How To (How I Did) Archives | Page 33 of 43

21 Aug 2013

How to Test Soil Test For Clay Content

This post came from several places; Christina Ott and I talked about this on the podcast and I read about it in the Hand Sculpted House.

I think Cob construction has some great benefits to preppers and homesteaders, but before you decide that cob is the material you will build with you really ought to test your soil to see if it is appropriate for your land.

Cob should be a mixture of sand, clay, and fiber – It is my understanding that the best mix is 30-50% clay. Sand gives it form and the fiber gives it tensile strength, but it is the clay sticks it all together. This post shows an easy soil test for cob.

Cob Building Clay Test

First scrape away the top organic layer.
Next take a cup or two of soil from various potential house sites and from various depths. (Soil samples can vary a lot even a few feet from each other.)
Take out any stones or pebbles.
Put each sample in a quart jar, you should have about 1/3 of the jar full of broken up soil.
Label each jar
Next fill the jar 2/3 full with water and either some salt or a couple drops of dish soap.
Shake well. Very well – make your arms tired, switch off with someone, and then switch back and tire yourself out again.
Then let it settle. If your soil has sand, silt and clay in it, you’ll get three distinct layers.
The sand is the heaviest and will sink to the bottom as you watch.
The silt will settle next, and the clay will stay suspended in the water for a couple days then settle on top of the silt.

Finally, the best soil with have little silt and a lot of clay. As you can always add sand to get the proper consistency.

14 Aug 2013

How to Make an Emergency Duct Tape Keychain Roll

This common Duct Tape Keychain tip is well known among backpackers. If wrap some duct tape around a water bottle or lighter you will always have a couple feet readily available for quick repairs.

I Went One Step Farther

In the video below I show some wrapped around a small disposable lighter, but taking the concept one step farther I took an old ink pin that was no longer serviceable and cut the ends off with a pipe cutter.

This left me a hollow tube as long as the roll of tape was wide.

I then wrapped about 4 feet of tape around the tube – in essence creating a mini-roll of black duct tape.

I then untied my monkey fist from my key-chain and threaded the tube along the length of paracord.

When I retied it, I now have a captive roll of tape that is always with me.

It takes no extra space, and adds very little weight.

I like it, and I hope it is useful to you. Until I went back to work at the prison and had to significantly alter my EDC for the correction environment I carried this ring daily for years. Having the tape on your person leads you to have need for it more than you would think.

13 Aug 2013

How to Make a Keychain Ferrocerium Rod Using Torch Flint

I want to take a couple minutes to show you a redundant fire starting method that is cheap, tiny, and easy. We are going to make a DIY Keychain Ferrocerium Rod using welder striking tips.

If you are a welder, plumber, or anyone who uses torches, you are no doubt familiar with friction sparkers. They are used to light propane or acetylene torches.

What makes the sparkers work are small ferrocerium rods that are held in a small threaded brass fitting. These rods are replaceable. Normally when you buy a sparker you get 5 or 6 of them in the package.

I went to Wal-Mart and bought a new torch sparker for about $5.00. Next, I then put one of the replacement tips in my drill press and drilled it out with a small drill bit.

The fitting was brass. Drilling it out was not hard at all.

I then threaded it on my keychain.

It weights fractions of an ounce – only a couple of grains (4,000 grains to a pound) and is tiny enough not to get in the way.
But now I have a waterproof, EMP proof, never run out of gas way to get a spark under almost any condition.

Plus, it sure beats a fire drill….

7 Aug 2013

How to Make a Milk Crate Camping Toilet

As the wife and I go to the farm we will have to rough it until I get some infrastructure built. For me, natural morning tasks can be done behind a tree. However, not only is Genny more civilized, she does not have a camping background.

To be nice to her I decided to make her a camping toilet. Hopefully, that would make her feel a little more comfortable. Note, I don;t want her TOO comfortable or it would take a longer time to get her to let spend money to build.

When I was in the Marines, we has a metal folding chair that our welder cut a hole in the seat before mounting a toilet seat to. We kept on the back deck of out M88A1 and when out in the field it was easy to set up.

