more sympathetic #Slab-City documentary by Off The Cuff #video
#VICE on “New Zealand’s lost hippy commune” Mahana #video about mostly a guy who is sad that his Mahanamates are working to keep new people from coming into the community
Metales Pampa in Cañuelas sells machining stock such as hexagonal brass rod, sheet copper, round bar copper, rectangular copper plates, and also ¼" copper for refrigerators, etc. Mostly Imperial sizes. They say stupid things like “Latón al 99.99% de pureza” and list their bar stock in random categories like “electrical ionizers”.
#video on saggar firing #ceramics in a homemade raku kiln. But her saggar is ALUMINUM FOIL‽ Before firing she applies a terra sigillata coating to bone-dry clay, then burnishes it with a lint-free cloth to a beautiful shine, much like a #dorodango. After bisque firing (which seems to remove the shine, so maybe 995° wasn't hot enough to vitrify the terra sigillata) she pours ferric chloride over the pots, which surprisingly restores the surface smoothness, and after it dries, does it again. Then onto the wet ferric chloride she sprinkles blue vitriol, green vitriol, and Miracle-Gro from salt shakers, along with sugar and epsom salt. To protect her dining-room table from the ferric chloride she uses a polyethylene tarp. Inside the base of the “saggar” she adds straw or pet-shop sawdust to, I suppose, create a reducing atmosphere, and also apaprently to blacken the base of the pot. She also includes some bladderwrack or copper wire or saltwater-soaked twine or horsehair to mess up the pot’s surface more, then wrinkles the foil shut around the pot to make the final “saggar”. She did the initial bisque firing in an indoor electric kiln, then the final “saggar” firing in a gas-fired ceramic-fiber-insulated giant soup pot. Warns about the chloride fumes. Her target temperature for the “saggar” firing is 750°, which seems like plenty to melt aluminum, and her target ramp-up time is 35–40', after which she turns the kiln off, waits for it to cool to 300°, and then opens the kiln to remove the miraculously-still-intact aluminum-foil “saggars”, though she says, “On some of the pots it will have almost completely crumbled away.” She unwraps the others while still hot to permit some oxidation. When cool she polishes them with furniture wax.
#video #toread on cooking in “wild” clay #ceramics #bootstrapping
#video #ceramics “firing the replica Roman pottery kiln at Vindolanda”. Except for the mud chinking or “clamming” of the “roof” or “capping”, this “top-loader” kiln is reusable, built in imitation of a Roman-era design, and they fill it full of 88 pots before wood-firing it, with a voiceover explaining how the Romans did it. Eventually they’re firing in reduction, with flames streaming out of the exit flue at the top. Their thermocouples say the maximum temperature reached was 958° after using 107kg of wood. If I had to guess, they had fired about 40kg of pots. They waited until the next day to open the kiln, presumably to prevent thermal shock, and the firebox was empty, meaning that the kiln had probably gone back into oxidation before it finished cooling, preventing the production of the desired black ware. No pots broke, though.
#stealth-camping #video sleeping in a “non-permissive environment” (for soldiers or civilians in disaster scenarios, but generally with non-permissiveness caused “by the enemy”) Apparently FM7-22 says that soldiers need 8–9 hours of sleep per night, up from 4. His first recommendation is to dig a so-called “ranger grave” with an entrenching tool to get below ground level, “if the situation dictates”. For wet-weather gear he recommends surplus Gore-Tex gear and specifically “full-zip” pants that you can put on without taking your boots off, and especially a poncho, which can also be used as a ground cloth; he especially likes the USMC tarp poncho and the Bushcraft Outfitters poncho, which has snaps for different configurations. Mostly some bozo talking to the camera, though it does demonstrate some of the gear.
20 extreme #stealth-camping tips #video #toread
60 #bushcraft tips #video #toread
super #stealth-camping #video by British woman #WildBeare under a camouflage net in a depression in the ground near a freeway, blending in to the dry oak leaves that cover the ground.
#stealth-camping in the city #video. Full of ultra-right-wing propaganda, misinformation (starting with “over 80% of the population of the world lives in a [sic] urban environment” at 1'16”) and talking-head filler. Also the guy tries to use bigger words to sound more important, but isn’t very clear on what those words actually mean, so he ends up misusing them, making him sound like a policeman and making the video harder to understand. Unsurprisingly there’s also a bunch of soldier cosplay and ammunition ads, followed by a lot of bragging about how great they are. Finally they start talking about the actual topic around 6'00", but it turns out they’re talking about how to run away from the police, not how to stealth camp. It's 100% talking-head filler for the first 7 minutes, but then after he demonstrates taking off his shirt and walking down an alley, we’re back to talking-head filler. At 11 minutes they’re recommending mesh networks, but again, just talking to a camera about them. Finally at 19'19” the #survivalists start trying to demonstrate how to improvise a charcoal filter for water, in case you’re in a city whose water has been cut off by a natural disaster, but they don’t actually finish it. Some potentially effective suggestions: collect dew from short grass with clean socks tied around your ankles, sleep in shifts so there’s always someone on watch, sleep in parks or under bridges with hobos, steal their clothing, beg facemasks from protestors, eat food out of the garbage, maybe cook food with citric acid, eat insects, and you can go two weeks without eating. A less effective suggestion is to try to cut rotten meat off of steaks to eat the non-rotten part.
