The Prepper Broadcasting Network - Matter of Facts: Revenge of the Night Vision Nerds

Episode Date: September 23, 2024

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Welcome back to the Matterfacts 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 mofpodcast.com on Facebook or Instagram. You can support us via Patreon or by checking out our affiliate partners. I'm your host, Phil Ravely. Andrew and Nick are on the other side of the mic, and here's your show. So I'm a little bit behind with the background and everything else, but Nick is now an official part of the show because I finally, finally, finally dug up all the old files, and I managed to change the audio on the video intro. So welcome, Nick. You're now official. Thank you.

Now we can really start the abuse. Like, who went easy on you before? Nobody. Works for me. Easy's not fun. All right. Well, we have one person already in the comments. Raggle Fraggle. Hey, guys. What's up, dude? Thank you for joining us this afternoon. So let's do the administrative work real quick. It's going to be quick and simple. Patrons, thank you all for supporting our autism and our nerdism. Y'all keep the show going. Y'all keep me from having to go into debt to run the show.

And I greatly appreciate that because the minute I have to start why who who's throwing up stuff like camera just completely like freaking decide was like i'm gonna lay down i was about to say my co-host is sabotaging our own show brutal i haven't been on in a while let me just let me be. Yeah, turn up your... I'm going to turn... You know what? I'm going to turn up your audio because you're a little bit too quiet. That's because I bumped the audio. Christ.

I'm not cutting any of this, by the way. This is all staying in. It's my first day. So, other than thanking the patrons, merch. The links are in the show description. It's Southern Gal Crafts. Nick has his shirt.

I choose Violent. All the shirts I have to say, and I have to say this because my wife designed half of them. More than half. So, you know, if I don't, then I have to sleep on the couch and I'm not into that. But the shirts are hilarious. They definitely captured the essence of our insanity quite well, I think. And Prepper Camp. Prepper Camp is coming up in a week. Like a week from today, I will be pulling into Saluda, North Carolina, ready to break bread with all the other sociopaths for a weekend.

And it's going to be a blast. So if you're coming, you should definitely go down to the vendors area and you should look for us. We'll have a booth down there. We're not selling squat. We have some stickers to give away to the faithful. We have a couple things to show you all in the booth just to get your gears turning. We have a couple things to show you all in the booth just to get your gears turning. We want to meet people and talk to people and invite them to come on to the show as a guest because we're going to be podcasting at Prepper Camp again.

And we'll be right next to the Disaster Coffee booth where I believe I'm going to be Shanghai'd to do a coffee roasting demonstration a couple days a week or a couple of days over the weekend. It's going to be a lot of fun. Is it Shanghai'd if you had the idea? Was it my idea? Because I don't remember it going down like that. I don't know. I'm pretty sure that was your and James' idea.

It might have been my idea, and then you were like, yeah, that sounds cool. So in other words, I got voluntold. Yeah. Come see us. Unfortunately, Nick will not be there. Not this year. Hopefully, maybe one year.

Come see us at the MOF booth. Also, Disaster Coffee. If you are listening to this, if you have not heard, Phil and I bought into... Basically, I guess not necessarily bought into, basically, I mean, not,

I guess not as a bought into, but, uh, we teamed with James, uh, for disaster coffee. Uh, so now we are,

uh, we are part owners of disaster coffee. Uh, got some great things coming down the pipe with that new website is up. And, we got some new teas that are coming out. Uh, we got some new coffee flavors that are coming out.

I'm currently working with Uncle Randy on a coffee flavor that he's trying to pick out right now. So hopefully that's, I don't think that's going to be done by Prepper Camp. But yeah, no, there's a lot of cool things happening. Just kind of branching out and everything. So come see us and we'll be down at Prepper Camp. So it'll be a lot of fun. Yeah, not to inflate your head, but the website redesign, it was on point. It wasn't bad before, but what you built, I think, is so much more user friendly and

streamlined. I'm just hoping the customer enjoys it as much as I did. Yeah, I'm hoping. It took a lot, a little figuring out, but it was fun. I enjoy doing that kind of stuff. so it was a lot of fun so i hope uh i hope it works out well with the customers i hope it's a little bit more user-friendly uh than what you know than before um i hope that i don't know i mean and guy and people if if you guys are having issues please let me know um or whatever So I don't know.

More things to come. I'm excited about that whole aspect. So, yeah. So anyway. Anyway, so the topic of the night is Revenge of the Night Vision Nerds because, you know, we've done a show about night vision. We had the guys from U night vision on they talked us through you know the company perspective on night vision the company history and they kind of gave everyone enough food for thought to commit felonious assault on their savings account and if you're still on the fence just remember your kids aren't that smart anyway they don't need to go to college kids either a don't have kids or b i mean you know nowadays by the time

kids get to college there's not gonna it's gonna be so inflated that they can't afford it so i mean are that a role i'll be we'll all be in a foreign land wearing you know flags on our shoulders nobody's going to college man they didn't want asthmatics back in 08. They probably don't want them now. I think I'm safe. Dude, I'm going to tell you, and that's a show talk for a whole other time, but I'm going to tell you that some of the waiver requests I've seen coming out of the Army lately, it's shocking.

Like, stuff they never would have tolerated amongst recruits before, they are actively trying to get waivers for and succeeding. It is going to be hilarious and terrifying to watch in equal parts, but I'm here for it. You know, considering I enlisted from 2006, and then when I tried to go to officer candidate school in 2009, they said no. Because apparently getting mortared for a year and high-risk PTSD was a good reason to preclude somebody from joining. But nowadays, I mean, I'm 41, I'm fat, and I'm bald, and I can have a beard halfway down my belly.

I could probably walk into a recruiter's office and they'd do backflips trying to get me in. And they'd practice your prior service, too. Yeah. I don't know if that would be a plus or a minus in my case, because I actually know enough to know that there's some silly stuff going on these days. But Revenge of the Night Vision Nerds is on the docket. Andrew and I are going to talk through some of the things we've been doing in that night vision vein and Nick I'm going to I'm telling you we're going to twist your arm into cracking open the nest egg

it's I know a guy you can resist as long as you want we're there you can resist as long as you want but as long as you admit that sooner or later you're going to lose the battle oh it's it's not a matter of resistance it's it's a matter of refilling the emergency fund after my air conditioner decided it was giving up the ghost which is about the same cost as night vision but but to be fair where you live it doesn't get that hot so you don't need not you don't need air conditioning it's 92 outside it's not 92 down here on the gulf coast what the hell illinois we get the worst of everything you know what it is it's that hell is closer to your state than mine and that's why it's

hotter there very well it could be no i've been seriously looking into night vision ever since you guys well since before you guys did that episode but i've been looking through u.s night vision specifically trying to build an idea of what i'm looking for and you know you guys did that episode, but I've been looking through US night vision specifically, trying to build an idea of what I'm looking for. You guys remember the COVID stimulus and all that? Since the government's printing money, I was going to spend my COVID stimulus

on something that would upset the government. So I went with body armor and a helmet. It's been sitting there, night vision ready for several years now and night vision keeps going up in price so i probably got to step on that quick well i'll just do what i did with phil i'll just sell you mine and i'll upgrade the panels i mean yes that could work

i'm not hearing a lot i'm not hearing what you do no what you do is you sell the binos to phil phil will sell me the monocular and you can get yeah i'll be honest i mean when we get there we get there but like i'm in no hurry to upgrade from from this mono i have it's no i'll like it well i can talk about some of the bottom binos that i have experience with. Anyway. So one thing, Jeff Jagg did say, yo, yeah, I'm paying off the car first. I support that. I support financial, I support good financial decisions,

and I wholeheartedly encourage all y'all that if y'all have any kind of interest-bearing debt at a reasonable interest rate, please pay that off first before you start buying silly stuff like night vision. Comma, however, comma comma if you have disposable income and money in an emergency fund it's a lot of fun but don't be stupid and put it on a credit card because i will shame you for that publicly 27 to 35 percent now jesus christ done at the beginning of next month. That is the way, sir.

Nice. Good man. Alright, Andrew, this is yours, and I'm already... It's supposed to be sitting up. Sorry, I oriented everything sideways because it fits the screen better.

