The Prepper Broadcasting Network - Matter of Facts: It's Not A Road!!!

Episode Date: March 23, 2026

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Welcome back to the Matterfax podcast on the Prepper Broadcasting Network. We talk prepping guns and politics every week on iTunes, Stitcher, and Spotify. Go check out our content at MWFPodcast.com on Facebook or Instagram. You can support us via Patreon or by checking out our affiliate partners. I'm your host Phil Ravale. Andrew, Nick, are 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 did 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 into outpatient surgery in the last week. Yeah, last week. Today's Wednesday, right?

It's Wednesday. Thursday. Today's, Jesus Christ, that's... We're recording. It's Thursday, but... It's all right. Take a minute. Have another swing of whiskey and Coke. You're going to need it.

Anyway, today is Thursday. So, yeah, in the last week, I've spent, I think, a total of like 20 hours in hospitals. Too many hours. Yes. Taking care of my wife and my father, both getting outpatient 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 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 was you 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 have four weeks of headache to recount i have without violating statute of limitations well okay so did you want to cover did you want to cover the admin work before we before this we'd probably better um patrons if you're not a patron you should consider become a one. The link in the show description. You can join the rest of the nut cases and support our sociopathie. 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 Gouse. That link is also in the show description. And if you'd like to buy really, really, really good coffee, just check out disaster coffee. You 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 detest he won't take your extra money 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 somebody puts in an order sometimes publicly yeah well every time someone puts in 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 an iced coffee. Uncle Randy's front porch is a really good Mexican single origin. Like, it is. I don't. It's 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 know, 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, like, cigars don't taste the same. They, they run the gamut of like all different strengths and flavors and everything else. Oh, my gosh, yes. Coffee's the same way when you really start digging into it. And like, if I, if I pull up, like, like, as three really different examples, the, and, and, you. And, and, and, you. And, MOF dark humor, which is a French rose, which is about that close to being burnt. And then the bare blend, 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 rise up. I think the one in the bar, the burrow. The barrelage. Uprising, yeah, the barrelage. I liked it. Some of the, sometimes it's a little acidic for me. 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 continue to tweak it. Absolutely. Your wife is saying it makes a good cup of cold coffee.

I'm going to be honest. And this is like getting kind of into the weeds as far as coffee nerd 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 observing a cold or hot or iced 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.

Yeah. If you go from drinking at one end to the temperature curve. to the other. I mean, look at hot apple cider versus just like a normal temperature apple cider. 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 venture to say you could probably, you could probably cold brew it and it probably mull out a lot of the acidity. Oh, I bet it would. And it wasn't all the time. It just seems like some maybe, maybe it's a difference for me. Like when my allergies get really bad, I get heartburn like. you would not believe. And sometimes having just a little too much acidic food, it's just too much. How are you brewing it?

Just drip machine. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Just a shitty Mr. Coffee drip machine like I've always had. Do you know, I've got a percolator from when we go camping. No,

that's fine. But I guess 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 same 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.

Which probably isn't helping. Probably not. I can't, look, I, 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 brew an air pot. Well, that's fair enough. Because it does influence it. To me, it influences the taste. Now, admittedly, I don't have the world's most developed coffee palette, 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 said, just the taste, I don't mind iced coffee, but I don't like cold coffee. Phil, what are they aged in? Was it a bourbon barrel? Uh, 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. Yeah. It's a good cup of coffee ragel. 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 going to, it's got to,

I do like the bitter. You're going to trade one for the other. So like, 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 roast, you're going to like a, you're going to 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 some like that bare blend that's like having medium right in the middle. This is also the reason why 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 ragel, yes. If you generally like French roast, so pandemic is a good one in disaster coffee's lineup. That's a dark roast. 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 a medium dark. So, like, if you like a French roast, you got some good options. 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 re, we, 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 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 on earth do you convince a bunch of bureaucrats that a plainly not road is not a road?

Because they seem to think it's a road. What is a road? Because apparently they don't know. Well, here's the problem. Most of the low-level functionaries that you're going to interact with, 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-of-way system it was never added to any jurisdiction

which is the key problem and just just for the people who didn't who aren't picking up from like last episode oh right we we are not talking about a road that cuts through your property we are talking about grass and dirt that the county swears is a road. We are talking about specifically two lines on a plat from 1952 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 plating and subdividing works is what you have to do is you have to take a 2D drawing of your land. You have to walk it up to the county. You have to draw all your little lines on it for 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 date and 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 date. date 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 going to make a subdivision. Next, we're going to buy this one and going to make a subdivision. But you never end up buying farm number two. So you never build the road that would have connected the two. Aragel, no, plat is the term. Platt of survey or land plat pl a t plot is different um and this may be an illinoisism it's probably i've only ever i've only ever looked at survey plats from illinois but mine says plat with an

raggle and i speak louisiana we don't we don't understand your your exactly parishes parishes the french i got it no problem they'll surrender eventually i think they already did A, A, A. Iran war. 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 that back in the day, they were thinking about putting a second subdivision next to our small subdivision. It's only about 18 houses. And they were planning to do another five or 10 next to it. that plan fell through because the property next door has federally protected wetlands. That tends to be a game changer. You can't build on that. Granted, those federally protected wetlands are basically a farm pond. I was going to say, dude, you know, if you grease the right palm with the right number of dollars, you can do things.