15 #bushcraft tips for surviving 100 days alone #video #toread
freeway interchange #stealth-camping #video, in a sparse strip of forest a few seconds’ walk away from the freeway, the forest strip being only about six meters wide. He strings up some camo netting between the trees during daylight hours to hide the campsite, then puts up a gray-green tarp canopy, and under it, a low white tent covered with a forest-camouflage cover. Lots of military-surplus gear, but for once it doesn’t seem like military fantasy but a practical way to escape notice. Not the most pleasant environment with the incessant traffic noise, but he says he doesn’t mind it and could stay for days. He does his cooking about an hour before sundown, on a so-called “instant barbecue” (“Zip” brand), to avoid lights after dark. This seems to be a metal dish with naphtha-soaked charcoal in it, which makes enormous, visible flames when lit. Once it’s burned down to coals, he puts a foil pouch full of frozen pasta onto the expanded-sheet-metal top. The base of the “barbecue” seems to be thin aluminum flashing. To all appearances, the coals are just sitting directly on the flashing, with nothing to keep them from burning through the aluminum; after a couple of hours he extinguishes the fire with water. I thought he failed to wake up to strike camp before sunrise, but actually he deliberately arranged for his ride to pick him up well after sunrise.
fully enclosed tarp #stealth-camping #video by Claire #WildBeare. She has a 3m × 2.9m “SuperLight” brand tarp from DD Hammocks, and she converts it into a tetrahedral tent (with no floor) by pegging the tarp’s four corners to three points on the ground and then lifting up the midpoint of an edge on her trekking pole, which was insufficiently tall, so she instead pulled up the tip of the new tent on a ridgeline run between two trees. Then she sets up a ground sheet inside, and bedroll, and air mattress, etc. The edges of the tent don’t quite reach the ground, leaving some air space. Most of the rest of the video is her cooking on a campstove and eating sausages. Not really very stealth, and I’m not convinced that it would work well in the rain.
#stealth-camping on the smallest roundabout yet #video #toread
#stealth-camping like a hobo from the 01930s #video seems to be some kind of poorly filmed fiction with no useful information; I’m not going to finish it
living in #Slab-City from Rabbitside camp #video #toread
“build secret underground bunker with fireplace in 18 days” #video in the desert with a burro, a dog, and a goat, none of which do a lick of work, stuccoing handbuilt stone walls with a rather annoyingly expansive clay, and digging out a cave in maybe limestone? Hammering in nails with an adze into hand-hewn timbers for a roof. For concealment he scoops dirt onto a tarp covering the timber roof. The entrance into the cave through the roof (vaguely reminiscent of a kiva entrance) is slightly proud of the surrounding dirt, and located on a slope, both of which favor drainage. The large amount of disturbed dirt would be very obvious to hyperspectral satellites of 5-meter resolution or better, but not to the naked eye. Scorpions, frogs, ants, and giant millipedes make appearances. Chimney appears to be a campfire from aboveground; rice and fish are cooked in camping pots in the fireplace. The roof door (nailed-together debarked timbers) only concealed in use with a tarp and brush.
smoking fish #cooking for long-term storage, #video of #bushcraft using sticks and bark. He’s a little vague on what aspects of his fish smoking process are important for safely preserving the fish for what period of time. Claims that eating saltwater fish raw is safe, which I don’t think is true.
