All Outdoor

You’ve selected your turkey gun, so now comes the most important part of getting your gun ready to hunt – test patterning. Many people never do this assuming a new gun always shoots straight – and for the most part they do. However, if your shotgun consistently shoots off your point of aim, you need to do something about it. A gunsmith can adjust your shotgun by bending the barrel or by changing the fit of your stock. A less expensive fix is to fit your gun with adjustable sights or a scope and then adjusting them until your shotgun hits where you point it.

The original Beta QR light from Prometheus was a huge Kickstarter success, and one hell of a 1xAAA light.  The light was scheduled to fund at $12,000 and it raised over $134,000. 

It is not often that folks get excited over reloading accessories. Reloading accessories are typically not as sexy as a brand new AR-15 or that new first-focal-plane optic you just picked up, but I must admit the three acessories I picked up for my Dillon 550 made reloading faster, more comfortable, and and far more convenient. These Inline Fabrication accessories are must-have items for the reloader and they are offered for all major reloading machines.

This is interesting enough. Apparently there’s a shooting myth which says that it’s a good idea to load rifle bullets backwards – that is, with the bullet base upward and the point sticking down into the case. This seems, well, backwards to me – but this guy decided to test it and I decided to watch, and see what happens.

Marshall County, OK – Four bored baddies reportedly decided to look for excitement by invading a secluded home – and they found it.

Global overpopulation would ‘withstand war, disasters and disease’ : A good followup to this post on population and doomsday scenarios. Behold:

Previously, I reviewed the James Williams designed Shinbu and Hisshou short sword defensive knives, and was wowed by their cutting ability. I have been a huge fan of his Heiho and Hissatsu folders so much so that a James Williams folder is almost always found in my pocket.

Spending a day fishing with Jerry Gross of Meatgetter Jigs is like taking a graduate course in crappie fishing science. I was very fortunate to jam the whole course into one day on Lake Washington in Mississippi, one of the top crappie fishing lakes in the country.

I recently acquired Taurus Curve .380 pistol for testing. I found interesting the concept of an extremely thing gun created to be more marketable to women, and I wanted to get a closer look.

This is a short clip from the television show “Animal House” which aired on the Sportsman Channel in 2012. Watch how this carp is shot underwater with compound bow!

The original AR15 was designed around iron sights and a lightweight, high-velocity bullet. 55-grain M193 ball gave flat trajectory and reliably fragmented in flesh at velocities above 2700fps. With the proliferation of flattop rifles and optical sights, the sight radius becomes a consideration mainly for backup use. For the original barrel length, that included ranges up to 200 yards. The shortest barrel for civilian use that is not restricted by NFA1934 is 16 inches, yielding about 150fps lower initial velocity and reducing the fragmentation range to 150 yards. The shortest non-NFA AR in common use has a 14.5″ barrel with a permanently attached muzzle devices extending the length past 16″. It’s fragmentation range is closer to 50 yards. With the heavier 62-grain M855 load, these numbers are further reduced. How relevant is this loss of velocity to our use?

My familiarity with 9×18 began with a Makarov pistol in the late 1990s. Cheap surplus ammunition and low cost pistol combination were irresistible to  me, and I ended up with a gun that was stone-cold reliable, shot what seemed like a decent defensive round accurately and was smaller than my other centerfire pistol, Glock 17. The pistol eventually got sold when the novelty and the price wore off. The recoil of the blowback design, heel magazine release, looooong and heavy double action trigger and backwards (UP for fire) safety all made it less than ideal for my use, and the Makarov was happily replaced by more expensive but far more useful Kahr P9. The only other relatively common 9×18 pistol was the Polish P64, a truly wretched lump of bad trigger and sharp edges that amplified felt recoil.

The Ruger Gunsite Scout Rifle was specifically designed around Jeff Cooper’s concept of a Scout Rifle by some of his closest friends at Gunsite and Ruger. The Ruger Gunsite features bulletproof reliability, good usable accuracy, and provides for various magazine capacities. The rifle does all this while delivering the common sense scout rifle design elements that make it handy and user friendly. If you were only going to own one bolt action rifle, the Ruger Gunsite Scout should be it.

We are all pretty familiar with the standard folding knife–a blade, a handle, a pivot, and some way of opening the knife along with a way to lock or hold the knife in the open position.  It’s a simple formula, one that has been around at least since Roman times.  But like with the cantilever chair (the first two legged chair after thousands of years of three or four legged versions), every once in a while some uber clever person comes up with an entirely new way to do a folding knife.  Here are three of my favorite off the wall designs and a little about them.

The calendar is fast approaching for wild turkey hunting seasons to open up all over the country. They usually crank up here in Mississippi in March and run through the first of May. You should be checking on your state’s 2015 hunting dates to see when your seasons start.

During my initial review of the American made C39 Centurion rifle, I asserted that the AK-47 may be one of the best deer and hog rifles around. If we look at the ballistics of the infamous Russian AK-47 7.62×39 round, we see that its energy and trajectory look just a bit better than the most famous deer cartridge ever, the 30-30, and better ballistics than the very popular 300 Blackout. Why indeed would anyone not not consider the most dependable rifle design in the world as a fine deer, hog, or scout rifle?

The Spyderco of the late 1990s and early 2000s is, perhaps, gone. The superior designs with excellent and varied steels at inexpensive prices are out the window. Having pushed the industry further than anyone else in the past 20 years, Spyderco is, now, following others into the highly profitable but frankly bloated high priced production market.

NOTE: Here was Spyderco’s SHOT Show line up from this year.  As you can see, SHOT is not where they debut their knives.  IWA is.

When I was a teenager, the video game console war was won or lost on the back of “console exclusives”, games like Mario or Sonic, that were made only for one console. Things have moved on from that point in the video game market, though exclusives, such as Halo, still matter quite a bit. And in recent years, the gear market has dipped its toe more and more into the “exclusives” waters.

My weekend carry is much different than my work week EDC, largely because I get to shed the suit and go outdoors, or, at the very least, down into my shop. Again, I don’t have a defensive carry, instead, opting for a utility oriented set up. If you want a good overview of a defensive carry set up, see Major Pandemic’s article.