Sure. 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, $40,000, $50,000 houses, something like that. High-end houses for the time, but there was just not that huge amount of cash game.

I thought you were going to 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, Nick. It's significantly worse. Illinois's famous for two things corrupt politicians and Al Capone. I mean, look, come on. I mean, that's like Louisiana's only famous for three things, corrupt politicians,

Bonnie and Clyde being shot dead and food. True, true. Chicago really should be more famous for its food. But the issue being that because the people that drew the initial survey and the initial land layout never officially told the county, we will never build this road. The road stayed on the plat. And many years later in the late 1970s, early 1980s, 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 1970s, early 1980s. 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 never vacated the race. vacated. Right. And no one knows how to vacate a road that doesn't exist. And that's really what we're come 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 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 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 doing things within predefined parameters. They do not excel in inventing or creating brand new at a whole cloth or deviating from those previously established parameters. So when they say a typical 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 are 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 70-degree weather, and then we get blizzards.

What the hell? Outstanding. It's pretty standard for Illinois, especially this time of year. We went from 80s to mid-30s in one day. We went from Monday, which was the low was negative 4, today was 65. That's just so dumb. Yeah, 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, this road. because they would have to mess around with some wetland laws. 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, representative 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 hasn't decided what all exactly they're going to want. But it sounds like to me that they're willing to play ball so long as I keep at this issue. And so long as I keep pestering them about it. They did ask one thing. They asked me to wait 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. Makes sense. Overseeing a lot of that. And they were quite busy, understandably. So it's just the primaries,

but me. But, uh, Dr. Scary guy, how long before the city attorneys sign 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 1,100 homes in my entire township. So one irritated person can make the council meetings take forever. And you, you And you are very responsive. And you're happy to be that irritated someone that makes the meetings. 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 15 minutes of knowing this was an issue. They were standing in my driveway, looking over the survey plat, walking 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 50 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 black top across the farm field or whatever. It's, 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 plating company. So the, like, say if I was to subdivise like a 50 acre field, I can at any point walk into the county with what's called Adida 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. So. what are you going to do? It's been four weeks of back and forth, going to the county, pulling paperwork, 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. So they've already approved things to be built there. I don't think it's going to be a problem long term. No, it's just going to be tedious. Yes. And Raggle, ragel, 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 she just build the damn thing and pay the fine on the back? And 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 rule. I do lots of things above board. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You appear to do a lot of things above board, because you don't get caught doing the things below board. There's a difference.

Everything in my house exceeds code. Do you really want permits for all the things I don't? Do you really want me to pick that statement apart? Because I can see the horns poking out of the top of your head, because you very carefully said that. That's because my current garage does not meet or exceed code. That's why I was saying Everything in the house is to code. Like, okay, what about?

Outside the house next. Technically, the overhang on the eaves of my house does not technically meet code because it's within 30 feet of the road that doesn't exist. Oh, you know what the funest part is, Phil? There's more fun. There's more fun. So the road is specked out at 40 feet wide. Yeah.

Okay. Do you know what? the minimum width in the state of Illinois is or a road bed. 42 feet, including 50. 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 decided to. 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 they would call it a day.

But persistence is key when you are dealing with small government bureaucracy. If you are polite, professional, 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, we'll, we'll point you to the person that can or can make up the answer. I will just say, which is 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. No, God, no. In fact, they will. For 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, there's that person out there that says, no, no, I'm going to 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 make it harder. They can make it harder. They can make it take 10 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, and ways to make any process hell on earth. The process can become the punishment. 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 there's not a process for it, which is the problem you're in 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 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 care of, let's move. And they're very quick to respond to edge cases. Bureaucracies hate edge cases, because edge cases are uncomfortable. It doesn't have a form, doesn't have a form,

doesn't have a process, there's nothing to greet upon. If I take any action with a looping my boss into it, I'm going to get screamed at for 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 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 on. So you get to the point very quickly where the fact that no one knows how to do this means decision paralysis at every level. It does. 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 25 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 going to avoid this they own the property find void also the laws have changed. Yeah. Well,

and laws have changed. And call 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, it's job 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's a really good example. Apple started off with two freaking 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 highs, tremendous lows. And then over the years, they didn't improve the market or push the market. 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. They did. 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 is being created, it's not that they 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 perhaps I wasn't super clear on that. Part of the reason why it becomes that way and why I call it job securities because you no longer as an employee have a reputation with CEO. You're a cog and 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 3267 you're out HR 31267 whatever your number is um you didn't run it up the chain of command somebody took offense to that you're gone goodbye yeah and and and none of what we're saying I don't think it's meant to be pejorative to anyone in those types of organizations it's just

it's just the way they're run for better or worse. 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, McDoubles 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 agility for that. And every reasonably large business that's gotten at a 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 effing 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 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 in that big army ever came up with they were able to requisition any equipment at any cost anywhere in the world and for any reason. They don't have to justify it.

