Matter of Facts: It's Not A Road!!!

Welcome back to the Matter of Facts podcast on the Prepper Broadcasting Network. We talk prepping, guns, politics every week on iTunes, Ditcher, and Spotify. Go check out our content at mwefpodcast dot com. On Facebook or Instagram. You can support us be a Patreon or by checking out our affiliate partners. I'm your host, Phil Raveley Andrew Nick on the other side of the mic, and here's your show. Welcome back to the Matter of Facts podcast. That's Nick. I'm tired. This is whiskey and coke. It's been a hell of the last two weeks since Nick and I sat down to talk together. Even though the patrons that don't pay really close attention and the listeners that don't pay really close attention probably didn't notice because the miracles of pre recording saved us. Again that it do. So, I've been out of pocket and a little low key because I had the distinct pleasure of escorting two different family members in outpatient surgery in the last week. Yeah, last week. Today's Wednesday, Right, it's Wednesday, Thursday, Today's Jesus Christ that we're recording. It's Thursday. By Oh, it's all right, take a minute, have another swing of whiskey and coke. You're gonna need it. Anyway. Today's Thursday. So yeah, in the last week, I've spent I think a total of like twenty hours. In the hospitals. Too many hours, yes, taking care of my wife and my father both getting out patient surgery. Everybody's good, everybody's fine, everybody's healing nicely. But it necessitated Nick and I pre recording an episode. It has meant that I've been very, very very out of pocket for the time being. Rightly so so, because every now and then Phil really needs a softball right over the plate that he can knock out it and knock out out of the park. I thought we would talk about something fun or at least funny, like Nick's bureaucratic nightmare with his road, which the listeners just heard about last week because that was the pre recorded episode. We started talking about. I am living week four of this now. Which which which makes which is going to make this little progression from last episode into this one all the more funny because you've had four weeks of headache to recount I have without violating statute limitations. Well, okay, so did you want to cover did you want to cover the admin work before we'd before. That we'd probably better patrons. If you're not a patron, you should consider become a one. The links and the sow description you can join the rest of the nutcases and support our sociopathy and it's a fun time most of the time. If you'd rather buy cheeky, funny shit T shirts and stuff, you can support us at the Southern Galas. That link is also in the show description. And if you'd like to buy really, really really good coffee, you just check out Disaster Coffee use code MOF. If I recognize your name at checkout and you don't use the promo code, I do reserve the right to harass. You, right because Phil hates I capitalism IDT it won't take your extra mind. I detest capitalism. I would rather save you a buck. I'm just saying, if you get your wife to order and she doesn't use the promo code, you are guilty in my eyes, and I will harass. You about it. Guilt by last name association. Yes, I think I've harassed five or six of the patrons because like every time someone puts in an order, sometimes publicly, Yeah, well, every time someone puts in an order you know, it dings me and my two business partners, and I'm like that mother, so yes, it happens. So we discovered something interesting that that Uncle Randy's Front Porch makes a hell of a niced coffee. Uncle Randy's Front Porch is a really good Mexican single origin, like it is. I don't rapidly become my wife's favorite coffee. You're not the first person to say that it's it's not my favorite because I like more like a medium dark. Sure, but I've tried it. It's really good. It's just you know, so you and I've had this conversation about cigars, and I tell everybody, if you don't like cigars, you probably haven't tried many of them, because, like acurate, cigars don't taste the same. They run the gamut of like all different strengths and flavors and everything else. Gosha coffee is the same way when you really start digging into it, and like if I pull up like like as three really different examples, the mof Dark Humor, which is a French rose which is about that close to being burnt, and then the bear Bland, which is a medium dark, and then Uncle Randy's front porch. That's a medium. Those three coffees taste nothing alike. No, no, they absolutely do not, and neither does the Barrel the Revolution. Oh yeah, the eyes up I think the one in the Uprising, the Barrel Uprising. Yeah, the Parrilage. I liked it some of these. Sometimes it's a little acidic for me. That's that's because it leans more towards a medium roast, and your medium roast are usually a little more acidic. But yeah, I mean, but that's my point is that none of those coffees taste alike. So if you say you don't like coffee, you haven't tried many of them, and you should. You should continue to tweak it. Absolutely. Your wife is saying it makes a good cup of cold coffee. I'm gonna be honest, and this is like getting kind of into the weeds as far as coffee nerve bowl crap. But like, if you really enjoy coffee, you should. You should find a coffee you like and then try brewing it different ways, and then try irving a cold or hot or ice or whatever. Try brewing in different ways, and you'll notice that it does It doesn't change the taste, but it influences it a bit. It does. It does bring out different notes in the flavor profile. Most most foods and drinks do. Though, if you go from drinking at one end of the temperature curve to the other. I mean, look at hot apple cider versus just like a normal temperature apple sider, you get you get more flavor notes out of it. Yeah. And as far as like that uprising being a little acidic, I would I'd venture to say you could probably, you could probably cold brew it and it probably null out a lot of the acidity. I bet it would, and it wasn't all the time. It just seems like something maybe maybe it's a difference for me, Like some my allergies get really bad. I get heartburn like you would not believe. And sometimes having just a little too much acidic food just it's just too much. How are you brewing it? Just drip machine? Oh yeah, oh yeah, just a just a shitty mister coffee drip machine like I've always had. That's do you you know? I've got a percolator from when we go camping. I don't have a stole. That's fine, but I guess my my My follow up to that question, is do you pay really close attention to keeping your water to coffee ratios the same? Like, do you put in the same amount of coffee, the same amount of coffee the dame amount of water every single time? You don't? Ever? Like, Okay, no, not really. I mean we've found I've found a strength of coffee that both my wife and me like, and I just kind of. I brew it every morning when I leave for work, so she has fresh coffee. Then I drink it the next day. She probably isn't helping. Probably not. I I can't look I will. I will happily accept anyone call me a coffee snob. I won't even drink coffee after it's a few hours old. Oh really, like if it's not. Even like, if it has had time to come all the way, if it has had time to cool all the way down, just of its own validity not being iced. I pitched out brewnrr pot. That's fair because it does influence it to me, it influences the taste. Now, admittedly I don't have the world's most developed coffee palate, but I am a coffee nerd, so like, I can taste it, and I just don't care for it. I don't even like, like I said, just just the taste. I don't mind iced coffee, but I don't like cold coffee. Phil, What's what are they aged in? Was it a bourbon barrel? Yeah? Bourbon. Well, it's either bourbon barrels or whiskey barrels. I don't recall specifically which, but it's one or the other two. It's a good cup of coffee, Raggle. I would recommend it. If you're sensitive to more acidity, then I would say try it and see. Maybe I'm just too sensitive. I don't know. I love the taste of it, though. I would say for anybody that's sensitive to acidity or bitterness, like the in general, in generalities, the closer to light roast you get, you get less bitter, more acidity. The closer to dark roast you get, you get more bitter less acidity. And it's gonna it's gonna do like the better. You're gonna trade one for the other. So like that, those are general rules. If you select a bunch of different coffees based on their roast strength, you should be able to kind of pick that up. And if you if you like a French row, you're gonna like it, for you're gonna be a dark roast kind of person, and if you don't like a dark roast, you're probably more towards a medium roast, or you can find something like that Bear Blend that's like a happy medium right in the middle. This is also the reason why I like I roast my own beans, because I've got the raw product, I decide how much how dark I want to roast it. I've settled on like a medium to medium dark. I've gotten to the point where I can I know exactly how to roast those beans to get exactly the flavor I like. Which kind of has the parallel to like reloading, where it's like I have the raw components, I decide how I put them together kind of thing and raggle yes. If you generally like French roast, so Pandemic is a good one in Disaster Coffee's lineup. That's a dark rose obviously dark humor, it's a French roast. It's very very very dark, not burnt, but very very dark. And bear Blend is my personal favorite. It's medium dark. So like, if you like a French roast, you got some good options if you go if you want to go back off a little bit. The Bear Blend is really good. Bear Blend actually used to be. It's the same. Roast, but a long time ago it was marketed as rapid Response and they really we read well not we. I wasn't involved in the company at. The time, but they relaunched that coffee roast as Bear Blend, kind of to do a collaboration with a Bear independent. Nice so, but that's for anybody that like may have had disaster coffee way back in the day, really like rapid response. Just get Bear Blend. It's exactly the same. Thing in the bag. Anyway. Enough coffee nerd nonsense, enough admin work, Nick, How how on earth do you convince a beer a bunch of breaucrats that a plainly not road is not a road because they seem to think it's a road is a road. Apparently they don't know. Well, here's the problem. Most of the low level functionaries that you're going to interact with at the county are trained in what are called typical responses to queries. And that was the problem I was running into. By bludgeoning my head through the bureaucracy, I was able to slowly and incrementally speak with people that had more authority and more knowledge, and we've gotten to the point where they have admitted it is not a public access. Maybe it is a private road, which seems to indicate that it was never added to any public right away system. It was never added to any jurisdiction, which is the key problem. And just for the people who didn't, who aren't picking up from like last stepsod oh right, we are not talking about a road that cuts through your property. We are talking about grass and dirt that we are squares. Is a road. We are talking about specifically two lines on a plat from nineteen fifty two and the word Woodpecker road. That's it. This is all it is. That's all it ever was. Now. I don't know if you guys are familiar with how platting and subdividing works. Is what you have to do is you have to take a two D drawing of your land. You have to walk it up to the county. You have to draw your little lines on it from where you want the houses, where you want, the roads, where you want, the utility easements, all that stuff, water management plans, that sort of thing. You take it there and