#bushcraft breakfast cooked on a rock in the rain #video #toread
solo overnight using 6 #stealth-camping tips #video #toread
turning a U-Haul van into a comfortable home for US$365, without making it impossible to return after the rental! This is their $19.95 per day van, not tall enough to stand up in. Goals: sleep, eat, excrete, relax. Camp cot, camping pad or mattress topper, sleeping bag, blanket, plastic drawer totes, filing cabinet, plastic totes under cot, duffel bag, 20ℓ bucket (maybe with pool noodles or pipe insulation), plastic water basin for dishes, towels, wet wipes, camp mirror, propane camp stove with canister, skillet, pot, silverware, cooler (12V compressor fridge usually but in this case just a styrofoam box), foldable camping chair, folding TV tray table, aluminized bubble wrap for the windows. No insulation, no solar, no battery, no air conditioning, no water, no shower. #stealth-camping #vanlife #video
Walmart “camping gear that doesn’t suck” #video. First, a US$15 17ℓ backpack (make and model not disclosed) with tie-on nylon straps (“MOLLE”) on the outside, water-bottle pocket, and padded shoulder straps. He stuffed a polyethylene foam sitting/kneeling/hip pad into the back of the backpack to give his back a little more cushioning. He got a US$5 32oz. polycarbonate (?) water bottle (make and model not disclosed). Also US$12 “Hyper Tough” brand gloves. Also US$5 “Equate” brand 85-item first aid kit. Also a US$20 “Stanley Venture Pot”, a single-walled stainless pot for cooking over a fire, into which you can nest a small butane camping fuel canister (from REI, not sold at Walmart), and which nests into the cheap (#pricing, make, and model not disclosed) stainless nesting cup. The “Venture Pot” also comes with two nesting foam coffee cups. He got a US$12 “Ozark Trail” brand (Walmart’s house brand) gas camping stove burner with a piezo igniter (model 31408, now US$15) to cook over the fuel canister, which acts rather like a blowtorch actually, suggesting propane in the can. His dishes are an “Uco” brand “mess kit”, because I guess he really likes military fantasies, model and price not disclosed, which has a hermetic gasket. He got dried (?) pulled pork and Maruchan ramen, too. He got “Koogwans” (?) brand aluminum Y-stakes (model and price not disclosed) to hold down a tent. He’s sitting on a US$10 5×7 tarp (make and model not disclosed) from Walmart. He got Gorilla Tape (apparently black electrical tape?), paracord, Bic lighters, Uco “Matchsafe” “lifeboat-style” safety matches in a watertight gasketed case, all at undisclosed prices, and a US$4 “Ozark Trail” brand fire-starting “steel” (really Mischmetall). He got a couple of “S-biners” of a brand I didn’t catch (price not disclosed). He got “Nice Glow” brand glowsticks after Halloween for US$1. He got an “Ozark Trail” brand 7-“inch” folding saw. He got a US$11 USB-rechargeable “Ozark Trail” brand LED headlamp (model not disclosed).
building a secret dugout #bushcraft #stealth-camping #video #toread
Ryan Twomey #video on #vanlife #stealth-camping in airport parking lot #toread. He starts out camped at Lake Meredith in Texas. He was actually taking a round-trip flight from the airport (Albuquerque), though, so I don’t know if this really counts! Planet Fitness makes an appearance, the implication being that he showered there.
He has a black cloth curtain behind the driver seats. But I’m not sure how stealthy this setup actually is; it’s a gray huge-ish (Mercedes?) van that’s tall enough to stand up in, and a diesel heater, plus a fan in the ceiling to suck humid air out of the van, and there are solar panels clearly visible protruding off the sides of the van roof, and at night, when he has all the lights on inside, you can see the van’s back windows from inside, which makes me think they are probably visibly illuminated from outside.
He says the Albuquerque airport only charges US$7 a day (apparently for at-airport long-term parking of the camper van in the “Basic Economy lot,” which is in the sun), and he doesn’t have to worry about getting to the airport early. He actually prefers parking in the sun because it charges his battery through the rooftop solar panels and because he worries that otherwise his pipes might freeze.
Some of his kitchen stowage is in a hammock-like net hung from the bottom of the cabinets; another part is hexagonal jars screwed into lids attached to the bottom of the cabinets, over the sink. Lots of footage of cooking and eating.
He has some kind of internet connection in the van that’s about 90MB/s (500Mbps), maybe 4G, since no Starlink antenna panel is visible. He uses it to play Fortnite on a large monitor inside the van.
The whole ceiling has what looks like indirect LED lighting between some parallel wooden boards spaced some distance apart.
He takes his laundry to his friend’s house to wash it.
Commenters out that airports often feature bathrooms, free Wi-Fi, and a food court.