I don’t want to cut up my folding chairs. However, I do have some milk crates.

Milk crates, incidentally, fit over a 5 gallon bucket.

By using a bucket under the toilet it allows me to pack the waste home and dispose of in our septic system. However, in a grid down situation, I could empty it into a deep hole away from any water sources.

How I Made a Milk Crate Toilet Seat

I bought a new wooden toilet seat for $5.00.

The angle of the brackets did not allow me to mount it directly to the milk crate without modification. I unscrewed the brackets from the seat.

I screwed a 1×2 wood strip to one side of the bottom (soon to be top) of the crate. This will eventually be were the bracket is screwed to.

I placed the seat on the crate and adjusted it to where I wanted. Next, I drilled and countersunk 4 holes in the seat. Then I used my reciprocating saw to cut out a hole.

Using some large washers and the bolts, I bolted the seat to the crate.

I then reattached the bracket to the seat lid, and screwed the bracket into the wood strip I attached to the crate earlier.

The plan is to set the crate on some bricks to both raise it to a comfortable level, as well as to keep the crate from completely covering the bucket, as that would make it more difficult to remove (last thing I want is to fight with a sloshing bucket of poop)…

Hopefully this little project will make my wife’s camping experience a little easier, and that you can find a way to adapt this idea to you bug out/SHTF/Camping needs.

23 Jul 2013

How to Make Arrow Fletching With Duct Tape

Duct Tape Arrow Fletching — Buy at Amazon

Several years ago I tried out Dave Canterbury’s sling bow. It was fun and I saw that it had potential, Unfortunately, arrows are expensive. The short arrows I bought just did not develop enough energy to be useful.

I decided to look into making my own arrows. Arrow-making has obviously been around a long time. So it is a pretty developed science. Feathers arraigned in a 3 feather system are the most common. However, some use 2 or 4 feathered fletching systems. Additionally plastic vanes are available commercially.

In today’s article we are going to go “mad max” and create Duct Tape Arrow Fletching.

The Prepper MacGyver’s Most Common Resource is Duct Tape.

The great thing about duct tape is that is common, cheap, is not too stiff so that it can bend as it comes in contact with the bow, but when doubled up is stiff enough to direct the arrow in flight.

To make fletching simply cut three bits of tape about six inches long.

Pick up one piece and bend it lengthwise to form a “U” with the sticky side outwards. The base of this “U” is stuck lengthwise along the shaft – in other words (and the video will help) the middle of the tape is stuck to 1/3 of the diameter of the shaft with the two ends flopping free.

Now pick up the second piece and bend it like the first one. This one will be stuck in position a third of the way around the shaft from the first one, while the first bit of tape is still bent in the “U” position to keep it out of the way. You do not want the two pieces of tape to stick together until you get everything situated. (I find that clipping the loose ends of the first piece of tape together keeps them out of the way.

Once you feel that the two pieces of tape are sitting in the right position, you can allow the two adjacent wings of tape to stick to each other, forming the first complete vane.

Mold the tape against the shaft to get it to stick well. The two bits of tape will sometimes stick without being exactly in the right position thus skewing the vane or making it lumpy.

Apply the third piece of tape is applied in a similar manner.

Tips for Duct Tape Fletching

A challenge with this tape fletching is to get three flat and evenly spaced vanes.

Another problem is to end up with the vanes where you want them in relation to your nock so that you get the conventional “cock and hen feather” configuration with the cock feather at right angles to the plane of the nock.

Once you have the tape into place, you can trim the vanes with sharp scissors.

Keep the vanes tapering down to nothing at the leading end so that they ride nicely past the bow and your bow hand.

Keep the vanes as narrow as possible and make the taper as long as possible.

You can also apply a tight wrap of soft insulation tape over the very front end of these plastic vanes to stop them catching and pulling away.

Obviously this won’t give you a good a result as using proper fletching and a jig like the one below, but it is serviceable and just the thing to use if your using a homemade PVC bow (more on that later).

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