I’ll probably snag one. They run very quietly, and in an elevated deer stand in the winter where I sit still for hours on end, it might be really nice to not feel the cold so deep in my bones.

Also, don’t underestimate the value of the “nice to haves” in a situation where you have to rely on your preps and not public infrastructure. The little luxuries can make all the difference between a miserable experience and a merely inconvenient experience.

Hammock Camping

I’m not getting any younger, and the ground isn’t getting any softer. Several of the fellow Dads in my son’s Trail Life Troop are avid backpackers, and they all recommend hammock camping. Some camping hammocks are mini-shelter solutions in themselves, some even with snuggly sleeping bags built in for cold weather... but not the ones I bought at Harbor Freight. I purchased two of these hammocks, one at the full price of $19.99 for my son, and one for myself when it was on sale for $14.99.

https://www.harborfreight.com/parachute-hammock-with-adjustable-tree-straps-57399.html

Bottom Line: It Works

It is a hammock. It is actually a very well-designed hammock for what it is: two nylon straps to wrap around trees, two steel carabiners, and a hammock with its own storage bag sewn in.

What It Lacks

Any sort of built-in coverage or bug screening, or any sort of thermal insulation. This means that when I slept in it for the last few nights of sub-freezing weather (I woke up with frost inside my bivy cover on my outer sleeping bag), I had to adapt my sleeping system a little bit.

To keep from freezing in the freezing weather, I put my close-cell foam sleeping pad inside an Army surplus bivy cover, and used both the winter and summer bags for the modular sleep system and a woobie to fill in the air gaps and Hot Hands brand hand and toe warmers to make me toasty. The Hot Hands warmers weren’t strictly necessary, but they definitely helped me get comfortable faster when the temperature was below freezing.

My Plan to Hammock Camp in the Rain

1. Bring 550 cord, bungie cords, ground stakes, and a tarp. 
2. String the 550 Cord over my hammock using the same trees I attached the hammock to, and make a rain cover. 
3. I wouldn’t recommend any tarp smaller than 8x10 feet, although the “Amazon’s Choice” recommendation for a hammock rain fly looks really tempting.

How to Overcome Bugs 

Other than chemical repellents, there aren’t many options. But for only a few dollars more, why not just buy a hammock with a bug screen built in?

https://amzn.to/4haOtJN

Complete Side Note and War Story

I once served with a bit of a character who had done some bounty hunting prior to his life in the Army. His team used a full-size van as part of their stakeout platform, and had modified the interior with hard points in the front and back to attach a hammock so one member of the team could get some sleep while the others observed, and the hammock could get stuffed away into nearly no space quickly (something an inflatable mattress couldn’t do). Having slept in a Ford Econoline van before, I’m positive the hammock provided an upgrade to the floor. If your preps include a van-sized vehicle, that might be an option for you.

I'm a Hammock Camping Convert

I still have to pack a sleeping pad in the winter time, but between the weight of the hammock and a rain fly, I’m saving weight and space over a tent. 

Is this something you absolutely need in your preps? Probably not, but it did provide me much better sleep than any other option I’ve tried, including some very expensive inflatable sleeping pads.

Snap Caps & Dummy Rounds for Dry Fire & Malfunction Practice

Modern firearms are “dry fire safe” in that they don’t need a round or snap cap in the chamber to safely work the trigger mechanism through the full range of operation. However, snap caps are a useful tool for deliberately inducing a “failure to fire” event during live training to help perfect the “clear a malfunction” sequence into muscle memory. 

Snap caps are commercially available from a number of manufacturers, often in sets of five for handguns and sets of two for rifles and shotguns. However, it’s often cheaper to make your own dummy rounds using commercial ammunition components.

https://amzn.to/40f7fth

In my military service, a dummy round was an inert training aid that can be easily distinguished from live ammunition by having indentations on the sides of the brass, being a different color entirely, or a combination of both feel and appearance. These dummy rounds were used in training personnel to use weapons in a safe manner, often in classroom locations. Lessons on how to load, arm, and troubleshoot a failure to fire could all be done as slowly as needed before going to a range and doing it live. If you’re helping to introduce new people to the shooting sports, then dummy rounds are a great tool for teaching basic firearm manipulation, how to load, unload, and so forth.

Making Your Own

I like to make my dummy rounds with a drill press by drilling holes through the sides of the cartridge case for an easy visual indicator that they aren’t live ammunition. Since I’m a handloader, I can omit the steps of priming and charging a round before crimping in the bullet. This leaves me with a dummy round that has holes in the side for visual identification, but weighs very close to what a live round would weigh. I find this to be useful for properly weighting a handgun magazine, as 15 rounds of 115gr 9mm ammunition is about 3.5 ounces of additional mass if you’re practicing “draw from concealment” drills at home.

The author's handmade dummy rounds

Some of you may be wondering “Why not just take a live round and drill through it?” I’ve done this when no other option was available to me, and it works because brass doesn’t spark. I don’t recommend it, though, because there’s still a lot of steel-cased ammunition on the market and I don’t think the risk justifies the potential reward. 

Additionally, if you drill a live round and then pour the powder out the holes, you still have to deal with the primer. You can’t use your firearm to do that, either, because the chamber would be directly exposed to the hot primer gas and you might dislodge the bullet into the barrel.