#PlayWithJunk #video: most useful tool for #electronics #hardware repairs is a simple Huntron Tracker curve tracer or “VI curve tester”. Includes very simple schematic with a transformer and three resistors, labeled “#Octopus in-circuit component tester”, though it seems to me like it would not work very well and might actually blow up your scope if the circuit under test had a ground connection. He demonstrates using it to diagnose a blown PSU, desoldering components with an electric-air-pump solder sucker, something I’ve never seen before
#Ken-Hawley on why files “aren’t used any more” #machining #video listing uses like rasping leather shoe soles, sharpening push saw teeth, and mechanical watchmaking which used to use files but no longer do
Norman Bayliss making moulding planes in 01962 #manufacturing #video #toread
Penknife cutler Stan Shaw, who died in 02021, in 01993 #manufacturing #video Confirms that the “pen blade” is for cutting quill pens, and demonstrates the use of a bow drill strung with pigskin, rotating around a horizontal axis and backed up by a breastplate so he can put his body weight behind the drill (though later he uses an electric drill press too). He’s not shy about running his file backwards across the brass or even the steel blades and nickel rivet pins. Something is wrong with the video, though, it cuts him off in the middle of a sentence more than once. He calls his humongous narrow belt sander a “power wheel” and sands the buffalo horn down by pressing it down onto the top of the wheel.
Irene Sellars, file maker #manufacturing #video unfortunately just a talking head interview
10 uses for a microwave oven transformer: #hardware #hoarding #video by #Murray-Smith. Among other things he demonstrates welding six of them together to get a large motor stator. #toread
top 10 tools to make with #3D-printing #video #bootstrapping by #Zack-Freedman: a mouse bungee to retract your mouse cord, a USB cable holder, some kind of camera holding thing, battery-holding inserts for an Altoids tin (to contain lithium-ion fires), a tiny shelving unit for Altoids tins, a screw sorting jig, a folding filament spool for a 3-D printer, a three-inch-long skateboard, a 3-D printing filament spool support, a solder paste dispenser, and a Dremel bit organizer. Pretty lame and disappointing overall.
build a drone engine from an old hard drive #video #hoarding a two-platter 120GB 7200 rpm Seagate Barracuda specifically. By #Zafer-Yildiz. Normally I’d assume the spindle motor was too low-powered to be useful this way, since they consume about a watt in normal operation, and quadcopters usually use several hundred watts per motor. He solders a “Simonk30A” ESC to the spindle motor and attaches the rotor from a computer cooling fan, which was unsurprisingly also a #brushless motor, with a bit of gelling superglue. He supplies the ESC with 12 volts, which is probably what the motor originally used. Even before he adds reflective tape to one of the fan blades, it seems to be poorly balanced and has a lot of vibration, which is probably not what the motor’s precision bearings are optimized for. Apparently he’s driving the fan at 6600–7900rpm. No force measurements, no temperature measurements, no power measurements, nothing. Zafer, I am disappoint.
digging a secret massive underground room #video as an add-on to the “#spider-hole” video, a couple months later. I notice he’s using a 4.0-amp-hour 18-volt Makita battery to drive screws into his shoring wood; if we assume that battery is 2C then it’s 8 amps and 144 watts. If you could use power tools driven by a few batteries like that to do the digging, maybe you could get the minimal shelter dug in less than 8 man-days? Like maybe you could drill into the dirt with an auger, then move some of the dirt on some kind of a conveyor belt? This seems especially relevant given that in the middle they’re advertising the “EcoFlow Delta Pro” “portable” (with built-in wheels) “home battery”, which features 30A 120V output, which would be uh 3600 watts, the equivalent of about 25 laborers. There’s even an AC-powered rotary hammer in the background of the advertisement shot, there on the forest floor! (Oh, halfway through the video they whip it out, calling it their “secret weapon”.) He also strongly recommends wearing gloves. Also I feel like maybe you could advantageously use galvanized steel studs instead of wood, or maybe even ferrocement. They start singing “Diggy Diggy Hole” in the middle, and he’s enjoying the 12° temperature in the hole because it’s 28° in the forest. Eventually they install a galvanized steel air duct. #stealth-camping
“New York’s secret tunnel societies” #history-channel #video #toread
Arduino #hardware vs. Pico #video, but it seems to be talking-head filler mixed with stock images, and the guy ("Gary Explains") seems to be pretty fucking clueless: “Now the Arduino IDE provides a language, they call it the Arduino Language, which is based on the syntax of C and C++, and by syntax I mean, you need the semicolon at the end, where the equal sign goes is the same as in C, curly brackets, all that kind of thing.” Of course actually the Arduino IDE lightly preprocesses your sketch and compiles it with the G++ compiler for C++. #Plonk.
24 hours underground in the “#spider-hole” #stealth-camping #video he installs a TV and cellphone antenna (threaded through the air duct) in his secret underground apartment. This is before he added the escape hatch and before it got destroyed by flooding. In this video he also set up a hollow tree stump above ground to conceal his air vent. Also this is where he built a bed onto one wall at knee height.
review of digging with a 40V battery-powered electric Ryobi auger #video I note that the auger, which was designed for drilling a vertical post hole, couldn’t actually remove dirt from the hole! You had to do that by lifting the dirt — and the auger motor — by hand. Also the auger demands that you spend a lot of time hunched over it. The result is that you can only dig 6–8 holes in a day by yourself before your back gives out, though two people together could do 20–30.
