Bar none

Submitted by Eric Daniel

To me, knives are tools.  They are to be used and abused, to accomplish the mission or die trying.  I’ve been through several multi-tools (on average I break one a year) and pocket knives come and go (they get loaned out, lost, or break) but the one knife I have always had unwavering faith in (up until the time I had to quit using it) was the Ka-Bar USMC fighting knife.

As I mentioned in a previous post, a good utility knife is indispensable in the field.  Pocketknives like the Buck 110 are great for light work, but sometimes you need something with leverage.  Whether it was cutting open MRE cases or prying the wire off of crated ammunition, my Ka Bar took it all in stride.  In a perfect world a bayonet would have done just as well for most things, had I been able to draw one from the arms room when we went to the field, but sadly this was not the case, which made the Ka-Bar all the more valuable.  Moreover, the Ka Bar’s design alone made it superior to the bayonet.  The all-leather grip worked wonderfully wet or dry, hot or cold.  The blade was thick enough that you could pry with either the point or the flat without undue fear of it snapping, and the big steel endcap, combined with the knife’s own mass, made for a fair field expedient hammer.

It didn’t bother me in the least that I was in the Army and I was using a Marine Corps knife.  That Ka-Bar was a tool, and one I deemed best available to do the jobs I needed doing.  I reasoned that since the Marine Corps used the same rifles, ammunition, artillery and armor that the Army did, it was perfectly acceptable to use “their” knife.

Silly me.  Eventually, someone vastly more knowledgeable in trans-service etiquette than I explained to me the magnitude of the military faux pas I was committing.  No, it simply would not do to be caught out of doors with such an icon of Marine Corps tradition prominently displayed on my LBE.  As a Soldier and an NCO, I should have known better.  Need to bust open those crates of MG ammunition?  No problem – smash them on the ground or kick them, or use a stick (a good NCO always carries a good stick with them for just such a situation.)  The bottom line was that Ka-Bar was a Marine Corps “thing” and it simply had to go.  No amount of pleading, reasoning, or rationalizing could resolve the situation.  I just had to learn to do without.

Of course, ten years later I’m back to carrying a non-issue “fighting” knife, but now it’s made in Nepal, not Olean, N.Y. so I guess that makes it ok…

Get your Ka-Bar here.

Coming soon: 100-gecko-an-hour tape

Submitted by Eric Daniel

Seems folk at the University of Akron are trying to take a page out of the gecko’s wall climbing playbook (or at least its feet) by developing a form of adhesive tape that mimics the gecko’s foot.  Unlike conventional 100-mph tape, which uses a “glue like” chemical adhesive, the gecko tape derives its binding power through a self-generated electrostatic charge.  The gecko’s foot pads are covered with thousands of hairs which are, in turn, split into hundreds of smaller nano-hairs.  The “gecko tape” mimics this through the use of setae, bundles of strong and flexible carbon nanotubes, which recreate the electrostatic charge.

Currently being developed for space applications, gecko tape isn’t available to the general consumer yet, though no doubt, when it does come out, it will be just the thing for doing BDA repairs on the F-22 and F-35.

Check out gecko-tape here.

Carbon paper for your PDA

Submitted by Jon Acheson

Jon, this post’s for you. 

As mentioned in the PDA comments, Blue Nomad’s Backupbuddy is software that you can install on your PDA to create a data backup in the event your data becomes corrupted or you experience a system failure.  In addition, BB will also create restore checkpoints which can used when you make changes to your handheld that may be risky, automatically create checkpoints during each HotSync, or as frequently as you want, retrieve previous files individually that have been deleted or overwritten, including ALL previous versions backed up by BackupBuddy.  Lastly, you can also exclude specific files, file types, and card directories from being backed up.

In looking over their product information, it seems that BB only works with the Palm line of PDAs, and is available for purchase on-line.

Get Backupbuddy here.

Body armor for your "brain"

Submitted by Eric Daniel

Remember that PDA I mentioned a while back?  The one I use so I don’t have to haul a filing cabinet of information around with me?  Well, good as it is, it isn’t perfect.

For starters, it’s not very flexible; sometimes it doesn’t bend when you do, and the resulting “flexing” can wreak havoc on your PDA.  More importantly, it’s an electrical system, not a paper “analog” one, which means that it is correspondingly more fragile than that little green memorandum notebook.  Dropping it is bad, so is stepping on it, kicking it, crushing it, or submerging it in water.

Solution?  Up armor your brain.  The option I went for was the Rhino skin aluminum carrier.  While not titanium (and yes there are titanium carriers out there) the Rhino skin does the job for me.  Made of aluminum, the Rhino skin locks the PDA in along the left hand edge of the PDA (using the devices original cover hinges) so it doesn’t rattle around in the case.  Furthermore, the skin has a black foam rubber liner to protect the PDA.  The construction of the Rhino skin carrier allows you to plug in the charger, data cable, audio headphones, access all the peripheral ports, with the case closed, so you don’t need to expose the PDA while doing maintenance.  Finally, the skin also has pockets for a couple of memory chips, in the event you need to juggle cards and don’t want to have your spares floating around.