For dummy shotgun rounds:

1. Take a spent hull and fill it with BBs and epoxy just below the crimp line. Because the vast amount of mass in a shotgun shell is in the lead shot, you really have to add a filler material back in to get the right weight/feel.
   
   
   
   
   
2. Wait for the epoxy to harden, then cut the crimp away at the crimp line.
   
   
   
   
   
3. Drill the visual indicators in the metal part of the hull and drill out the spent primer. 
   
   
   
   
   

This is a tad more expensive than pistol or rifle dummies, but still quite a bit cheaper than commercial snap caps or dummy rounds. 

Concerns

“Is there a risk of having a bullet from a homemade dummy round come loose into your firearm?” Yes, but I've not yet encountered that in reality. I’ve experienced an AK-style rifle (Saiga .308) slam uncrimped match ammo so hard into the chamber that it unseated the bullet spilling powder everywhere, so it’s entirely possible that this “inertial bullet puller effect” could happen with a dummy round. If you’re worried about that, then don’t use homemade dummy rounds mixed with live ammo for live training.  However, I haven’t experienced this with dummy pistol ammo, and the dummy shotgun ammo is epoxied in place.

Conclusion

Dummy rounds are useful for teaching new shooters the manual of arms with a firearm and for working misfire drills and dryfire practice for more skilled shooters. I cannot recommend strongly enough that every prepper incorporate dummy round-enhanced training drills at home, as they are incredibly valuable to skill building and skill retention and don't require range fees or expending live ammunition.

Dummy rounds are also cheap to purchase and easy to make if you have reloading tools, and I encourage you to buy or make them at your next opportunity. You don't need a whole lot of them, but you should have a few on hand for practice and education. 

Picky Eaters in Survival Situations

Last month, we received a request for an article about prepping long-term food for people with Avoidant/Restrictive Food Intake Disorder (ARFID). While I don't have any experience with ARFID, I'm neurodivergent and have neurodivergent children, so that means I have some experience with pickier than normal eaters. This article will cover a few options for dealing with the possibility of going through a survival situation or disaster response with a child who is a picky eater and may be neurodivergent. These recommendations will change based on the age of the person.

Children Under Five 

At this age, children really do have a less developed digestive tract and weaker stomach acid, so I recommend avoiding raw vegetables (they're great for fiber in adults, but they can really irritate a young child’s digestive tract). Preserved fruits are generally an easy source of calories and vitamins, and fatty tinned meats like “Vienna Sausages” are enough to meet their protein requirements. It isn’t a healthy diet in the long term, but in a survival situation the goal is to last long enough to get back to normal. Sweet snacks like chewy granola bars are generally a good option here as well, and the “mac & cheese” from a box is often well tolerated.

Tips for this age range: Add nutrition to foods that are easily digested, such as a half cup of dehydrated milk to mashed potatoes to add protein and calcium, or a scoop of unflavored collagen protein powder to the boxed mac & cheese. This doesn’t change the taste much, and helps round out the nutrition intake. 

Children Five to Eight

At this age, texture is more of an issue than flavor, and this is “green vegetables” more than anything else. Chop the vegetables finely and mix them in with a starch (potatoes or rice in my house, but a pasta based casserole works too). Your goal is to get them to have enough calories and nutrients to survive.

Tips for young children: Have plenty of a sauce on hand that they like. At this age, a lot of children really use food as a delivery method for ketchup. 

Children Nine to Twelve 

This age group has food aversions based mainly on taste or texture. If all Billy or Suzy will eat from what you’ve cooked is mashed potatoes or white rice, that's enough to get them through a few weeks without adverse effects. The impact of malnutrition from a month of potatoes (which you can fortify with powdered milk or protein) is negligible, and you should have multi-vitamins in your preps anyways. Children at this age can be willful, so letting them skip a meal until they are hungry enough to eat is just fine.

Tips for pre-teens: Involve them in food prep with appropriate tasks such as peeling vegetables, opening cans or jars, building a cooking fire. Involving them in the prep makes it easier to involve them in eating together.

Teenagers

Let them choose whether or not they eat what's available.  Acknowledge their sovereignty over their body, but limited choices are limited choices, so let them choose. When they're hungry enough to eat, whatever's available is their choice. 

Note: If it does get to the point where they are literally dying (which takes weeks if they were nominally healthy before the disaster), then the survival situation has gone on long enough where force feeding options are on the table. How to force feed a person of normal intelligence who is choosing to starve themselves to death is a very low probability, so I won't go into details here.

Tips for teenagers, even neuro-divergent teens: 

• They're much more likely to eat food they prepared (or helped prepare) from start to finish. It’s the same food you make, but because they had a hand in making it they are more willing to try it.
• Herbs and spices are cheap. Letting your teens have access to them to change the flavor profile of food is generally a good thing.

In Summary

• Involve your picky eaters in food preparation at every age level. This will build them into competent people who know how to cook when they leave home and start their adult life. 
• Have dietary supplements, multivitamins and unflavored protein powder on hand for rounding out nutrition requirements.
• It's okay to let your picky eater skip a meal or two, as hunger is the best spice.