you go county board, this is what I'm doing. They look at it and say, okay, it follows all the requirements for today at the dayton time that you file it. The problem with that is these codes change, and these plans are never required to be updated because they're approved at the day and time. If say you're building a subdivision and you decide, well, there's these two farms here, and really we'd like to have a road that cuts right down the middle of the property land between the two. Because we bought this one, we're gonna make a subdivision. Next we're gonna buy this one and gonna make a subdivision. But you never end up buying farm number two, so you never build the road that would have connected the two. Ragle no plat is the term plat of survey or land plat p L A T plot is different. And this may be an illinoiism. Ever, I've only ever looked at survey plats from Illinois, but mine says platt. With an A Louisiana. We don't understand your. Exactly parish parishes. The French, I got it, no problem. They'll surrender eventually. I think they already did. Aar w the whole reason why all the Cajuns are here is because the French kicked all the rebellious French. Out and we all came here to become Americans. Well, yes, the prostitutes and the rebels exactly. So basically the deal is is that back in the day they were they were thinking about putting a second subdivision next to our small subdivision. It's only about eighteen houses, and they were planning to do another five or ten next to it. That plan fell through because the property next door has federally protected wetlands that wants to be a game changer. You can't build on that. Granted, those federally protected wetlands are basically a farm pod. I was gonna say, dude, you know, if you greased the right palm, the right number of dollars, you can do things. Sure to Sure, but you have to remember the amount of money they were looking at gaining at this point compared to the amount of bribes they would have had to pay. It's not like today where you're selling you know, half million dollar houses on these properties. It was probably going to be you know, forty fifty thousand dollars houses something like that. Now, high end houses for the time, but. There was just not that huge amount of cash. Game. I thought, sure, I'd tell me Illinois's politicians used to have principles, but. Oh god, no, it was believe it or not, it was worse. Oh, I believe it worse. Illinois is famous for two things, corrupt politicians and al Capone. I mean, come on. I mean, but that's like Louisiana's was only famous for three things, corrupt politicians, Bonnie and Clyde being shot dead, and food. True, true, Chicy really should be more famous for its food. But the issue being that because the people that drew the n survey and the initial land layout never officially told the county we will never build this road, the road stayed on the platte, and many years later, in the late nineteen seventies early nineteen eighties, my neighbor across the street acquired the property the road section next to her. Not sure how, but because we can find no records of sales, we're thinking that all these properties seized the sections of road based on adverse possession laws, and she was able to vacate the portion of the road on her property. In late nineteen seventies early nineteen eighties. Well, the owners of our property did seize the property, somehow did combine it with their property, and it was sold to us as one lot, but the ray right and no one knows how to vacate a road that doesn't exist. And that's really what we're coming down to. So, through my discussions with varieties of levels of county I'll call it building and zoning folks, I got to some very helpful people, the director of Building and Zoning and the the senior supervisor of Building and zoning, and the two of them came together and said, we have no idea how this works, and they brought it to the state's attorney. State's attorney took a look at it, took a look at the law, and to them said, well, we're going to have to come to an atypical resolution. I don't know what that means, neither do they. I have to do some more information gathering. And what they asked for was a a moderate amount of due diligence on my part their exact words, a moderate amount of due diligence. Phil You've worked in the government for a long time. Care to translate, Okay. So an atypical solution means we have no freaking clue how to do this, because there is no procedure for this, and bureaucracy is excelled at doing things within pre defined parameters A to B to say, do not excel in inventing or creating brand new at a whole cloth or deviating from those previously established parameters. So when they say atypical solution, they mean we don't know how we're going to pull this off, but we're going to figure something out. And a moderate amount of due diligence means if you're not prepared to lift a finger, we're going to let this fall by the wayside. So they want to know that you are going to expend your own effort to prove that you are really going to be a pain in their ass if this. Doesn't get done. And that's where we come to persistence. So through some emailing back and forth and a team's meeting online thanks to the blizzard that we had on Monday, Yeah, we get seventy degree weather and then we get blizzards. The health outstanding, it's pretty standard for Illinois, especially this time of year. We went from eighties to mid thirties in one day. We went from Monday, which was the low was negative four. Today was sixty five. That's just so yeah, dude, it's Illinois. You take what you get. Sometimes it's all four seasons in one week. Whatever. But what they asked me for through like, I said, I need some direction here. I said, I have spoken with the township representatives and they tell me that there is no such road on their roster. And they tell me that they have no intent of utilizing this road because they would have to mess around with some wetland law. There's a creek in my backyard they would have to bridge. It would cost them millions of dollars to put a road that just basically goes past my house, past the lady behind me's house, and connects two dead end streets. It's never it's never ever going to happen. It would be quite extravagantly expensive. So they asked me to get in touch with the township and get them to sign something, at least some township representatives saying yeah, we have no official or unofficial interests in this road because it doesn't exist. So I have to convince the township reps and perhaps the township council. We're not sure yet even the State's Attorney doesn't hasn't decided what all exactly they're gonna want. But it sounds like to me that they're willing to play ball so long as I keep at this issue, as long as I keep pestering them about it. They did ask one thing, they asked me to win to bother them about it until after our elections on Tuesday, because State's Attorney's office. I don't know if you guys are aware, but State's Attorney's Office does a lot of things with managing elections, overseeing a lot of that, and they were quite busy, understandably, so it's just the primaries. But yeah, but. Doctor Scarry guy, how long before the city attorneys signed off on a release of a claim to a road they don't want. I don't live in a city. I live in a township because I am unincorporated, which is easy to put pressure on, especially when you live in the same neighborhood as two of the township council members. There's only like eleven hundred homes in my entire township, so one irritated person can make the council meetings take forever. And you're very responsive and you're happy to be that irritated someone that makes well I would so far, so far I have not had to do that. They've been extremely helpful, which is great. I mean, one of the guys the first time I found. Out this was an issue, I had two of them. Out at my property. Within fifteen minutes of knowing this was an issue. They were standing in my driveway looking over the survey platt walk in the property with me saying, there's no way in hell we're ever going to build a road here. We'd have to cut fifty feet off the top of the hill just to get to the highway. You know. It's it's not a simple matter of just okay, we're just going to blacktop across a farm field or whatever. It's a lot more complicated than that, fortunately for me. The unfortunate part is we can find no records of a road being vacated by any other process other than the original platting company. So the like, say, if I was to subdivise like a fifty acre field, I can at any point walk into the county with a what's called a deed of vacation and say plat number seven striking it from the roster combining it with PLAT number eight done, one step process, no issue. But after it's been sold, there's no technical process to do it because it doesn't happen very often. M So what are you gonna do. It's been four weeks of back and forth going to the county, pulling PaperWorks, freedom of Information Act filings. I found the permit, and a friend of mine helped me find it. The permit for the original garage. It does show it built on the road based on their initial drawing. They lied to me. Well, I don't think they lied. That's not fair. They didn't look. They didn't look. They didn't look, and so they they've already approved things to be built there. I don't think it's gonna be a problem long term. No, it's just just going to be edious. Yes, andregl Man, you, my grandfather, the two reps from the township, and one of the lawyers I've talked to all just said, well, why didn't you just build the damn thing and pay the fine on the back end? I said, because I didn't think this was going to be a problem. The one time Nick tries to do something above board and play by the I do lots of things above board. No no, no, no no no no no no no no no, no no no. You appeared to do a lot of things above board because you don't get caught doing the things below board. There's a different. Everything in my house exceeds code. Do you really want permits for all the things? I don't really. Want me to pick that statement apart because I can see the horns poking at the top of your head because you very carefully said that. That's because my current garage does not meet or seed code. That's why I was saying in the house is to code. Like, okay, what about outside the house? Neck Technically, the overhang on the eaves of my house does not technically meet code because it's within thirty feet of the road that doesn't exist. Oh you know what the funnest part is, Phil, There's there's more fun. There's more fun. So the road is specked out. It forty feet wide? Yeah, okay, do you know what the minimum with in the state of Illinois is or a roadbed and fifty So the road is also too narrow for them to build right now. Anyway, I don't. Think that would stop them if they really decide. No, they would just seize a foot on either side of it and call it good enough. Yeah, they would just seize it under eminent domain and they would they would throw you a couple grand and it would call it a day. Persistence is key when you are dealing with small government bureaucracy. If you are polite, but in sessional and persistent. Do not yell at the people because they're just doing their job. Do not harass the people, but continually ask the questions because eventually you will get to the person that if they can't answer it, will will point you to the person that can or can make up the answer. I will just say the state's attorney in this case. I will just say from my own personal experience, bureaucrats do not react well to being yelled at or harangued. Oh god no, In fact, they will a policy. They can then kick you out and ignore you. But if you become a thorn in their butt. I know there's that that there's that person out there that says, no, no, I'm gonna be a thorn in the