Author: donnorum

Pat Goodale – Practical Firearms Training (PGPFT) Tactical Rifle AAR

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[Same introduction, note, and disclaimer as before.]

Ammunition (5.56x45mm NATO):

  • M193: Standard 55-gr ball cartridge, good for bulk shooting / practice.
  • Mk262: 77-gr Sierra MatchKing, good long-range performance, match-quality (and price)
  • Mk318: 62-gr, USMC standard. Hunting bullet – Open Tip Match Rear Penetrator (OTMRP) (62 gr. Federal Fusion).
  • M855A1: US Army “green” round (lead-free). Politicized development & adoption process.

Manufacturers:

  • Entry Level: M&P Sport
  • Low-Medium: Rock River Arms, Anderson
  • High-Midrange: BCM, Colt
  • Premium: Daniel Defense, LWRC

Sights:

  • Red dots need adjustments to avoid vanishing (too weak) or ‘blooming’ (too strong) depending on lighting conditions.
  • Red dot sights tend to ‘fuzz out’ (astigmatism) with (shooter’s) age.
  • Low-Power Variable Scopes
    • 1x-4x, 1x-5x, 1x-6x, etc.
    • Used by lots of military special forces
    • Have the lowest magnification as the initial & default. Once on target, then ramp it up – otherwise, like searching through a straw.
    • Throw levers can make the magnification adjustment significantly easier.
  • Expect scope + mount to be ~½ of cost of rifle. (LaRue mounts.)
  • With good quality mounts (indexed and repeatable) can hot-swap between red dot and scope.

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Pat Goodale – Practical Firearms Training (PGPFT) Defensive Handgun AAR

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A brief introduction – this AAR and the Low-Light Handgun and Tactical Rifle AARs to follow are all based on a private course weekend. Defensive Handgun was on Saturday, Low-Light was that evening, and Tactical Rifle was Sunday from morning until mid-afternoon. As such, it doesn’t match up exactly with the Defensive Handgun I/II/III, Tactical Rifle – X Days, etc. courses on the website, but I think it still gives a good idea of what level of detail and which topics to expect to encounter.

Another note – since these notes were written up primarily to organize and remember the concepts and drills that were covered, they omit details of the range, class setup, etc., but the range was awesome, the class setup was superb, the instructors were excellent – honestly, it’s an unqualified recommendation. I can’t think of anything negative to say about it, so if you read no further and take nothing else away from this – strong recommendation.

And the obligatory disclaimer – these were typed up from my hastily-scrawled notes and dissipating recollections over the week, week-and-a-half after two days jam-packed full of shooting and excellent (have I said that I recommend it?) instruction, so – as always – if something is wrong or seems amiss, that’s almost certainly on me. Similarly, all of the drills were done under the close supervision of trained professionals by participants whose performance levels were constantly monitored and accounted for in the instructors’ selection and setup of said drills, so… honestly, if you’re the type of person who’d read a random person on the internet writing about running through the woods with a rifle engaging targets 100+ yards away and go out and actually do that on your own, well, you either don’t need this disclaimer, or you wouldn’t heed it anyways, so… on with it!

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What It Was Like to Run 100 Miles

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(FYI, this was the 2017 Pine Creek Challenge in Pennsylvania.)

0: Okay, I guess we’re really doing this then. Six AM – we start running.

1: It sounds really cliche to say ‘you don’t run a hundred miles, you run one mile a hundred times’, or that ‘a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step’, so to hell with that noise.

The first mile of any race, for me, is like jumping into cold water – kinda panicky and I have to remind myself, it’s okay, you’ve got this, just relax and get going. Keep going. Just not too fast.

2: Still paranoid about every step, every breath. There’s a long way to go. There’s no way to win an ultramarathon in the first five, ten, maybe twenty miles, but there are a helluva lotta ways to lose one. We’re obviously not in this to win it, but we do have a goal of a day (i.e., we want to be back at the finish line and finished [since it’s a sorta-loop/sorta-out-and-back course] by six AM tomorrow), and it would be hellaciously embarrassing to twist an ankle on, like, mile three.

3: Did not twist my ankle!

4: Did not gas myself, either. Kept to a nice and steady pace alongside my brother.

5: First aid station, wheeling around and heading back. Not much more to say – I don’t eat or drink that much this early in a race and I started with snacks in my vest so I don’t need to refuel, and it’s not a landmark on this visit – we’re just running to cover distance right now. Later on we’ll be running aid station to aid station, but right now it’s just mile, mile, mile.

6: I eat cookies, I think. Maybe?

7: Becoming properly morning. We joke about how we’ll be able to say “good morning”, “good afternoon”, “good evening”, “good night”, and “good morning” again during the course of one run.

