So, after scanning in a bunch of old Star Course materials for OCR training, I figured why not toss them up here, too?
(Broken into four parts because while I was originally going to just cram it all into one post, I figured that at least three of the bits were distinct enough to warrant their own things and the fourth was… not so much really, but by this point it was halfway in-between two of those bits, so why not just go for it? And totally not because of anything like this… And oh yeah, maybe in honor of our getting 4th? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯) So!
(And just to clarify for those too lazy to click on the link to Post 4 above [or, well, an inch or two ago], or the “Read More” below – the event was great. The stream-of-consciousness-profanity is about, well… let’s just say that if you didn’t sign up for the event when it was first announced in the middle of 2019, you would have had no idea that it was held this past weekend.)
Continue reading “(RWC 001) 2020̶1: The AAR Itself&Proper (4th)”
A’ight, so my brother and I ran the GORUCK Star Course 50-Miler in Philly over the weekend. Team Sloth, @teamslothgoruck on Instagram. Here’s the rough timeline of relevant stuff, with miscellaneous asides thrown in when relevant, way more memes than are in any way necessary, and a random blurble of semi-related stuff at the end. Steve’s stuff is again in sky blue.
(And in case you’re thinking, “Hey, this intro looks a lot like this one, and even more like this one“, then spot on.)
After performing acceptably at the Philly Star Course last year, it was kinda inevitable that we’d do it again this year, especially after our poor performance in DC. Due to this being our 3rd Star Course, our preparation was a bit more relaxed than usual. For example, I wrote our navigational website AstroNav for Philly 2018, and then made a new version for DC, but I didn’t bother with a new one for Philly 2019 (I started on one, but only worked on it for a few hours before abandoning it). The 2018 version worked just fine, and the one minor feature I added to it ended up not even being necessary.
A’ight, so my brother and I ran the GORUCK Star Course 50-Miler in D.C. over the weekend. Team Sloth, @teamslothgoruck on Instagram. Here’s the rough timeline of relevant stuff, with miscellaneous asides thrown in when relevant, way more memes than are in any way necessary, and a random blurble of semi-related stuff at the end. Steve’s stuff is again in sky blue.
A’ight, so my brother and I ran the GORUCK Star Course 50-Miler in Philly over the weekend. Team Sloth, @teamslothgoruck on Instagram. Here’s the rough timeline of relevant stuff, with miscellaneous asides thrown in when relevant.
But first, here’s Steve with his intro – he had to fly out to London for work 8AM the morning after, so we’re going back and forth writing this over email:
Big picture background: Who are we?
Ahem.
[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
(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.)
Note: You can’t actually buy the GORUCK Rifle Case at the moment (it’s been available through a pre-order, an initial run, and a second pre-order to date). It’s probably 50/50 if it becomes standard production this time around, and even then, outside of their core rucks GORUCK often comes and goes on inventory.
(Not that there’s anything wrong with this; it’s just a different mentality that you have to be willing to accept. GORUCK is a small, high-quality, American-made gear company; they don’t have a logistics tail of Chinese factories & warehouses [although, fine, I admit that I don’t know where their Cordura, thread, etc. comes from…] nor front-end resellers buying in bulk.
Up-front for what it’s worth, if the GORUCK case had been available when I bought the LaRue case, I would have ponied up the extra for the GORUCK case. I’m happy with the LaRue case, but I’m also a GORUCK aficionado.
Now that I have both, though, they’re similar enough and different enough that I’ve got a better understanding of both of them; enough to provide a bit more of an overview than “Yup, it’s a case, it holds a rifle.”
Further note that my point of view on this is that of an OCPD geek. If you want to improve your shooting, buy a case of cheap ammo and go practice. If you want to take a piece of gear downrange, buy a pallet and test it to destruction yourself.
If you’re bummed that Sortimo T-BOXXen still aren’t readily available stateside and really wish that we could all just get along and choose one of MIL-STD-1913 / KeyMod / M-LOK already, then yeah.=ƎE=)
Both cases are advertised / designed to either hold an assembled SBR or a broken-down carbine or rifle. (I’m using my go-to AAC 300 BLK 9″ and a Noveske Light Recce 16″ here.)
Continue reading “GORUCK Rifle Case / LaRue Covert Rifle Case”
Update 2016-05-13: If you’re interested in GORUCK Firearms Gear and missed out on the latest pre-order, my brother’s put together a quick tutorial about upgrading a regular rucksack into a Shooter-style Ruck:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Goruck/comments/4ipyk9/homemade_ruckshooter_ruck_upgrade/
Note – I wrote this up for my own reference from my scrawled notes the week after the FAD, and then I went back and formatted and edited it to put up here years later. If anything ended up misremembered or flat-out wrong, that’s on me.