government's butt. But just walk a fine line, because they they might have to do what you want them to do, but they can can make it harder. They can make it harder. They can make it take ten times longer. They will file paperwork one minute before closing on Friday afternoon. They will leave off zip codes to make sure that stuff that gets mailed never gets delivered. I'm just telling you from secondhand experience I have talking to other people. There's a thousand ways to make them make any process hell on earth. The process can become the punishment. Yeah. On the other hand, if you're just polite, professional and persistent, usually people will say, Okay, the squeaky wheel is going to get the grease. Let's get this done and get the sky out of here so we can go on about our day. And even if even if there's not a process for it, which is the problem usual right now, right, that usually means it's such an out of pocket situation that it demands special attention from a higher authority. And it's also worth pointing out that, like you have to bear in mind that this is one of the critical differences between bureaucracies, whether it's government or private. It doesn't matter like a huge corporation deals with a lot of the same nonsense, but a bureaucracy and a small business have totally different perspectives on things like invent a new process. Small business says, invent a new process, let's make it happen, Let's get the customer, take careful, let's move, and it's they're very quick to respond to edge cases. Bureaucracies hate edge cases because EDU cases are uncomfortable. EDU doesn't have a form, doesn't have a form, doesn't have a process, there's nothing agreed upon. If I take any action without loop and my boss into it, I'm going to get screamed at or why didn't you follow the process? And if I tell them there is no process to do this thing, their immediate answer is going to be why did you come talk to me? But the problem is that that works up through the levels. They have to talk to their boss, they have to talk to their boss, so on, so on, so on. So you get to the point very quickly where the fact that no one knows how to do this means decision prolysis at every level. It does become that, and I think that is the reason why we don't have records for it. When the neighbor across the street did this exact process, because they said they just looked at it and said well, this will never be built. So void done. Yep, Because back then we didn't have a twenty five person planning department. It was two people. Yeah, you had Barbara and Joe in an office and they said, this is dumb void. Move on, this is dumb void. Yeah, okay, we're just gonna avoid this. They own the property. Find void. Also the laws have changed. Yeah, well the laws have changed. And call it what it is. I mean, bureaucracies left to their own devices will make things more bureaucratic. That's just what they do. I mean, like, yeah, it's protection. That's a I'm not arguing with you. It's a very like pessimistic view upon it. But it's more of a it's more of a company culture thing. Like if you look at like a small if you look at look at any business, look at Microsoft or better yet, Apple, Apple is a really good example. Apple started off with two frickin' whiz kids in a garage building shit from scraps and everything. For the first I don't know how many decades of this company was like while fly by the seat of our pants, throw convention to the wind, make shit, see if it works. They had tremendous highed tremendous lows, and then over the years they didn't improve the market or push the market. They invented the market like they were the first They They invented the app, the iPod, they invented the iPhone. They revolutionized so many industries they got into. But eventually that company got to a point where it became large and bureaucratic and run by committee, and it bureaucratized itself. And now once a bureaucracy's been created there it's not that they do things for job security. The problem is they do things bureaucratically because it's what they know how to do. I don't think, uh, perhaps I wasn't super clear on that. Part of the reason why it becomes that way, and why I call it job security, is because you no longer as an employee have a reputation with CEO. You're a coggin machine. Because of that. If you make a decision on your own, CEO doesn't say, oh, yeah, Joe, Joe's great, he knows what he's doing. Good call that'll work. HR says employee number three two sixty seven. You're out. HR three YEP three one two six seven, whatever your number is. You didn't run it out the chain of command. Somebody took offense to that, You're gone, goodbye, Yeah, and and none. I get it. None of what we're saying. I don't think it is meant to be pejorative to anyone in those types of organizations. It's just it's just the way they're run better. Any sufficiently large system has to develop formulaic responses to common protocols, and the more formulaic responses to common things that happen that you generate, which will happen over time just by the nature of existence, causes you to lose agility and causes employees to feel as though they cannot make some of those decisions. You sacrifice agility for economies of scale and reliability because if you if everybody knows, if you go to McDonald's anywhere in the country, mcdouble's and mcdouble yep, their reliability goes. Pretty far with customers. It might not be the best burger you've ever had, In fact, it probably won't be, but it'll be the same burger. You can gain standardization, and you can gain economies of scale, but you have to sacrifice the agility for that. And every reasonably large business that's gotten to the point that has tried to reinvent themselves with like scrums and sprints and six sigma and all this crap to regain agility. It's like, my point of view has always been, like what you're talking about having to do is you're having to take a team of innovative people and remove them from the chain of command. I use the analogy a lot of like Army Special Forces. Your special Forces command answers to literally the mother fing president of the United States of America and not meant not really anybody else. Yeah, only people within the command. Yeah. And because they have shortened that chain and command to like two people to get to the guy up top, they have gained agility. They've gained the ability to like completely wipe their behinds collectively with all SOPs in the arm that big army ever came up with. They were able to requisition any equipment at any cost, anywhere in the world, for any reason. They don't have to justify it. It's I want ray gun in the forty I want plasm rife on the forty wide range. Doesn't matter if Army ordon it says it's a good idea doesn't matter if how if it costs a million dollars a rifle, it doesn't matter. Special forces says they want it, Big guy top authorizes it, Special Force command gets it ship to Zimbabwe, you know, so a guy on a bicycle can cart it down to this green break. But that's agility you can only get because you take this entire bureaucratic nightmare that is big Army and you say you go stand over here by yourselves and leave these guys alone. And companies can do the same thing. Governments can do the same thing, but it requires the will to do it. And unfortunately, once an organization's got into that scale and size, it tends to weed out most of the people who would be the special forces of that company. It does. It sheds them to other organizations that still have that agile mindset. Largely because that agility is punished through the process, yeah a lot of times, or you get well at the very least, it's not rewarded. Or you get weirdos like me that like, I beat my head against the wall of your bureaucracy all the time, and I'm constantly just pecking and poking and scratching at the surface, saying I'm not going to shut up until y'all let me do cool stuff again. And every now and then they let me do cool stuff, and then they put me back in the closet and say no, no, go back to being a clogging machine. And I grumble and grind and scream until they let me back out of the closet again to go do cool stuff again. But like you know, sometimes you just need a big bearded autistic guy to shake things up, you do. It's important, Yes, So we got to talk about what doctor scary guy dropped into our lap, and then we can do full crap about what we've been doing for. The last several days. Have you consider the benefits of rim fire cartridges in prepping and survival scenarios in a word? Yes? Okay, yes is a word? Xfoliate upon that expand on so. I felt I had to make that joke because I can so rim fire cartridges, especially twenty twos. I'm assuming we're talking mostly about twenty two l Are, but you know, are we not. Talking about the French forty one Rimpire? I'm not okay, so La Matte revolvers aside, I know what they are, just no La Matte revolvers aside, twenty twos are phenomenal. Absolutely are. They can be fantastically accurate. They're excellent for taking small game. Know the limitations of your cartridge, Know the limitations of the weapons system that is using that cartridge. Anybody here that shot a lot of twenty two am out of a semi autom Jeff jag forty four, Henry correct, that's another good one. They get dirty as fast, uh two's a lot of them still use a waxed bullet. A lot of them use a fairly dirty, very cheap powder. The rim fire primers are not as clean. There's not as much energy in the in the cartridge to cycle the bolt when it's dirty. So a couple things about them. One, it's still a gun. Yeah, it's still a firearm. If you shoot a twenty two unsuppressed, people are going to hear it for quite a ways away. Although that being said, if you have a decently long barrel, twenty two l R is a hell of a lot quieter than like any any other. Center fire cartridge out there. Oh, it absolutely is sun suppressed, a lot quieter without suppressor. With a suppressor and shooting subs it's as quiet as a bbgun, quite as a pellet gun. I can get a pellet gun today that is a break action pellet gun in twenty two caliber with the same muzzle energy as I can get from a twenty two LR. Now I will never get rid of my twenty two is number one, because my wife loves a little Brett and Neo. She'll never let me get rid of it. And number two, it's a fantastic training tool. The twenty two caliber rifles are a fantastic training tool for marksmanship. You have to compensate for so much more bullet drop and so much more in wind calls that it really hones your fundamentals. In my opinion, you can do the same thing with a break action pellet gun with the same energy. I mean, that's all fair. I look at twenty two twenty two LR in terms of like use ks in the two things that always come to mind, because like the benefits of twenty two Who long rifle over I would, I want to say, any other cartridge, But I'm really struggling to think of anything that would beat twenty two long rifle in this except for some of the smaller rim fires which don't count in this, but like they're extraordinarily lightweight. They're very small, very compact. You can carry an absolute fricking wad of twenty two long rifle in a very small package for not much weight. By comparison, the firearms are usually very lightweight, very simple, very sturdy. But a lot of them are blowback. You know, you already mentioned that they're very that they do get very dirty, very cruddy, very carpeted very quickly, but like quite frankly, pack a can of ballistall in your bag and like just hose that every now and then. But like most twenty two is can be brought back up to functional with a stiff brush. Yeah, but at the end of the day, like I think, my point of view is like if the two places that a rim fire shines in a survival preparedness situation, this, first of all, as like a small game cartridge. It does you can pop. I would