8: Pace stays the same. It’s slow. (“Start slow, then taper off.”) A couple minutes slower than my normal to- and from-workout pace. Feels like we could keep it up forever. Forever, however, will slip into the rearview mirror fifty miles from now…

9: The 100k race started later, so we’ve been passing runners coming towards us on the first outbound leg for a while now. No difference in bib color or attire, which makes it kinda nice that the two distances being run on the trail today are so similar (relatively speaking, I mean…) and their starting times so close, given the difference in cut-off.

Nothing like sharing mile 22 of a marathon course with mile 5 of the half…

10: Hit the bridge again, and joke that it accounts for probably 50% of the total course elevation. (My brother specifically looked for the flattest 100-miler that was logistically feasible. Next year, however, we’ve signed up for the Old Dominion 100. 14,000 feet of gain vs… about 900, here.)

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A (Marginally) Better Use of My Time Than Watching Television; or, Never Skimp on Luxury –

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– by which I don’t mean, ‘blow all your money on overpriced crap’. I mean, if you’re going to spend time and/or money on something for no other purpose than that you enjoy it, i.e., luxury, then you should spend as much time and money as you need to actually enjoy it (assuming, of course, that you can afford to). Stuff like, you know, gas, staple foods, office supplies, etc., I get them to accomplish a specific function. Assuming that they accomplish that function, the cheaper the better.

(Of course, this ignores the fact that things are not 100% necessity XOR luxury; my favorite brand of toothpaste (e.g., not that I actually have one) might be 90/10 necessity/luxury, whereas (depending on how much stock you put in studies that say writing longhand improves cognition) fountain pen ink would be 10/90 the other way around.)

Tl;dr, e.g., if you decide to ‘save’ and buy a $20 bottle of wine even though it’s not really all that good instead of your usual treat of a $50 bottle that you know you’d like, you didn’t save $30, you wasted $20.

… Which is all a long-winded way of saying that:

  • For the WH40k players, yes, I realize that conversions involving bits from five different companies (six, counting the eleven rare earth magnets of varying sizes), drilling and pinning, (minor) use of Green Stuff, and pre-assembly painting of almost all of the 23 individual pieces (not counting those magnets), per model, for a basic Troops choice is utterly ridiculous. (I also realize that grenades don’t have to be represented on the model.)
  • Of course, GW charging $80 for a squad of ten (10) metal (i.e., pretty much non-customizable) Sisters of Battle is also ridiculous. (I started this when 7th edition had recently been released, so by the time I finish it there’s a good chance that with 8th edition we’ll finally have nvrmnd we’ll probably be able to have the Emperor as our Warlord before we ever see plastic Sisters.)
  • Churchill himself adhered to a regimen of ‘2000 words and 200 bricks’ per day, or, to quote another great man, ‘the more complex the mind, the greater the need for the simplicity of play‘. (Because, y’know, if you’re going to implicitly compare yourself to one of the greatest wartime leaders ever, why not throw in one of the greatest starship captains ever, too?)
  • For everyone else, add up how much time you spend staring at the television or flipping through YouTube videos or your Facebook feed. And keep in mind that this is, like, one or two relaxing hours per week every other month at this point, at most.

So, all that out of the way, here’s Part 1 of “Converting (Mostly) Plastic Sisters of Battle in Way Too Many Ridiculously [Unnecessarily] Complicated Steps”:

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I Kinda Can’t Believe This Worked… – Bookshelf Design, Part 3

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With the piles of ready-to-shelve books growing and a sufficiently large sample size ready for processing (~45.7% measured!) I decided to go ahead and see about making a smaller bookcase for underneath the window in the study while continuing the planning for the semi-built-in shelves in the other… okay, almost literally all of the other rooms.

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DIY: GORUCK Shoulder Strap

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[There was to be something longer here but, honestly, this whole thing boils down to “I liked GORUCK’s old shoulder straps, I have GORUCK bags without shoulder straps, and GORUCK no longer sells the type of shoulder strap I like so I’ll make my own.” So.]

GORUCK used to make and sell the best shoulder strap I’ve ever seen – dual tri-glide adjust, just-right-width nylon webbing, and solid metal clips. They still sell a shoulder strap, but it has a section of sewn-on padding in the middle, and

  1. Said padding puts a rather high lower limit on the shortest length to which the strap can be adjusted, plus
  2. If you need padding on a cross-body shoulder strap, you should most likely be reëvaluating your load-carrying equipment choice(s).

(And, y’know, at $35 a strap, and given the number of GORUCK bags I have that could take a shoulder strap, less the number of shoulder straps I have already… why not DIY?)

