forever shotgun

FOREVER SHOTGUN

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note: BP from NBH ( North BumHump, since I don't know where you hang your hat ), many thanks for a generous donation, and the kind words.
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note: a wonderful minion just sent these to me.  I don't know how they work but it looks like a nifty product to use with a wetstone for a great knife edge http://amzn.to/2uh9Kcv
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I offered one of the worlds best books, “Forever Gun”, last year.  If you for some bizarre reason missed it, it is available for the outrageously expensive cost of a whole friggin dollar, with a bonus book added, in Bison Book Batch #9.  I understand that some of you can’t fathom why they would cough up fifty cents to support an author, and to you I say, crap, never mind dude!  I guess you at least serve the purpose of inflating my reader numbers so I think I’m more important.  To quickly recap, although I of course think the whole book is well worth the read, if you reload your rimfire you can still get an entire arsenal for $300 if you can find a hundred dollar rifle.  The Forever Gun concept is that of being armed with smokeless powder long after all your enemies are using bows and crossbows and spears with the odd black powder musket thrown in.  Smokeless, even at rimfire and pistol cartridge strengths, or more properly, weaknesses, is far superior to other missile weapons, so you try to keep one going for, ideally, forever.  Hence the title.  I use an arbitrary number of rounds of ten thousand.

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Ten thousand rounds, used as a guerrilla warrior rather than a semi simian wildly hosing down the battlefield with lead hoping to hit something while frightening your enemies with the noise, should last a very long time indeed.  I’d strongly advise trying to get a rimfire revolver ( the semi is both a semi and won’t cycle with substandard rounds ) for another $200.  Normally I hate battlefield pistols, but with some weapons they are almost required.  Like when your rifle is an anemic rimfire.  If you want to step up your rounds wounding capacity you’ll need to go to the 9mm.  The reloads are much more reliable, and only twice the price ( 3 cent reloading supplies rimfire, six cents the 9 ), although the guns are $500 rather than $300 for a carbine/pistol combo, plus you’ll need magazines as an extra cost.  I covered other ways to achieve a Forever Gun, from extra reloading components for your battle rifle, to betting on being able to battlefield retrieve ammunition ( not that I think that will be viable unless we stay in a militia porn collapse rather than move to PODA ) and so owning the three main calibers in bolt rifles, to thirty cal inserts and I’m sure one or two others such as black powder.  What I didn’t cover in detail was the Forever Shotgun, only giving it a one sentence treatise on the last page of the book.  Let’s cover that a bit more.

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I suck at shooting a shotgun, pure and simple.  I’m about as accurate with a scatter gun as I am with a Chinese SKS without its sites adjusted ( in case you haven’t had the pleasure, try feet rather than inches at less than a hundred yards-I should have known there was a reason the thrift store always had them available for $100 ).  So I no longer own any just for that reason.  My relatively open local terrain is merely another reason to forego ownership.  Perhaps I have some weird bodily proportioning and can’t use a bead site.  I have no idea.  I won’t spend the money getting regular leaf and post sites on one of the guns to find out.  So a lot of this is academic.  Some of it you are going to have to experiment with.  The big one is primers.  You can go the smart and easy route and buy shotgun primers, and you may, but as usual I’m assuming complete and total money contraction issues and am going completely frugal.  Hell, the Forever Gun concept is purely optional as it is.  Why add to the cost?

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You need to focus on the feeding of your primary rifle first, as it is.  That is priority.  The Forever Gun is AFTER your main battle rifle has all the ammo you think necessary.  The Forever Gun is for when the better gun runs dry.  If you don’t care for the rimfire or a pistol carbine and if your terrain is appropriate, and if you really just love the shotgun, but are poor ( which would kind of be self evident as poor boys own shotguns rather than AR’s ), this might just be the Forever Gun you favor.  All it is is paper shotgun hulls and separate primer material and planning on using black powder as propellant.  Whereas a 9mm or a black powder rifle costs you $1200 on up for ten thousand rounds plus weapon, a reloaded rimfire or a shotgun both stay at the $300 mark, which is what it cost prior to about 2006 for buying 10k of factory rimfire plus the rifle.  A lot more preppers can afford $300 compared to $1300, and the whole point of the frugal forever gun is to be affordable so you can actually own it rather than dream of it.