say anything up to a rabbit pretty you know, pretty convincingly with a twenty two long rifle. Anything bigger than that you might struggle a little bit. I know of poachers that take that have taken whitetail with a twenty two. But reliably yes, oh, yes, given more credit than I would have thought. Then most of them are shooting them through in the head. Well yeah, fairly close ranges while spotlighting. But yes, there there was a fairly well well known poacher in my county that got caught years ago, probably shortly after I graduated high school that he had taken, by his own admission, over fifty whitetail with a twenty two. Well, dang the art thing I was going to. Say, though, in addition to it, in additional harvesting small game, I would put a twenty two long rifle in the same boat as like a Liberator pistol from World War Two. It's not going to give you the best range, it's not going to have the most energy. It is not the best choice to get into a gunfight with. But if you need to turn that twenty two long rifle into a collection of more powerful firearms, you could do that if you were sneaking about it. So for me, it's killed a lot of people with their version of the twenty two rim fire. Yeah, so like from it from my perspective, like, I've never been a huge twenty long rifle guy. I went straight into centerfire after I joined the army and like I was full blast, you know, forty five ACP nine mil five five six seven sixty x thirty nine, and branched out from there. I only got into twenty two. It's really when I got my Henry US Survival rifle. And even then, I'd never had like what I would consider to be a lot of twenty two long rifle. On hand, I've always had like maybe twoenty rounds twenty two because I. Have not bought twenty two shells in probably fifteen years. I haven't bought any in a while because I just don't shoot it that often. But more recently, when my daughter picked up her twenty two, her little twenty two Chipmunk, and I started taking her to the range, I started buying like a two hundred and five range pack every time I would go, and obviously she wouldn't shoot all that up, so I was building up a surplus. And then since my wife has inherited this Marlin nine ninety and we've gone to the range with that a couple of times. I have bought, just in the last couple of months a little more in twenty rounds of twenty two. It is it is the most common round that I end up having given to me. I'm there are a lot of gun guys in Illinois. There are not always a lot of gun guys in your family circles or in your work circles. And when someone's father in law or grandfather passes away and your coworker comes up to you because you're the gun guy at work and says, hey, man, I don't know what to do with all this, Like legally, what do I do here? I give you one hundred dollars and you put it in my trunk and go away pretty much, yeah. I mean like I'll walk you through it. Usually what I do is I call up a couple of guys and I get the I get the the firearms, like the value guides because I know some guys that collect a lot of antique firearms. So I'll grab those guide books from them and a few of the auction site books and I'll take it over take the stuff over there, and I'll help them go through it. But they usually have either you know, a small cardboard box full of ammunition or in some cases a wheelbarrow full of ammunition, and they're usually like, I don't know what to do with this I'm like, look, I'd give you something for it if you want something for it. Otherwise I'll give it away to people I know that shoot this caliber. The two most common things I get are paper shotgun shells and twenty two long rifle. Yep. But well, I mean that's put this way. When when it came time to break up my father in lost firearms collection, that's kind of what I did, which was anyone who was getting any of the firearms, any of the amienition I had in that cartridge, that all went with that gun, even though there were two twenty twos and we got one and the other one went I think ultimately went to my nephew. I sent all the twenty two that my father in law I had with with that gun, because my point of view was, I'm like, I don't know how much twenty two he already has. I'm sure he has something. They live in the country, but I know I'm sitting on several thousand rounds. Yeah. In the name of full disclosure, Stewart sent my daughter as a birthday present years and years ago when she first started shooting, sent her a shoe box full of just twenty two. That sounds like Stuart, we have we have we we did not manage to shoot. I mean we shot a fair bit of it. But you know with that little chip, that little single shot chipmunk, that was all. It takes a lot. That was gonna be a lot of work. That's how we got that chipmunk. Was a neighbor was helping their parents clean out their childhood home and they found this thing sitting up in the corner of a closet behind a bunch of coats, and they brought it to me, like nobody, well, no, they knew what it was. They knew it was an old twenty two because like the family had kind of traded every every kid and the whole family had shot this. Thing out of their property. Okay, but they. Were like, look, nobody wants to sing. We don't we know, we can't just throw it in the trash. We don't know how to legally get rid of it. And I was like, and I grabbed it from like do you want money for it? And they were like, well, no, we just want rid of it. I'm like, so you don't want money for this? And they said no, if I mean, if you want it, like you can have it. But like the bolt was froze. Ure we go, well, but so the bolt was corroded shut and it was non functional. So I said, okay, and I walked in the garage and came out fifteen minutes later and like it was a functional rifle again. And the guy was just flabbergasted. He was like, what did you do? Not a whole lot to those things. Well, it helps if you hose a cannabalistall over the bolt and then you whack the freaking bolt handle with a hammer one good time to shock it loose. Once I had the bolt open, it was just a lot of scrubbing and brass brushes and you know, crap. But once I got the gun cleaned up, I mean that was that was my daughter's first twenty two. Anyway, all that being said, I am not one of those guys that who's gonna go out and say, like, you know, you need a twenty two and like ten thousand rounds of ammunition because we're gonna make it all the way to the last day of the apocalypse. But for all the reasons Nick laid out that I don't disagree with, and the reasons I laid out, I think a twenty two belongs in every gun guy's collection. I think so, I just I will never be that guy who was like, you need like fifteen twenty twos and ten thousand rounds of ammunition, get a single twenty two. Go get a Ruger ten twenty two, or go get a Ruger mark for or go get any old twenty two that you find. There's ten million of the stupid things out there in circulation already. Go find one used. Clean it up, really, really, really really clean it up, because the action is going to be chop full of crap. The barrel is going to be chopped full of lead and wax and crap. Get it really clean, give it a good once over, good bill of health by say two or three thousand rounds of twenty two, and then go out to the range and work your fundamentals. Yeah, just have fun with it. I mean, look, I see in a lot of the post apocalyptic survival books and a few of the different blocks, and a few of the YouTube videos I've watched over the years, people say, oh, you'll be able to hunt small game and feed your family with it for six months, until everybody has the same bright idea and hunts everything out of existence. Well, during the Great part of the big reason why we have a lot of the hunting regulations that we do now, which yes, do pre exist the Great Depression, but a lot of them got a lot stricter and a lot more heavily enforced because of people hunting animals during the Great Depression. One of the big arguments against silencers was poaching, prevention of poaching. Yeah, but. Anyway, a couple of comments. One big downside of twenty two is no reloading. Nick, let me do the comments and then we'll argue about that. That would be a good segue into reloading, So Jeff Jags said forty four. Henry Ragglefrago said forty one. Swiss always good time. Jeff Jags said, there is also a story of a guy who killed a polar bear with a surplus COLT sixteen in Alaska ten out of ten. I don't want to be anywhere on the continent when he tries. That hard pass. Raggle Frago said, cz four fifty seven. I'm assuming that's one of the I mean, they. Are not cheap. They're not cheap, but they're nice. They are very nice. I have looked at them several times. Yeah, and Jeff jag saying, fun fact, a fifty cal amocn fits eight thousand worth of boxes of twenty two. I believe that. But what I've got a small toolbox with like thirty twenty two rounds. Or something like that, what is it way? When it's fully loaded, though, that is my dump. I just don't pick it up. I just I open the FlipTop and I grab out the box I need. See. This is part of the reason why I have fifty cow cans. But for like for the cans that like, when I'm going down to the gut range, I either bring loaded magazines out there and I shoot those load magazine that I'm done, or I will occasionally take smaller containers, or I might take a thirty cow ammo can with me. I don't love fifty col ammo cans around because I like. Fifty cal cans for twelve gage fits two boxes side by side, right down on another. For fIF for twelve gage, yes, yeah, but for any for any center fire cartridge. Once you get a fifty cow can full to the brim, it's gonna weigh a lot. Yeah, So it sounds funny because I mean shotgun shows have a lot of payload, but they also have a lot of like they have, they got a lot of dead space in them with like the wad and the you know all that stuff. So yeah, the packing to prevent prevent pellet deformation, and they don't. They're they're they're big, they don't stack really tight together. Yeah they're not. I mean it's heavy, you don't get me wrong. It's heavy, but it's not that heavy. You're not fitting a full case in there. Yeah, but you know, I get, I get what you were going towards Phil with me saying you can't reload twenty two l R. Yes, I know you can. You can can be done. Ten am ten Is it economical? Does it make sense? Is it a smart investment of your time? Absolutely? Zero out of three. It also requires making fulminated mercury in your house, So what's probably rod. You've made worse than that in your garage. I'm sure I have. But I'm not saying it's great for your health. I mean, so I work in machining, briefed your cynogens all the time. Probably not great for me long term. Oh do you know what amy k is? Methyl ethyl keytne. Yes, I've heard of it. Isn't it a solvent. It's a solvent. You know it's banned in most industries, right, yeah, except for automotive and arrow and. Aircraft army Aviation still uses this shit to this day. I have bathed in aircraft. Before, so not great for your lungs. Turns out, Hey, you know what, I held my breath the best I could do. My wife is correct. Her family was not ready for the well all, I was laid up with a hernia repair, surgery recovery. Her family was not emotionally prepared for the weight of my hobbies. Hoof too. Yeah. At the time when we moved, we we filled the bet of my RAM fifteen hundred with AMMO cans. And were you sitting on the bump stops, yes, yes, of course yes. And then we got to the lead, just boxes of letting gets. I actually got to do the You know, if somebody picks something, they're like, well, Jesus, what's in this bricks bricks of lead. So to answer your your statement, yes, you certainly can reload twenty two LR. The reason I think most people will tell you it is a fool's errand to do it is that I think, like current twenty two LR prices I saw the other day bulk nothing special was