Dallas Hospital Had the Ebola Screening Machine That the Military Is Using in Africa. – P.M.
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Houston to pastors: Forget your sermons, now we want your speeches. – B.B.
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Apocalypse Now: Preppers Are Gearing Up for Ebola. – G.G.
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Ebola outbreak projections for the United States defy CDC’s false assurances. – J.W.
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FEMA Pandemic Exercise Series. – B.B.
“Rejoice, O ye nations, with his people: for he will avenge the blood of his servants, and will render vengeance to his adversaries, and will be merciful unto his land, and to his people.” Deuteronomy 32:49 (KJV)
Today, we present another entry for Round 55 of the SurvivalBlog non-fiction writing contest. The $12,000+ worth of prizes for this round include:
First Prize:
Second Prize:
Third Prize:
Round 55 ends on November 30th, so get busy writing and e-mail us your entry. Remember that there is a 1,500-word minimum, and that articles on practical “how to” skills for survival have an advantage in the judging.
Walter Miller’s sci-fi masterpiece, A Canticle for Leibowitz, envisions a nuclear apocalypse that wipes out the 20th century world, leaving the few survivors in a pretty hard core TEOTWAWKI situation. Many of the survivors blame the technological horror on human learning, rather than on human sinfulness, and band together to destroy all remnants of western culture. They burn books, and they burn the people who try to preserve them, including Isaac Leibowitz– a major “booklegger”. Leibowitz had organized a group of men into a new monastic order that smuggled books to the relative safety of their monastery, where they copied and memorized them, but these bookleggers are a small, persecuted minority. So, predictably, the book hating majority, who proudly call themselves “Simpletons,” lock their progeny into a centuries-long dark age.
Imagine yourself as a booklegger. Imagine you wish to preserve the best of our culture, after a horrific event devastates our world. If you wait until after such an event, you won’t have much of a choice about which books to save; you’ll have to save what you have or what you can find. Now imagine you wish to prepare to preserve the greatest books of western culture. What should you start with?
There are some apparently easy answers to that question. First, you might want to start by downloading a ton of books onto some kind of electronic device. That’s a great idea. Do that. However, I’d prefer to have some paper copies around, just in case the Kindle quits working.
So here’s another easy answer: you could just buy a set of the “Great Books of the Western World,” and consider yourself sorted. However, for a couple of reasons, that’s actually not the best approach. First, sets like this include an awful lot of chaff. Do you really need a volume of Hegel’s writings or Freud’s? Do those books really belong on a list of must saves? I’m skeptical. Second, and more important, all that chaff comes along with a lot of wheat. Put together, they fill up 60 volumes. That’s 60 large, heavy, volumes. I am assuming that we want a somewhat more compact collection of books. We want to find the best, we want to leave out the not-best, and we want it all to be fairly mobile. It won’t fit in your pocket, but fitting into one box would be nice.
So let me make my question a little tougher to answer. The question was: what should you start with? Let’s say you can stash 15 books in one smallish box. So what about those 15 books?
When you narrow things down like this, I think you’ll find an interesting phenomenon. When you must pare things down to the absolute essentials, five books will jump out as non-negotiables. After those first five, we’ll find ourselves hip deep in controversy, and nobody out there will agree with all of my other choices. However, the first five are virtually incontrovertible.
The Bible. There is nothing more to say about this one.
Then, include Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. This is a cheat, because these are two books, but they can be found bound together in one volume. Get one. It’ll be big, and it belongs in your box. Homer’s great works were probably written seven or eight hundred years before Christ, and they lay at the heart of Greek culture for centuries.
Plato’s Complete Works. This is another big, fat volume. Plato lived from 427-347 BC. He was a follower of Socrates, and when I say “follower,” I mean that literally. He followed Socrates around and listened to him. Socrates was not a teacher in the ordinary sense, and so had no students. However, many young men, including Plato, liked to hear him argue with the leaders of the day. After Socrates’s execution, however, Plato did settle down. He began a school called the Academy, whose most famous alumnus was Aristotle. It has been said that all of western philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato. Even if that’s a bit of an exaggeration, Plato’s thought is fundamental to western culture. Get this book.
