Articles by Paul Helinski

I have always been a fan of the .44 Magnum, not because it is the biggest boy on the block (it’s not), but because you can always get ammo for it, and it’s easy and cheap to reload. But probably the biggest strength of the .44 Mag is that you can get ammo at most any gun shop, and even at Walmarts that still carry ammo. To me that outweighs the little bit of extra power you can get with guns that are more powerful, and that have much more expensive and rare ammo. I think every gun accumulation should have a .44 Mag in it. And if you can afford one of the top name (and price) brands, you should consider them. But if you’re on a budget, I have found that this new generation of Taurus products are extremely high quality. The Model 444 Raging Bull 44 Mag .has been around for a generation at this point, and at a street price of under $700, I thought it was worth a new look and a range test. After a couple hundred rounds downrange, the gun did not disappoint. The Raging Bull is a handful, to hold and to shoot, but if you are in the market for a .44 Mag, I think you’d be surprised by this big Taurus stainless steel revolver.

I like to share my failures with you all along with my successes, and I have to to tell you, water, the most important resource of all, is a tough thing to collect and store successfully. I set up my own collection system over a year ago, when I first started this column in March of 2014, and water was my very first actual article. For me, the most bang for the buck was to buy some used IBC totes, which I showed you in that article. Then I had gutters installed on my house, with the downspouts directly feeding into the tanks. The result was a lot of water, but a year and a half later, it’s not as simple. I also tried an alternate water collection system, as I’ll explain, and that is still giving me fits.

I try to take nothing for granted. For some people it is probably a no brainer to have a couple hurricane kerosene lanterns on hand, and I’m sure a lot of you have at least one Coleman white gas lantern with mantles. But did you know that both of both of those will work with much more common fuels, and have you thought about whether you should store some extra wicks and mantles? How long does fuel last? How cheap can you get extra lanterns, and what is the best choice for fuel conservation? There are also some really good and cheap LED options for survival lighting these days as well. So for this week we take a opportunity to consider a few inexpensive approaches to light. There is a pretty good chance you will want to see at night once the lights go out. And you may feel confident that you have a plan for emergency lighting, but what will you do when the lights go out for good?

I’m sorry that I didn’t get this out quicker for those of you who have deer season kicking in this week in your state. This product, the Walker Game Ear, shocked me when I got to test it this summer, and I had in mind that I should run the story before deer season, because it is an absolute secret weapon. If you haven’t tried these things, they have super sensitive microphones embedded in them, so they not only protect your ears from your eventual gunshots, they also allow you to hear like…well, a deer.

It seems like everything that I look into when it comes to survival is not simple. You would think that the extent of survival dentistry you need to know doesn’t extend further than “yank the darn tooth,” but that is not the case. I sat down and actually read the book, “Where There Is No Dentist,” by Murray Dickson, and I highly suggest that you buy this $16 book, and some of the tools and medications that will make substantive dentistry possible. There are very few non-fatal injuries as debilitating as tooth pain (disk pain of the back being the only one I can think of worse), and if left to fester, tooth maladies themselves can be fatal. The book was apparently written to help volunteer medical workers in African villagers, but it includes everything that you will need in a survival situation.

About the scariest thing I can think of is to lose contact with my children in a world over the brink of collapse. Most young people don’t even have a land based phone line these days, so if the cell networks go down, that’s it. But there is a way, if you do it now, to establish a communications protocol with loved ones who are hundreds, or even thousands of miles away. As I’ve discussed a few times before in this column, the Amateur radio bands, otherwise known as the Ham bands, under 30 megahertz, are capable of reaching around the entire globe at certain times of the day. Full access Ham radios, covering several bands, or even all the Ham bands, sell for $300 to $10,000, but I found some small radios that cover only one frequency for as little as under $10. You have to still buy an antenna, but the overall cost could be as little as $50. As a bare bones mode of communication on a very tight budget I don’t think you can beat these little radios.

Answer:A $25,000 inflatable concrete building. Just add water.
Question: What is a Concrete Canvas Shelter?

Believe it or not, this is not a joke, and when I encountered this product it reminded me that I have been meaning to discuss the qualifications for a proper nuclear fallout shelter for some time. But I have to admit, of all the survival preparations I’ve written about for this column, this is one of very few I have not actually worked out for myself. That is why I found this product so interesting.

Thermoelectric generators are not a new technology. “TEG” power was discovered in 1821, but I have to admit, it is new to me. I recently discovered three consumer products that create electricity from direct heat, and all three of them have survival applications. One of them is the best bugout or camp stove I have ever encountered, and I would take it one step further and say that it is the best bugout cooking solution I have ever encountered, period. A second is made for generating electricity while you cook your dinner, and I had marginal success with it. The third is made for a high level of direct heat electricity production, and you can drive it from your rocket stove, a camp stove, and they have models from 10 watts up to 100 watts that use waste heat from your wood stove.

A few weeks ago I was interviewed on a radio show about this prepping column, and during the commercials I heard an ad for a specific survival food company that claimed to offer more “calories per dollar” than everyone else. On checking their website, that number is 250 calories per dollar. I have been buying and storing food for over a year now, since my original food article, and all this time I have had a really hard time explaining to people the importance of making the most out of their prepping dollars, and focusing on supermarket food, not survival food. The company itself didn’t impress me, especially after they bailed on sending review food when I explained this article. But then I realized, that’s it! It really is all about calories per dollar! And that claim of 250 calories per dollar may be high when compared to other brands of survival food, but compared to the foods below, all from Walmart, they are embarrassing for the actual food you get. Even expensive name brand Dinty Moore beef stew is 238 calories per dollar. Which would you rather eat? Other foods here are well over 1,000 calories per dollar, and one is over 4,000 calories per dollar.