like six cents around, right. Yeah, that's not uncommon. You can get them as cheap. As five at six cents around. It is so freaking stupid to go through the amount of pain and the butt necessary to reload rim fire. It is completely and totally like it's a science experiment at that point. You're not doing it to save money. You're not doing it for fun because it's not fun. You're not doing it because it's gonna be more accurate or you're gonna make tiny seen title groups. It's a freaking twenty two. It's not even gonna be as reliable as the factory twenty two was because you know, once you've already hit it with a firing pin, if you just haven't hit in the same spot, it's not going to detonate. So like two is just my crappy experience from start to finish that I would not recommend for anyone who likes himself. The foreman that taught me my trade, he used to with a little piece of aluminum go in and bang out that little dink mark from from the firing pin in the rim. He used to form that back out and then fill that whole rim full of fulminated mercury. They would make that in their dorm room on a hot plate. College was wild back in the day. I guess yeah, ragl Frank was saying, uh uh okay, that's where I draw the line and reloading I was falling through. He said he didn't know I cast. I do have the stuff to cast my own bullets. I never really got around to it because I met a guy that lives just on the other side of town for me, that has a rotary magnets and he only charges like forty six bucks a box for five hundred coated, so not bad. That's kind of hard to argue with, especially with no shipping, especially with no shipping, because the shipping on that shit is always expensive. So I just go down to him and get it, and then I don't have to sit out in my garage when it's like twenty degrees outside casting bullets. All right, So let's let's start from the word go, Like, we both reloader on AMMO. We do. How long have you been reloading? I know you have a newer setup, and I want to talk about gear and our process and everything. But how like take us. Back to the sorrow. So when I bought my first house is about when I started reloading, so it would have been about ten years ago, and it was mostly focused on thirty odd six rifle rounds and nine milimeters pistol. That's all I did. So I started reloading in twenty sixteen, or was twenty fifteen. I started podcasting August of twenty sixteen, and I'd been reloading for maybe a year ahead of that, maybe two of the most before I started podcasting. And my original originally when I first started, the only thing I was reloading was forty five ACP because when I first started, well, when I first got my reloading gear, I literally only had two handguns. They were both forty five ACP. The gun collection has expanded a little bit, hence the number of dies I have sitting on the shelf. Yeah, I mean I started out. Remember the open sea frame Lineman. Presses, a little orange liman yep ram in the front, had like the two toggle links on the side, and this one was. So old it was the single taggle link. Oh, it was the. Gray, the original gray. You're talking about the old seventies vintage maybe. Yeah, the seventies vintage. I got it from a guy at work who was getting he was upgrading from that to a Dylan ten point fifty with the Automation series on it, because he decided, oh yeah, oh yeah. I mean, he was getting up there in years and he didn't want to have to, you know, waste time. He wanted to spend more time shooting and less time loading. That's fair, fair enough, and uh I loaded nine mil on that for about a year and a half. And then a friend of my grandfather's was getting rid of his gun collection because he was going into a retirement home. And my Grandpa's like, you reload right, I'm like, yeah, I make bullets. He's like, I got a bunch of bullet making stuff for my buddy. Let's, you know, let's see if any of it will be any GOODDEA and U. And that was a rock Chucker Series one rock Trucker fan fantastic love that thing, huge upgrade from the original Alneman C. C shape. And then a few years about what about a year before I sold my house, my first house, I got this thing behind me and that is a hornity lock and load ap progressive with a case feeder on it. This week is the first time I have set up that case feeder because prior to when we were getting ready to sell the house, I knew I was going to have to put a lot of time into fixing stuff that I was just putting off because it was just paining the ass I went through and I spent about three and a half months basically the entire winter doing nothing but loading all of the casings and bullets I had, and I just finished shooting through most of those a couple weeks ago, So I at one point had so much nine I was able to shoot for almost five years without needing to reload, And so I never bothered to set this press up because I've been so busy working on the house and doing some other things. And I did lose access to a private range as well. In the meantime that hurt couldn't shoot as much, right, so I was through one of the patrons, I became friends with another guy that lives out here by me, and because of that, I was able to pick up a slot in a private range that's about forty five minutes to an hour from me. So I thought, well, since I'm going to be shooting more, I should probably load up all these empty nine mili casings that I have. So I set this up and without the case feeder, this will do about two hundred and fifty rounds an hour. With the case feeder, they claim I haven't tried it yet. I'm waiting on some cases. They claim it'll do four hundred rounds an hour. I'm looking. I'm looking at there's a bunch of models out there for three D printed bullet feeders as well. And I happened to have a lathe to make a bullet feeder die. That should get me to five to six hundred rounds an hour. Now, conversely, I got into reloading, so to go back before I started reloading, my dad, actually him and a buddy of his, in trying to think of this is when he lived in Houston or in Beaumont. This is before I was born, by the way, back in the seventies, a buddy of his had a reloading press. My dad had a couple sets of dies, and the to them basically, we just get together, yeah, trade the setback. Yeah, you know. I think the deal they have is basically like bring your own stuff and buy your own dies of something. I don't have maybe just get together and just you know, hang out, make some mammo. And that was before I was born. Yeah, So fast forward to about twenty fourteen, twenty fifteen. I a coworker of mine at the time, has he'd gotten an RCBS rock trucker, the kit like you know, the press the kid come was. With the powder measure and all that. So he had gotten that, I think as a birthday present, and he was getting ready to move and he was like, you know, doing the the adult thing of I don't I'm not really going to use this. I'd rather not have to pack it. It's heavy as shit, it's cast iron. So he was selling. He was trying to sell it for something fairly reasonable. I think it was like seventy five percent of the cost of a brand new one. And it was literally still in the box. He'd never even taken it out. You'd be surprised how many of those I see on marketplace. Yeah. So I gave him some cash, took it home, started setting it up. My dad gave me all the dies he still had, and a lot of the bullets and like all the all the reloading stuff he still had in a box from the from the late seventies. He just gave it to me. Now, no powder, no primers, that had all gone away over the years. You can get that. But I got a set of nine mil Dies and a set of thirty eight Special Dies and a couple of differ things to kind of get me going. At the time, the only cartridge I reloaded was forty five ACP, So I went and got set of forty five ACP RCBS branded car by dies Sure, and I started off loading forty five ACP. I bought a couple of boxes of oh what were they? I want to say it was like Precision Delta or whatever it is was the brand. It was kind of a bigger brand of full deal jacketed oh Sure jacketed bullets. Because when I first started off, like money was tight, but I was saving so much money reloading the AMBO that like, I was willing to spend the extra for jacketed bullets, not even full with anything that was power coded or lit or Yeah. I switched to plated bullets later on because when those came online through Extreme Bullets, they were so much cheaper than jacketed bullets. It made the case for itself. There was a gun store like about a hundred yards away from my house at the time that did sell small volume of reloading stuff. So that's where I bought my first eight pound jug of Hodgton Universal, which is which I still have. I still have half of the second eight pound jug sitting home, sitting on my shelf being used. Now. Well, pistols, you don't go through much. I mean my nine mil load is well right now. Winchester two thirty one, I'm using three point four grains, yeah, so I'm running out the higher end, so I use four and a half grains at a whack for one hundred and twenty four grain nine mil and five and a half grains for forty five acp and I think for four point two or something like that for thirty eight special like. A spitch of powder. Not a lot, yeah, but I bought my first powder, my first primers from them. When I branched out into reload for three way Winchester, I bought a bunch of Imar forty sixty four for them. They were my go to powder and primer source for a long time until they stopped carrying it because nobody else is buying at me, so I found another source inside l It was a competitive shooter who kind of round it ran a power business on the side, bought a bunch. He's the guy that did the big buys everybody and then broke it up. Well, he had he had a shop in his on the side of his house. It had to be maybe fifteen by fifteen or something of that bane. The walls were like just shelving, all three walls of just powder and powder and powder and primers and primers. And he had a loft where he kept Dylan's Like he had multiple six fifties just sitting up there waiting for somebody to come by and buy. Those are not cheap, no, well. Okay, but his his personal shit took up the garage. That's why he needed the shed for the bit the business, the way he subsidized his remoting habit. The garage had three ten fifties with auto drives sitting in it. It's like, it's not like nine or ten k each right now. He shot a lot, Nick, I'm sure he did, because those things will do almost a thousand rounds an hour if memory serves. Yeah, and apparently they're all according to him, there's such a gigantic pain in the butt to get reset. They are now by one and you set it up for a caliber. Yes, and that's exactly Actually, no, No, he had I think he had two of them set up for nine mil and one for thirty eight special, but the two for ninety the two for nine mil was one for minors and one for majors. Oh that makes sense. Or no, I think it might have been one he should one load he had for IPSICK and another one he had for USPSA or something like that. But he had two of these things that were. Just nine mil. This dude had toys. He was He was, for all intents and purposes, pretty much retired at this point, and that was just his thing. And it was all the way. Home from work. So literally I like call him up, say hey, dude, do you have any of this? He tell me what he'd called me when he had in stock, and I just swing by his place on the way home from work, drop cash, bring combustibles and explosives home in my car. You know. It was a fun time. Phil. How long does it take you to set up to do a caliber with the way you reload right now with a single stage. You mean, like right here now, I'm Okay, so right now the garage is set up for. Say you had to do a caliber switchover. How long would it take you. Depending on what step I'm on, like maximum two three minutes, Yeah, and so, And by