#bootstrapping a DIY digging auger from a circular saw blade, some allthread, and an electric drill. And a MIG welder, and a vise, and some nuts, and an angle grinder of course. #video with shitty elevator music. Jesus, they’re using a brand-new carbide-tipped saw blade for this, max 9000 rpm. I can’t read Polish well enough to tell if it’s designed for cutting steel, but I suspect it just says it’s made of steel. Jesus, has this guy never heard of intermittent welding? Because he’s just holding his improvised auger onto his allthread with a jam nut, not even a little bitty weld. In a minute and a half he digs 300mm deep in the garden, okay.
breaking up basalt with #expanding-grout. #materials #video doesn’t seem to say anything about what the expanding grout is made of. “Expando” brand. They drilled 149 holes with a rotary hammer about 200mm apart along crisscrossing lines about 600mm apart and then poured the stuff into them from a bucket with a funnel. Two days later the giant rock had broken into small pieces. The grout had turned white, seems to be crumbly and dusty and chalky when the hydraulic digger picks the rock apart, and seems to have expanded by on the order of 10% of its diameter. The holes where the grout couldn’t split the rock, they split with a hydraulic wedge splitter. Lots of hydraulic bucket digger action if that’s what you’re into. Bleh.
drilling a well at tens of meters per hour #video. In Pakistan. Apparently manually drilling with a sort of coring drill (aided by water), and hauling the whole drill string out of the hole by hand every time the core gets full, then banging it with a wrench to knock the dirt out? 150mm does seem like a good diameter for a well. Once the drill string gets too long to use this way (maybe 6 meters) they put together some 150mm pipes for further drilling. Cloth is packed around the pipe in the hole to keep it centered. It sounds thin like stovepipe, but it’s stiff enough to support a platform with a guy standing on it. Then they drop a much longer (2m) coring drill pipe down there on the end of a long cord, and as they move it up and down in the hole, the platform slides down; evidently it’s undermining the pipe he’s standing on. Each time he hauls it back out of the hole, it’s full of mud. Once the platform reaches ground level, screwing another pipe onto the end of this well casing with a chain wrench permits moving the platform back up. The chain wrench serves as a stair to climb back onto the platform. Much water is poured down the wellbore, a couple of liters at a time, to reduce the dirt at the bottom to mud. (A 200-liter barrel is next to the well for this purpose.) They perforate a big (50mm) black PE pipe and lash a filtering cloth around it, then lower it to the bottom of the well. The pipe displaces water out of the well casing as it slides in. They remove the well casing using a couple of logs and a chain ratchet to pull it bodily back out of the well. Plastic cement connects the black pipe (now the only thing in the hole) to a plastic fitting and then a hand pump.
digging underground sandstone tunnels #video in Sandland, in Western Wisconsin, a group of volunteers
fast well digging by hand #video. Looks like northern Mexico. Three barefoot guys with shovels hit water about five meters down, but have to start breaking rocks with sledgehammers. Galvanized buckets on pulleys remove rocks and some of the mud once it’s inconvenient to throw it all the way out of the hole. Square wooden posts support a shade tarp and the pulleys. Audio is in Spanish and has had its pitch shifted, perhaps to evade copyright-infringement-detection algorithms. Once the water starts slumping the walls, they begin casing the well with mortared bricks. An old woman watches from the rim of the well, arms akimbo. A scaffolding built from scrap wood inside the well permits extending the masonry to the surface. Rebar is bent and tied to form a permanent support structure over the well, cement mixed from bags in a heap on the ground and carried in the buckets to slop in around the masonry. Centring constructed from dry-stacked bricks supports a circular reinforced concrete arch over the well, perhaps poured in forms we don’t see. A permanent pulley is affixed to the arch.
Then we cut to what looks like a similar well-digging operation in Pakistan, aided by a tractor engine powering a windlass hoisting apparatus through the power take-off; in this case a tripod over the nascent well supports a pulley but no shade tarp, and spoil is hauled up from the bottom of the well by the engine in a large cloth bag rather than by hand in a steel bucket. This time the well is 10 meters deep, and the digging implements look sort of like an adze or a huge hoe than a shovel. Again the well casing is built from fired-clay bricks joined with mortar, starting from the bottom, but the foundation is thoroughly mortared over, hiding the bricks. The final casing has two layers of bricks, and a steel ladder set into the brick side.