It's, I want Raygun in the 40, I want plasma rifle in the 40 watt range. Doesn't matter if Army Ordinance says it's a good idea. Doesn't matter if, if it costs a million dollars a rifle. It doesn't matter. Special Forces says they want it. Big guy atop authorizes it.

Special Force Command gets it shipped to Zimbabwe, you know, so a guy on a bicycle can cart it down to this green beret. 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 to 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 at the very least it's not rewarded.

Or you get weirdos like me that like I beat my head against the wall of 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, no, go back to be in a cogging 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 Dr. Scary guy dropped into our lap and then we can. bull crap about what we've been doing for the last several days. Have you considered the benefits of rimfire cartridges in prepping and survival scenarios? In a word? Yes.

Okay. Yes is a word. Exfoliate upon that, expand on that. So I felt I had to make that joke because I can. So rimfire cartridges, especially 22s. I'm assuming we're talking. mostly about 22 LR, but, you know, are we not talking about the French 41 R Empire? I'm not.

Okay. So, Lamat, Lamat revolvers aside. I know what they are. Just no. LeMette revolvers aside, 22s 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 weapon system that is using that cartridge. Anybody here that shot a lot of 22 ammo out of a semi-auto? Jeff Jagg, 44 Henry. Correct. That's another good one. They get dirty as hell. 22s, a lot of them still use a waxed bullet.

A lot of them use a fairly dirty, very cheap powder. Yep. the rim fire primers are not as clean there's not as much energy in the in 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 22 unsuppressed people are going to hear it for quite a ways away although that being said if you have a decently long barrel 22 lR is a hell of a lot quieter than like it is any any any other Centifier cartridge out there. Oh, it absolutely is. It's a lot quieter without suppressor. With a suppressor and shooting subs, it's as quiet as a BB gun, quiet as a pellet gun. I can get a pellet gun today that is a break action pellet gun in 22 caliber with the same

muzzle energy as I can get from a 22 LR. Now, I will never get rid of my 22s, number one, because my wife loves the little bread and neo. She'll never let me get rid of it. And number two, it's a fantastic training tool. The 22 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 22-22 LR in terms of like use case and the two things that always come to mind. Because like the benefits of 22 long rifle over, I want to say any other cartridge, but I'm really struggling to think of anything that would be 22 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 freaking wide of 22 long rifle in a very small package for not much weight. By comparison, the firearms are usually very lightweight, very simple, very sturdy.

A lot of them are blowback. You know, you already mentioned that they're very, that they do get very dirty, very crudy, very carbonate very quickly. But quite frankly, pack a can of ballastol in your bag and, like, just hope. of that every now and then. But like most 22s can be 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 rimfire shines in a survival preparedness situation is 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 22 long rifle. Anything bigger than that you might struggle a little

bit. I know of poachers that take that have taken white tail with a 22, but reliably. Yes. Oh. Yes. Given more credit than I would have thought then. Um, 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 50 whitetail with a 22 well dang the other thing i was going to say though in addition to i don't recommend it in addition to harvesting small game i would put a 22 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 22 long rifle into a collection of more powerful firearms, you could do that if you were sneaky about it. So it's killed a lot of people with their version of the 22 rim fire. Yeah. So like from my perspective, like I've never been a huge 22 long rifle guy. I went straight into center fire after after I joined the army. And like I was full blast, you know, 45 ACP, 9 mil, 556, 766, 2,539 and branched out from there. I only got into 22s really when I got my,

my Henry U.S. survival rifle. And even then, I'd never had like what I would consider to be a lot of 22 long rifle on hand. I've always had like maybe 2,000 rounds of 22. Because I have not bought 22 shells in probably 15 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 22,

her little 22 chipmunk, and I started taking her to the range, I started buying like a 200 or 500 or 500 pat five and around 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 990 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 than 2,000 rounds of 22. 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 $100 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, uh, 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 wheelbarrel full of ammunition. And they're usually like, I don't know, it's. 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 22 long rifle. Yeah. Well, I mean, that's put it just way. When it came time to break up my father-in-law's firearms collection, that's kind of what I did, which was anyone who was getting any of the firearms, any of the ammunition I had in that cartridge, that all went with that gun. even though there were two 22s and we got one and the other one went, I think ultimately went to my nephew. I sent all the 22 that my father-in-law had with that with that gun. Fair enough.

