Field Curiosities | A Corner for the Curious

I’ve spent too many hours in forums, too many nights digging through European second-hand collector sites, chasing that next thing that makes the pulse jump.
Old rifles with oil still in the grain, knives that have been sharpened more times than I can count, and bits of kit that smell like lanolin and history.

That’s where Field Curiosities comes in.

It’s a new corner of Raptor Outfitters — a place to show a bit of love to the wonderful pieces of history that still matter. Some we’ll sell, some we’ll just talk about, because half the fun is in the story.

If you’ve got something interesting tucked away, something with a story worth sharing, we’d love to hear about it. We’ll happily build a blog around it and give it a bit of daylight. This isn’t a fast project; it’ll move at the same speed everything else around here does — sporadic, slightly haphazard, but always forward.

Sometimes you’ll see pieces for sale. Other times it’ll just be an article on a Winchester 1895 that will never leave the safe, or a Vietnam-era jacket that’s lived three lives already. The Field Curiosities cabinet is where you’ll find the preloved, the weird, and the wonderful — the stitched-up, smoke-soaked, second-hand stories that connect us to the past.

It’s about the stitching, the smell, and that feeling you get when you open an old book and find someone’s handwritten notes in the margins.

We know selling old military gear isn’t new. But this isn’t just selling. It’s keeping the conversation going — a small online forum of sorts, built around shared curiosity.

So here it is — our first step into something slower, smaller, and maybe more meaningful. Away from the shiny new stuff and the expensive European jackets.
Just a quiet little place for history to breathe.

Our first official piece under Field Curiosities: the NZDPM Wool Swanni, and, fittingly, a tin of Scho-Ka-Kola — both built for endurance, both stitched into history