Then the real well drilling begins, lowering steel pipe segments of perhaps 200mm diameter into the bottom of the well, guided by barefoot workers in beige kurtas. It’s unclear how they are penetrating the floor, but it seems like spoil is being hauled up through the pipe with a sort of two-meter-long bucket, making space for the pipe to slide downwards. To screw pipe segments together to reach the top of the well, a strap wrench is improvised from a tree branch and a few wraps of rope. Finally the pipe is fitted with a flange which is bolted to an elbow and another flanged pipe running horizontally, presumably to carry off the well water.
Very poor quality video from "Machinery Magazine", omitting many crucial steps. #Plonk!
Are they the stupid motherfuckers, or is the guy who watched the video the stupid motherfucker?
drilling a well with an electric drill and a chain ring #video #toread
backyard tunnel construction #video using the usual ditch-and-cover method but with a passel of teenaged boys with shovels instead of, say, a backhoe. Once the trench was dug, they lined its walls with wide knotty pine boards and the occasional bit of plywood, then roofed the trench with plywood, then covered that with dirt.
the “#spider-hole” this guy dug on flat ground in the forest got flooded #stealth-camping #video A useful cautionary tale. Once the dirt was saturated with water, plasticizing the thick clay layer, it began collapsing his wooden walls inwards. They were made with short lumber braced against posts in the middles of his walls, but the posts weren’t braced against anything, nor were they screwed to the wall boards; once they had moved inwards a few centimeters, the walls broke free, and the mud flowed down from above ground level until you could see daylight. Actually it was holding until he pumped the meter of water out of the interior, at which point the increased pressure difference had that effect. Drainage is utterly fundamental for underground building. One commenter pointed out, “I wouldn’t go in later without breathing protection, it’ll be a mold hole.” Other commenters pointed out that digging a sump under the floor so you could pump it out would help, and that having an elevated floor would help. #Drainage, man. Motherfucking drainage.
adding an emergency exit to the “#spider-hole” #stealth-camping #video #toread
hand digging a “war tunnel” and sleeping in it #stealth-camping #video #toread
excellent trench digging #tutorial on proper shovel use #video
how he started digging his own tunnel #video showing two minutes of the floor starting to flood with groundwater. Not a great video by Hanz Moleman but at least it's 100% content, no stock photos or talking-head filler.
#clickbait underground “tunnel” shelter #video. With a narrow shovel and a lot of sweat, she carves an elaborate bedroom out of the hard, dry clay, including a fireplace, in the hillock under a tree (a commenter says it's an old termite mound, which is why it’s rock-free). The bed and table are elaborately-squared-off blocks of clay, with chamfers to prevent chipping. Beneath the tree there is no risk of a cave-in; apparently the tree does not have a taproot. Maybe she’s Filipina or Vietnamese; her machete curves forward. She lashes a frame together from machete-cut saplings with vines to form a door for her entrance, sloped like a conventional US cellar door. Lashings to hatchet-pounded stakes serve for hinges. Sod cut with the shovel serves to cover both the spoil pile from the excavation and the door itself. A candle illuminates from an alcove carved into the bedroom wall. Smoke from the wood fire up the chimney makes her presence obvious; she could really benefit from Cesar’s pyrolytic coffee-can stove. Coals raked from the wood fire into a cooking pit permit cooking pineapple brochettes and a steak on a Korean-style barbecue on a steel grill she brought, though possibly also risking carbon monoxide poisoning. She cooks with tongs and a kitchen knife, eating with the knife, without chopsticks. A silky-looking green tarp protects her from the bare clay of the bed. The grass in the area seems to be of a mowed variety. Another commenter claims that the interior is not actually filmed in the same place as the exterior, but at 17'22" we can see that it at least has the same tiny entrance, which has the tree roots cut off in the same place. #scouting #bushcraft #stealth-camping
growing #bamboo as the holy-grail homestead plant. He recommends Phyllostachys nigra “Henon” bamboo for its thick wood, Phyllostachys rubromarginata for its flavor and long internodes, some kind of black bamboo for its beautiful black wood, yellowgroove bamboo (Phyllostachys aureosulcata?), and something else. Has advice on propagating bamboo and on killing it off. Recommends Ted Jordan Meredith’s Bamboo for Gardeners and David Ferrelly’s The Book of Bamboo. #video
#digging an #underground 1-bedroom apartment #dwelling. Lots of talking-head filler, like most #Kevin-Builds #video productions. Useful datum: some garage-door panels are steel-faced sandwich panels with a styrofoam interior. He’s using a dump-truck trailer, backhoe, etc., so this is far from bushcraft. Bit of a Minecrafty feel as he circular-saws the legs off his just-crafted table, so it won’t be so tall, while waiting for the pizza to get done in the oven. The plate-steel culvert, canned food, and Tang are less Minecrafty. He discusses but does not show his future plans to put in drain tile “with a sock on it so the sediment don’t get into it” to drain water from below the shelter. Also he put down a tarp under the surface dirt to keep rain from soaking into the shelter from the top, which he did sort of show. #stealth-camping