Parts: Wasn’t too picky about the webbing or the tri-glides, but the snaps I wanted to be just right. My brother finally found these for me – 1 ½” Metal Snaphooks from Tom Bihn. (Cue sectarian strife over the mixing of Tom Bihn and GORUCK.) They’re a touch smaller, but otherwise appear identical to the snaps on my original GORUCK straps.

A few quick measurements gave 60.75″ for the total length of the webbing for the GORUCK strap, so I called it 5′ and cut and melted the edges of the nylon webbing. (No picture because one, it was blurry, and two, it’s exactly what it sounds like – five feet of loosely folded nylon webbing.)

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The first tri-glide attached. Note that my sewing machine had trouble going through three layers of heavy nylon webbing, so while the end-folds were machine-stitched, the tri-glide attachment was done by hand.
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The first of the snaps attached with the rest of the strap threaded back through the tri-glide.
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Finished strap, cinched down.

UROC 100K (2017) // Ranger Beads, I Wuv U!

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Race was good and fun. New personal-record distance! Beat my stretch goal by almost half an hour. Got new and deliciously obnoxious hardware:

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Ate at least a whole pizza afterwards. Curled up by the firepit, at one point trying to reheat cold pizza over the grate.

Single-legged stepped-up onto the podium, hopped down, and didn’t blow a quad.

No new toenails for the collection, but a couple of wicked blisters.

Best of all, though, I managed to bust through my usual mid-ultra doldrums and disheartenments and keep up a nice and steady pace instead of crashing and crapping out in the last ten miles like at Bel Monte.

Thus, ranger beads – I wuv u.

Given that, like, 90% of the tiny amount of traffic here is due to a comparison between LaRue and GORUCK rifle cases, you’re probably familiar with ranger beads. If not, here are a few links.

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Every ten (10) four-count steps (so, “left, right, left, one; left, right, left, two…”) move a little bead over. After moving all nine beads, next time move one of the big beads. Then start moving the little beads back. When all nine big beads are moved, the next time a big bead would be moved, switch directions on those, and you’ve got a thousand counted out.

Of course, I do wear a GPS watch, so I wasn’t worried about distance, per se. But ~2 miles (1,000 counts per cycle, 4 steps per count, 2’6″ to 3′ per step) is enough of a chunk to seem like a chunk, but still short enough (<30 minutes, usually, unless it’s hella uphill) not to turn into a drag.

Bottom line, it’s an instantiation of the old saw “How do you run a thousand miles hundred kilometers? One step at a time.”

  1. Something to focus on other than legs, stomach, feet, chafing, etc.
  2. Kept the cadence up. Even when I walked a stretch, keeping up with “one, two, three, one; one, two, three, two…” kept the pace brisk.
  3. Built-in timing. Some of the slightly uphill sections I’d run 80/90, walk 20/10, repeat. Was practically automatic with the beads instead of having to look at my watch. Also a good way to keep up a steady eating and drinking pace. E.g., drink every 100, eat every 1000.

Bel Monte 50M (2017) // An Arbitrary Number of Awesome Things Thereabout

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  1. People cheering and cowbelling a random dog that happened to trot down the finish chute.
  2. Getting asked how I was doing as I was passed around mile 40+ and replying “Tip-top!”.
  3. Realizing that it was totally true.
  4. Also realizing that morning that this would be five (5) ultramarathons in five (5) months. (For context, up until November 2015, the longest race I’d ever run was a 10-miler, and that was one of my ‘long’ runs.)
  5. The wolflike howling that filled the valley at about mile 49.9 and stopped the second I threw up a quick Rocky pose at 50.0.
  6. Not getting any weird looks when asking the lady manning the grub table to, quote, “Nutella up these Oreos”…
  7. … not even when I went back for seconds. So delicious.
  8. Reading in the paper the next day about the local 10 Miler and the “seemingly endless straightaway along Main Street, from mile 7.4 to mile 8.1″…

‘MURICA!

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My boss’s son speaks I-don’t-know-how-many languages and is very much a world citizen, at home anywhere in Europe or the US, but is still very much an American kid. He also loves to draw, and one day left this lying around the office, much to the… consternation of his father, a naturalized US citizen with a decidedly European point of view:

cropped-scan

It was glorious, even in draft form – note how the slide has “LIBERTY” engraved on it.

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IDPA Template… template

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Relevant Biographical Details:

  1. I make a large proportion of my purchases from Amazon.
  2. After extracting purchased items from their packaging, the cardboard shells (boxes) are chucked down the basement stairs, forming a drift there against the wall.
    1. Said drift now impedes progress down said stairs.
  3. IDPA targets are more fun to use than splatter targets or hand-drawn circles.
  4. I’ll pay… well, I’ll pay good money for guns and the ammo with which to… fuel? feed? supply? them, but paying for things which I’ll just shoot until there’s little left of them to be shot is… eh.

So. IDPA target specifications pulled from Google:

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