It's breaking my brain because I'm like, that's not the way the way my safe place i mean it could be if you had a tornado but right an f5 coffee anybody i'm just kidding anyway uh so what do you want me to talk about yeah talk us through the rifle and then as we talk through the rifle i kind of want to get into like why some of these decisions were made, why some of the parts were chosen, because I know that for some of these things, you and I did things differently. Yeah. So,

um, yeah, this is my pistol. Uh, and so, yeah. So, I mean,

I guess suppressor, I don't know. I mean, if you want to go from tip to butt, like, uh, uh, grand thumb, uh, we are not sponsored by grand thumb. We don't give him credit for things. I give him credit for tip the butt though. Uh, so anyway, it's the surefire RC two, I believe.

Um, it's five, five, six can, uh, but yeah, basically, uh, the the the laser on it and that's not a very good picture at all uh but the laser on it is the the designated irv uh from night vision uh us night vision rather uh and it's the ir slash green visible uh with the um illuminator all built in uh i'll bring actually i'll be bringing this to prepper camp because i know you got the hollow sun one uh be kind of curious to see uh to see him side by side so it'll blow it out of the water probably but uh yeah so i'm i'm really happy with this um again this is a terrible freaking uh a picture of it i should have did a better one but uh the what i love about it is and i haven't played too

much with it too i haven't really played too much with it uh but as of right now with the because it's a 10 and a half inch barrel uh it's like a roughly about i think it's like a 10 inch or so uh rail with the way it sits right now where my thumb where i place my thumb naturally the way they built these is like so that button you'll see at the very top so you'll see where the screw where it mounts to the rail just to up to the top and to the right of it is the button for to activate it and where that is at and the way they built it and when i was talking to duncan and stuff is it basically it's just a natural it's it's nice and it kind of slopes down so that you can actually place your thumb right on top of it and it's a good resting point for a thumb so you almost don't need a uh pressure pad uh to an additional pressure pad for the laser which is really really nice i really like it from the

the little bit i have played with it so far uh that's what i really like about that uh so yeah and it sits really low profile again that's what I like to is it sits super low profile. So even if you had a lower mount, so like that is the, uh, that is the Holosun, I believe it's the Holosun 503 red dot. Uh, and it, it's on a scalar works, uh, 1.93 inch mount. So it actually puts it up pretty high. If you had it a little bit lower uh it's nice because it would not like it would it would completely clear what i like about this is when i had this a scope on this uh on this rifle uh actually no not the scope i had this on i put the laser on a scoped rifle that was a 16 inch rifle uh it like usually with the steiner d ball that i have it actually

you could see this top of the steiner d ball in the in a scope this like you could barely see like it it pretty much cleared it like the scope cleared it it was no issues no occlusion or nothing so that's what i really enjoy that uh i did have a flashlight on it but because when we get to my Scorpion, uh, I swapped the flashlight over to that cause it's a vampire light. Uh, and this having the illuminator, I figured, you know, screw it. I can kind of go away from the IR light to where I'm probably going to put a, just a white light on it for right now. Uh, so I got actually, I have a, I have a, a stream light thousand X that I probably will just throw on there for right now and, uh, call it good. Uh, but yeah, that's, uh, that's my rifle, uh, the rifle setup.

So Raggle Fraggle asked Surefire can, you said earlier it was an RC2. Uh, yeah, it's the, I believe it's the RC2. I'm pretty sure it's the RC2, uh, but it it is a surefire uh five five six so is that red dot night vision compatible then can you can you use that yeah yeah so this the uh what i like about the hollow sun is yeah it goes down it goes down super freaking low to where you can't see it the naked eye but yeah you can definitely pick it up with night vision uh what i like about it is it is like hollow sun what the thing i like about it is it is like how it's on. What the thing I like about them too, is the fact that if you go down all the way,

you crank it down all the way and you crank it back up or vice versa. One of the two, you can either go to a circle and a dot or just a dot. Some of them actually, I think they have some of them that are just the circle too, but, but I, what I like.

So if anybody doesn't know the PBS 14 that phil has i sold him that to upgrade to duels when we get there much appreciated so but what i liked about that so when i had this all set up and i would shoot passive uh so basically i would bring this up and i could actually shoot with both eyes open and i could look through the dot and i could look through my night vision at the same time and it would my eyes my brain would merge the merge the image together especially i mean especially it would like pitch dark when it's super dark especially like in the woods and stuff like that my brain would merge it so i would see the white phosphor image and then it would be i'd have like uh i'd have the red dot in the center. And so that's what I really liked about the PBS 14 and doing this. So, uh, and yeah, again, though, um, and when you have it, when you have it, uh, uh,

up high enough to where you can see it with your naked eye. I mean, yeah, it kind of, it does get bright in your night vision, but you got to think, uh, you know, if you got to shoot, uh, if you have to shoot with or without night vision but you got to think uh you know if you got to shoot uh if you have to shoot with or without night vision you got to have it set to a brightness that you can see with the naked eye as well uh so but i to me it worked out great i love the hollow this hollow sun i'm not i i hate that it's china but hollow sun makes some solid freaking products um and this dot i've had for i don't even know how many years I've had it. And I've bumped it around, smacked it.

It's been dropped, kicked, all kinds of stuff. I'm grass, gravel, knocked off rocks, and it's kept like zero solid. And I've had, I've never changed it. I've never swapped it out. It's been a solid, solid red dot yeah and then contrasting that to my ar so this is like the same this this used to be this upper lower used to be my 10 and a half inch pistol a long time ago i tore it all all apart, salvaged the parts, and rebuilt it as a 16-inch carbine.

So it's a 16-1⁄4-inch, I think, fax and barrel, no suppressor, because I haven't made that jump yet. I'm probably going to end up getting a 12-gauge before I get into suppressors. But on the front end of it, I have an Arisaka Defense light body with a Malkov white light head, which is a hundred times better in terms of output and focus and everything than the Streamlights I used

to use. And a Hollison LS321, which is probably... So when I bought the LS321, I don't think the DIRVs were out or they were, they had probably just come out. And the problem is that with night vision lasers, there's always been this kind of built-in problem where with traditional non-VicCell illuminator technology, the only way to have something that was acceptable to the FDA to sell to the civilians meant you had to knock the output down a ton. And that is what is in this LS321, is the older IR illuminator technology. So Andrew's DIRV will blow this thing out of the water in terms of illuminator power, in terms of range, in terms of all that.

Not even going to debate any of that. But what this thing does is it gives you a street price of $650 to $700 bucks brand new, which compares very favorably to $1,500 to $2,000 for the street price of some of the full power lasers that are out there. And until things like the, really until the DIRV came out, there wasn't anything sub $2,000 that had the performance it did. You know what I'm saying? So yeah, call this a budget laser illuminator. It is. But I can tell you that at inside the house and across the yard

ranges this thing works perfectly fine and i've got both of them driven off of a uh an accent switch because again with a 16 inch barrel with a 14 inch rail the to to get the laser far enough down the rail and the light fart enough down the rail to not have Incredible shadow from the barrel I had to push them all the way out and that meant it was just a little bit too far To be taught comfortable reach so I have a switch in there which I can actually the light or the laser but I did make the point based on Andrew's experience because Andrew you had a I think one of your earlier night vision setups, you ran a Surefire light with one of the UE end caps, right? It was a plug-compatible tail cap, but you didn't have the extra switch on the back of it.