the way, when I say two or three minutes, I mean two or three minutes. If let's say what I'm loading in is the very last step where you have to actually like configure your die so you're getting the crimp and the bullet seating depth and everything correctly. That takes a couple extra minutes as I have. Oh it does, because what I do is I have dummy cartridges that are already made to that round, and I just drop one in, raise it up on the RAM, and then screw the die down until I make contact. And I'm within a couple of thousands at that point. Yeah, you're not gonna be too bad. So for this you have you have the same thing. You gotta set up every one of your dies. Uh. Fortunately, this back here has a quick change powder measure system, so you can actually just push a de tent pin pull out your your charge. I'm gonna call it your charge, piston, charge bar, charge bar, whatever you want to call it. That's what they call it in Dylan speak. Yeah, it's like a charge bar. I mean, you gotta set every single one of the dies and then there is a five position shell plate that you have to time in with these little fucking grub screws down at the bottom of the press. It's a gigantic pain in the ass. Getting that timed in. Can take Ragle behind me. Is a turret press. It's a hornity lock and load ap progressive. It's their answer to the low level Dylan's. I did not pay full retail for this. If I had not gotten this because a guy died and I got it for like two hundred bucks, I would have gone for a. Dylan point of order. You don't have a turd, you have a progressive press. Yeah, it's a progressive he's asking about turred press like the Redding, like the Redding T seven, which is like it's like a single stage with with a movable shell plate on the top. Basically, Oh, the shell plate full of full of shells rotates, not the dies rotate. Yeah, you're right. Yeah, I I haven't tried a turd either. Honestly, I've gotten like this close to pulling the pulling the trigger on a red red reading T seven a couple of times, but at the end of the day, like so, my problem is, I've been reloading on a single stage for literally years, and I don't prioritize speed. I don't care. I really don't mind taking my time and taking a long time to make my amba because I just don't shoot that often. I do a lot more like dry fire, and when I do go to the range, I do a lot of very like intentional low round count, you know work. So I've never been in a situation where I haven't often been in a situation where, oh my god, I'm gonna run at VANM but I gotta stop shooting and go spend some time in the press. If I do get to that situation, I just go by a thousand rounds sure factory and just be done with it. Trouble you get to is with situations like my state's going on right now. A few weeks to a month ago, the state of Illinois decided they were well one of the one of the representatives for the state legislature decided they were going to push forward a bill with a five cent per round tax and serialized casings and bullets. I see every pistol round in the state of Illinois. Guess what I can't buy reliably in the state of Illinois right now. Pistol ammunition. Guess who doesn't give a shit that press don't care because I can. I can pop on I mean, Netflix has got SG one back on. I can pop on a few episodes SG one and reload enough for a full class. So you know, it gives you a little bit of a fallback. I've offered when you can't buy stuff, I've offered to help you do house hunting. Down here. You and I can buy compound together. So it's so hot. Rachel Rachel and Gillian Rachel would be missed. Listen, Rachel and Gillian Rachel could run like a little one room schoolhouse in a building off the back of the property. They both teach. They would love working together. I'm sure we would really have to sound proof that. To deal with the firing range, well, we just we just reload during the day and do the firing range after the kids go home. Why kids need to learn to shoot? Yes, Look, if I'm running a school on my property, we're having gym class at the range. Okay, fair point. Anyway, the point is if you ever decide that you and Rachel have had enough of Illinois, like, I'm happy to help you all property hunt. We've definitely had enough of Illinois. And this is the problem that we always come back to. And this is why I try not to I try not to harangue people from California and people that are in New York and other people that are in Illinois. It's always hard to leave. Yeah, you've got a job. I am blessed and trapped by a mortgage rate so absurdly low that it would never make finance sense for me to pay a cent over the minimum because inflation is almost always greater than my mortgage rate. I mean, as much as much as I goof with you about like come on, dude, move on down, like I get it. Because Gilly and I've had I wish we could. Gilly and I have had discussions about moving out of Louisiana, and I had love with her and told her I'm like, you know, I'm not a post moving out of Louisiana for the right for the right situation, for the right opportunity. But I'm like, I'm not going to laugh to be the right opportunity. Well, especially so I find that at forty three, I'm beginning to get a little nostalgic about my home, but like not my home, like this house. I don't care about this house. Now the community around you, well. Not let me do. The Rabbitays have lived in this state since seventeen thirty two. That's kind of at a certain point that kind of gets hard to walk away from. It's like, my family has been here since before here was part of the United States of America. Like we were literally just mine our own damn business. When all of a sudden, we're like, why are all these anglos running around? Yeah, and they're speaking this funny language called English, you know. And I have a pretty great job where I'm at it. It's awful hard to leave it because the pace, the pay for my job compared to industry standard is pretty darn good. I just have to pause you for a second. Do you want to build a commune? Do you want to run away? I kind of do, okay, which I have constantly joked with my wife's family that we're going to build a family commune in Wisconsin on one hundred acres. Okay, whichever one of you soshopaths writes a decent song to the tune of a Frozens Do you want to build a Snowman? That starts with do you want to build a Commune? I will sing it on this show. Oh God, I will have someone has to make this happen. I will. I have no writer. I will have to be inebriated, and it will be horribly out of tone. But I swear to God, if one of you nutcases writes it and it's good, I'll sing it. That's fair. Yeah, I'm thirty six. My parents are starting to get up there in years and they can't And I say up there in years, they're in there. They're been their mid fifties. They can't do a lot of the things that they normally would do. My sister, hold up, can't do no Ragle. I said not. I said, you have to write it, not skynet. Yes, damn freakin. Yeah. I mean my grandparents are even older. I mean I've got one set of grandparents that are in their mid eighties and one set that are in their early seventies, early to mid seventies. So I get a phone call probably once a week of somebody in my family that needs me to come give them a hand with something, and look, I don't feel obligated to. I want to be able to to go help them. That's part of the reason why I've gotten back into lifting weights and exercising a lot more, because I see what happens when you don't, and I would like to be the one that's still able to help when I'm older. And I can't do that if I'm nowhere near my family. No, I respect that I can't. I reserve the right to give you crap about it, but I, oh. Yeah, no, absolutely do. Please do. I give Illinois crap all the time because I live here and I have to deal with it, and it's terrible. There's a lot of horrible things, like in order to keep the Chicago Bears, they're looking at doubling the state property taxes. How could that possibly end badly? Oh? You know, it'll just end in more people leaving the state and increasing the tax burden and then spending even more money for less returns. Did you not hear the sarcastic tone. It wasn't sarcastic enough to break through. Oh, if ever, I say so positive about Illinois politics, you should just to assume it's rhetorical or circument or downstate. The downstate politicians are pretty good, though, the ones that aren't in Springfield. Oh, by the way, Pritzkurt is coming for the rest of you fuckers, So y'all better vote against him when it comes up in the primaries for the presidential run because he's coming. I've been warning the Signal Chat for years now that he's been planning a presidential run. And look at that. Who got on ozepic and started hitting the tanning bed Fritz skirt. Buddy, Can we save that for next for next episode, because tonight I'm in a bit of a black pill mood and I just might espouse voting for the fat cheese cheeseburger eating bastard just to accelerate the apocalypse. He actually paid this year the property taxes on the manchion that he's been removing the toilets from to make it non taxable because it's not considered habitable. Oh look at that, right before he runs for president. He's willing to pay taxes. How charitable of him. Anyway, back to reloading. Yeah, so you've upgraded a couple of times from alignment to a rockchucker to a hornity localod emp and I have stuck with stubbornly stuck with my old rockchucker. I also use the rockchrucker as like utility presses. Oh yeah, all my rifle cartridges. If I'm going to reload for rifles, being that you know, ars are no longer kosher in this state, and there's really no point I'm reloading for precision, in which case the rockchucker is king that press is not as consistent for setting overall bullet length. It is not. I'm going to tell you that, using my rockchucker and a little bit of care, I managed to load a batch of three away Winchester bullets that will stack four rounds on top of each other, literally holes touching at one hundred yards. Yep, absolutely possible. I'm not the world's greatest shot, but I'm much better than a bridge. But four holes clover leafing together one hundred yards, I was rightfully impressed by that. Honestly, the guy that taught me how to shoot rifles, me and him used to play darts with thirty odd sixes at three hundred yards on a regulation sized dartboard printed out on paper. Targets nice so you can be phenomenally accurate with your reloads if you put the care into them, and honestly, you cannot get a better, in my opinion, a better basic press than a rockchucker. I don't think there is a better one. I think what speaks so well for the rockchucker is the sheer number of rockchuckers are still set up on benches that are forty fifty years old, the number of rockchuckers that have been bought from freaking like estate sales or garage sales, are handed down through families, like the stupid things just. Work, and I it's it's a solid frame all the way around, and it's cast iron. And you you and I've had a talk. I mean now, I I talked very highly of our CBS's customer service, but all of your reloading companies tend to be above average and customer service. I think. I think they do because I've had problems with some of my with some of my least stuff, and that's that's entry level. Yeah, the entry level budget more budget. Friendly it is. And the one time I had an issue with their product, they rectified it immediately. So recently I snapped a decapping pin of my my r CBS Press and I ordered some extras. Didn't even pitch a fit about it. I just, you know, literally went on the website, ordered them, bought a shirt, got a shipped to me. But a couple several years ago, when I first got my Dad's, a. Guy wore out more than one rock trucker. I'm not saying it's not possible. Oh it's possible. It's just damn impressive. Yeah, that's a lot. There's a