Introduction:
We started off ranked up and the cadre went over the basics – range rules, cold and hot, what the medevac vehicle was, all of the basics. Lots of jokings, (“We have several Delta medics here, but you’re all civilians, so if you’re injured, they’ll just sit and watch.” [Bert points and laughs.] “And remember, you signed a death waiver.” And, “We’ll throw you in the back of the car and drive you to the nearest hospital. Which is six hours away.”) but it was still all professional and squared away.
Then we all circled up around Tyler as he went over the basics. We all had to recite after him the Four Rules and he also clarified that, while the First Rule is that all guns are loaded, that said – know what condition your gun is in at all times. Then he went over the details of loading, unloading, manipulating, checking, and handling of the gun.
“When you have your gun out of the holster, it makes us nervous. We might say, ‘No, don’t do that’, but inside we’re thinking ‘Holy fuck no, don’t fucking do that!’“
– Cadre Garrett
Someone asked a question about the slide being locked back, and one of the guys in the advanced group said how there’s a notch on the slide that gets caught, and Garrett spoke up – “We’ve got half a dozen cadre here. If he [Tyler] misses anything, we’ll help him out.” Translation – shut the fuck up, guy. Adults are talking. Very calm and no-nonsense.
Throughout, Tyler stressed how shooting was a science. Math, physics, ballistics in between, all of it science. Do A, then B. How stance helps with balance, and how a lot of that is common sense (i.e., put someone on a moving platform and see how they naturally stand).
Update 2016-05-13: If you’re interested in GORUCK Firearms Gear and missed out on the latest pre-order, my brother’s put together a quick tutorial about upgrading a regular rucksack into a Shooter-style Ruck:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Goruck/comments/4ipyk9/homemade_ruckshooter_ruck_upgrade/
Note – I wrote this up for my own reference from my scrawled notes the week after the FAD. If anything ended up misremembered or flat-out wrong, that’s on me.
No idea how long it’ll be up, but the Facebook page with pictures and such is here.
Introduction:
We started off hanging out in the parking lot for a few minutes as people trickled in – lots of GORUCK gear in evidence, obviously, and mostly young to younger-middle-aged males. An interesting contrast to the mostly older men and women showing up in equal numbers for the handgun class being put on by the range the same morning.
Snow started falling fairly heavily and, as fun as it would have been to see the vortex trails from the full firing line, I’d foregone a base layer of tights and was just in jeans… Fortunately, it let up by the time we came back outside after the briefing.
The Cadre called everyone into the clubhouse and introduced themselves (there had been a brief delay due to three or four traffic stops by State Police on the way over). Cadre Machine was leading the course, with Cadres Jesse and Logan assisting.
Everyone confirmed their name, age, occupation, GORUCK experience, and firearms experience. As you might expect, mostly male, mostly young – thirty plus ten minus five, a preponderance of police / EMT / firefighters / forensics scientists, a few techies, and most had done several GORUCK events.
There were several, though, who hadn’t done any GORUCK events, and several who hadn’t fired a gun before. Only a couple had serious experience with the AR platform (besides the Cadre, of course), though most had some pistol and general firearms experience.
Standard uniform was Arc’teryx jacket and cargo pants, supplemented with sweatshirts and morale patches. Apart from a couple of guys with chest rigs or battle belts and one guy running drop-leg, the tacticool-aid was at a minimum.
Scene set, we drove over to the club’s law enforcement range and got out our kit, set our stuff up underneath the shelter, and then joined Cadre Machine in classroom formation out on the range.
Each GoRuck challenge requires a team weight – 25# for the Challenge, 15# for the Light. Ideally awesome. For Light 002 with Cadre Devin, our weight was a lead-filled bulldog wearing a backpack filled with tiny, red-white-and-blue wrapped bricks. Time for a new team weight for the upcoming back-to-back Challenge-Light in Charlottesville.
Requirements:
1) Awesome.
2) Modular – able to be pared down for the Light without having to take a saw to it.
3) Portable – not just small enough to carry, but convenient to handle while buddy-carrying, crawling, running, etc. Also will need to be passed from person to person easily.
4) Awesome.
Solution:
So – fill the magazines with lead.
After carefully figuring out the internal volume of a STANAG 4179 30-round magazine, I didn’t do any of that and bought a stack of metal 30-round magazines. (The cheapest and worst-rated I could find.)
Now to fill them with lead. First, I stripped out the springs and followers.
Then I melted some lead. Pieces of lead brick left over from previous weights went into the pot.
Holding the magazine in a bench vise, I hit it with a blowtorch to preheat the metal.
The magazines had holes in the base and for the magazine catch, so I held a flathead screwdriver against them as I poured that level. (The cold metal cooled the lead quickly enough to plug the holes. I still had some leaks, though, requiring re-melting and re-pouring.)
I ladled each magazine full of lead, then refilled the pot and let the melt heat up again while the magazine cooled. Finished product – a stack of magazines, each one weighing a touch over 5 pounds.
Same magazines spraypainted blaze orange because I’ll be running around wearing them at night through the middle of a college town.
Don Norum 