No, so it was a Streamlight. It was a Streamlight 1000 L. Streamlight. It was a Streamlight. That's right. Basically because I wanted to run just a single pad, I did some conversion stuff. You can buy the conversion kits for it to convert it to

the, was it the plug? The Surefire tail caps. Surefire tail caps and stuff like that. I was actually running it in a class and it completely crapped the bed on me. It completely quit working on me a hundred percent altogether. And so I ditched that, went back to just a clicky tail cap, uh, and, uh, you know, Bob's your uncle, I guess. So, yeah. So what I did that was different than you, and it was based on your experience was first of all,

instead of trying to adapt a Streamlight light I just went for the the air socket defense body which is already surefire compatible I put on that a DS00 tail cap which has the plug it has the surefire plug but it also has a little bitty a little bitty the switch on the side of it so I don't know how visible that is, but next to that plug coming out of the back of that light is a little bitty push button that you can use to actuate the light. If the switch goes down or if the wires rip out of it. Well, so I have,

I have access to that light, even if the switch goes down or the, or the plug backs out or any of that foolishness, I can reach a couple inches further forward and kind of stretch himself out to get to the fire button on top of the laser if the switch goes bad. That was all based on your experience of the switch makes things nicer. It's exactly where my thumb naturally wants to fall. It's better for ergonomics. It's better for reach, but I still have

the ability to kind of torque myself forward and reach those manual switches in a pinch. So that switch, is that a momentary on or is it click on, click off? So the laser is momentary only. The light is click on, click off or momentary if you just don't push it down all the way. Very similar to the clicky tail switches that come on Surefires. Yeah. So that's the thing is that's one reason why I kind of, I be careful, be careful with the switches that you get. And this goes for everybody.

And this is what I've learned. And this is what I learned. I learned this the hard way as well. When I did a low light class, a low light long gun with track and the, and the MDFI. The pressure pads are awesome. They make things great, especially if you have a longer rail, if you want your hand placement completely different,

if you want to actually make it. I like the idea of having the pad in between where my hand rests, where my thumb kind of C-clamps over the rail, because then I can clamp i can clamp i can basically hold the rifle down if i need light i can just move my thumb back just a little bit and i can hit the light however if you have a momentary on that pad gets very heavy or hard to push down when you when you're holding it down for 10 seconds 30 seconds to a minute uh that it gets pretty you can feel it in your thumb. Uh, and that's one of the exercises that we did, uh, in the class on low light was utilizing,

if you have a pistol without a light, or if you have a pistol and the light dies on it, utilizing, using your rifle light and say something happened and your rifle's down as well. And you rely and you're relying on your pistol and you don't have a light on your pistol or whatever you we're doing it we were doing a drill that you basically were using your rifle light and then you're shooting with your pistol so you had your rifle tucked you were basically pushing the pressure pad down and holy crap like it felt like it was like you could definitely feel how heavy that pressure pad got and it and my thumb got fatigued like that it was that's the last time i used that pressure pad uh i went back to a click if the pressure pad that's on my scorpion it's it's the it's clicky

like that's what i like about it so yeah that way and that is the thing i do appreciate about the accent is that the the switch for the light does have a constant on position so like the only thing about this whole setup that ever gave me any pause and it's the reason why on the very end of that light you can see i it escapes me for the moment what the the company is that popularized those it's the little um the little cover for your light i got it for two reasons first of all because i have a full size Surefire X300 on my CZ and I have to clean the lens off of that SOB every single time it goes to the range because it gets so much carbon caked onto the front of it because it sticks out past the barrel.

And I could just do the minute I mounted all this up, I looked at that and I'm like, yeah, that, that flashlight is going to get, is going to look like crap in about five seconds after I put a couple of mags through it. So it does that. But it's also there to keep me from ending with the light if I'm working with night vision. And it's super quick to pop off if I need to activate the light. But it's just like a safety on your rifle just to give you that extra little... We all know you should keep your finger off the trigger, but just in case your finger and your brain come disconnected,

it's nice to have a backup. You know what I mean? Yeah. It's 100 Concepts is the company. That's it. I don't have it on mine yet, but it's something that I want to add

because it's definitely a, especially when I get to my helmet, I definitely will show you guys what I'm talking about. So. All right. Well, Nick, you have any questions before we slide forward? I mean, I've got the same red dot magnifier setup I've had on this thing for the longest time.

It's just a cheap primary arms red dot, but. There's nothing wrong with that. They work. Well, and I haven't had any real problems using it with night vision although unlike andrew i tried to do this the way andrew's described where he puts his night vision on his non-dominant eye and it uses dominant i look through the red dot right and i can't make my brain work those two things together like some that'll be interesting to try yeah i i think i i like i know i'm right eye dominant and right handed. And, you know, I know all that. But for some reason, when I put the night vision monocle on my left eye, my brain turns that left eye off.

And all I see is this little red dot in this field of black. I cannot make my brain put the two images together. I got one question for you, Phil. How many rounds have you run through this rifle wish with that tape switch on there and have you ever had that tape switch either come unscrewed come off the gun failure to fail to work i mean maybe only about five six mags at this point since i mounted all this up um I don't anticipate having problems with it just because there is a gratuitous amount of blue red dot

or a blue lock on a lot of things. Okay, but I hate to be that guy, but every other item you add adds a point of failure, right? Yes. I can't tell you how many times I have seen at work granted this is not under nods but there'll be a control hanging off of a machine and there's a thin little wire that connects that control panel to the machine and for whatever reason that wire catches on goddamn everything that walks past that machine your belt a cart a cart, the forklift, whatever. I can only imagine,

it looks like your wires are pretty tight in this image here. I can't really see that well, but I can only imagine it would be fairly easy to snag and break one of those wires. I suppose my concern is, or my question is, do you think you have any concern that failing you, say in a high stress environment? So that's something I didn't point out actually, is that it's very difficult to see. But if you look directly underneath that switch, it looks like there's two square pads on the side of the rail directly underneath that switch. So what I got was I got Magpul makes these little, these little bitty square plastic doodads. I mean, it's Magpul. They do everything in plastic.

And it clips into an M-LOK slot, and it just has slots cut out of the bottom, the underside of it, to secure wires. Oh, okay. So there's nothing loose. So I've got two on each side of the rifle, and I've got the wires that go in through the front, go all the way through, loop

around, and come back out the front and it's like that on both sides so there's really not a lot of slack in the wires and if you pulled on the side of the wire that does not go to the light and laser you're going to be pulling on i mean it pins the wires in there very very tightly so the only way you could pull those plugs out is if you happen to catch the correct side of the wire to pull the wire out of the back of the light or the laser. Radical Fragas said zip ties. I use zip ties to secure all the wires for all my lights on every weapon before I ever got these things. Because a pack of the little bitty tiny zip ties cost nothing.

And who cares you know it's like five bucks for it's like five it's like five bucks for a thousand and you just use a pair of dikes to cut them off whenever you want to move stuff around yeah it works yeah that makes sense i'm just i just have concerns about you know i've had stuff i've shot stuff loose off my guns before i have too before illinois did their assault weapon ban I ran a lot of pistol carbine courses. And a lot of those courses were four to 600 round courses of fire. And despite blue Loctite, despite locking washers and stuff like that, I have shaken sights off. I have shaken my buttstock loose, even though it was staked i shook my pistol grip

loose the one day i mean i realize that you do what you can right and i'm just wondering if from a long-term reliability standpoint if the tape switch is the way to go over just the tail cap on the uh on the leg i'm interested to see what your long-term results are. We'll see. But the two things I'm going to say in response to that is that a, if you have any fasteners that screw and unscrew on any of your firearms, it'd be a really smart idea to check them every single time you go to the range. It's part. Look, the reason I clean my, my firearms after a range day has nothing to do with vanity and has nothing to do with the fact that guns don't work if they have one speck of carbon in them.

That's nonsense. I clean them every single time because that is an opportunity to inspect my weapon and make sure nothing is loose that should not be loose and nothing is tight that should not be tight. That's a good point. It's an inspection point. And I take the time to – because, I mean, all my tools for working on guns are right there on the workbench. So I take the time to, like, just check them all. And the one time I didn't was actually with the previous light I had on this rifle, my Streamlight, and that tail cap backed off from just a couple of range days. And I didn't realize this until I put the firearm back firearm back together and I'm doing function checks on it.

And I just happened to hit the tape switch and it did not work. The light would not come on. And then as I'm, you know, tweaking on stuff, I'm wiggling the wire and it lights up. And it was cause I, I put just enough pressure on the tail cap to make the connection.

So I screwed that stupid thing in about a half turn and never had a problem with it after that. But it reinforced in my brain, check your freaking firearms. Check your stuff. And the other thing of it is that I did make a point of having the tail cap on the light that has the auxiliary switch, and I can reach the switch on the laser.