Cyrillic improvised powered digging instrument #video #toread
another carbide-tipped sawblade turned into an electric auger for digging I guess. He slits it with an angle grinder cutoff wheel, clamps it in a vise, softens it with a rooftop-tar-melting gas torch, and twists it into a helix with a wrench, then quenches it in water. Then he stick-welds it to a steel pipe, in which he nests a smaller steel pipe which he stick-welds in place, and then stick-welds the whole assembly onto a galvanized steel rod he had lying around, with about 100mm of extra steel rod sticking out the bottom, which he laboriously angle-grinds down to a rounded point. Then he grinds a cutting edge onto the leading edge of the auger, then touches it up with a file. Then he chucks it up in his Makita and digs a hole in the garden. #mechanical #manufacturing #video
how to dig fencepost holes in rocky ground (old riverbed). Using a Bobcat skid steer with a post-hole-digging auger that they’ve welded rebar and shit to, which digs a hole in about two minutes, but then he has to pick all the river rocks out. In wet ground it worked better, because the soil wasn’t just sand in between the river rocks; if it were just sand, he’d add dry bentonite in powder form to it as a binding agent. If he had to dig next to utility conduit he’d use his spud bar instead of the auger, not clamshell post-hole diggers. #video
#bigclive random high voltage eBay thing #hardware #video #toread
#bigclive high-power shady £16 #ozone generator teardown with schematic #electronics #hardware #video. Arrived with a broken ceramic plate through which it arced. Operates around 4000V and uses the “ridiculously high power” of 155 watts with a power factor of 94%. He says it really needs to be mounted in an enclosure with a fan so it doesn’t overheat. The wires to the high-voltage conductive-ink grids (very hard ink, harder than his box cutter) are silicone-insulated for high temperature, and the solder connections are silasticked over, presumably to prevent lower-voltage corona discharge. He explains that capacitive coupling through a high-dielectric-strength insulator gives you lots of tiny little sparks when you’d get an arc without the insulator. The input bridge rectifier is made out of 1N5399 1.5A 1kV diodes. An interesting oscillator design using a sort of totem pole of two npn transistors, perhaps FJP13009 (700V 12A; they’re labeled J13009-2), driven from (opposite-sense?) feedback windings on a high-current toroid, only used for feedback; its primary is in series with the primary of the resin-potted high-voltage transformer (2Ω primary, 100Ω secondary). Surprisingly to me, there’s a diac in the oscillator, which he says is the “start circuit”. The transistors are mounted on a giant aluminum heatsink through an insulating film (mica?). The primary of the toroid is tied to both rails of the power supply through rather large (0.47μF 400V) film caps, which discharge through the transistors when they come on. There’s no storage cap, so the oscillation dies down when the 50Hz signal is close to its zero-crossings. Originally I thought it was a blocking oscillator, but apparently the feedback through the toroid is positive, not negative; what terminates a pulse is when the film cap, discharging through the two transformers, runs out of charge, and thus stops turning on the transistor it was discharging through. “Normally, with transistors to a positive rail, you’d have a pnp transistor, but in this instance, because it effectively has its own transformer-coupled supply to its base here from the emitter, you can use standard npn transistors for both of them. (...) Much simpler circuitry than I was expecting.” The diac to the base of the negative-rail transistor is activated by a .01μF cap charged up through a 470kΩ resistor pulling it up toward the positive rail, though I’m not sure why you need the cap. The size of the heatsink makes me think it can’t be dissipating more than 5–10W, which means better than 92% efficiency.
#bigclive inside a nasty high-voltage ozone-generator power supply #hardware #video #toread
#bigclive inside an ozone room deodorizer #hardware #video #toread
#manufacturing a high-power #ozone generator #hardware #video using 3000 volts on each of several heatsunk plates to get corona discharge, plus a waterproof industrial fan to blow air through; he says the overall machine, with 3 modules totaling 12 plates, produces 120g/hour of ozone. The frame is welded up from steel structural tubing, with rivet nuts to add threads to the holes drilled in the tubing to which to screw the fan, ozone modules, frosted plexiglass side panels, aluminum top and bottom and fan panels, and air intake grille. The high-voltage wires have all the panels in parallel and are electrical-taped together, potted with household silicone inside a snap-together plastic conduit, zip-tied to the steel frame. He dremels holes in the side panels to epoxy-mount the electronic modules such as the timer, power meter, power entry module, and power switch. The modules’ screw terminals are potted in silicone presumably to prevent ozone damage. Uses about 350W. He doesn’t show the high-voltage power supply.