Dante’s Divine Comedy. This was written early in the 14th century AD. It is historically significant for many reasons; among them, the fact that it was one of the first important works published in an Italian dialect, but that’s not why the book belongs on this list. It belongs here for its beauty, (you must find a good translation—try Allen Mandelbaum’s), as well as for the way it provides a poetic summation of the Christian vision. Dante is often said to have reproduced St. Thomas Aquinas’s theological treatise Summa Theologiae in verse. Whether that’s correct or not, this poem belongs in the box.
Shakespeare’s Complete Works. This is yet another big, fat volume. It’s impossible to pretend you have a grip on western culture, without having seen Hamlet, Othello,*****check name to see if “and company” is part of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” name or not. I don’t recall that being the case, but I want to be correct here. I think he’s using “company” to refer to the remaining Shakespearean works within the volume.**** A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and company.
As I said, those first few books seem non-negotiable. The remainder of this list will be much more controversial. That’s fine, of course; you should argue and object, and then fill up your box as seems best to you. However, at the very least, the remainder of the books I mention here are very much worth considering, and they’ll go in my box.
Plutarch’s Lives Again. The complete set will be a fairly large volume, but it’s worth it. Plutarch wrote his series of parallel lives late in the first century AD. When it comes to getting a basic grip on the ancient world, there’s nothing else like them. Actually, there’s one thing like them, in my view: Shakespeare’s historical plays. If you put the two together, you can develop a fairly thorough picture of the history of the ancient world. It’s true that both the lives and the plays are kind of hit-or-miss in terms of exact historical accuracy, but that’s fine. As Jimmy Stewart put it, when legend becomes fact, print the legend.
The Rule of St. Benedict. Now here’s a slim volume for once! Perhaps you can get a copy bound together with The Life and Miracles of St. Benedict, by Pope St. Gregory the Great. St. Benedict wrote his Rule early in the 6th century. The Rule stands at the head of the European civilization of the middle ages, establishing the rules for the monasteries that preserved the best of ancient civilizations after that culture collapsed under its own weight. A humane document with much to teach everyone, not only about our past, but about how to direct our present lives and aim for our future lives.
The Imitation of Christ has been translated into more languages than any book apart from the Bible, and it is widely considered the most-read devotional book after the Bible. Criticisms of its spirituality aside (both from within Catholicism and from outside of it), the work is so extraordinarily influential that it cannot be ignored. Its authorship was disputed for a long time, but the best evidence seems to show that it was written by Thomas a Kempis, who probably wrote it in the early 15th century.
St. Augustine’s City of God is, again, so influential on all that comes after it, that in order to understand our world, we must know this book. The Bishop of Hippo wrote his masterwork in the early 5th century. St. Augustine had been a Platonistic-leaning philosopher before his conversion to Christianity, and much of Plato’s influence can be discerned in this work. However, here St. Augustine gathers what is best in Greek philosophy and puts it in the service of the Gospel. He attacks and undermines the paganism of his day and shows how Christianity views and orders the world.
Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, like the Divine Comedy, were published in a vernacular language—in this case, an early form of English—in the 14th century. They present a delightful, earthy look at 14th century life. While I do not think of Chaucer as a master on the level of Dante or Shakespeare, his work is such a lively compendium of wildly divergent stories that for its variety and humor it deserves a place in the box.
The novel, as a literary form, is so familiar to us these days that it might not occur to us that it’s really fairly new. Certainly, none of the authors I have mentioned so far on the list ever penned a novel. In fact, it is sometimes said that Cervantes’s Don Quixote, published early in the 17th century, is the first novel. Whether that’s true, I cannot say for sure. I can say, however, that it’s a novel I’ll put in my box. Apart from its huge literary influence, the characters and story are just written into the western mind.
Now we come to more recent writings. Here, things will be even more controversial. For me, there’s no hesitation over any of the next three choices.
First,David Copperfield. The later works of Charles Dickens—Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities, Hard Times—are much more “serious” than his early works—Nicholas Nickleby, The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist. So those later works are, I think, often considered to be greater or more important. Well, whether that’s true I cannot say for sure. But I can say that David Copperfield falls near the halfway point in Dickens’s career, and might be seen as a kind of transition between his early and late periods, and somehow magically manages to capture the comic abandon of the early works, and the gravity and profound insight of the later works. And there are no characters in the world of fiction who can compare with the awesome Micawber.