lot of that's a lot of moving. That's also also improperly a pride applied lubrication. Yeah, don't beat me to that punchline then. Anyway, So several years ago, I called up our CBS because I got my Dad's thirty eight special dies. Right now, you're accustomed to more modern thirty eight Special dies where like it's usually three die set, unless you're dealing with lead with the factory crypt die, then you have four but a three die crimp set, right, So your first your first die is usually resizing and decapping, right, your second die is bell mouthing, and your third die is seating and crimping correct or seating, and then a fourth die to do the factory crimping separately. Yeah, if you really, if you really feel so in flied. Yeah, the die set I got from my dad that was bought in the early seventies. The first stage did nothing but resize this thing. The decapping pin was screwed onto the bottom of the bell mouthing tie. I've not seen that. That's because you haven't seen a set of dies. It's fifty years old, Nick, because that's the way that our CBS used to do them. The I have our CBS dies from the seventies. I've never opened them. I got them when I got this press. It all came in a big box. Pop it open and check it out. I've still got I'm gonna do that. I've still got the parts to revert back to it. But what happened was I was looking I was looking at the instructions that came with the r CBS press, and I was looking at these set of dies that were fifty years old, and the pictures just didn't It made no sense, right because your dies were not in those pictures. So I called our CBS up, like called their customer service line is zero zero, zero zero zero. Until I got to a loving breathing person, and how can I help you today and I was like, so, here's this situation. I just started reloading. I got a rock trucker and my dad gave me a set of his old hand me down dies from like their early seventies. And I'm reading in the instructions where it talks about your first die is for resizing and you know, knocking the primer out, But my dies don't look like that, and my decapping looks like it happens on the second die, which is expanding, and Bell mouthing and the line got dead silent for a second. He was like, explain that to me one more time, just to make sure I heard you correctly. And I explained it to him and he was like, when were those dies purchased? And I'm like, best, I can tell about nineteen seventy two. And he immediately knew what I was talking about. He said, Oh, yeah, we haven't built dies like that in fifty years. You know, we reconfigured him to match what your instructions say. I'm going to send you all the parts you need to retrofit those old thirty eight special dyes to modern basically to modern specs. Nice cause you know that like they kept all the same diameters and thread pitches and everything. So you literally just unscrewed the old eyes, put in the new parts and bam, And I was like, thank you what I owe y'all. I was fully prepared to like pay them for the parts in the shipping, because like I wasn't looking for a handout. I would just Oh, those diyes have well exceeded their expected lifespan. Yeah. Literally. Our CBS's customer service told me your dad gave them to you, right, I said yeah, and he said, good, keep using them and given to your kid. We'll call it even. Fair enough. I got an envelope full of frigging parts. Less than a week later, I reconfigure the dies. I am still using them to this day. Our CBS, whatever they lost on those those those handful of little pit fiddly parts and the shipping, they've more than made up for me on over the years with the amount. Of crimes from them. But customer service among reloading reloading companies seems to be above average, at least because the reloading community like so the farm's commute unity. Nick, I know, I I've seen it estimated, like what forty to sixty percent of the US population are like regular recreational shooters forty to sixty percent. Yes, And that's a really wide range. And I get that, but it's because nobody has a gosh, nobody has faith in in the in the statistics. I would be surprised if it's that high by my definition of regular. I think I think they're definition more than once a year, yeah, annual? Yeah I could. Okay, so yeah, I could. I could buy that forty to sixty percent. Was it probably for reeloaders four or five percent? I've heard three percent of that population. I could believe that. So, assuming we're talking about three hundred and thirty million people and call it half. Sure, one hundred and one. Hundred and fifty, one hundred and fifty to one hundred and sixty million of them are regular shooters. Three percent of that reload their own, ammo. It's a very small, very tight community. I hate to say. There's a freaking shit ton of like fuddlre and not so much gatekeeping, thankfully, but there is so much like mysticism and myth involved in reloading. Because it's such a it does lend itself to a lot of procedure and a lot of like you know, everyone develops kind of their own way to do it, but then I think it morphs into people think that way that they that way that they developed doing it is the only way to do it, to be. Fair, to be fair, to be fair. I think a lot of that comes from how and I see it changing in the communities that I'm involved in that a lot of people. Of the people I do know that do reload. I do see it changing a little bit with the younger generation because of the Internet. You I didn't learn how to reload off the Internet. I knew a guy at work that had a reloading pres that he wanted to. Get rid of. He knew I was a shooter. He's like, hey, do you want to learn how to make bullets? Come over. We'll have a couple of beers, we'll make some bullets, we'll grill some steaks, and then you know, you can take the stuff home and you can do it at home. For probably a couple of years, I reloaded the load he taught me to make with the bullets he taught me to use, and the same type of casing. Because I didn't really know, I had a reloading manual that he gave me that was probably from the seventies based on the pictures in it. In fact, I still have it. It's the Lineman manual that came with that sea frame press, you know, the exactly what I'm talking about, spiral bound with that crackly yellow plastic. I didn't know where to find this stuff. The only person I knew to buy bullets from was the guy that he introduced me to to buy cast bullets from. So I shot waxed and cast bullets up until about five years ago. From my reloads pretty much exclusively, no funny and conversely enough, I taught myself how to reload. Yeah, I read the man you can do it from the book. It's not a complicated process. I read the book, I read the manual. I bought another manual and read that. And you know, like Nick, you and I have talked about, like my background in your background, like your machine is by trade. I'm a former aircraft and automotive mechanic. Like reading books, there figure there. Is a procedure you do A, then B, then C then D to get the result. In aviation, Yes, but in automotive mechanics you and I both know there's a lot of figure It out involved. Oh yeah, it's a lot of I know that has to come off that engine and it has to come out of this engine bay. But I don't see exactly what hole is big enough to get it out. So you have to just look at it and figure it out. So I was very comfortable with reading the books, reading the manuals like baby step at one step at a time. The first couple of rounds I made, I used no powder, no primers. I literally took like ten cases and ten bullets, and I just reloaded that same ten cases and ten bullets and then knocked the bullet back out of the case. Made dummy rounds over and over and over and over, and measured a measure to measure them until I got comfortable with the process, until I was getting good consistent measurements and everything. And then when it came time to like, you know, put powder in, I put powder in. I just dumped into a case, jump back to the top, and over and over and over until I got comfortable with how do I do this? So I get nice consistent powder throws. And then I put it all together. I made ten rounds. I went out to the gun range. Yes, Ragle fraggle. I did the old. I did the old, left hand on the family jewels, right hand stretched out as far as you can, safety squints fully engaged and pulled the trigger while praying. And anyone that. First batch of rounds you make all alone, you wonder dude. Every I'm telling you right now, I have never met a single person that reloaded that wasn't a little bit nervous the first time they dropped the hammer on one of their rounds. When I started making my my hotter three hundred wind bag rounds, I had extra safety glasses on. I had goggles over my glasses. That's a lot of powder in a big cartridge. Did you safety squint? Oh? Did you have your left hand on your jewels? Uh? No, I was on a cement block tabletop, so I was pretty okay with that. Okay, that that that that that's acceptable. But the hand on the rings completes the whole thing. Oh it does. The range I used to shoot at had cast cement tables for the long range precision shooting. Rago says he did the string and vice method. Oh nice, that's a day to go. I wasn't a rifle vice. I wasn't quite that concern because like, at this point, like I followed the Dagon instructions and I was loading to minimum, so like I was fairly confident I wasn't about to blow my hand off, but I was still a little nervous. Now, it took me a couple of years of reloading before I let anybody but me shoot my reloads. Yeah. Now, I will say that as I continue to reload and like learn more and push the envelope, I did get to the point where I started, Like, when you load those minimum rounds, you get to a point where you're pretty confident the sain't going to blow anything up because it's a minimal. I want to feel for it. Yeah, then if you are within the safety bounds of the minimum and maximum in a published manual by the powder manufacture, you are more than likely fine unless you really cock up that bullet seating depth. Now, I will say two things. First of all, I don't know if you remember, but years and years ago, my dad did cock up the seating of depth on his nine meals and blew up a Smith and Weston shield. It can happen. It absolutely can happen, and it only takes a moment of not paying a whole lot of attention to result in powder burns on the hand and a lot of profanity and a gun that may or may not have a live round in the chamber we're not sure and doesn't really want to unlock. That's that's rough. We eventually solve the problem by taking a pen and dropping it into the barrel and then like marking it, and then yeah, move the pen to the outside of the barrel so we could see exactly how far down the barrel the pin went, and then based on that we knew if we had if the pen was sitting on top of a bullet or inside a case up against a breech face. True, really works really quick and simple way. And you do not just with a with a not just with a pen, but like a pin, a screwdriver, a piece of wire boor brush boor brush, anything you have on hand. If you don't know if you have a live round in the chamber, play that, play that trick. Just put a friggin nice long straight piece of something down the barrel until it contacts something, and then use your thumbnail and mark, like you know, pitch whatever that rod is. Right at the end of the barrel, take it out and then run it alongside the barrel and then kind of line it back up, and wherever the tip of that rod is, it will show you very clearly either you're up against the breech base or you're exactly one bolt length away from it, and you know immediately if you have a live round. In the chamber or not. That's one of the reasons why I do in some cases really like chamber and chamber flags and chamber indicators on some guns. It can be nice. Another nice