My point of view was I'm like, I don't know how much 22 he already has. I'm sure he has some. 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 shoebox full of just 22. That sounds like Stuart.

We have, we have, 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 right. It takes a while. That was going to 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

potes and they brought it to me like nobody in the family is it well no they knew what it was they knew it was an old 22 because like the family had kind of traded every every kid and the whole family and shot this thing out of their property okay but they were like look nobody wants this thing 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 I mean if you want it like you can have it but like you can have it but like you can have it but like Like the bolt was froze shut.

Oh, way we go. Well, but the, so the bolt was corroded shut and it was non-functional. So I said, okay, and I walked in the garage and came out 15 minutes later. And like, it was a functional rifle again. And the guy was just flabbergasted. He was like, what did you do? There's not a whole lot to those things. Well, it helps if you hose a can of ball stall over the bolt and then you whack the frigging

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 my, that was my daughter's first 22. Anyway, all that being said, I, I am not one of those guys who's going to go out and say, like, you know, you need a 22 in like 10,000 rounds of ammunition because we're going to make it all the way of the last day of the apocalypse. But for all the reasons Nick laid out that I don't disagree with and the reasons I, I love. laid out. I think a 22 belongs in every gun guy's collection. I think so. I just I will never be that guy who is like you need like 15 22s and 10,000 rounds of ammunition. Get a single 22. Go get a Ruger 1022 or go get a Ruger Mark 4 or go get a any old 22 that you find. There's a there's 10 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, the action is going to be chopped 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. Buy, say, two or three thousand rounds of 22, 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-pocalyptic survival books and a few of the different blogs and a few of the YouTube videos I've watched over the years, people say, all, 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 22 is no reloading. Nick. Let me do the comments and then we'll argue about that. That would be a good segue way into reloading. So Jeff Jaggs said 44 Henry, Ragglefraggo said 41 Swiss. Always a good time. Jeff Jaggs said there is also a story of a guy who killed a polar bear with a surplus

Colt M16 in Alaska. 10 out of 10, I don't want to be anywhere on the continent when he tries that. Hard pass. Raggle fraggo said CZ 457. I'm assuming that's one of the, I mean, I have, 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 Jaggs saying, Fun fact, a 50 cow ammo can fits 8,000 worth of boxes of 22. I believe that, but what? I've got a small toolbox with like 30,000, 22 rounds or something like that. What is it way when it's fully loaded, though? That is my question. I just don't pick it up.

I just, I open the flip top and I grab out the box I need. See, this is part of the reason why I have 50 cow cans, but for like, for the cans that, like, when I, going out to the gut range, I either bring loaded magazines out there and I shoot those loaded magazine and then I'm done or I will occasionally take smaller containers or I might take a 30-cal ammo can with me. I don't love 50-cal ammo cans around because- I like 50-cal cans for 12-gauge fits two boxes side-by-side right down in another. For 12-gauge, yes. Yeah. But for any for any center-fire cartridge, once you get a 50-cal can fold of the

brim, it's going to weigh a lot. Yeah. So it sounds funny because I mean, shotgun shells have a lot of payload, but they also have a lot of like, they have a lot of, they got a lot of dead space in them with like the wide and, uh, you know, all that stuff. So yeah, the packing to prevent, prevent pellet deformation and they don't.

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 fit in a full case in there. Yeah.

But, you know, I. I get what you were going towards Phil with me saying you can't reload 22 LR. Yes, I know you can. You can. Can be done. 10 a. 10 a 10.

It can be done. 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?

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, I work in machining, breathe carcinogens all the time. Probably not great for me long term. Oh, do you know what MECA is, methyl eton? 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 aircraft. Army Aviation still uses this shit to this day. I have bathed in that crap before. 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. Oofta. Yeah. At the time when we moved, we filled the bed of my RAM 1500 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 lead ingots. I actually got to do the, you know,

somebody picks something. I was like, well, Jesus, what's in this? Bricks of lead. So to answer your, your statement, yes,

you certainly can reload 22LR. The reason I think most people will tell you it is a fool's errand to do it, is that I think like current 22LR prices I saw the other day, bulk, and 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 RIMFAR. 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 going to be more accurate or you're going to make tiny tiny little groups.

It's a freaking 22. It's not even going to be as reliable as the factory 22 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, Relo 22 is just a crappy experience from start to finish that I would not recommend for anyone who likes themselves. 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. Raggle, Frago was saying, uh, okay, that's where I draw the line and reloading. I was falling far down. Yeah, he said you 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 magnetcaster. And he only charges like 46 bucks a box for 500 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. Yeah.