Precise Shots at Close Range

Years ago I wrote an article about low power optics that I've used on the AR-15 platform. Since then, I’ve been using the Vortex Crossfire II 1-4x24 regularly on both my 20” service rifle and my 16” utility carbine. Both are mounted in the same manner, but the optic is used differently in each case. With the 20” service rifle, I manually dial in the 200, 300, and 600 yard drops for my shots. With the 16” utility carbine, however, I set it to a “maximum point blank range zero” and call it good. 

At my last “two gun” experience I was the only person using a low powered variable optic (LPVO) on top of my 16” utility carbine. I normally keep the Crossfire dialed down to 1x and use it like a red dot sight for competitions that require both speed and accuracy, but the one stage where having an LPVO gave me an incredible advantage over the competitors who were using no-magnification red dots and holosights was the 14 yard, United States Air Force Rimfire Alternate Qualification target. The targets were just far enough away that people couldn’t see their bullet holes in the target through the no-magnification optics, but I could as I cranked my LPVO to 4x. I fired my first shot, saw that my impact was low, and used the bottom stadia line of the reticle as an aiming point to place my shots carefully.

The illuminated reticle on the 1-4x24 has a 1.5 MOA center dot, 6 MOA separation between the ends of the stadia lines surrounding the center dot, and 12.5 MOA distance between the thick outside stadia lines. Using the top of the thin stadia line I was able to precisely place my shots at 14 yards, almost 3 MOA low, which is exactly as predicted by my JBM ballistic software.

Vortex Crossfire II 1-4x24 

The match director laughed when he briefed the stage, saying that everyone who shot it hated it. I think this is because the trend in the centerfire rifle community has two main communities: the “long range precision” community that shoots F-Class, PRS, and High Power; and the “action shooting” community that sets up a battlesight zero on a carbine to compete in 3 gun, 2 gun, or cosplay CQB drills. There really isn’t a “short range precision” community outside of rimfire and air rifle, which makes these types of precise, short range shots something well outside the training norm for most centerfire shooters. After all, why train to hit a 1” dot at 14 yards with a rifle capable of first round hits out to 300 meters? If I want to hunt squirrel or rabbit, I’m much more likely to choose a rimfire or air rifle to handle that chore. 

The reduced range target we shot that day had silhouettes that represented 50, 100, 150, 200, 250, and 300 meter targets, and the vast majority of competitors that day hit less than 10 out of 40 possible trigger pulls because they were impacting under the target. Most of their scored hits were on the larger silhouettes where the bullets were clustered near the bottom of the black on the larger 50 and 100 meter sized silhouettes. Any optic on an AR is about 3 to 3.5 inches above the rifle bore (meaning that you have to aim above the intended point of impact for short range targets) and having an optic with reference points in the reticle makes this much easier than a no-magnification optic, or a “fine line” cross hair optic.

I wasn’t a better marksman than anyone else on that stage; I was just the one with the better gear for the problem. Even if I’d only had a fine line reticle, the 4x magnification would have allowed me to see impact on the target and hold by guesstimate, which would have still let me win the stage, but would NOT have let me get first round impacts on an animal.

I hope you get to the range and practice this skill for yourself. If you have your rifle set up with irons, a red dot, or a holosight you can still practice short range precision, but it will be more difficult than with an LPVO. To keep your training expenses low, I recommend that instead of buying commercial targets you get some 1” round orange stickers and use them as targets to see how many shots it takes you to break the color.

https://amzn.to/41urZym

Try to see how well you do at 7, 14, and 21 yards (common pistol ranges) and see if you can’t rapidly transition between those ranges with your carbine and get first round hits in the orange.

Given the nature of the world, you never know when you might need to make short range precision shots with your rifle. It might be placing a head shot on a young feral hog about to root up your potatoes, or perhaps winning a shooting contest with your friends for bragging rights, or maybe for a more urgent situation when the SHTF. 

No matter the reason, that rimfire stage identified a skills gap I was lucky enough to adapt to on first attempt. Next time, I won't have to rely on luck, and this cultivated skill will come in handy.

The Ryobi 3716 Chainsaw: a 5+ Year Review

There are big names in the Chainsaw product line, like Stihl and Husqvarna for the professional loggers, with Echo and Poulan targeting the home user market segment. And there are not-so-big names such as Craftsman (which used to be the Sears brand, and is now available at Lowe’s), Ryobi (available at Home Depot), and a whole bunch of “Me Too” Chinese brands that you can find online.

For context, I’ve used my  Ryobi 3716 chainsaw to fell trees, cut firewood, and remove debris preventing access. My Trail Life troop has a few “work days” where we assist other organizations by cutting firewood, and my Ryobi has held up alongside the Stihl, Husqvarna, Poulan, Crafstman, Homelite, and Echo saws the other dads bring. This isn’t saying the Ryobi is better, only that it isn’t any worse than other established brands. My neighbor has a BlueMax (available at Lowes) brand saw, and it too worked just fine when we were clearing his backyard.