When Fyodor Dostoevsky was still a relatively young man, he was arrested for politically subversive activities and condemned to death. As the firing squad prepared to fire, a letter from the Czar was delivered, sparing the lives of Dostoevsky and his fellow “conspirators” and exiling them to Siberia. Eventually, Dostoevsky was able to return to Russia and of course became the greatest of the Russian novelists. The Brothers Karamazov is his best work, and although it is dark and often chilling, it has a place in the box.
There is no work of fiction that I love more than The Lord of the Rings. Though it is generally published in a 3-book set, it really is just one book. If you want to press me on the “15 books” thing, you can find it published in a one-volume version. If you wonder whether it really belongs in a list like this, I would simply say there was virtually nothing out there that could compete with Homer’s great myths, until the writing of The Lord of the Rings. It is epic in every way.
We’re trying to preserve the best of western culture, but the books I’ve picked are disparate. There’s no unified vision. How does someone take those books and see how the western vision fits together? I close my list, then, with one book that depicts a worldview, a philosophy. GK Chesterton’s Saint Thomas Aquinas lays out the great core of western culture by way of a fascinating study of its most towering intellect.
So there are the 15 books I recommend.
You might be wondering why are there no science books? Why not On the Origin of Species? Why no Freud? I have left out the science books for two reasons. First, the great science books, like Darwin’s, are not really great books, even if they include great ideas. Second, the history of science is a whole different thing from the history of western culture. You can be a cutting-edge scientist without knowing much of anything about Galileo or Darwin, provided you know the contemporary shape of your field. It’s not like that with the western canon, where you simply cannot be well versed in the greatness of our civilization if you don’t know its giants of the past. It follows from this that if we wish to preserve our scientific knowledge through difficult times, the wisest course would be to pick the most up-to-date information. We would also be well advised to recollect older, perhaps more easily recoverable technologies; the metallurgy behind blacksmithing, for example, would be more likely to be important to us than the metallurgy behind microchips. Still, that’s a matter that simply falls outside of the scope of what I’m doing here.
You might also wonder why I’ve included no modern or contemporary politics or history? Why not include the “Federalist Papers” or The Wealth of Nations? Why not Machiavelli’s The Prince? The answer here is simply that in my list I’m going for foundational rather than derivative or recent. There’s no doubt that The Prince is important, as is Das Kapital, for that matter, and if I had a bigger box, I would think seriously about including works like these. If you disagree with my priorities, adjust your boxes accordingly. My only interest here is in trying to help us think through the important matter of saving the best our culture has produced.
Editor,
After reading a recent article on SurvivalBlog about keeping stored water clean, I thought I’d mention my experience with that. While living in the Colorado mountains, my water source was from a short stream running from a spring. This filtered water was pumped into a 1,000-gallon tank in my basement. All surface water is subject to some contamination, but in all the years it was used it never gave me any problems. I finally had it tested, and the bacteria count was some 50 times what was allowed. After that test, I figured I was living on borrowed time and decided to do something about it. After some research and having used it on my hot tub, I decided on an ozone system. The advantage of ozone is there is no chemical added to the water. Ozone is just oxygen with an extra oxygen atom temporarily attached to the normal O2 molecule. This acts like a super oxidizer that kills any living particle it encounters in the water tank. This includes bacteria, viruses, and various spores, like Giardia. Ozone then reverts within a second or two to a normal oxygen molecule and bubbles out of the tank.