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 20 degrees outside casting bullets. All right. So let's start from the word go. Like we both reload our own 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 start. So when I bought my first house is about when I started reloading. So it would have been about 10 years ago. And it was mostly focused on 30-0.6 rifle rounds. and 9mm pistol. That's all I did. So I started reloading in 2016, or it was 2015. I started podcasting August of 2016,

and I'd been reloading for maybe a year ahead of that, maybe two at the most, before I started podcasting. And my original, originally when I first started, the only thing I was reloading was 45 ACP. Because when I first started, well, when I first got my reloading gear, I literally only had two handguns.

They were both 45 ACP. The gun collection has expanded a little bit, hence the number of dyes I have sitting on the shelf. Yeah. I mean, I started out, you remember the open C frame lineman presses? A little orange lineman. Yep. Ram in the front had like the two toggle links on the side. This one was so old.

It was the single toggle link. Oh. It was the gray. the original gray. Ooh, you're talking about old old 70s vintage. Maybe 80s vintage. I got it from a guy at work who was getting,

he was upgrading from that to a Dylan 1050 with the automation series on it. Like upgrade from Model T to a Bugatti. 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, I loaded 9-mill 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 was like, you reload, right? I was 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 good to you.

And that was a rock chucker. Series one rock trucker. Fan-tastic. Love that thing. Huge upgrade. from the original Lyme and C shape. And then a few years, 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 a pain in 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. I did lose access to a private range as well in the meantime. That hurts. 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 sloth. lot in a private range that's about 45 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 mill casings that I have. So I set this up. And without the case feeder, this will do about 250 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 400 rounds an hour. I'm looking. I'm looking at there's a bunch of models out there for 3D printed bullet feeders as well.

And I happen to have a lathe to make a bullet feeder die. So that should get me to five to 600 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 70s. A buddy of his had a reloading press. My dad

had a couple sets of dies and the two of them basically would just get together and trade the setback. Yeah. 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 ammo.

And that was before I was born. Yeah. So fast forward to about 2014, 2015, 2015. I a co-worker of mine at the time has he'd gotten a an R-CBS rock chucker the kit

Like you know The press I know what kid you're talking about Yep The kit Comes 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 75% 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 um my dad gave me all the dyes he still had and a lot of the bullets and like all the all the reloading stuff he still had in a box from from the late 70s 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 9 mil dies, a set of 38 special dies, and a couple of different things to kind of get me going. At the time, the only cartridge I reloaded was 45ACP, so I went and got a set of 45ACP RCBS branded carbide dyes.

Sure. And I started off loading 45ACP. I bought a couple of boxes of oh, what were they? Um, I want to say it was like precision delta, whatever it 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 ammo that, like, I was willing to spend the extra for jacketed bullets, not even full with anything that was power coded or lead or, I switched to play to bullets later on because when those came online through. 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 a 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 on my, sitting on my shelf being used now. Well, pistols you don't go through much. I mean, my 9-mill load is, well, right now, Winchester 231, I'm using 3.4 grains. Yeah.

So I'm running out at the higher end. So I use 4.5 grains at a whack for 124 grain, 9-mill and 5.5 grains for 45 ACP. And I think 4.2 or something like that for 38 special, like a spidge of powder, not a lot. Yeah. But I bought my first powder, my first primers from them. when I branched out into Reloven for three-way Winchester, I bought a bunch of IMR 4064 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 except me. So I found another source in Slidell. It was a competitive shooter who kind of ran a powder business on the side. He's the guy that did the big,

the big buys for 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 15 by 15 or something to that thing. 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 Dillens. Like he had multiple 650s just sitting up there waiting for somebody to come by and buy them. 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 business, the way he subsidized his reloading habit.

The garage had three 1050s with auto drives sitting in it. It's like, it's not like nine or 10K 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. You buy 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 mill and one for 38 special.

But the two for nine, the two for nine mill was one for miners and one for majors. Oh, that makes sense. Or no, I think it might have been one, he should one load he had for Ipsic and another one he had for USPSA or something like that.

But he had two of these things. There were just nine mill. this dude had toys. He was, for all intents and purposes, pretty much retired at this point. And that was just his thing. And it was on the way home from work. So literally I could like call him up, say, hey, dude, do you have any of this? He'd call me when he'd call me when he had in stock and I'd 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. 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? Yeah. 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 by the way, when I say two or three minutes, I'm, 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 dye so you're getting the crimp and the bullet seating depth and everything correctly, that takes a couple extra minutes because 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 dye down until I make contact. And I'm within a couple thousands at that point.

Yeah, you're not going to be too bad. So for this, you have, you have the same thing. You got to set up every one of your dies. Fortunately, this back here has a quick change powder measure system. So you can actually just push a detent pin, pull out your charge. I'm going to call it your charge piston. Charge bar. Charge bar, whatever you want to call it.

That's what they call it in. That's what they call it in Dylan speak. Yeah. It's like a charge bar. I mean, you got to 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 a raggle behind me is a turret press.