So the switch on this thing makes things work nicer for me but i also train to be able to use without it makes sense because because why wouldn't you it's right it's right there there's an old saying in the military that if you plan for things to go wrong you're never surprised when they do it has some validity to it so I mean Nick if you remember from our shotgun class with the MBFI crew I and I I mean you go through your rifle every time if you pick it up or

you know Phil you do it after a range trip or whatever it is you I and I it doesn't hurt to pick your take your rifle out of the safe every once in a while if you do some dry fire drills do whatever with it. And then you, I, and I, and you inspect all your stuff from tip to butt, go down and you make sure things are tight and torque down as they should be.

Make sure. And that's where witness marks come from. I know, Phil, I see you don't have any witness marks on your stuff. Uh, if I have witness marks on a bunch of my stuff and if you know, if that's what those are for is you have the witness marks so that if the screws are coming loose, you're going to see that turn. So that's another, that's something,

a reason I've never really had anything pop loose, uh, on my rifle shotgun. I almost lost my light and my red dot. Uh, the first time I did the class, the second time with you, Nick,

I was actually very happy where I torqued everything down. I retorqued stuff down and I mean, it never came loose. So I was really happy with it. We didn't have any yard sales at that class, did we? No, no, it was really interesting. But the other thing I want to address, too, before we move on to Raggle Fraggle is I nothing on my personal stuff right now because I took it off because I'm redoing a bunch of stuff. But Coban, i it's sticky uh i like it just because it's sticky it you know when you grab it you know that you're right there on your at where you want to be yeah it does collect you know dirt and grime and stuff like that but it's cheap uh and it self-adheres to it you know it to itself

uh and so i'll zip tie a couple things here and there but to and then on top of that you have the zip tie when you cut it it can be kind of sharp on the one edge if you don't tuck it in properly but to stop that i use coban and i will wrap coban around the uh around everything around the wires and everything to give some added protection that's a great idea or ranger bands yeah just like the big the big thick heavy duty rubber bands. Same concept. But I mean yeah. No matter how you choose to do it.

Please for God's sakes don't leave your wires lying around loose. The thing about Ranger bands is. Don't spend your money on actual Ranger bands. Go buy a bicycle tube. And just cut it up into strips. That's what the original ones were anyway. So. Yeah. I mean that's the part that cracks me up, is that if you look at pre-GWAT, pre-tactical days,

the actual door kickers and pipe hitters of the world were using zip ties and duct tape to put stuff on their rifles, and it worked. So that's why I'm always like, look, if special operations got away with it in the nineties, it's probably okay for me to LARP with my friends today.

Just saying. I mean, in some circles you could call that a clone correct build and get bonus points from all the other autists. Truth. Yeah. Oh, Andrew already advanced this and I advanced it again and he sabotaged

my ass again thank you andrew you're welcome um no so this is my scorpion it's the scorpion three plus uh that i picked up uh yeah there i there's a lot of configuration going on here i'm gonna i'm completely changing out like this actually hopefully i was hoping by prepper camp it would be different but it's probably going to have to stick like this for another couple months uh but i have the aimpoint acro uh red dot on top with an arisaka mount and then i have my steiner d ball that uh the a2 that i have on top. Currently, I'm working with a friend of mine who owns a machine shop. We're actually working on our own mount. So because the Scorpion has such limited rail space,

I like the idea of the red dot and then with a beaver tail that comes out so that you can mount something on top of that, like a laser or something on top of that to give you to free up some of that space. So that is actually, that's something that him and I are kind of working on right now. Um, so hopefully, uh, that'll come, hopefully we'll get that, uh, down the road. Uh, but unfortunately this is how this is probably going to look. Uh, I might actually remove it. I don't know yet.

Uh, the pressure pad, uh, is going to definitely, it's kind of a, something. I might actually remove it. I don't know yet. The pressure pad is going to definitely, it's kind of something that I've been messing with. The only thing I really don't like about it, and I like because of the limited rail space, I like the light on the right-hand side, not on the left. But the thing about the right-hand side is

where it's at, you can see where those cables at, it's blocking the ejection port. So I'm going to have some malfunction. So that's why I'm messing around right now, um, with different, uh, I'm looking around for different cables, some different cable management, or just not use, uh, not use a cable, um, or a pressure pad. And, uh, and then that pressure pad on top of that, that's not going to stay there. Uh, I'm actually, I actually, I just found, I forgot I had them. I just found, um, mod light, uh, the little small mod light pressure pad, uh, that I forgot I had. So I'll probably end up putting that somewhere. Um, but, uh, that's

the suppressor I just got. That is the, the rugged obsidian 45, uh, is the, what I just picked up. obsidian 45 uh is the what i just picked up um so i have it converted to where actually if that's a shortened version so it actually has like another two inches that you can put uh at the at the end of it and extend it out a little bit more and make it quieter adds a few more baffles but uh it's uh got the converted it's a three prong adapter uh to connect to the uh the pistol or to the the scorpion And then obviously the pistol brace that kind of, it will come out, extend out a little bit. So that D-ball, that's my old laser. So that is actually the A2. So that is a green laser, green visible and an IR laser. So there's no illuminator. That's why I put the Surefire the, on there to give me some illumination at night.

Like I said, that it's, it's kind of subject. I, this is where it's at currently. Is it going to stay that, is it going to stay like this? Probably not.

I don't see it staying like in this configuration for very much longer, but this is the current configuration that I've been messing around with. So questions, Nick, or. Well, you know, as much as I like the idea of the scorpion i've i've never been a fan of pistol calibers for self-defense in a larger platform like that personal preference if i'm going to be carrying

something bigger than a handgun i'm probably going to be using a full-size rifle or now a shotgun simply because I just, every, everything I've ever researched has always said that pistols and pistol caliber just sucks at doing the job you want it to do. It does. Now, given that you've got a suppressor on it in a home defense situation, I could see that being fantastic, especially paired with your night vision. You know, I got, I've got similar concerns. You know, you've got your, you mentioned the wires in front of the ejection port. I mean, hot brass, I'm not sure how hot the brass gets coming out of this gun. Do you have any ideas that hot enough to burn you like out of a 5.56 or is it fairly cold? I mean, it's just like, just, I mean, if you're shooting a pistol it pops out and it it will it'll uh it'll make you say

ow so it'll give you a fresh free burn if it stays on you i suppose my concern is where you have the wires there you're probably going to get some damage to the wiring from the cases it's not going to stay like this this is right exactly exactly i'm just saying in the in the short term that i mean that's my only real concern other than my my my standing concern about loose wires i mean you know i know this uh so this i have not shot it like this oh okay i do not intend to shoot it like this uh this is this was concept me me concepting it out and phil's like hey we're doing, we're going to do this episode. And this is the current configuration that I'm messing with.

And so this is not going to stay like this. I have not shot it like this at all. And I will not shoot it this time. I mean, it looks like it'll be a hell of a lot of fun to shoot. I mean, for sure, it's going to be a ride of a good time. You know, I really do like what I see from the Scorpions. shoot i mean for sure it's going to be it's going to be a ride of a good time you know the um yeah i i really do like what i see from the scorpions and what little i have seen of them we don't see a lot of them here where i'm at because you know reasons we get no fun here apparently um can you

use that hall of sun it you know as short as the rail is, I noticed on your guys' other optics, or your guys' rifles, you had the optics way further forward. Can you actually shoulder that and see through your red dot with your night vision on? Yeah. Okay. Yeah, yeah. Well, as it is right now, no, because it's collapsed all the way. Yeah, with the brace extended.