With all this comparative experience over the years, I wouldn’t say that the Ryobi 3716 is a “must buy,” as there are plenty of reasonable alternatives in the same price bracket. For example if you have a Lowe’s near you but not a Home Depot, a Craftsman or BlueMax chainsaw might make a lot more sense in your situation. But if you do have a Home Depot as your nearest major home improvement store, perhaps it’s the right option for your situation.

https://amzn.to/3B2nRdW

The Ryobi 3716 is aptly named. The 37 is for 37 cubic centimeters of displacement, and the 16 is for the 16” bar size. It comes in at 12 pounds, which isn’t ultra-light for a chainsaw, but is much handier than the 20+ pound McCulloch chainsaw my dad let me use to cut firewood. In the 16” bar range, the 37CC engine on the Ryobi 3716 is completely adequate, and I would not recommend getting a smaller saw unless you are also stepping down to a 14” bar. A more powerful saw will cut faster (given equal blade sharpness), but not noticeably so over the course of a homeowner response to a few trees falling. If you were going to be in a job where time is money, then the chainsaw would become a time sink, and you should get  a “top tier” chainsaw.

The Good 

The initial price is cheap for a chainsaw, and is a very good value.

Consumable costs are also very good, as Ryobi is able to use the “Powercare” line of blades and bars, as well as Oregon blades and bars. My buddy with a Husqvarna pays nearly 37 dollars a blade, and I can buy a two pack for just over half that.

Other consumable parts, such as spark plugs and air filters, are cheap and available due to Home Depot carrying them, and after 5+ years of use, I should probably get a tune up kit for it. 

https://amzn.to/4g8ePLy

The Bad

After Hurricane Helene, I found myself needing to do two cuts to get through the trunk of large trees. If you have a lot of work to do, with two foot diameter trees, a more powerful saw with a longer blade is probably a better option. This was never really a problem before, as all of my chainsaw work up to that point had been pre-planned on my schedule. But in a disaster response, sometimes I wished for a 20” bar as that extra 4 inches of cutting length would have come in handy quite a bit, and a Craftsman 20 inch chainsaw with 46cc engine is only about 50 to 60 dollars more. However, the blades and bars get more expensive as well (to get more, one must pay more).

The Interesting

If you want a real German or Swedish chainsaw, you’ll pay top dollar for one. Pretty much all of the affordable chainsaws, regardless of brand, are made in China, and brands that want to build on brand recognition and brand equity keep a tight reign on their original equipment manufacturer (OEM) quality control. Ryobi is no different in this regard; the Ryobi name is Japanese, but Ryobi power tools in North America is owned by a Hong Kong conglomerate. 

If you find a brand you know nothing about, look up a YouTube review or two before purchasing. It doesn’t save you any money in the long run if the saw needs the expensive brand blades or parts.

Prepping Thoughts

To be prepared with a chainsaw you also need to stock fuel, bar oil, spare blades, and at least one spare bar. I recommend spending the money on a pre-mix fuel (I use TrueFuel 50:1 92 octane, no ethanol) as it lasts a long time, and bar oil lasts indefinitely. If find yourself without bar oil, you can substitute normal car engine oil, but as it is thinner you’ll need refill more often.

https://amzn.to/3V8zSWb

If you don’t have a chainsaw at all, and live where windstorms can knock trees down and lock you in (like what happened recently in the Pacific Northwest), or live where hurricanes are a known risk (pretty much all of the South), or even where Nor’easters can hit and drop trees, you probably should have a chainsaw in your resiliency preps, and it probably should be a two cycle gas chainsaw unless you have a robust power generation setup where you could recharge a bunch of 40 volt lithium battery packs. After Helene, no one was using electric chainsaws after day two, as there were more pressing needs for electricity, like refrigeration.

Press-N-Go Bullseye Holsters

One of my local gun shops carries a line of Bullseye brand kydex holsters that are designed to be custom molded to your particular pistol. I wanted to use my Beretta 92 for the Protector 1 class taught by Sheepdog Defense, and the required holster type is “kydex, no Serpas,” so I took my Beretta in, paid my sixty dollars for the kit and pressing fee, and got a strong retention inside the waistband (IWB) holster.

The Good

It works.

 Bullseye "Heat Press Go" kydex holster in "carbon fiber" texture 

The Bad

It has a leather back. I don’t like the feel of leather against my skin, so I always wear a shirt tucked in between my skin and the holster. I would have preferred 100% kydex, but “large frame auto, left hand draw, IWB” only had one option that day, and it was the leather-backed design. The good part about leather is that it is slightly more comfortable, but the bad part about leather is that it gets wet, gets floppy over time, and can stretch, making that “friction retention” holster looser and looser.

My gripe about leather aside, if you carry something with widespread adoption like a Glock, odds are good you don’t need to get a custom holster. The Beretta 92 may have been all the rage in the 1980s with the Lethal Weapon franchise, but it’s a full size service pistol that isn’t particularly good for concealed carry; however, I’m 6’1” and over 200lbs, so there is plenty of real estate to carry a full size auto in my situation. I carry a Beretta because it’s what I use for Service Pistol competitions (choices for that are limited to 1911s, Beretta M9 clones, and probably the new Sig Sauer M17 commercial equivalents).

Currently, the Bullseye Holster web site is less than helpful and I can find no Amazon outlet for the brand. However they seem to be in stock with multiple gun stores, such as Keene Tactical.  