It's a Hornady Lock and Load AP Progressive. It's their answer to the low level Dillon'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 200, bucks i would have gone for a dillon point of order you don't have a turd you have a progressive press yeah it's a progressive he's asking about turret press like the redding like the redding t7 oh no i have not used that right it's like a single stage with with a movable shell plate on the top basically oh you're right you loaded all your dies and the shell plate full of full of shells rotates not the dyes rotate yeah you're right yeah i uh i haven't tried a turd either honestly i've gotten like this close to pull in the turn pulling the trigger on a reddit reddy uh redding 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 ammo 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 out of ammo i got to stop shooting and go spend some time in the press if i do get to that situation i just go buy a thousand rounds sure factory and just be done with it trouble trouble you get to is with situations like my state's going on right now um i'm

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 that happening. Well. 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 sg1 back on i can pop on a few episodes asg1 and reload enough for a full class so you know it gives you a little bit of

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 so many mosquitoes. Rachel and Gileon Rachel would be best. Listen, Rachel and Gileon 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 soundproof that to deal with the firing range. Well, we'd just reload during the day and do the firing range after the kids go home. Why? Kids need to learn to shoot.

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 down here. 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 financial 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 Gilling and I, hey, I wish we could. Gilly and I've had discussions about moving out of Louisiana. And I had to love with her and told her, I'm like, you know, I'm not opposed to moving out of Louisiana for the right, for the right situation, for the right opportunity. But I'm like, I'm not going to lie. It has to be the right opportunity. Well, especially.

So I find that at 43, 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. No, the community around you. Well, I mean, dude, the Rabaets have lived in the state since 1730. 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 mind our own damn business when all of a sudden we were like, why are all these Anglos running around?

And they're speaking this funny language called English. You know, and I have a pretty great job where I'm at. It's awful hard to leave it because the people. pays 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. I have constantly joked with my wife's family that we're going to build a family commune in Wisconsin on 100 acres. Okay. Whichever one of you sociopaths writes a decent song to the tune of Frozen's, 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 i have 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 um yeah my i'm 36 my parents are starting to get up there in years

and they can't, and I say up there in years, they're in their mid-50s. They can't do a lot of the things that they normally would do. My sister, hold up, aunt, no, has to be manually raggle. I said you have to write it, not Skynet. Yes. Damn, freaking. Yeah. I mean, my grandparents are even older.

I mean, I've got one set of grandparents that are in their, mid 80s and one set that are in their early 70 early to mid 70s 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 i don't feel obligated to i want to be able 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. Mm-hmm. 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 who are looking at doubling the state property taxes.

How could that possibly end bad? 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 anything that sounds positive about Illinois politics, you should just assume it's rhetorical or sarcastic. You really should. Or sarcasticly.

The downstate politicians are pretty good, though, the ones that aren't in Springfield. Oh, by the way, Pritzkerd 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 Ozempic and started hitting the tanning bed? Pritzkirt, buddy.

Can we save that for next episode? Because tonight I'm in a bit of a black pill mood. and I just might espouse voting for the fat cheeseburger eating bastard just to accelerate the apocalypse. He actually paid this year the property taxes on the mansion 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.

Yes. So you've upgraded a couple of times from a lineman to a rock, chucker to a horny lock load A&P. And I have stuck with stubbornly stuck with mild rock chucker. I also use the rock chucker as like utility press. 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 rock chucker 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 rock chucker 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 100 yards. Yep. Absolutely possible. I'm not the world's greatest shot, but much better than average. But four holes cloverleafing together at 100 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 30 out sixes at 300 yards on a regulation size 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, a better, based. sick press than a rock trucker. I don't think there is a better one. I think what speaks so well for the rock chucker is the sheer number of rock chuckers are still set up on benches that are 40, 50 years old. The number of rock truckers 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 have, it's a solid frame all the way around. And it's cast iron. And you and I've had a talk about, I mean, now, I talk very highly of our CBS's customer service, but all of your reloading companies tend to be above average in customer service. I think, I think they do, because I've had problems with some of my, with some of my Lee stuff. And that's, that's entry level. Yeah.

