Harbor Freight Propane Torch Review

 

Harbor Freight Propane Torch
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Buying an affordable piece of raw land typically means either spending a lot of money or inheriting someone’s problems.  Since I don’t have a lot of money I got a piece of property with lots of issues.  The main one being that the previous owner basically abandoned it and it was horribly grown up.

With the land being more than an hour from my home cleaning the land was a nightmare.  Getting there and getting to work took time.  Luckilly I have a secret weapon.

FIRE!  Fire has been used to clear land for as long as the earth has had humans.  The problem is controlling the fire.

To clear my land I burned firebreaks by closely controlling the burn on one side and sectioning off the land so that the fire could only spread in the direction I wanted.

I was helped in my controlled burn by my harbor freight propane torch.

*Update:

It is October 2018 and this torch is still going strong.  It sits on my back deck exposed to the elements and while it is rusty, I use it a few times a week to light my grill.

Emergency Dentistry Handbook

Book Review: Emergency Dentistry Handbook
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Armed conflict, disaster relief, missionary work, back-country travel, humanitarian aid—these all are situations where you may come into contact with someone experiencing dental pain under adverse conditions.

Emergency Dentistry Handbook is a field guide to providing dental care in such challenging environments, where resources and trained personnel are scarce and you need to save a tooth, manage pain, and prevent the spread of infection.

The guidelines in this book are intended to provide emergency dental care in “forward” areas and help bridge the gap until definitive care can be given by a trained dental professional.

Paramedic Met Clark, who has devoted his professional career to the special challenges of providing medical care in remote and austere environments, shows you how to:

  • recognize and manage dental trauma, inflammation, and infection
  • perform simple procedures for examining and cleaning teeth, draining abscesses, splinting repaired teeth, extracting teeth, and more
  • administer essential medications, including painkillers, antibiotics, topical anesthetics, and various forms of anesthesia
  • identify dental emergencies that require evacuation to a higher level of care
  • stock three levels of field dental kits

Like emergency war surgery, this is not a skill to learn from a book, I have seen some emergency dental workshops for preppers in the past, and I highly recommend you go take one.

Hive Management

Book Review: Hive Management
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The beekeeper’s year begins with a late winter hive inspection and ends with “putting the bees to bed” in the autumn. Richard Bonney believes that each beekeeping activity should be performed with an eye toward the overall well-being of the colony, as part of an integrated year-round program of hive management.

Long-term success in beekeeping can only be achieved by understanding the intimate lives, behaviors, and motivations of honey bees — the factors which govern the life of each colony.

In this book, Richard Bonney explains the reasons behind common practices that many beekeepers perform without really knowing why.

He also stresses when to take timely actions that will prevent problems in future seasons.

Hive Management offers concise, up-to-date information on the whole range of beekeeping tasks, including:

— How to prevent, control, and capture swarms.

— What you can tell from an outside inspection of your hives.

— When and how to “take the crop” and harvest honey.

— How to successfully requeen — from handling and marking queens to methods of introducing one into a hive.

— The problem signs to look for when you open up a hive.

For the practicing beekeeper who needs more information, or for the serious novice who wants to start out right, Hive Management offers sensible advice to help keep your honey bees thriving.

Strength of Materials

Book Review: Strength of Materials
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Strength of Materials was developed at MIT, to be a textbook.

This distinguished introductory text is popular at engineering schools around the world. It also serves as a refresher and reference for professionals.

In addition to coverage of customary elementary subjects (tension, torsion, bending, etc.), Strength of Materials features advanced material on engineering methods and applications, plus 350 problems and answers. 1949 edition.

I keep this book to help design projects that I am working on, as well as to teach myself engeneering concepts.  But beside that normal use, I keep it so that people more trained than me may have it available in the event of a large scale disaster.

I look at reference books like  Strength of Materials the same way I look at surgical supplies stored away.  I am not the one that will use it, but that does not mean that the person using my stored goods won’t use it to help me.

This is not an easy book to read, but that does not mean that it is not valuable.  But, it is an introductory text, so it is not beyond the abilities of any individual that is willing to take the time to think about what they are reading.

Surgical Speed Shooting

Book Review: Surgical Speed Shooting
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Surgical Speed Shooting helps you learn the secrets of shooting a handgun quickly and accurately under the extreme stress of a gunfight.

These cutting-edge techniques for managing recoil in rapid fire, high-speed trigger control and more are used by today’s hostage rescue teams and competitive grandmasters.

Andy Stanford is a well known firearm instructor, and the shooter on the cover is the famous/infamous James Yeager.

I actually come from a town near where Yeager came from and took my very first handgun permit from him before the goatee and tattoos.

All that aside, this book is about how to shoot fast and accurately – and that is something I can get behind no matter who is the person teaching.