Tuesday, January 10, 2012

Improvise, adapt, and overcome...and shit.

So no shit there I was….trying to get into the armory.



A week or so ago I headed into work and needed to get into our armory. The outer perimeter fence is secured via an mk1 mod o lock big ass 1 each. It had been raining like a champ for a few days prior and the temp dropped rapidly overnight  coating everything in a few inches of ice…which pretty much fuckin rocks.

I skate across the ice from my truck to the fence and find the lock mechanism frozen out like a married man’s sex life…FUCKINGREAT (that’s a word by the way).

As I contemplate vehicle breaching the gate and or cutting holes through the wire like a VC sapper in WW NAM I start digging through my truck looking for ways to get the lock open.

I carry a fairly large vehicle survival kit in my truck in a filson bag (It’s a satchel…Indiana Jones has one). Contained within that survival kit I have several ways to get a fire going, amongst them a lighter/flint and steel/9v battery and steel wool/and some of these bad boys http://www.fast-fire.com/index.php?p=products&prod=7  the SOLKOA fastfire tinder’s. Now before we continue…yes I am trained in wilderness survival and can get a fire going with a bow and drill…you should learn this as well for a longer life, that being said…sometimes the easy route is the best route.

Hmmm…FIRE. \m/



Out come the fastfire tinder’s and the lighter (It was too delicate an operation for flint and steel as I had to position the tinder on top of the lock and couldn’t disturb it without knocking the tinder off the lock).



A few frozen fingered moments later and I had ….wait for it……wait for it…..wa FIRE! I let it burn for about 15 seconds which melted the ice out of the lock and whammo… access to the giggle cage.

Not its intended use but it got the job done. I need to order some more as I’m down currently down to my last one….which of course meant that a few days ago I had the EXACT SAME PROBLEM and our maintenance department didn’t have any lock de-icer…so I fucked around…and fucked around….and finally just got pissed off and beat the shit out of the lock with an etool (Folding shovel) until the ice broke up enough to allow the lock mechanism to turn and unlock.

You see being  down to my last fire starter meant that if I had used it Murphy would have ass raped me on the way home and I would have needed that to get a warming fire going after center punching a unicorn on the highway and freezing to death in the cold….or something.

Moral of the story…buy some of these things as they can literally save your ass, and also an etool ;). I also own the Suma container which has several uses and I had one of the grip S kits but broke it in about 3 seconds…story of my life. This stuff is all made by SOLKOA, a personnel recovery/SERE training outfit and is good to go. Check them out.

In other news, stay tuned for some updates to 4:1 products which should be available soon, as well as some pretty awesome MG related stuff I’m working R&D on. Thanks for reading folks.

\m/

4 comments:

  1. That's thinking outside the box...er...lock. I like the alternate of "beat the winter off it" too, since that's the method I use most often, with admittedly varying results. Thanks for the tip!

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