That's an entry level product line. Yeah. 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 RCBS 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 it shipped to me. But a couple, several years ago when I first got my dad's, um, 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 as a lot of, that's a lot of moving. That's also also improperly applied lubrication. Yeah, don't beat me to that punchline. But anyway, so several years ago, I called up RCBS because I got my dad's 38 special

dies, right? Now, you're accustomed to more modern 38 special dyes where like, it's usually a three dye set unless you're dealing with Lee with a factory crypti, then you have four. But a three dye crim set, right? your first, your first die is usually resizing and decapping, right? Correct. 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 inclined. Yeah. The dye set I got for my dad that was bought in the early 70s. 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 50 years old, Nick, because that's the way that RCBS used to do them. I have RCBS dies from the 70s. 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 the parts to revert back to it. But what happened was I was looking at the instructions that came with the RCBS press, and I was looking at the. the set of dyes that were 50 years old and the pictures just didn't made no sense right because your dyes were not in those pictures so i called rcbs up like called their custom service line is zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero until i got to a living 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 dyes from like their early 70s and i'm reading in the instructions where it talks about your first die is for resizing and knocking the primer out. But my dyes 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 1972. and he immediately knew what I was talking about. He said, oh, yeah, we haven't built dyes like that in 50 years. You know, we reconfigured them to match what your instructions say. I'm going to send you all the parts you need to retrofit those old 38 special dyes to modern, basically to modern specs.

Nice. Because, you know, they kept all the same diameters and thread pitches and everything. So you literally just unscrew the old dies, 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 and the shipping because like I wasn't looking for a handout. I would just. Oh, those dyes have well exceeded their expected lifespan.

Yeah. Literally, R CBS's customer service told me your dad gave him to you, right? I said, yeah. And he said, good. Keep using them and give them 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 dyes. I am still using them to this day. RCBS, whatever they lost on those little, those handful little pit fiddly parts and the shipping, they've more than made up for me on over the years with the amount of crap I bought from them. But customer service among reloading, reloading companies seems to be above average at least because the reloading community, like so the firearms community, Nick,

I know, I've seen it estimated. like what, 40 to 60% of the U.S. population are like regular recreational shooters. 40 to 60%. Yes. And that's a really wide range. And I get that. But it's because nobody has in the, gosh, nobody has faith in the in the statistics. I would be surprised if it's that high by my definition of regular. I think, I think their definition more than once a year. Yeah, annual. Yeah. I could, okay. So yeah, I could, I could, I could, I could buy that 40 to 60%. Was it probably for reloaders four or five percent? I've heard three percent of that population.

I could believe that. So assuming we're talking about 330 million people and call it half. Sure. Call it 150. 150 to 160 million of them are regular shooters. Three percent of that reload their own ammo. It's a very small, very tight-knit community. I hate to say there's a freaking shit ton of like fud lore 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 develop 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 i knew a guy at work that had a reloading press that he wanted to get rid of. He knew I was the 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 stakes. 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. And nothing else. 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 70s based on the pictures in it. In fact, I still have it.

It's the Lyman manual that came with that C-frame press. You know the exact one 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 a, about five years ago for my reloads pretty much exclusively. Now,

funny and conversely enough, I taught myself how to reload. Yeah. I read the manual. 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've talked about like my background or your background. Like, your machine is by trade. I'm a former aircraft and automotive mechanic.

Like reading, book there is a procedure you do a then b then c then d to get e 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 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 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 10 cases and 10 bullets.

And I just reloaded that same 10 cases and 10 bullets and then knocked the bullet back out of the case, made dummy rounds over and over and over and measured them, measured, and measured 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 dump it into a case, dump 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 10 rounds. I went out to the gun range. Yes, raggle, fragel. I did the old, um, I did the old left hand on the family jewels,

right hand, stretch out as far as you can. Safety squints, fully engaged and pulled the trigger while praying. And anyone that... The 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 hotter 300 windbag 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, 100% yeah. Did you have your left hand on your jewels? 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 range, completes the whole thing.

Oh, it does. The range I used to shoot at had cast cement tables for the long range precision shooting. Raggle says he did the string and vice method. Oh, nice. That's a good way to go. I wasn't, I wasn't, I wasn't quite that concern. Because at this point, like, I followed the dagam 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 this ain't going to blow anything up. Because it's a minimum load. You got to feel for it. Yeah.

If you are within the safety bounds of the minimum and maximum in a published manual by the powder manufacturer, 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 depth on his nine mills and blew up a Smith and West. 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 solved the problem by taking a pen and drop it into the barrel and then like marking it and then oh that works. 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 the pen was sitting on top of a bullet or inside a case up against a breach face. True. Really quick and simple way. And not just with a, not just with a pen, but like a pen, a screwdriver, a piece of wire, a piece of wire, um, forebrush, four 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. 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, pinch, pinch 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 breach face or you're exactly one bolt length away from it. And you know immediately if you have a live round in chamber or not. It'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 lot of round in the chamber because the gun had blown up. And we weren't really sure if it, 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 solid. 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 of the chamber, I got super aggressive and enthusiastic about getting it open. And I did eventually. At that point. I mean, the gun's trashed probably at that point.