The only thing the skin won’t do is keep your PDA dry.  For that I use a Ziploc freezer bag (or, for you high speed active duty types you can use the newly developed re-sealable pouch the Army’s putting in MREs now for drinking your beverage base powder with.)

Get the Rhino Skin here

Sweet Agony Habanero Syrup

Submitted by cdburklund

For those of you who don't care for the taste of tabasco or rooster juice, there is Sweet Agony Habanero Syrup, or it's two sister products, Sweet Agony InCINNerator Habanero Cinnamon Syrup and Nuoc Cham Asian Style Hot Sauce. They've all won Fiery Food CHallenge Awards out of FT Worth and are for the seriously hot food deprived individual. They are not for the faint of heart.  All habanero based they have lots of flavor, lots of heat.  Their jams are even hotter.

Get some Sweet Agony Habanero Syrup here

Barn busting, Remington Rand style

Submitted by Eric Daniel

In 1990 I was issued an M1911A1 .45 caliber pistol that had been manufactured by Remington Rand during WWII.  Though a stout and reliable firearm, my “Colt” had one limitation. 

Its accuracy. 

To put it mildly, I was surprised the bullets ever hit the ground.  At 25m I had a shot group of around 2 feet. 

Now, I was (and still am) by no means an expert on firearms, and stories abound regarding the inaccuracy issues of the M1911A1, but the one thing I did know was the .45 was, and still is, used extensively in pistol competitions, so I knew the weapon design was not the issue, nor was the ammunition, but I was at a loss as to why I literally couldn’t hit the target right in front of me.

This went on for a year or so until we got a new Platoon Leader in our company who also happened to be something of a shade-tree gunsmith and a Colt collector.  What he said was, no the weapons aren’t bad, and the ammunition, while not match grade, wasn’t the cause, but rather, the Army’s level of “tolerance” in key components.  Bottom line, all my troubles centered on the barrel and barrel bushing.  Upon further inspection it was noted that when fully seated (slide all the way forward) my barrel was still capable of movement, a LOT of movement, as was explained to me, which obviously was having an effect on my accuracy.  Unfortunately, as the LT explained, that “slop” was still within Army tolerance, so technically there was nothing to be done.

Well, the next day what should appear but a Brownell’s catalogue, listing all the parts I would need to ‘fix” my .45.  I purchased a barrel, barrel bushing, barrel link and pin (as well as a plastic deadfall hammer and some lapping compound to fit the barrel and bushing to the slide) and then spent the next field problem hammering the slide back and forth the fit them.

The results, however, were immediate and satisfying.  My shot groups had collapsed to about 5” (good I thought, considering I was still shooting a stock slide and receiver.) The Lt., on the other hand, was shooting VERY good groups, but then he’d gone the extra step to get a complete fitted slide assembly, to include adjustable rear sight; after qualifying he’d just remove his slide, re-attach the Army issue one, and turn the .45 back into the arms room (which would explain why folk who checked his .45 out to qualify with didn’t do so well.)

Anyway, that small investment on my part not only dispelled all those accuracy issues surrounding the .45, but also improved the quality of my shooting.

Visit Brownells here

Boresighting the M256 cannon, Step 1...

Submitted by Eric Daniel

Two things turned me on to these indispensable binders; the 1991 Canadian Army Trophy competition (where I was a gunner) and the SGT Morales club (where I was caught moving in the open.)  For the first, the checklist binder was indispensable for providing a easy access means of referencing our gunnery SOPs and procedures, as well as providing me with a means to record all of my boresight data, as well as store cut out maps detailing the location and lane responsibility for all the target pits out at range 301 in Graf (for you who have never been there, there are a LOT of target pits out at 301.)  For the second, the check list binder was my concession to the Board’s requirement that I carry a binder with all my soldiers CTT/ SQT/APFT/IWQ/Personal data and favorite color in an easy access format (most SGT Morales candidates I saw were carrying veritable file cabinets of information.)

The flight crew checklist binder, for me, became my battle book -- if it wasn’t in my binder, I didn’t need to know it.  What it did contain were BOLF FACE pages for 9-line MEDIVAC requests, Close Air Support requests, INSUMs, aerial photographs, everything I needed to accomplish my mission (as soon as I got kicked off the Corps-level Morales board (my first line supervisor was in the wrong uniform apparently), all that silly CTT/APFT, etc… “stuff” went out the window.)

The neat thing about these checklist books is that you can mix and match pages, it truly is a living document.  I can insert and remove pages as required or needed (now a days I carry a lot of stuff from the engineer’s field data manual on demo, bridge classification and mines, as well as frequently used phrases in Arabic.)

Get a Flight Crew Checklist binder here.