The day after installation, a test of my water in the 1,000-gallon tank showed a zero bacteria count. Besides effectiveness and no chemicals added to your water supply, an ozone system is dead easy to build and install. It consists of a box the size of a shoebox with a UV light in it. The UV light generates ozone from the air. A small plastic tube leads from the box to a venturi and the discharge of a submersible pump, the kind used in small water features. Little Giant is one make. The pump is the size of a fist and inexpensive to buy and run. The venturi is a little plastic fitting that costs a couple of dollars. As ozone is safe for fish, aquarium pet stores often carry all this as does Amazon. As the pump circulates water, it pulls air from the light box, bringing ozone with it. Here are a couple of cautions:
Other than that I can’t think of why anyone would not use ozone. – Expat
Introducing Home delivery of IRA Gold or Silver Eagle Coins with Perpetual Assets LLC IRA program
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Empire State Manufacturing Index Slows Sharply in October
Walmart Cuts Sales Outlook for Fiscal 2015
Markets on Edge After Worst Turmoil in Four Years
9 Ominous Signals Coming From The Financial Markets That We Have Not Seen In Years
So, you like that flashlight app on your phone? Snoopwall Flashlight Apps Threat Assessment Report. – P.M.
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Growing concerns over ‘in the air’ transmission of Ebola. – P.S.
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An interesting site that may help you plan a bug-out route.http://hazmat.globalincidentmap.com/map.php. – JFJ
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CDC considers adding names of health workers monitored for Ebola to no-fly list. – T.P.
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The Pompous Prognostications Of “Permanently High Plateau” Prophets. J.W.
“A free society is a place where it’s safe to be unpopular.” – Adlai E. Stevenson, Jr.
Today, we present another entry for Round 55 of the SurvivalBlog non-fiction writing contest. The $12,000+ worth of prizes for this round include:
First Prize:
Second Prize:
Third Prize:
Round 55 ends on November 30th, so get busy writing and e-mail us your entry. Remember that there is a 1,500-word minimum, and that articles on practical “how to” skills for survival have an advantage in the judging.
If I had to choose one tool or piece of gear for survival, a knife would be on the top of my list. A knife can be used to make fires, shelters, weapons, traps, and most of the things needed for survival. With a few tools and some practice, anyone can have a workable knife (or chisel, hook, hinge, or any number of other tools and hardware) in a few hours of work. Besides the usefulness of the self-fashioned tool, it will bring a great amount of satisfaction and pride. The skill of blacksmithing will also put you in a very important position, should circumstances be reverted to post-civilization conditions. Your skill and handiwork will be in high demand.
Of first concern is having a way to heat the steel. There are various options. For fuel, the most common options are wood, coal, or propane. Wood is better in charcoal form, but it can be used as is. Its primary advantage is availability; you can pretty much find it anywhere, and it can easily be made into charcoal. Coal isn’t so easy to find, but if you have a source near you, it makes an excellent fuel. Propane would be the hardest to find in a survival situation, but there are many propane tanks and bottles around, and it might be a good option.
Charcoal can be made very easily. There are some excellent websites on building a charcoal retort– a simple arrangement using 55-gallon, steel drums. I personally use a very basic method. I buried half of a 55 gallon steel drum in the ground. I start a fire in it and load it with wood, even piling it up over the top. Through experience, I’ve learned to cover it at the appropriate time, which I will explain. After all of the wood has been burning sufficiently, I cover it with a piece of thin sheet metal. Then I seal the edges of the lid with some dirt. After twelve hours or more I uncover it, and if my timing was right everything is charcoal, with no unburnt wood and very little ash. I have a friend who takes the embers from his fireplace or wood stove, when he’s cleaning it out, and just douses them with water. Over time, he collects all the charcoal he needs this way. Indigenous peoples have perfected a method of covering a dry fallen log with dirt and lighting it on fire. Eventually, the entire log turns to charcoal. The key is to balance burning off the volatiles and cutting off the oxygen supply.
If you use wood or coal, you’ll want it in small chunks, golf ball-sized or smaller, especially with coal. As I mentioned earlier, wood is much more efficient as charcoal, but you can start the fire with wood and after much of it converts to charcoal, start working with your metal. I have done this before, and it can be a little challenging with all of the smoke and flames, but it does work. However, you must realize that just burning the charcoal or coal as a regular fire will not produce the needed temperatures to adequately heat up the steel for smithing. You’ll need some way to feed oxygen to the fire so it gets hot enough, using a device known as a bellows or blower. We’re going to assume there is no electricity available. There are instructions available online for making a bellows-style blower with leather and wood. There are also plans to make box blowers out of wood, and blowers with barrels and water. You can make blowers with whole animal skins. I even saw a video of African smiths using old cement sacks as their bellows, and they worked perfectly.