Should You Get One?
Does the Bullseye IWB heat-press-go holster get my recommendation? No, not unless you have no other option (my situation at the time) and absolutely need one right now, or you are getting an outside the waistband (OWB) holster in full kydex. The cost of convenience is what it is, and I don’t have a setup to mold kydex at home. 

I’ve since found a full kydex IWB Beretta 92 holster for half the price of the Bullseye.

https://amzn.to/496sFLV

Holsters are like firearms in that they are designed around a deliberate set of compromises on material, size, texture, features, etc. There are no “perfect” firearms or holsters, but you may find a pair that perfectly aligns with the set of compromises you prefer, and if you are carrying a more common polymer frame auto, you should have a lot more options at a lot more price points.

Rope as Cordage

In any “survival packing list” worth a darn you’ll see “cordage” listed as an essential. Even if you aren’t roughing it in the wilderness, having rope and cordage on hand can be a real asset in a disaster or disruption of normal life.

Some quick background information:

• Cordage is twine and string, useful for small tasks.
• Rope is bigger than cordage in all dimensions.
• There are two types of rope, static and dynamic. This simply means one (static) stretches less than 5% of its length under load, and the other (dynamic) stretches more than that. 
• Both types have a broad range of uses, but when the power is out, sometimes having rope on hand is the difference between waiting for someone else to solve your problem, or being able to do it yourself. 
• Static ropes are generally used for climbing, rappelling, and other activities where humans are going up and down the ropes. 
• The cheapest, most readily available rope worth having on hand is dynamic, and made from synthetic fiber, 3/8th of an inch in diameter. 

You can do a lot with dynamic rope, from simply tying things together to creating a simple pully system using household hardware items like eye bolts and carabiners. I generally like to have one or two lengths of this type on hand, although the last two times I used up my stash it was just to teach youngsters how to tie knots. You can get 100 feet of it for about $6 at Home Depot, and essentially the same stuff at Lowes.

https://www.homedepot.com/b/Hardware-Chains-Ropes-Rope/3-8-inch/N-5yc1vZc2grZ1z1slt3 

In the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, one of the problems we had was a massive amount of downed trees, leading to a lot of chainsaw and tree removal work. One tree dropped right over my neighbors' deck, and the problem became how to remove the tree without having all the weight of the trunk fall on his deck. Fortunately, (or unfortunately, depending on how you see it), my neighbor was able to arrange for a professional to remove the trunk with heavy machinery before I had another weekend free to help him finish the job (which is a huge plug for having a solid Homeowner's insurance policy).

That neighbor and I had already used a bunch of rope to control the fall of tree limbs as I limbed the big beech tree. I tossed the rope over a limb using a weight (small sandbags work great for this), then tied a safe knot around the rope, and neighbor tied the other end to his lawn tractor. He would apply tension with the lawn tractor, and I would chainsaw the limb, letting him pull the limbs away from over his fence so they landed safely on the lawn. A six dollar rope saved hundreds of dollars in fence repair.

I’ve since found commercial block and tackle pulley systems available for very moderate prices (this one costs about the same as a few eye bolts, plus high strength snap-over carabiners, and I think I'll purchase one for the next time I have to teach kids about simple machines (levers, incline planes, and pulleys).

https://amzn.to/4hKjQeD

One other use of cordage was helping another friend cut through the downed forest to get to his shed where they stored their animal feed. When we got to the shed, it was crushed, but my buddy had a come-along and a bunch of 550 cord. In order to not snap the cord, I wrapped it around the fallen tree trunk about a dozen times to distribute the pressure over multiple strands, and that worked fine to pull the fallen oak off the shed enough to retrieve the animal feed so they could keep their farm running.

Finally, knots. You should know how to tie a square knot, and a bowline. These two knots cover the vast majority of practical rope and cordage uses you will encounter in an emergency, or a camping trip. Yes there may be more appropriate knots for tying down a rain fly over a tent, but you can get it done with square and bowline knots. 

There is a lot more information about the different types of rope out there: braided, double braided, twisted, natural fiber, kernmantle, etc. There are a lot more knots, and a lot more potential pulley setups. There are many better ropes than a 3/8” polypropylene rope, but I found that the cheap 3/8th polypropylene, as well as non-milspec 550 cord, served perfectly well in disaster response. 

Win the Battle, Lose the war? The SUDA Loop

This is definitely not a typical Blue Collar Prepping article. Instead, there will be a fair bit of military history and theory, which will then be tied into prepping at the end. 

 

The history of maneuver warfare theory is long, storied and ancient. From the “weighted flank” used by the Thebans at the Battle of Leuctra to the guerilla tactics of Francis “the Swamp Fox” Marion, from the battlefield genius of Napoleon to the blitzkrieg of WW2, every generation has adopted new technologies and abandoned previous orthodox military doctrine. It was in the skies of Korea that Colonel John Boyd developed his intuition about the nature of air to air combat, something that would require him to go back to school to earn an engineering degree and create Boyd’s Energy Maneuverability theory. A few years after BEM was accepted (it helped design the F-15, F-16, and F-18 fighter jets), its principles were modified into the OODA Loop to explain how information processing could enhance ground combat operations.