We weren't sure if it was trashed or not until we got the gun apart and realized that the frame had bulged. Ooh, that's why I wouldn't open. Shield. It's a polymer. Oh, yeah, that'll do it. Yeah, what was holding, what was holding, things to be said for steel frame 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 frigging barrel in place. How far did he have the bullet set back? 35,000, someone I want to say. That's not insignificant. No. I mean, I think on a nine.

mill I think for my load I figure if I'm anywhere from one inch one 10 to one inch 120 I'm okay so I go below one inch 110 I get curious and I pull everything down so bearing of mind that I'm a spreadsheet nerd

and Boyle's law is a thing and for those you non-physics nerds Boyle'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. It's basically how it works. So I built a spreadsheet based on that and did lots of really nerdy math to figure out like what the case volume of a nine mil, an average nine millimeter 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 dad, what was dad's target overall link? 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, no. So shoving that bullet 35,000's deeper into the case increased the pressure by 65%. Yeah, I believe that. Over what he was targeting, which was already a mid-level ring. of 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, the range. Two of them were remanufactured ammunition, not by a user, professionally remanufactured ammunition, one of them professionally. Well, it is an insured corporation that doesn't mean they're professional. No, it does 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 AR. Guy was doing double tap drills. And the first one sounded weird and then bam. Yeah. I didn't have enough. Nobody had enough time to stop him because 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. Fortunately, nobody was injured.

It just blew out the frame on his upper and scrapped the mag. But 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, I don't know if it was, I don't know if it was factory ammo or his reloads. He says it wasn't, but I've had squibs. I've, I've, I've, I've, I've, I've lifted my nine mill barrel. What was the cause of your squib? Uh, I believe, uh, bad primer. the primer did not ignite the powder because my my um the mechanism inside the fire was just full of

of unburnt powder everywhere it was terrible it's a horrible mess so you probably had either 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 a hundred one of them did that I 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. The 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 them. 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 were new, some of them were 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 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 budding 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 24 hours before I touch it. This particular time, I thought to myself, I'm going to shake it extra hard. And I'm going to let it sit for about eight hours. And then I'm going to load it.

The difference between 24 hours dry time and 8 hours dry time in southeast Louisiana where the humidity is 200 and fuck you is apparently just enough for there to be a little kernel of water hiding out in the primer pocket of one of my rounds. And this manifests itself because I went out to the rain start shooting and it was bang, bang, bang, click. And I was like, that's unusual. So I open the cylinder, pull the round out. it's got a freaking hit on the on the 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 boy it goes the second time i'm like that's weird 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 hink feeling of powder peppering my face. The gun, the cylinder, was caked in half-burned powder. Hmm. And I had made my first and my last hang fire because the minute of that happened, it scared me so bad, I took all that ammunition,

deadlined all of it. Shot up the rest of my 38th special. I was from a nerve batch and it was fine. Brought the 3-7 Magnum's 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 it.

I like to when I know I'm going to process a bunch of cases, and I know we're getting a little long here, so maybe we should talk about this later, but, man, I like to give it at least a full day with a fan blowing on all the casings. And I'll go down there a few times and just mix them around. Mm-hmm. We do need to pick this up next episode and maybe like talk, because we wanted to talk about process and everything, but then I got drinking and you got talking about government malfeas things just kind of went off the rails. We can talk about our processes. I'll try and if I can get

my hands on some casings, I'll try and shoot. If I can get my hands on 100 empty casings somehow magically, I'll, I'll shoot a video of how this all works a little bit if I can. I need to okay, so now bear in mind, we have to check the YouTube regulations because YouTube, to nuke 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 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 doing streaming. That got nuked a long time.

Huh. I'd be damned. Wouldn't have thought that. It was right about the time all of that. all of the how to make AR-15s and AK-47's content got new off of YouTube. Yeah, I don't know. There's a lot of ammo making stuff on the internet.

I don't know how much in detail they show. Well, at the very least, would the press without bullets go spin? I mean, I don't see why not. You're just demonstrating mechanical principles at that point. I suppose so. We'll 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, we'll take some pictures and be prepared. I talk about process and some of the ancillary gear that we've purchased over the years. Because, like, I'm still rocking that rock chucker. But, dude, I've got so much little doodads and extra stuff that I've put around that press to speed up and improve that process. It's ridiculous. Mm-hmm.

Absolutely. Got some fun little doodads. Yes. All right. We'll 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 going to do where I was going to pull all the ammo cans off the shelf and like inventory all the ammo. I don't know. It seems like every time I go looking to do that, I find more ammunition. I forgot that I scrolled away someplace. This happens. I know you're thinking like first world problem, but it's more like. 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 from scraps and it's stood up to like, I forget how many, it's stood up to almost 10 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 for structure.

Well, yeah, if you try to bolt a press to a sheet of plywood, 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 than I thought we thought it would do. And next time we'll skip government bureaucracy and just talk about reloading. Unless the government's... 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. Hmm. All right. Matter of fact, it's going to go out the door. It's been an hour and 45 minutes. Thank you to everybody that stuck with us and screw off to everybody who didn't just get to love y'all bye. Night.