My favorite option is the hand crank cast iron blower that was once common across America, often associated with the Buffalo brand. These old blowers can be found on sites like eBay, but they are usually quite expensive since they are sought after items. With some patience and searching, they can be found at reasonable prices or even for free. First you have to know what you’re looking for. Go online and see what they look like. Then start keeping an eye out for them. Sometimes they’re decorating a yard or a store front. Sometimes, they can be found at yard sales or antique shops. There are many other possible places you might discover a blower, but make sure it isn’t completely frozen with rust, especially if you’re shelling out some money for it.
Once you get your hand crank blower, you’ll need to make yourself a forge. This can be done in various ways. The “Tim Lively forge” is popular. Basically, it’s a galvanized steel basin with a hole-filled, steel pipe air tube in the bottom. The basin is lined with adobe clay, leaving the holes in the air tube exposed in the bottom, and the blower is attached to the tube where it comes out of the forge. Do an Internet search on this, and you’ll see how simple it is. Other options are the brake drum forge or any simple forge one can weld together with scrap metal. Of course, if you’re going to weld together a forge, you would need to make it now, while electricity is available. The most primitive option is to just dig a small pit or make the forge walls with clay or adobe or even bricks or sheets of iron. Use a steel pipe for the air supply, coming in at the bottom of your forge, where the base of the fire will be, and attach your blower to the other end. This simple setup is common throughout third-world countries. The same forge can be used for both coal or charcoal.
I think it’s best to get set up for both coal/charcoal and propane. My propane setup is very basic, and it was both easy and fairly cheap to make. For a propane forge you’ll want an adjustable regulator. The regulators that come with barbecue grills are not adjustable and won’t work, at least not very well. I got mine at a plumbing supply store. I was also given some larger more industrial-sized ones with big dials on them, but I haven’t tried using them, and they’re just sitting in a box. The regulator is the most expensive item, but you’ll only need to buy it once, and it’s not really that expensive. With the regulator, get enough gas hose to go from your propane bottle to your forge, a few feet. Next is the burner itself. I did an Internet search, and there are a surprising number of different designs made out of cheap basic plumbing parts. I tried a couple and settled on one I liked. I’ll probably do more experimenting when I have time to try out some of the other styles. Make sure you look up plans for a Venturi-style burner and not the forced or blown air style, which requires a blower and electricity.
You’ll also need a forge body. Mine is a large coffee can lined with ceramic wool. You can get ceramic wool at a pottery or ceramic supply store. You can cut it with scissors, but you should avoid breathing in the dust from it. Cut a piece that will fit around the inside of your coffee can, or whatever you’re using. While the ceramic wool is amazingly, completely fire- and heat-proof, it’s best to line the inside of the wool in your forge body with refractory cement, or even clay slip– a slurry made of clay and water. This will increase the durability of the forge, especially since you’ll be putting lots of metal in it. You’ll need a bracket of some sort to hold the burner in position, so it shoots its flame into the forge body. My setup is very simple, and I have the burner held to a simple frame with a hose clamp. While it does take some planning and work, it’s very satisfying to make and use a forge you made yourself.
Once you have your forge all set up and ready to go, it’s time to think about steel. In a survival or post-apocalyptic situation, excellent steel for knife and tool making should be readily available. I am constantly on the lookout for it and have amassed enough to last me well past my lifetime, but it’s always fun to try new and different types. Plus scavenging is just addictive, so I’m always on the lookout for more.
What you want to do is get in your mind the way steel is made and used. Steel for many structural applications is what’s called mild carbon steel. It only has a small amount of carbon added to it. Carbon, when added to iron, is what makes steel, and it is what gives it its ability to resist bending, as well as taking on and retaining hardness. When you think of a knife or tool edge, low carbon will take a sharp edge, but it won’t retain it when you start using it. High carbon will take an edge and then keep that edge for a long time.