With the brace extended all the way yeah yeah with the stock with the brace extended with the brace extended all the way yeah i can i i can uh um i can see go through i can look through the red dot and i can see i can see the red dot just fine with my night vision okay well yeah because i know that i don't know how i've never actually handled night vision in person but just looking at it compared to the size of helmets they're sticking like what four to five inches out in front of your face about that so i was just thinking that might get in the way yeah no i mean yeah and that's the thing is like and what's not so the thing with night vision and what i've what and maybe i'm wrong if anybody knows more than i do please share because i'm not anywhere a pro uh but with the night vision especially when i'm shooting night vision like a lot of times a rifle sometimes you might choke up on the rifle when you pull into

your shoulder you kind of your head will kind of might crane in a little bit um the one thing that i've been going to with all of my almost all of my rifles uh and even like this here is the higher mount so i i like the 193 uh mount where it actually puts the red dot high on uh high in the center line and everything because i found that as i come up i don't uh the more practice i've gotten and i've trained myself out of it is uh i my neck stays in line um and keeping my neck up i head up and keep until where i just bring the rifle up and it's actually higher is I found that I can actually keep my, I'm not tucking my head in. And so I can actually keep the goggles away from the red dot so that actually it's your, you're actually more sitting straight up when you're pulling the

gun up. Yeah. Cause I definitely have my head down forward when I'm mounting the rifle. Yeah. Well, and it turns into a geometry problem. think of it like this if this is your head and this is your eyeball and you rotate you rock your head forward but then you crane your eye up you can do that to lower your eye relative to the position of like your top vertebrae the problem is when you're doing that with night vision right and you turn your head down not only does your eye piece go down much further because it's it's gimbal forward again it's like a triangle it's the math problem it's a geometry problem not only that but now it's not in line with your red dots you can't see what you're doing so the only way to lower your eyeball is to scrunch your neck down or raise the red dot up so i mean i i've

i've heard people argue that like high mounts for red dots aren't necessary for night vision, but I'm going to tell you that it helps things dramatically. Because it's not as simple as just scrunch your head down like you're a human turtle and get your chin closer to the rail. So this is mine, and I have done probably something that a lot of people are going to twist their head up about that is a TLR VIR2 which is a pistol white light that has an IR laser IR illuminator built into it and it is positioned on the bottom rail of that scorpion because I've got all that set up to where that like the tail switches on that light fall right where my index finger wants to be. So from a firing grip, I have full control over the weapon.

I can actuate either the white light if I'm set to white light or the IR illuminator and laser. It's a big, flutty illuminator. It's really only good across a yard or in a house but it the the lasers brighten up i mean andrew i had this at prepper camp last year and it it was enough to illuminate you know the treetops where we were i see raggle fraggles saying i don't understand the 20 round mag so for context this is among a small batch of dedicated home defense firearms that are in a hidden safe. And the smaller I can make this firearm, the better chance I have of fitting into that safe. So 20 round magazine is what stays loaded in it when it's in the safe.

Because for space constraints, I've got two 30 round magazines sitting on a shelf right by it. So if I need a bigger magazine, it's nothing to drop this one and stick in a bigger one. I've got two spares, and I've got two more spares in the bedroom. And 20 rounds is no joke, though. Well, it's, yeah, 20 rounds of not lightly loaded 9mm. But it's also, that's also the reason why this pistol light is where it is. Because if I had mounted it on the size or on the top of this weapon, it would not have fit as well into the very small, tight space it has to fit into. And putting it where it is now keeps the lateral profile of the weapon narrower versus having something on the sides.

So this was kind of a study in compromises to make it fit into a very small space this is a home defense firearm but it is also it's also the weapon i take on trips a lot of times because i came to this way of thinking years ago that if i was going to pack firearms on a trip and i was going to pack anything more than just you know a handgun and a couple extra mags and a little bit of extra ammo, it would be really helpful if all the firearms all ate the same round. So if I pack my carry gun, my wife's carry gun, and this, then I can bring an extra 200 rounds of 9mm and it feeds all three firearms. So that's kind of the rationale. I will wholeheartedly admit you're never going to see

nine millimeter swing for the fence like five five six will but i will say that if you would be if you would be comfortable fighting your way out of trouble with a nine millimeter handgun this thing's going to have more velocity and better ballistics than that will well i mean yeah i mean everybody would always love to have a bigger caliber and and sure but concealed carry requires concealed and it gets awful hard to conceal a full-size 12 gauge after a while yes and that's the other thing with the uh pistol brace on this thing folded i have concealed this under i believe it well they used to conceal mp5s and and long barrel uzis tommy guns why do you think so many gangsters didn't put stocks on him you'll have to be that accurate when you're just spraying and praying well for sure you know you know looking at this one here i gotta say i like the

slimmer profile on it i don't see any reason to go to a bigger light than a pistol light and and here's why your effective range is still probably 75 to 150 yards whatever you're going to do with a nine mil right i mean you know yes jerry michelek can probably hit at a thousand yards on a paper plate with a nine mil whatever i'm not him neither are the rest of you. If you are, congratulations. Why are you not on TV? But that weapon mounted light, I mean, for a home defense gun, a pistol light like that is going to be more than capable in home distances. It's going to be more than capable in hotel distances. It's going to be more than capable at a campsite. You know, you're not looking across a three or

four hundred yard open field trying to identify a friend from foe with your white light and i can i can tell you from having run rant run drills with this thing if i put a 21 if i put a 20 round magazine in this thing and say a 21 round a 21 round magazine in my czpo9 i can get 20 rounds on target a lot faster with this than I can with the P09. Three points of contact versus two. Three points of contact. It weighs more. It's got a longer barrel.

This is more accurate than the CZ P09. Oh, undoubtedly. And it has a phenomenally better trigger. The Timney V2 that's in this thing, highly recommend for the Scorpion guys. V2 that's in this thing, highly recommend for the Scorpion, guys. It's, it is a beautiful trigger compared to the bucket of BS that

CZ put in these things from the factory. But, so, Andrew, I don't know if you want me to drop this, because we've been going you, then me, then you, then me, and you have 10 minutes, and then you have to leave, and I don't want to screw you over. I don't care. So you want me to drop this, you pick up your helmet? Um, I mean, then you then me, and you have 10 minutes, and then you have to leave, and I don't want to screw you over.

So you want me to drop this? You pick up your helmet? I mean, if you want. Yeah, let's do that. That way, if we ramble on too far, you know. So, this is my helmet. Camera. Make Andrew big. Hang on a second.

I'm working on it. There he is. There we go andrew's big now this is my helmet there are many like it but this one is mine yep so basically um i'll get it from all angles uh where how do you get all three all three of us again there we go there my so big anyway uh so yeah so basically my helmet uh i went with the team windy bump helmet uh and then so team windy bump helmet it's got the uh rhino mount just a standard uh rhino mount i'd like to get a a nicer wilcox one that folds down closer to the helmet but this one is doing just fine for right now but these are

uh these are the bnvd uh 1431s the mk2 dual tube articulated night vision so white phosphorus of course i can't i'll never i've looked at green and i will never i'll never go green it's crazy the difference of the uh less eye strain and everything that i really could tell uh these are so i do not have a manual gain on mine. Mine are auto gain. So basically what that means is as I walk from a light area to a dark area, it will like your PBS 14s are a manual gain. So you actually got to turn that up if you go into a darker place.

And what that does is that actually it's allowing more light and everything. Like it's, it's like pushing out, like it's, it's allowing more light and everything like it's a job it's like pushing out like uh it's it's basically how do i say it it's basically a for the less light you have you adjust the gain to where it actually but the downside of it is actually makes it more grainy you get more of a green picture uh if you're in that situation uh that's where like an ir floodlight comes in handy or you can have extra bounce which is nice so uh these uh these dual tube uh like i said white phosphorus uh the nice thing is the 1431s because the pb or the what is it the the pbs 31s are like the articulated ones that you see these ones the 1431s uh basically the pbs 14 these are based off of pbs 14 technology and the base

14 tubes uh but then they just use the utilize a 31 like a 31 technology as far as the bridge goes uh the on and off and then they articulate and how they articulate up uh so that's what i really like because um if you want to make me large again, what I like about these. Hold up. I have to make Andrew large. Give me a second. There we go. What I like about these is if I can actually run them down just like this.