thing about hammer fired guns, if you're not sure and you can't unlock it, you can always just drop the hammer in a safe direction. In this case, we weren't sure we had a live round in the chamber because the gun had blown up. And we weren't really sure. If we weren't really sure if it blew up with the round in the chamber or if it actually managed to like cycle and shove a new round in the chamber before it locked up, which it can it absolutely can. We wound up taking the gun home, and let's say that once I was convinced I didn't have a live round in the chamber, I got super aggressive and enthusiastic about getting it open. And I did eventually. At that point, I mean the gun's trash. Probably at that point. We weren't sure if it was trashed or not. Until we got the gun apart realized that the frame had bulged. O. That's why I wouldn't open shield. It's a polymer frame. Yeah, that'll do it. Yeah. What was holding what was holding things? To be said for steel framed guns, what was holding the frame? What was holding the slide locked shut? Was the fact that there was some molten brass from the bottom of the case that blew out, that just went in all directions, and like the brass welded the freaking. Barrel in place. How far did he have the bullets set back? Uh, thirty five thousands. Some want to say. That's not insignificant. No, I mean I think on a nine mil I think from my load, I figure if I'm anywhere from one inch was it one inch one ten to one inch one twenty? I'm okay. So I go below one inch one ten, I get I get curious and I pull everything down. So bearing in mind that I'm a spreadsheet nerd and Boyle's law is a thing, and for those you non physics nerds, Boil's law says that like for it tells you about a relationship between volume and pressure, and basically like if you have a given amount of gas, burning propellant, whatever, the pressure increases by a known quantity, by a predictable quantity as you shrink the volume. Basically how it works. So I built a spreadsheet based on that and did lots of really nerdy maths to figure out like what the case volume of not of a nine mili an average nine milimeter case was at. I called it a zero seating death because instead of seating off of the bullet tip, I was measuring from the base of the bullet. Sure, And then I figured out what you know, like how tall was the bullet and what was what was Dad's target? Overall links, So I basically said, Okay, the bullet you were trying to make was X amount of pressure, and I don't know what X is because there's no way to figure that out reasonably, but it's no. So shoving that bullet thirty five thousands deeper into the case increased the pressure by sixty five percent. Yeah, I believe that over what he was targeting, which was already a mid level rain or mid level load. So he made plus P plus plus by accident. Oops and yeah, it blew the bottom of the case open. It shot the magazine at the bottom of the gun. It welded the barrel into the slide with molten brass. It was bad. Scrap the gun, but I digress. Anyway, it can't happen. But you know, I have seen I have seen. Three guns blow up on the range. Two of them were remanufactured ammunition, not by a user professionally, remanuf factured ammunition. One of them professionally, well, it is an insured corporation. That doesn't mean they're professional, No, it is not. And one of them, we believe was squib induced. That that you know, sometimes things want to move and if you don't let them move. It was an arc. Guy was doing double tap drills and the first one sounded weird and then bam. Yeah, I didn't have enough We nobody had enough time to stop him, because a couple of a couple of us were there, and everybody turned and looked after the first shot, and we were all looking at him when the gun detonated. It Fortunately nobody was injured. It just blew out the frame on his upper and scrapped the mag But we we believe it was squib induced because there was a squib stuck in the barrel. That's pretty damning, honestly, Yeah, it's it was. It was pretty hard to not think that that's what it was. And it was. It was a guy that was newer to reloading, and I don't know if it was I don't know if it was factory ammal or his reloads. He says it wasn't. But I've had squibs. I've I've whipped it and thrown a squib. What was the cause of What was the cause of your squib? I believe bad primer? Mmm, the primer did not ignite the powder, because my my, the mechanism inside the fire was just full of spent of unburnt powder everywhere. It was terrible. It's a horrible mess. So you probably had just enough pressure to push the bullet into the barrel. Not enough to ignite the primer. So I'm and same batch of bullets I had made, one hundred one of them did that on that hundred? Can I offer an alternate theory because this is exactly what I did when I made my hang fire. Oh, moisture in the case. Do you think there was moisture in the case. I don't think so. That will time. I was dry tumbling only, okay, so unlikely, Uh. Yeah, but I was at that time. I wasn't using like new primers I had bought. I was going through old stuff. So possibly contaminated primer, though potentially it's I don't know which batch of primers those rounds were loaded with. I know all the primers I had, I had not purchased, I had been given. Some of them are new, some of them are older. I'm still going through some of the large rifle primers that I was given because I don't shoot that many. So I've told the story before about my my hang fire. I had not long before started wet tumbling, and I got in a little bit of a rush because I really wanted to load some three sevens for my ruger to go to the range that weekend, and I was kind of like butting up against time with work and everything else. So I now, when I take brass out of my tumbler, I shake the piss out of it to get all the water out of the primer pocket and everything else and then I let it sit for twenty four hours before I touch it. This particular time, I thought to myself, I'm gonna shake it extra hard, and I'm gonna let it sit for about eight hours, and then I'm gonna load it. And the difference between twenty four hours dry time and eight hours dry time in southeast Louisiana, where the commidity is two hundred and fuck you, is apparently just enough for there to be a little kernel of water hiding out in the primer pocket out takes one of my rounds. And this manifests itself because I went out to the range start shooting in you know. It was bang bang, bang click, and I was like, that's unusual. So I opened the cylinder, pulled the round out. It's got a freaking hit on the on the primer and I was like, that's weird. Put it back in the cylinder, line it back up, pull the trigger, it hit. It goes the second time. I'm like, that's weird. Bang bang bang bang bang click. What the bam? Literally long enough I got. I got just enough to say, what the f and then the round went off. When it went off, I felt the distinct pink feeling of powder peppering my face. The gun, the cylinder was caked in half burnt powder. HM. And I had made my first and my last hang fire. Because the minute that happened, it scared me so bad. I down. I took all that ammunition deadlined, all of it, shot up the rest of my thirty eight special that was from a nerve batche and it was fine. Brought the thirty the three seven magnums home and when I pulled those bullets out, the powder was coming out. It was damp, and it was clumped together in about one quarter of the rounds. That'll do it. That'll do. I like to when I know I'm going to process a bunch of cases and I know we're getting a little long hair, So maybe we should talk about this later. But man, I like to give it at least a full day with a fan blowing out in all the casings, and I'll go down there a few times and just mix them around. We do need to pick this up next episode and maybe like talk because we want We wanted to talk about process and everything, but then I got drinking and you got talking about government malfees things. Just do that off. We could talk about our processes, and I'll try and if if I can get my hands on some casings, I'll try and shoot if I can get a hundred, if I can get my hands on one hundred empty casings somehow magically, I uh, I'll shoot a video of how this all works a little bit if I can. I need to say, Okay, So now bear in mind we have to check the YouTube regulations because YouTube nuked my reloading video years ago because showing people how to make ammunition is scary and. Against the rules. I suppose it just might be. I'm telling you it is. I had I had a whole video on making on reloading ammo, like way way way back in the day, maybe even before Andrew, when I was still dabbling and making YouTube videos, before we were in streaming. That got nuked a long. Time, huh. I'll be damned. Wouldn't have thought that. It was right about the time all of the how to make AR fifteens and AK forty seven's content got newt the off of YouTube. Yeah. I don't know. There's a lot of amim making stuff on the internet. I don't know how much in detail they show well, at the very least with the press without well, let's go spin. I mean, I don't see why not. You're just demonstrating mechanical principles at that point. I suppose, so, well, see, I'll see if I can get a halfway decent video of it working. I'm not a good camera person. Yeah, I mean, one way or the other. If nothing else, will take some pictures and be prepared to talk about process and some of the ancillary gear that we've purchased over the years, because like, absolutely I'm still rocking that rock chucker. But dude, I've got so much little do dads and extra stuff that I've put around that press to eat up and improve that process. It's ridiculous. Mm hmm. Absolutely got some fun little dude ads. Yes, all right, talk more reloading next week. Then next week more reloading, less whiskey, more targeted, more focused reloading. And for this weekend, I think I'm going to sleep and probably reload more AMMO because I have not done the thing I said I was gonna do, where I was gonna pull all the AMMO cans off the shelf and like inventory all the AMMO. I don't know, it seems like every time I every time I go looking for to do that I find more ammunition. I forgot that I scrolled away someplace. This happens. I know you're thinking like first roll problem, but it's more like I'm slowly reclaiming my ammunition manufacturing plant from the chaos that was my garage. And yeah, I'm finding old relics from a forgotten time. I need to build a dedicated reloading bench. I mean, right now I have filled my basement machining bench with reloading stuff. Again, we should also write this down or we'll forget. We should also talk about reloading benches, because we should. I built my own from scraps, and it stood up to like, I forget how many it's It's stood almost ten years of reloading of projects of wood of like woodworking. Nice. Yeah, well, that's what happens when you use like old four by fours from fence posts and two by six is for framing. And even though it's decked in quarter inch plywood, there's a freaking ladder frame of two by fours underneath it. Fra structure. Nice. Well, yeah, if you try to bolt a press to a sheet applywood, it doesn't last very long. Yeah that's true anyway, So yeah, we'll probably have to call this right here, this kind of went a little further I thought we thought it would do. And next time we'll skip government bureaucracy and just talk about reloading unless the government. Unless I finally get approval to build this garage. Or unless the governments do something really psychotic, and then we might have to, you know, pinch hit. That's true. You never know, m all right, matter of fact's going to go out the door. It's been an hour and forty five minutes. Thank you to everybody that's stuck with us, and screw off to everybody who did, and just kiddle up y'all. Bye night, Un