 

Colonel John R. Boyd (Wikimedia Commons)

As far as I can find through research, the OODA Loop really dates to a 1995 brief Col. Boyd delivered as a model for a decision cycle, although Boyd's earlier works support that brief. Note that the OODA Loop, as a construct, is designed to “win an engagement.” Whether that be a jet fighter on jet fighter engagement, or a ground combat maneuver force engagement, the side that correctly understands the situation faster than the other, and makes higher quality decisions faster, is more likely to create an outcome in their favor where, eventually, the other side's decisions cannot change the outcome.

In the wake of Desert Storm, in 1995 the US Army and USMC were facing massive troop and budget cuts from the Clinton administration (the “peace dividend” from the fall of the USSR). The previous strategic operating doctrines, of AirLand Battle and Active Defense before it, were coming up as too costly in the shrinking DOD budget. The OODA Loop concept, as applied to maneuver warfare, looked very promising to create a situation where the Army and Marine Corps could “do more with less.”

Experiments in the years that followed, such as the Force XXI project conducted by the 4th Infantry Division, proved the value of intelligence- and information-driven operations. Simply by adding surveillance drones to the 4th Infantry Division, the unit was able to more effectively use artillery to shape the battlefield deeply, and was able to reduce the M1 Abrams quick reaction force size by 25% as proven across multiple exercises at the National Training Center. (Citation: I was there for two of those exercises.)

As a result, the OODA Loop found its way into the white papers, doctrine, and buzzwords of military professionals for multiple generations, and we didn’t really win any wars using it. We won a lot of battles; we could, and did, fight like demons. General Stanley McChrystal, in his role as Special Operations Afghanistan commander, expanded upon the concept with his F3EA special operations targeting methodology of “Find, Fix, Finish, Exploit, Assess” process, where rapidly executing raids to collect information that would be rapidly exploited to uncover the next target for a raid. The F3EA methodology was as accurate as flipping a coin, never really breaking much above the 50% accuracy level. Trying to combine “violence of action” with “deliberate information processing” was an operational failure as the violence outpaced analysis quite rapidly.

I should note that not all military thinkers were completely enamored with the OODA Loop. Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster wrote a very informative paper in 2006 about how the proliferation of sensors and drones to create a “transparent battlefield” would result in tactical successes and strategic failure. McMaster was correct: war is still very much a human endeavor, and a political one at that.

Where does this leave the OODA loop? Is it a deep insight into the nature of how to win tactically? Well, yes, but it never was about winning a war, or solving problems where the enemy isn’t some other human trying to harm you. If you want to get better at defensive pistol work, training to draw and fire from your concealed holster is going to help you shorten your OODA Loop. If you want to learn how to outfight someone attacking you, consistently train in kickboxing and grappling and you’ll have an almost magical advantage simply because you can see openings faster, and your body has the muscle memory to execute almost without thought. But surviving or “winning a fight” isn’t always the goal, especially when the threat isn’t violence.

An alternate model, one designed deliberately to avoid repeating our strategic failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, is the “Sense, Understand, Decide, Act” or SUDA Loop model. Rather than observing a threat, the first step is simply to sense the environment and find out what is really going on (or not going on, as the case may be). Once the environment is sufficiently mapped out, then understanding of key players, resources, and grievances can be processed into understanding.  Once you understand the actual problems, you can decide on what to address first, second, etc., and then begin to act on your plan. You then sense the environment again to see if your actions are creating the changes you want.  

The SUDA Loop is simply a modern twist on what others have done before, such as Doctor John Snow and the Broad Street well pump handle removal in 1854 to stop a Cholera outbreak in London.  He sensed the environment by mapping out where people were getting sick; once he understood the data set enough to identify the epicenter he decided to remove the well pump handle. After the well pump handle was removed, new cases of cholera stopped, and he continued tracking that data to show his action achieved the desired outcome.  

My final point here isn’t that the OODA Loop is bad, only that it should not be applied to big problems. If it is a violent encounter, having the tighter, quicker OODA Loop is a serious tactical advantage, and you should train your body accordingly. But if it isn’t a violent encounter, but instead an earthquake or hurricane, then using a more deliberate model like SUDA seems more appropriate to making things better in the aftermath, such as which of your tribe is still connected to the Internet, who has what resources to share, who needs resources, etc. Sensing your operational environment helps you understand what you can do, what needs to be done, and prioritize the work.   

One of the more quotable Generals I worked with before I retired constantly told his staff, “Be quick to think, slow to plan.” What he was hammering home was the need to get your brain involved with understanding the situation and problems before trying to slap some doctrinal answer on paper. Military history is full of units who received completely worthless orders because the higher headquarters didn’t understand the operational reality. As a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, I assure you that is still very recent history indeed.

Sheepdog Response "Protector 1" Review

Last month, I attended the Sheepdog Response “Protector 1” class taught at the Government Training Institute (GTI) in Barnwell, South Carolina. The Protector 1 curriculum was delivered over three days, Friday evening through Sunday afternoon.

Friday

The initial briefing on Friday night covered a lot of the course administration, but also set expectations for the weekend of training. Concepts like situational awareness, the OODA Loop, a methodology for categorizing situational awareness zones, even Colonel Cooper's color code was covered.