Where's my camera? There it is. So I can run them down just like this. Where's my camera? There it is. So I can run them down just like this. And then if I want, I can actually put one down and I can look through that side or I can do both sides just like that. But what I like about it is if I need to go into a room or when I was doing like a night vision class and we were like, okay, nods up or, hey, we're actually, you know, I just, I need to shoot maybe passive uh through i want to shoot passive and i don't need my night vision i can actually fold these up just like that and i can actually look underneath and yeah you have some of this that is kind of annoying you kind of get used to it but i can look underneath here and i can have a clear line of sight so that's the one

thing i really like about the about these ones um i have uh the ear pro mounted as a sword in uh it's the uh the sword and uh the supreme pro x uh and then they're connected by like the mark uh ear pro connectors like basically they're the ones that you see standardized that fold up um i kind of like them i actually need to clip them make them a little bit shorter uh i kind of i was thinking about actually going to clip them, make them a little bit shorter. Uh, I kind of, I was thinking about actually going to like the ops core that they actually just pop out. Uh, and so instead of these, um, but, uh, but yeah, I mean, so far they're actually doing pretty good. Uh, top of my helmet is the, um, it's a TNBC Mohawk. Uh, and then that's got extra batteries

and some weights, the two lights on the on the top and the back those are just knockoff lights off amazon uh they do pretty well uh one is green one is red and then i got the enforce uh weapon mounted light on the side and that is a white slash ir and you can flip it back and forth uh The one thing I like about, especially like that true, the 100, was it the 100 concepts? The light that you have, the shield is every once in a while, I'll forget which, I need to figure out something. Maybe like to put a dimple or put something on the white light side to where when I'm feeling for it, I can feel like the indicator that it's on white. Because there's been a few times where I've hit the light and it's on white and it fricking, it shines out a white light and I have to quickly like shut it off or flip it over. So, um, uh, but yeah, I mean,

that's pretty much it. Uh, as far as, uh, my, my night vision setup goes, I, I love my, I love the dual tubes. The reason I wanted to go from single to dual is I really like the PBS-14. But having both eyes covered really helped with my depth perception and actually driving. I may or may not have driven with these on before. And so... In Mexico. Yeah. And so that... We all have lawnmowers right uh so i really

like so driving uh just walk generally walking uh i i didn't do too bad with the pbs 14 but my eye i noticed like because i always kept it over my left eye and i noticed my right eye was like what am i doing um the you know so everything so i i see pros and cons to both but yeah i really like having both eyes covered uh to see i mean you get the same field of view really unless you have like the panel bridge or these i mean these i can kind of separate out a little bit they do have some articulation to where you can actually um pan that out so you can kind of pan it out to where it's not going to be 100 like a 40 degree field of view um just like a pbs 14 but uh uh but yeah i mean i really like it the

only thing i might change like i said i might do like a wilcox mount that it will it'll bring the basically all that'll do is really it'll bring the the night vision closer when it's mounted and they're adjustable like they have a little bit finer adjustments which i like but uh and then some of like the wilcox the newer one is a breakaway which is nice so if you get your if you get your nods snagged on something it'll break away so it won't snap your neck or break uh break your helmet or break your uh your nods if anything um then the other thing i might change is i think i might put a vampire light uh surefire vampire pistol light uh on that on the side or i thought about the other thing too is what is it uh thyrom i think is the company they make an articulating mount

that actually will i can put the light on and i can actually move it and so you can push it up um and so you can actually adjust it you can adjust the light how you want and then you can or you can aim it up and what that's what's good with that what i like about that is if you aim it up and you actually can use that weapon light or you can use the light on your helmet to use as a spill light so if you are ir or white if you're going into a room and you don't want a direct beam just uhaming in, you can actually aim it up. It'll bounce off the ceiling, bounce off the walls, do whatever. And it'll actually give you some good illumination in a room. So, but yeah, I mean, that's pretty much, that's my, that's my helmet setup.

Yeah, it's, I love it. I've been really happy with it. I love it. I've been really happy with it. And then I think the helmet cover... I'm trying to remember where I got the helmet cover at. Team Wendy. Yeah, it was Team Wendy. And they actually were discontinuing these because they were super on sale, which was nice.

Yeah, I remember when I saw it, I was like, hey, dude, if you ever wanted to get one, now's the time. Yeah, I'm really happy with the the helmet i really wish uh i had more places to shoot uh under night vision and or classes i would love to take more classes i've taken one uh one good uh and one really well taught uh class uh and I'd like to take more but yeah no it was good alright Andrew I don't want to chase you out of here but you did say you had to bug out right now yeah yeah I got a balance

so anyway that's it if anybody has any questions about what I got or suggestions or what not hit me up I'd love to hear it. But, yeah, so, no, thanks, everybody. And, you know, thanks, guys, for this was a fun show. Glad you could join us, man.

I'll see you in a week. Yeah, for sure. See you guys. Later, man. Later. And now that we got rid of him, we can talk shit about him. Right. No.

I did notice he did say he went with a bump helmet. Phil, is yours bump or is yours ballistic? Same Team Wendy bump helmet, and I understand that there are those out there that are not going to like that decision, but I'm going to be honest with you. The likelihood that I am going to use this in a two-way kinetic range are low enough that I would rather save a couple pounds and several hundred dollars and not get a ballistic.

I have other things to deal with before I think about getting a ballistic helmet. No, I get that. I was just curious. I went with a ballistic helmet only because the government was paying for it and I didn't have to sign a four-year contract to get it so perfect perfect so i figured yeah i have that was that was a funner choice yeah so i have the same team wendy um think i think they call it their xtp or whatever it's the team wendy bump helmet there's a reason why they're so freaking popular they're comfortable as hell. They come with okay helmet pads. Not great, but okay. You've got to try these things.

Memory foam. Cooling gel memory foam. I've actually heard that hardhead veterans, their whatever they call it, their lattice, it's almost like a polymer mesh helmet pad. I hear those are really nice, but I also hear really good things about 4D Tactical's pads, which I haven't tried. They're removable and washable. Yeah, the helmet pads are the one thing that I don't want to say Team Wendy lets you down.

I just think there may be better options out there, and that's something I'm probably going to play with in the future, but this works. Oh, absolutely. I wouldn't say they don't. that I'm probably going to play with in the future, but this works. Oh, absolutely. I wouldn't say they don't. I mean, I know a lot of guys that heavily use those in Milsim Airsoft, and everybody likes to shit on Milsim Airsoft, but let's be honest, those guys use their gear a lot more than most of us. I'm going to tell you that most of the serious Milsim Airsoft guys

could put a whole lot of people to shame. Oh my gosh, yes. I'm not going to say that that's my endorsement to go do that instead of getting a legitimate training class. But I'm just going to say, if you want to know if your shit's going to work or not, go hand it to an Airsofter and let him bang it up against trees for a couple of days with his idiot friends, and you'll find out really fast. Yeah, but good luck going force on force with live rounds with two teams.

I mean, you can do that with airsoft all day long, but you're getting a whole lot of felonies if you start doing that with rifles. But I guess what I mean is, if you want to test stuff like boots, uniforms, helmets, LBE, chest rigs, it's going to fall apart or it's not going to fall apart really quickly

For sure Yeah, I'm going to work my way around to that Because he's kind of right and kind of wrong It's not different, but it is So what I have on here is I have the Team Wendy bump bump I'm using a PBS-14 on a Wilcox G11 mount I actually switched the j arm

and i'm so drawing a blank on what it is right now but it's a it's an aftermarket aluminum j arm that actually uses the bayonet mount oh i really didn't want to i really didn't want to have to like fart around with, because I got the Wilcox G11 thrown in on the deal from Andrew. Right. And to convert to a dovetail mount would have been that cost on top of everything else. And the cost for this aftermarket aluminum J-arm that actually fits really, really nice compared to the plastic ones was reasonable enough that it seemed like a good middle of the road option. And I really haven't been upset about it so far. So all that seems to

be working well. Um, I do have a set of Peltor mounts and a, uh, Unity Remora. That's what's in that far right picture. That's the, what's mounting that light above the Peltor mount. So it just, it gives me like, you know, 180 degrees of swivel. So I can point the light up at the sky. I can point down the ground or point wherever I want it. And that light is, um,

drawn a blank. Hang on. I should have wrote all this down. I don't know why the hell I didn't take, I know better that when I'm going to drink bourbon, I have to take notes, but I completely boggle that up this time. It's all right.

But, um, it's notes, but I completely boggle that up this time. It's alright. It's white light and IR capable. It does the job. I found it to be... I found it to throw enough IR light that I haven't felt the need for more, put it that way. And I can't see myself using the white light that's helmet mounted

for much, because if you're in the dark and you turn on white light in the middle of the woods, everybody knows who you are. And they're going to aim at your head, which is bad. Especially if it's not a ballistic helmet. Yeah, well, I'm going to tell you that even if it is a ballistic helmet, the next five minutes of your life are going to be very interesting

even if it is a ballistic helmet. Or very short. You're going to talk to Jesus. You might not stay with him for very long but you're definitely gonna have a talk with him put it that way for sure yeah raggle fraggle it is not an o light it is a go cheap cheap light brand but i'd be you could put a gun to my head right now and i couldn't tell you what brand it was but it's the not that's all right it's the not o light cheap cheap light brand because it's basically an admin light.

