Gun Blog Variety Podcast #127 - Nice SHOT, Man

That's why I say man, nice SHOT
What a good SHOT, man

• The SHOT Show is over and Beth has some thoughts about the Good, the Bad, and possibly the Ugly aspects of it.
• Who steals a golf cart and punches a cop? Sean takes a closer look.
• Barron is on assignment and will return soon.
• In the Main Topic, Sean and Erin talk about the recent gun rights court victory, Ezell II.
• Tiffany also spent the week at SHOT Show. She asks "Why are we so divided?"
• Do you like wool clothes? They're great for the cold and wet that preppers might have to face. But how do you clean them when you don't have all your modern conveniences? Erin tells you how.
• Josh Horwitz, the Oompa Loompa of Gun Control, was on the Tucker Carlson show. And you just KNOW that Weer'd is going to take a crack at him.
• And our plug of the week is Bondic, the Liquid Plastic Welder. If you need to fix it, Bondic might just be the ticket.

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Listen to the podcast here.

Read the show notes here.

Thanks to LuckyGunner and Remington for their sponsorship, and a special thanks to Firearms Policy Coalition for their support.

Blue Collar Prepping Transcript:

Cleaning your Winter Wool

It’s wintertime for most of the country -- I say “most” because here in Florida, it’s still 73 degrees outside -- and when preppers put on their winter clothes, they’re usually made of wool. 

Wool is favored by preppers because it retains its insulating properties even when wet. This makes it a great material for clothes that could get immersed -- like socks -- or become damp from sweat. 

But the problem with wool is that it doesn’t clean easily. While this isn’t much of a problem for your favorite sweater that you take to the dry cleaners once a year, stinky clothes -- especially socks -- can be a hygiene and morale problem. 

So how do you clean your woolies? First of all, don’t wash them like regular clothes. There’s a link in the show notes to a video explaining why, but the short version is that wool, unlike cotton or synthetic fibers, is made out of protein -- which is exactly what most stains are made of, and most cleaning agents are optimized to destroy protein stains. So putting your wool clothes in with regular soap is about as effective as washing them in acid. 

In a non-emergency, the best way to clean your wool unmentionables is to use cold water and a soap that is listed as being wool-safe in the gentle (non-agitating) cycle, and then dry them without heat. 

But what do you do if you don’t have access to cold water and soap? Fortunately, there are other cleaning methods available to the intrepid prepper. 

The easiest method is to use snow. It’s free and it requires very little effort, but you need need snow -- not the easiest thing to find in places like Florida -- and it should be fresh, dry, powdery snow. Using wet snow will make your clothes soggy and you’ll have to carefully let it dry without heat, which is difficult to do in the winter. Assuming you can find this kind of snow, here is what you do:

1. Shake your clothing out to get rid of any loose dirt or dust. 
2. Hang your clothes outside for at least 30 minutes to allow them to reach air temperature. 
3. Using a clean broom if available -- and if not, use your hands -- sweep enough snow across the clothes to cover them but not bury them. 
4. Compress the snow onto the material using your palms or the flat of the broom. 
5. Let the snow sit for 15-20 minutes. Snow contains trace amounts of ammonia, and it will react with the cold air to cause stains to solidify and be expelled from the material. 
6. When time is up, flip the clothing over and repeat the above process. For garments like socks and underwear, you may need to turn them inside out and repeat the process again.
7. After you’ve done this to all the soiled sides, shake as much snow off the item and then hang it up to dry in the sunlight. If you’ve done it properly, the snow will evaporate without even getting your garment wet. 

If you don’t have access to snow, there’s still another option open to you, but it’s riskier. According to BCP author OkieRhio, who is a fiber arts enthusiast, you can clean soiled wool with plain white vinegar, so long as it’s no more than half cooking strength, and provided you don't have a delicate nose which is overly sensitive to the smell of vinegar on your clothes. 

However,  there is a problem with cleaning clothes with vinegar, because you have to make VERY certain that you get the material rinsed out EXTREMELY well, so that there is no trace of the vinegar remaining! This is because vinegar is something called a mordanting agent - a chemical used to make fibers more porous and prone to accepting color. What this means is that if you have this great wool sweater that you really like and you rinse it in cold vinegar water but don’t rinse all of the vinegar water out -- the next time you spill anything colored on your sweater, such as tea, your sweater will now be almost permanently stained by the tea. 

So here’s the takeaway from all this: Wool clothes are great to have for preps, but odds are good that if you need to clean them in an emergency, they are likely going to end up with odd colors or smells. That’s fine if they’re socks, gloves, or underwear -- function over form -- but keep in mind the drawbacks of cleaning your nicer wool clothes this way. 

• What Happens to My Wool Sweater in the Washer?
• How To Clean A Wool Blanket With Snow