There is a simple test you can perform as you start to learn the different types of steel. Take an old file and put it up to a running bench grinder. Make sure it’s sufficiently dark to see the sparks well. Observe the pattern of the sparks produced. They are complex and full of little fireworks-like bursts. That is an indication of high carbon. Now take a piece of angle iron or steel plumbing pipe and do the same. You’ll notice a much more simple spark pattern, with smaller and simpler fireworks bursts. That is due to its lack of carbon. A few common sources of high carbon steel are old tools, like lug wrenches, old files, car springs, saw blades, and even bed frames.
With your source of heat ready and some steel collected, you’re ready to start forging. Try to avoid overheating the steel. Heat it up to a good bright cherry red to forge it. When you overheat it, the steel starts to shoot off little sparks and disintegrate. The part that is burning is losing its carbon content, and should just be scrapped at that point.
After you’ve shaped your implement, you can do some filing or sanding on it if you want to. It’s better to do it at this time rather than after you harden and temper it, because the steel is still in a softer state that is easier to work. If you want to do this, make sure you let the steel cool off gradually in the air rather than sticking it in a bucket of water to cool it off. Plunging it into water will harden it and may even crack it.
Now it’s time to harden and temper your tool, so it will take and hold a good edge. Stresses have been building up in the piece as you’ve been hammering it, so I like to heat it up in the forge to a dull red and then pull it out, letting it air cool until it’s black, doing this about three times. To harden the piece you’re going to heat it up to red hot and then plunge it into a quenchant, which will cool it off quickly and harden it. Water can be used, but you’ll have to experiment with it because it is such a severe quenchant that it will often crack your steel, ruining your work. The Japanese cover their knives and tools for quenching with a thin layer of watery clay, letting it dry, and then quenching in water. This is a better way to do it, but even then you may need to pull it back out before it completely cools. You would have to experiment, and they say that a soft water such as rain water is best.
A preferred quenchant is oil. This is much easier on the steel, because it cools it off more slowly. Various oils can be used, but each one cools the steel faster or slower, depending on the oil type and its make up. You want to cool the steel off as quickly as possible without cracking it. This results in the hardest state possible, which gives the best edge. A common oil that is also fairly fast is canola oil. That is what I use. It is best to warm up the oil first. I will heat up a railroad spike and put it in the oil to get it up to about 120 to 130 degrees Fahrenheit. In a survival situation, I imagine old motor oil would be readily available, and while not optimal it will definitely do the job.
Heat your piece of steel up to red hot. If you have a solid metal magnet, you can test the steel as it rises in temperature; you’ll know it’s ready when it loses its magnetism. You have to be careful when judging by colors. It’s best to do this in low lighting. If there is a lot of light, the piece will actually be much hotter than what the colors seem to indicate. Quenching the steel in a state that is too hot will result in satisfactory hardness but also large grain size. Steel is composed of grains, kind of like the grains of minerals in a rock, and you want as fine a grain as possible. Finer grain structure results in superior edge-holding potential. Higher heats in the forge result in larger grain structure, which is bad for edge holding.
This might be getting a bit complicated, but it’s not that big a deal. If you just jump in and start smithing, you will learn as you go. Even an inferior quality knife or tool is far better than something made from copper or bronze, which was being used at one time to keep civilizations going.
Quench your piece, going quickly from the forge to the quenching fluid. Hold it in there for about thirty seconds and then pull it out. Next comes tempering. The steel is in a very unstable and fragile state right now. It’s glass-like and too hard to be of practical use. If you were to drop it on a hard surface, it would shatter. That is why you need to temper it. Tempering is accomplished at about 400 degrees Fahrenheit. Fortunately, steel produces different oxidizing colors, as it rises in temperature. Probably a good way to do this at first is to have a scrap chunk of steel that you have heated up in the forge; use something heavier with some heat-holding ability. Take your piece that you have just quenched and hardened and, using some sandpaper or a sharpening stone or anything sufficiently abrasive, shine one side of it. This can be done quickly and doesn’t have to be pretty or perfect. You just need to see some steel surface.
Pull out the scrap chunk of steel you heated up in the forge and lay your piece against it. Try to just put the thickest part, like the spine of a knife blade, against the hot steel, letting the edge hang off, pointing away from the hot steel. Keep a close eye on the shiny part. Before too long you will see some light yellow color creeping across the surface. If you were to leave this, it would eventually turn a darker yellow, then brown, then purple, then dark, blue, light blue, and finally gray blue. Ideally, you want the edge to be a dark yellow to brown color. Move the piece around so the color you want is as evenly spread as possible along the edge. For instance, if the yellow starts to darken faster toward the point of a blade you are tempering, move the point farther away from the source of tempering heat to slow down the tempering process in that area. You may have to reheat the scrap piece you are using as a heat source. Take it slowly, especially as you are learning.