It doesn't have to be a Surefire. Sure. So now to Raggle Fraggle's point, so what's hanging off those Peltor mounts is a set of Howard Light Ear Pro. The reason it doesn't look the same from one side to the other is because the left hand module has a little, it now I'll be the first to admit it came off of Amazon it seems to be working just fine so far, when I beat it up against a couple of trees I'll let you know how it holds up

but it's an add-on module that connects to the Howard lights adds a microphone boom and comes with a comes with the down lead to connect to their push to talk and plugs into a k-plug nice so that's what i use to integrate this comp setup into my gmrs radios which would also i mean it's k-plug so it's also going to work with like bay of things and most most of

your ham radios out there except for yesu because they like to be different but um you know this is this was one of those things that i can't see myself running super often but i do have another one of these setups where it's still the howard lights like they came on the headband they usually come on with the same module that gives me the ability to have like you know one-handed communications to a radio station in my belt. It all comes down back. It all this all stems from the idea that, you know, like post Hurricane Katrina, post Hurricane Ida, when cell phones are down, there's no comms. If I have to leave my front yard, I would like to have a radio in my hand and communicate back to

the house where my wife is. For sure. If I'm in a situation where walking around with a radio is not convenient, or if I'm operating at dark anyway, and I would have this on my head, it'd be really nice to have complete, yes, thank you

Rattle Fraggle, it's in force. Beautiful. Which just means it's in force beautiful which just means it's cheap flashlight that's not that doesn't double as a hand grenade i don't know if that's a feature well right i mean yes you can't beat bricks with it but it'll do i'm not gonna beat bricks with my head i won't have beat bricks bricks with my head my head's probably stronger absolutely i've absolutely run this helmet into beams, doors, bricks. The pads are very good. I don't think that's how you're supposed to test those things, though, Nick.

Oh, it wasn't on purpose. I'm tall. You can't tell from the video. I'm a little over six foot tall. And so me and some buddies were running some drills into his in his old barn. So me and some buddies were running some drills into his, in his old barn. And well,

one of the grain areas that we were, that we were going into is about a eight inch step up and it's a five foot doorway. And I was too dumb to duck. How many times did you have to make that mistake? But just stopped after three and that's something. No, we went to a different room oh here i am trying to give you credit you're you're doing your no no i mean no look when you're

when you're trying to move fast when you're trying to move fast and you're trying to do your high speed stuff sometimes the low speed stuff you forget about but that's why you gotta run drills so raggle fraggle ass would you say it's as good or better than my carbon fiber hard hat i'm i'm going to say that better i well but here's the thing you're talking about i don't i'm not sure if he's referencing my bump helmet or your ballistic helmet your ballistic helmet's going to take a pretty good flag but i'm gonna oh yeah i've i've worn a hard hat a time or two this is actually surprisingly heavier yes but more comfortable than any hard hat i've worn what i will say from a protection

standpoint though okay the bump helmet here's here's the thing comparable i don't from a protection standpoint again like my my experience is just about like that much military i didn't do cool door kicker, special forces stuff. So take my opinion with a grain of salt. Whether or not the shell of the helmet stays intact or not is only about a fourth of the problem you're going to deal with if you bash your skull into something. The next problem is going to be where does that energy go? Because if the pads don't absorb it, if the suspension don't absorb it if the suspension doesn't absorb it like if if you just had a layer of freaking anything titanium up against your skull and you smash it in something

all that energy goes through the titanium into your skull and your skull doesn't like that very much and your brain likes it even less so if you rack your head on something wearing a bump helmet and the pads don't have sufficient amount of give and support and all that energy goes into your skull, it's bad. Same problem with a bump helmet. Same problem with a hard hat. Same problem with any of those things. I mean, I don't know a ton about hard hats because I haven't worked in an industry where I wore them. I don't know a ton about hard hats because I haven't worked in an industry where I wore them, but I will just kind of put that out there that is it better?

It depends on everything below the skin. No pun intended whatsoever. No, for sure. And, you know, I did pull the pads off of this before, but you get a better look at it. There's actually two layers of pads in this helmet. Let's see if I can get the suspension rig out of the way a little bit here. There's two layers of pads in this helmet. Let me get the suspension rig out of the way a little bit here. There's two layers of pads in this helmet. There's your removable layer, and then there's the sewn-in layer.

So you actually have twice as much padding, depending on the size of your head. For my head, you have twice as much padding in this helmet as they originally intended. Now, it's like a closed-cell memory foam, cooling, fanciness, all kinds of things. I don't know what's in the bump helmets. Is it just a normal closed-cell foam? Hold that thought. Now, hard hats, a lot of times, it's a plastic suspension system, and you really don't have much foam. You've got that plastic ring, and then you've got kind of just like an air gap to where that plastic's mounted to the hard hat, if I remember right, last time I wore one. So what I'm feeling is actually two different things. There are, I would call them comfort pads, which are very, very squishy.

And then underneath that feels like a much higher density foam. feels like a much higher density foam the high density enough that you can you can deform with your fingertip but when you pull your finger away it stays deformed for a couple seconds it's right back yeah okay and then even below that there's another layer of high density foam so i would say that the inside of the of a bump helmet probably pretty good i would say it's built pretty pretty comparable to something like a skateboarding or like a bicycle helmet, like a legit crash helmet. Yeah, an upper end bicycle helmet or skateboarding helmet. Yeah. Yeah.

And I see the hooligans in the chat talking back and forth about Jeff Jags said the hard hats are hard to mod into a tactical helmet. It costs just as much as buying one. I will say that I have seen fairly cheap bicycle helmets. People have turned into tactical helmets with a lot of work and modifications. I'm going to tell you that I don't think I've seen one that was as well put together as just going and buying a freaking Team Wendy bump. Yeah, for cost to performance ratio as far as like a time investment to the team wendy bumps they're not bad at all cost wise

yeah and raggle you know if you're wearing hard hats on the regular i mean i i bought a ballistic helmet because i got a check from the government that i didn't ask for and didn't want and i thought well if i'm gonna spend this money i'm gonna spend it on something that'll upset my state senator so you know i went with a ballistic always the proper response to getting free money by the way right i mean had i had to pay for this out of my own pocketbook and it wasn't sugar daddy trump paying for it probably would have went with a team wendy bump because there's nothing wrong with that it protects your you protect your

head i do have ear protomon onto these i've got a set of peltors and the mounts um but i'm currently waiting on a second set of peltors because i currently use my peltors when i mow the lawn too because my lawnmower is kind of loud and i don't really want to have to mow it in a ballistic helmet as much as my neighbors already think i'm odd that would probably just push it right over the top perfect oh i know it would especially oh god my crazy neighbor but no then she's really gonna think that i'm with the government perfect no no i don't need any more hassle from that lady. Oh, Jesus in heaven. But yeah, I mean, that's just, when I start making decisions about equipment,

like you have to always bear in mind that like what I'm always looking for is, is that there is an intersection point between I am a cheap bastard, and this works good enough to be somewhat legit. And wherever those two points click together is usually where i buy and like the team wendy bump is a perfectly respectable helmet oh it's very reasonable money and to go it is it's exceptionally reasonable exceptionally reasonable that's a perfect description for me in a lot of ways. Perfectly exceptional. Reasonably exceptional, perfectly average, something in there. Something like that.

But in any case. No, really. What are the odds I'm ever going to use this ballistic helmet for what it was intended for? Probably zero. Because first off, it's down in my kit box in the basement. Bump in the night, I'm not going to go down and get my kit box.

I'm not going to be wearing this in the event of a, you know, New Madrid fault line that makes the Mississippi run backwards for five days. I'm going to have too much other shit to be worrying about than to worry about this helmet. But it's kind of cool, and I'll probably wear it to a night vision class when I get night vision. That's really about it. It was all for cool guy points. Yeah.