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Now, this is by far no lazy mans arsenal.  You’ll need to make your own powder, covered below, and reload primers.  Here is the first issue you might encounter.  I don’t know if the amount of primer material used in a rimfire is sufficient to ignite a load of black powder in a shotgun shell.  I’m assuming if it is, you get the one cent cost. 

22LRreloader.com

That is the company that sells the rimfire reloader kit, along with the priming liquid that is $20 and is supposed to reload two thousand rimfire shells.  Obviously you’ll want to test this yourself rather than assume it will work, or then you might end up without as many rounds as you think.  My advice would be to ONLY use the reloading primer chemical if it is only one cent.  If it is two drops, double the cost, why bother?  Just spend three cents and get a factory made ready made more reliable shotgun primer. 

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I’ve read many folks boasting they made black powder as kids, and an equal amount crying that its manufacture is more difficult than you imagine.  Granted, those kids probably just bought the ingredients rather than made them from the dirt in the chicken coup, or maybe they actually did have a copy of the Army Improvised Explosives.  I don’t know.  I do know that given the need, you’ll eventually get it right and if louse ridden near medieval dudes can make the stuff, you can too.  Just have paper instructions on a couple of different ways to do it.  I have several, but I tend to recommend this: Backwoodsman magazine, July/August 2007, the article “black powder just like grandma’s”.  It is nitrates from dirt, just like the Army instruction manual, and scraped off rust.  Now, that article used to be reprinted somewhere online, but a Google search reveals nothing, nor does searching this or my last blog.  I know I posted the link, but I can’t find it.  You might be stuck spending the $6 for the magazine issue.  I can’t vouch for the articles accuracy, but it seems to have become quite popular.

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The longevity of the plastic hulls is not important.  They seem to be made from real crap, but since they are being used in a break open shotgun, paper or cardboard can easily be used instead.  Your gun can be as low as $100 this way, plus the twelve gauge has the cheapest ammo and it is the easiest to load with improvised material.  The bigger question is the life of the base.  They seem to usually be made of crap easily rusted steel rather than brass ( although I can’t vouch for this-I’m just going by appearances at the shooting range ).  You can buy a full length brass case for a buck each, but then you are negating your low price dictate.  I would just buy the loaded shells on sale for a quarter apiece and store them airtight, then when reloading keep the shells protected from moisture.  You’ll need to do that anyway once the paper hulls are being used.  I’m not sure about the longevity of all plastic shells.  If they can be re-used many times, if the base stays intact, you could always replace the upper part that is splitting with paper.  But, again, as you own the type of firearm this is something you’ll  need to experiment with.  If ALL shell types break, split, rust or disintegrate too quickly, this won’t even be a viable project.  The whole point to saving money is being able to reuse shells, besides skimping on the primer and having free powder.

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I’d just assume that the Wal-Mart $100 single shot break open shotgun is a real piece of offal and try not to buy it.  But if you can’t find a used one for that price, and have no choice but to not spend any more than possible, it is an option.  The primer material is $100 for, in theory, your ten thousand rounds in reloads, so that leaves you $100 for the ammunition.  Primed empty cases are as low as about thirteen cents, or you can just buy a loaded shell for twice that price.  Four hundred rounds of factory ammo, or 800 for shells that need your powder added.  Your choice, if you are on this limited budget.  I wouldn’t worry overly much about the projectiles as you can pretty much shoot anything loose from a shotgun.  Pebbles, pieces of nails, rusty staples pulled out of cheaply constructed trailers.  Don’t do something stupid like a steel slug ( okay, I don‘t even know if that will be possible.  Perhaps you‘ll try to improvise something equally too rigid such as aluminum ), but otherwise the pellets can be as improvised as the hull.  Glue to attach the paper to the base is as easily improvised as pitch for fletching was. 

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There might be a better way to do this, as I recall minion printed YouTube links previously.  You might instead opt for turning your war surplus bolt into a black powder rifle, hence only needing the three cent primer replacement, although I don’t know how many rounds you could shoot before fouling negated ejecting the case or how many times you could reload or how accurate it will be.  There are many factors.  But if nothing else, perhaps this got you thinking a bit outside the box.

END ( article related link http://amzn.to/2utXGX4 )

 

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