Tempering can be done directly in the fire of the forge, but this requires experience. In a non-survival situation, I use an oven, so I can make sure I have a consistent and measurable heat. When you actually use the knife or tool, you will be able to tell whether you tempered it enough or not. If it chips and breaks in use, you didn’t temper it enough. If it get dull easily, you tempered it too much.
Now your piece is ready to be finished. You can sand it, or do whatever else you want to achieve a desirable appearance. Mount a handle on the tang, put the final edge on it, and you’re ready to use it.
Scot,
Regarding the review, I have used an Attichison kit since the mid-70’s. (Yes, my first AR was bought over the counter in ’71, serial number under 20,000.) I have been satisfied with performance and accuracy. The CMMG is nearly identical so far I can tell on cursory examination, and I sold probably hundreds in retail and can’t recall any being returned or complained about. They save money, provide opportunity to train in places where .223 might prove problematic, and overall perform as they ought. I must confess to taking out a huge Norwegian Wharf Rat in my home in San Francisco’s Castro Market district back about ’77 using what was then called CCI Zimmerpatronen aka CB cap in a .22 LR casing. (This way it would manually feed through a .22 LR magazine), however with only a primed rim casing powering it and with the AR gas system absorbing some of the gas, the rat was dispatched and removed before the wife folding towels only 10 feet away entered the room, never having heard a thing. Someone in a restrictive urban environment could enjoy regular target practice in a residence basement using only a phone book for a backstop should they get the powderless CB .22’s in a long rifle case, of which several manufacturers are now producing.
The singularly most important consideration in using the conversion kit as such, a conversion kit, and after returning to using the .223/556 is that aside from residue accumulating in the gas system, usually blown out with the first round of .223, is that there is a slight residual dusting of lead and carbon that leaks around the chamber insert that builds up in the chamber to the point that if converted back to .223 without an absolutely thorough cleaning with a wire chamber brush and inspecting to assure all is removed, you risk destruction of the upper receiver. A friend here in Idaho fired zillions of .22LR in his M16 and then converted it back to .223; round #1 destroyed the upper but thankfully not the lower.
Enjoy using these kits, but I would prefer using a dedicated .22 LR upper, but the kit works great, so long as A CHAMBER FLAG is employed as mentioned in the article, AND a strict cleaning regimen is employed when converting back and forth from .223 to .22 and vice versa. – AHT
Americans face post-foreclosure hell as wages garnished, assets seized. – G.G.
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Weak Economic Data Slams Wall Street
Time to Reduce Reliance on the Dollar: Russia PM
Greek Bonds Extend Selloff, Pushing Yield Up Most in 15 Months
U.S. Retail Sales Drop: A Cautionary Sign on Consumer Demand
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Tiny Box Promises To Keep You Anonymous On The Internet. – G.P.
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When Holding An Orphaned Baby Can Mean Contracting Ebola. – T.P.
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America’s Ebola crisis is made worse by the people in charge. Dr. Thomas Frieden was Mayor Bloomberg’s Commissioner of the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene from 2002–2009 and enforced the mayor’s trans-fat, 16-ounce soda, smoking, and salt bans.
CDC Director Tom Frieden faces rising tide of criticism[CNN] – M.A.
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Nurses’ Union: Ebola Patient Left In Open Area Of ER For Hours. – P.M.
“You should never have your best trousers on when you turn out to fight for freedom and truth.” – Henrik Ibsen, 1882
Today, we present another entry for Round 55 of the SurvivalBlog non-fiction writing contest. The $12,000+ worth of prizes for this round include:
First Prize:
Second Prize:
Third Prize:
Round 55 ends on November 30th, so get busy writing and e-mail us your entry. Remember that there is a 1,500-word minimum, and that articles on practical “how to” skills for survival have an advantage in the judging.