Raggle Fraggle, feel free to send it to me. I mean, I'm sure by now you know what all of our socials are and you can find me on any of those. State? Shit. Facebook group. Throw it on there. You could throw it on the Facebook group. I am not usually that good about checking facebook because facebook is kind of a cesspool our group

is cool but facebook as a whole is a cesspool it's not reddit it's not as bad as reddit but it's a cesspool but anyway well i'm not currently banned from facebook time to fix that all right all right let me time to go antagonize folks well i think we covered about everything we said to cover like the whole the whole point of this episode was really to just like when the last time i feel like we talked about night vision like i was still kind of getting my feet wet i say getting my feet wet so you have to bear in mind that the first time I played with Night Vision was when I was 18 years old and I was wearing a green uniform

with a patch on my shoulder. And it was a PBS7. Probably about 1500 FOM. It was green. It was not fun. And I had a half-crazy staff sergeant in the passenger seat of a deuce nav screaming at me to go faster while I learned to drive under night vision.

Scariest moments of my young life, up to combat. So, like, I've played with night vision before, but, like, the last time we talked about night vision, I was still kind of figuring out what I didn't know because night vision, like, everything in the tactical community has undergone this night and day transformation from pre-GWAT to now. So Andrew had kind of like already started down that path, getting a PBS 14 and getting into it and taking classes. And I was catching up to bridge a gap between what I knew, which was antiquated, to what's current.

And I feel like, you know, this was warranted you're getting there yeah well this was warranted because like i told andrew like i don't just want to like tip to butt grand thumb talk about the parts that are on the rifle and nothing there's anything wrong with that but i really want to talk about the why because a lot of times like especially when you get into like that whole discussion about like do you use switch? Do you not use a switch? How do you do cable management? Those are all things that Andrew and I have made different decisions on based on experience. And sometimes I make decisions based on his experience

because I'm like, I saw that screw him over and I don't want to be screwed just like he was. Or I start looking at things like, this works because I have a very specific set of requirements I'm trying to fulfill with this, and those requirements are not Andrew's requirements. So I'm making different decisions. I'm putting things in different places because at the end of the day, what I always tell people about firearms is, like many things, make it work for you.

I can't tell you what the perfect way for you to do something is. You're the only one that can figure that out. I'm just going to give you enough ideas that hopefully you can say, this works, this doesn't, and you piece together your own plan. But the minute you start copying somebody else's stuff without asking if it works in your application, the minute you do that, you're on the wrong path, in my opinion. Yeah. And really, I think one thing I've always done, fortunately, I learned this from other people's experience. When I make a change to a firearm that I own, I make one change. If it's the position of my buttstock, it is one change, one small change, so that you don't get to the point where you've made four or five changes and then you make a range trip and you hate it, but you don't know why you hate it.

Okay, you change your buttstock. You don't like it. You go back. You sell the other one. You change your pistol grip. Okay, you like it or don't. You don't have a cascading stack of things to try and evaluate. Just like with any kind of scientific experiment you're going to be doing.

One variable at a time. You know, it's worked for me. My guns end up staying fairly simple because of it. I mean, when I was running ARs, red dot. That's all that was on it was not really very special just had a red dot shotgun my shotgun's still currently bare after class i don't think i'll be ready to start tossing red dots and lights on my shotgun for probably another thousand rounds of 12 gauge just because i want to make sure that everything that's on there i am truly happy with

the way it is yeah and i will just say like as we kind of round this out round this out like every time i and this isn't even a guns conversation this is guns trucks freaking every this is hiking boots this is everything with me yep and this is the way i encourage y'all to be out there in the audience. Every time I get something, it will not stabilize until I have F'd with it 12 different ways. I'm going to tweak everything on it a tiny little bit until

I find the way that works best for me. And only then am I going to leave it alone and it will finally stop getting stuff taken off of it. That rifle behind me has been ripped down to bare receivers and completely rebuilt because what I had built at the time fit the set of requirements I had for it. It had to fit in a very small spot.

It was a truck gun. So being able to fold and being very space efficient was key and took a lot of priority over a lot of other things. And then I didn't have need for it as a truck gun anymore because I had something else that fit that role. So this thing got ripped apart, turned into a carbine. And once I started putting things back onto the firearm, I started moving stuff.

I started moving controls around. I started moving the air socket finger stop that's on there that kind of helps locate my hand. I started moving the Arasaka finger stop that's on there that kind of helps locate my hand. I kept moving stuff. I moved the optics package back and forward until I found the spot everything fit. And that's all I ever encourage people to do is do not be afraid to duct tape, zip tie, and hack, cut, andb weld your way to the perfect thing for you because you should continue like there are two schools of thought here there's that person out there that says the the weapon is the weapon you learn to work around it and that's the way that the military

teaches us because they don't let you modify your weapons in the military they're boring like that unless you're like one of the cool guys with the beards, they get to do all kinds of interesting stuff. But to be fair, they need to be able to issue you rifle number seven or rifle number 4,000. Different set of requirements, right? Exactly. But here in the civilian world,

we don't have those constraints upon us. So why not make the weapon fit your requirements as well as it can? And if that means, if that means screwing with it 12 different times, then go for it. Yeah. Just, I just, I just ask you do it in a scientific fashion. So you know what you've changed and you know, whether or not it works. Yeah. And if you don't, if you don't abide by that advice, because I don't, sometimes I change three things at once, but you know, but what I am very particular about is

that I don't change things so I'd ask myself why do I want to change this like I don't do very I don't do changes because it's cool guy Instagram points I could care I do it because this isn't exactly the way I want it and this isn't the best way I think works for me so I'm gonna fool with it and it might be better might be worse but at I think works for me, so I'm going to fool with it. And it might be better, it might be worse, but at least I know what goalposts I'm running towards, and not just what gets me likes on the gram. You're modifying with intention.

Yes. Sometimes that intention is as simple as it makes me happy. That's perfectly valid. Right, and there's nothing wrong with that. I mean, I don't like spray painting my guns. I just don't. Some people do. Some people love it.

Fine, whatever. Does it really affect how the gun works? Probably not. No. The day after the zombie apocalypse, I will Krylon all my firearms. But until then, there's something about a Krylon firearm that just makes my skin crawl, and I don't like it. It's fine for y'all. It's just not cool for me.

So that's why my guns don't have the cool guy Krylon paint that just makes my skin crawl and I don't like it. It's fine for y'all. It's just not cool for me. So that's why my guns don't have like the cool guy Krylon paint jobs on them. I have seen an awful lot of people that do it and have no problems after they've done it. I've seen people that have done it and then they have a real bear of a time taking things apart because they accidentally painted over something they shouldn't. Do I think that I would do that? Maybe. I've made worse mistakes before. You do it at least three times if your history holds out. Exactly. Probably three times. Let's go ahead and punt this one out the door. Prepper Camp is...

We're recording this on the 19th y'all are listening to this probably on the 20th or after prepper camp is next weekend nick will not be there andrew and i will this year we're going to record at least a morning podcast and post it from out there friday saturday and sunday so you know you might not get your content first thing in the morning on Friday because we have to post it and everything. It might be later in the morning, but we'll post some morning shows. We'll record as many people as want to come on the show as a guest. We're going to make sure we grab them and make some content that will be coming out after we get home because that's a little bit of an editing job and a lot of bandwidth to get all that pushed up into the Internet. And if you're out of Prepper camp, come look for us.

Like, you know, we will not be hard to find if you come looking for us around the campsites. Just listen for the sound of hooliganism and we will probably be right there in the middle of it. And come find us in the vendors area. My wife has taken command of the Matter of Facts booth and it's going to be much nicer than anything I could have put together because she's so much smarter than I am when it comes to anything aesthetic. That's why we have

wives, man. Thank Christ they put up with us. They put everything together. And they put up with us, which is a blessing. Truth. Alright, MatterFacts going out the door. Nick, thanks for joining me tonight and I wish we could have hung on to Andrew for another half hour, but he had adult stuff to do, so we'll cut him some slack.

It's important. Yeah, I guess. Alright, good night, everybody. Have fun. Stay out of trouble. Talk to you in a week. Bye. Night. We'll be right back. Thank you. I'll see you next time.