Saturday

Saturday morning, on the mats at a martial arts gym in Aiken (45 minutes from GTI), we covered the basic positions of mount, side control, back mount, and guard. This all culminated in running through “Drill One,” which is escaping the mount by “arm trap and roll” into the guard, passing the guard to side control, and transitioning from side control to the mount, at which point the drill starts again. The final exercise on the mats was full resistance rolling from various positions, such as back to back, lying side by side, or even starting in the mount.

Saturday afternoon was at the shooting range. We started off with slow fire, then progressed to drawing from the holster and other basic pistol drills. There were two of us on the line with DA/SA pistols, and I identified that I was dropping the first double action shot. The instructors helped me achieve a better grip, which fixed that problem over the course of the weekend.

Sunday

Sunday morning we were back on the mats, this time working up through parts of “Drill Two” and taking the back to a rear naked choke, along with kimura from guard, guillotine from guard, and the hip bump sweep. Weapons control was introduced, and rubber pistols and knives were included in the sparring. 

Sunday afternoon we were back on the range, this time with more advanced drills including dummy round induced failure to fire drills (tap & rack drills), turning to shoot, alternate positions (squatting, kneeling, seated, urban prone), barricade shooting, vehicular barricade tactics, and the final “run, pummel, barricade shoot” stress shoot.

https://sheepdogresponse.com/collections/protector-1

Review

That is a lot to pack into the time, and it left me with a conundrum for how to review Protector 1 for Blue Collar Prepping. First, at $950 it is not a cheap course. Second, I think it is best if I explain that Protector 1 is designed as a "baselining" course to ensure that everyone who wants to continue with Sheepdog Response has a solid set of skills to build on in more advanced classes. 

My personal “gun school” resume includes various US Army Infantry school courses, Army Marksmanship Unit CQB and SDM Train the Trainer courses, Shivworks' Extreme Close Quarters Combat, and my competition history is a lot of service rifle with some two-gun mixed in. My grappling is experience is getting close to four years of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu at 2 to 5 hours of training per week, and a US Army Combatives instructor (level 2).

That being said, I learned things in Protector 1. They were little tricks that improved my pistol performance, a different way to set up a guillotine from guard,  and an alternate head placement for an arm trap and roll. You know the instructors truly know their craft when a student, for whom all of the curriculum is review, still learns something new to improve his skills. That makes it a solid course taught by good instructors.

So in the “Good/Fast/Cheap, Pick Any Two” definition, Protector 1 is “Good and Fast” but not cheap. It is quality, however, so you have to balance the monetary cost with the residual value:

• If you attend a class like Protector 1 and then go immediately back to your previous lifestyle without incorporating new priorities into your schedule like exercise, range time, and grappling time, you wasted your money and time. 
• If you go to a class like Protector 1 and then go, “Huh, I was completely out of breath three minutes into a live roll, I need to join a BJJ or MMA gym and train regularly, and I need to do fifteen minutes of dedicated dry fire every other day” then Protector 1 was well worth the cost. 
• However, if more modestly priced “fundamentals” courses in your weak areas are offered, it might make more financial sense to invest in a basic pistols fundamental class, or a concealed carry class, and then just join a BJJ or MMA gym and start training. Protector 1 represented over four months of tuition for me at my BJJ school, so it was definitely a luxury purchase in my budget.

Side note: once you complete the course, you are eligible to join the Sheepdog Response forums to connect with other alumni and start finding answers to your questions as they pop up. This is an additional residual value that needs to be mentioned.

So who do I recommend go to Protector 1? People who can afford it and have nearly zero formal training on grappling or pistol shooting. Attending Shivworks' Extreme Close Quarters Concepts convinced me that I needed to develop my grappling skills more seriously, because testing myself against one or two full on attackers was an eye opener. I believe that Protector 1 provides that same “eye opener” experience of where your skills are lacking. 

https://agile-mercurial.com/2019/07/12/the-dunning-kruger-effect/

Getting off the "Peak of Mount Ignorance" on the Dunning-Kruger scale is the most important part of building real expertise. However,

if I had to choose between Protector 1 and Extreme Close Quarters Concepts, I would recommend ECQC to anyone who already has a passing familiarity with grappling (years of wrestling or BJJ) and pistol shooting (has attended at least one CCW course before).

What if Protector 1 and/or ECQC is out of your price range? Join a martial arts school that does full resistance training (BJJ, MMA, wrestling, krav maga, etc), and find training opportunities for defensive pistol training. As much as I give the NRA grief, they do offer some affordable 8 hour classes for pistol training, including intro to conceal carry and defensive pistol. 

(Erin adds: If you can at all afford it, I recommend the MAG40 class for both pistol instruction and class time on "Armed Citizens’ Rules of Engagement". See my review here for more information.)

Final Thoughts

You always pay for an education; always with time,  and often with money as well. You have to live in the body you have, so you have to train in the body you have. Don't wait to "get in shape" to start training. Start training now, and "getting in shape" will happen. 

Hurricane Helene After Action Review

When Hurricane Helene hit the Central Savannah River Area (CSRA) on the Georgia/South Carolina border, it retained Hurricane Category 1 wind speeds. The destruction was widespread, and many disaster preparedness plans were put into effect. This is what we learned.

Water

• You really can’t have enough water on hand for a situation like this. Being able to restock on potable water, or boil to make safe municipal water, is essential. If you run out of water all your other preps start to matter less and less. 
• We also keep a lot of “hydration salts” products on hand, as we do a lot of outdoor activities with our children's Trail Life troop, so we were well prepped to stay hydrated. 
• I would say a minimum is a 36 pack of 0.5 liter bottles per person per four days of use, at least in our heat conditions, but do your own math for your own situation.

Gas

• You’ll need a lot, and in two types: unleaded gas for vehicles and generators, and 2-cycle gas for chainsaws and pole trimmers. There's a lot of wood cutting that has to be done immediately after a storm passes in order to open roads. 
• When we needed to refill gas cans, we emptied the ones on hand into my pickup and headed east to Columbia, SC. It took 60 miles to get to a gas station without a waiting line, two miles off the I-20. 
• The 2-cycle gas needs to be ethanol free, or it can eat the plastic/rubber fuel lines in all the “made in China” 2-cycle engines that power tools these days. I just pay the premium to pick up a 1 or 3 liter bottle from Home Depot or Lowes when shopping. 
• Have funnels, because modern gas cans suck (never forgive the EPA for what they did to the gas can) and you may need a funnel to properly fuel a machine without spilling too much.

Tools

• The most commonly needed tool was a chainsaw, the second a pole saw. Get the kind that uses gasoline, as there is more work to be done than electrics will be able to handle.
• Have extra blades, bars, and bar oil to keep them running. 
• One friend of mine used a lot of bow saw and teenage boy labor to clear branches, but the chainsaw is going to be faster. 
• Pro tip: you need to know more than just the chain length, as different brands will have slightly different link sizes, so know what you need in case you have to have someone else do your shopping.

Cooking

• We cooked on a single burner propane stove, a cinder block “rocket stove”, and a campfire. Of the three, the rocket stove and propane burner got used the most. The propane burner was fastest to boiling water for coffee or soup, and the rocket stove was best for big family meals (but it does take a little longer to get going). 
• We tried to use a Coleman white gas stove, but the pump system froze up and needs to be replaced, which is probably a project for this winter. 
• If I had to recommend any one system, it would be the single propane camp burner and a two pack of 1 lb propane bottles. It's light, cheap, and doesn’t go bad like a white gas stove can. 
  
  

  

  Ozark Trail Single Burner Backpacking Propane Stove 
  

  
  
• If you have room on your shelter location to set up a cinder block rocket stove, absolutely do that as well. To speed up the rocket stove starting time, I used my plumber's torch to get the central chamber area hot enough really fast, which is cheating but uses way less propane than just cooking with propane.

Medicine

• All four of us in my family got the flu. Thankfully, this was early October not mid-August, and temperatures didn’t hit into the 90s except for a few brief bits on some afternoons. But having influenza in the south with no air conditioning is a miserable experience. 
• We didn't need to hit up a pharmacy as we had NSAIDs to bring down fevers, and expectorants to help clear lungs. A prepper’s medicine cabinet ought to be able to keep a family of four through a 7 day disruption of electricity and potable water.
• Those hydration salts really helped me get through the worst of the “man flu” that laid me out for most of a week.

Luxuries

• Generators and portable air conditioning units aren't a necessity to survive, but they do make “sheltering in place” more comfortable. 
• We didn’t use either, but we plan to get a Jackery and solar charging system for camping gear anyways, and that would have made this little “free Amish lifestyle experience” a little less spartan, and it would have allowed us to run our chest freezer enough to keep frozen proteins frozen.
• As it was, we lost maybe a few hundred dollars in groceries that could have been prevented with a small solar generator system.

Tribe

• We know our neighbors, they know us. When we would make the 120 mile round trip supply run to anywhere open, we made sure we had their needs and wants list. 
• When we were eating out our thawed chest freezer we came across a turkey breast, really too big for us as a family of 4, so we let our neighbor deep fry it and they made mashed potatoes and mac & cheese; we added green beans to make a little Thanksgiving meal a tad early.
• Build your tribe before there is a problem, because the worst place to meet for the first time is disaster response. 

Cell Phones

• The cellular network stayed up, but bandwidth was very clogged, dropping me from 5g down to LTE on multiple occasions as cable internet (the majority of home broadband in our area) was cut just as much as the electricity. 
• Group texts became the normal way for people to organize support for people in need, and it worked out pretty well. 
• Internet came back up in our neighborhood two days after electricity.

Final Thoughts

• We were incredibly blessed to be in the 50% of customers in our area who got electricity back after seven days. Other than not having a portable power solution to extend the useful food storage period of our chest freezer, we were pretty happy with the skills and resources we’ve built up as a family. We didn’t even have to open up any of our freeze-dried food stores, as our home survived the winds. 
• For those who lost their home to the storm, they may have had a different experience, and my wife and I discussed creating “prep boxes” that could be sealed long term and placed in a shed just in case we needed to direct a neighbor to resources if we weren't there to help with disaster response. 
• Resources can be shared, or can be destroyed in the disaster, but skills are something you keep with you. If you are new to prepping and have to choose between "stocking resources" and "building resilience skills" I'd recommend the skills building option.