#stealth-camping in a storm drain #video #toread
#VICE homemade guns of #Taiwan #video includes Tsai Ing-Wen’s 02016 apology to the indigenous Taiwanese peoples and Tama Talum Suqluman’s prosecution. Indigenous hunters have an exception to the general #gun-control prohibition in Taiwan, as long as they make the guns themselves. Much footage of colorful Taiwanese clothing. “It was in the 80s that the government told us to hand in the guns for safekeeping, and we never got them back.” They’re using nail-gun powder cartridges to drive ball bearings. Covers Tsai’s pardon of Talum. #mechanical #politics #history
10-person US$10 10-minute temporary cabin from pallet wrap. They delimbed some trees and wrapped pallet wrap around them, then I guess delimbed and lashed together some saplings (with pallet wrap!) to form gables and put pallet wrap on that too to keep the rain out. They have a nifty folding bow saw, but all the time to delimb the trees with the saw and axes is not included in the 10 minutes, and looks like it was more like three or four hours. Lashing with pallet wrap is a nice idea, giving the appearance of things being connected by spiderwebs, though it was completely unnecessary to do most of it while standing on a stepladder; they could have lashed things together on the ground and then lifted them into place. Even after doing all the delimbing ahead of time, and working in a pine forest planted in neat rows for logging, it took them over 30 minutes and about a roll and a half of pallet wrap, and they didn’t have a door yet, and wind blew under the walls until they piled up pine needles, and it was big enough to sleep maybe four or five people. Adding a door involved a “zip wall system”, basically a long zipper with sticky tape on it which they stuck on one side of the plastic wrap and magically opened, like the door the girl draws in Pan’s Labyrinth. Stretching pallet wrap over a log frame makes a soft cot top, which they then supported on logs. They showed another plastic-wrap cabin nearby that was a year and a half old which looked pretty intact. #video #clickbait #bootstrapping
“this cabin build sent me to the hospital” #video by the spider hole dude. He built a cabin up off the ground out of wooden cable spools. The inside walls are all full of expanding spray foam, and he thought sanding it would be a good idea. He was using a P100 mask with charcoal filters, which seems like it ought to be up to the job. Cordless power tools with lots of batteries can build shit in the woods. The sanding disc on his cordless angle grinder shapes the foam very nicely and even slices it somewhat. The second day he wore a Tyvek suit to keep the powder out of his clothes. After ten hours of sanding, the conical roof is pretty smooth, and he wants to coat it with drywall mud and slightly sticky fiberglass mesh normally used for stucco; I guess the idea is that the stickiness of the mesh holds it in place until you stucco it. He suggests adding Dawn dish soap to your drywall mud so it goes on smoother. After he mudded the ceiling with chemical-setting Sheetrock 90 mud, the whole left side of his body was numb, which he thinks is repetitive stress injury. After a week of rest he goes back and muds a ledge around the conical ceiling and sprays paint on it with a compressed-air sprayer. RGB LEDs around the ledge provide customizable ceiling color. And he brought in a little projector to project a photograph of the moon and some stars onto it. His little girl is enthusiastic about the color-changing abilities.
“I built an underground bunker” trying to repair following the “#spider-hole” collapse. #video It did turn out that there were some mushrooms growing in the wood, hemlock or no. He hypothesizes that the air space between the wood walls and the dirt behind allowed water to cascade down the dirt walls, eroding them, a theory which seems dubious to me. A puzzling thing is that it looks like the previously dug 2×2 meter room reached to within centimeters of ground level, so the timber ceiling must have poked above the ground at some point, which I don’t remember from the earlier videos. #drainage
#stealth-camping in an abandoned automobile, actually an ambulance, in the middle of a forest. #video #toread
“off-grid living is a lie” #video #clickbait this guy and his wife lived in and then later built a series of off-grid and semi-off-grid houses, including three log cabins, over the last 30 years. Also, living in tents on a raft floating down the Yukon. Most of the video is a slideshow of his photos with a voiceover. He’s very proud of not having borrowed money for housing since his first cabin.
#3D-printing design for vase mode #video #toread
#Angus recommends “best free CAD” software for #3D-printing. #clickbait carefully omits any actually free CAD software! #video
#3D-printing mysteries that need to be solved in 02024 #video #toread #clickbait
designing strong parts for #3D-printing #video using a pinch collar for his drill press as the example, discussing slicing direction and how perimeters are stronger than infill.
#TPAI on boost converters #hardware #video with a demo of a manually-operated one. He mentions the TL494, which he “doesn’t recommend as a beginner’s project”, for which he recommends the LT1070, which he then builds a 20V laptop charger around. For his water-wheel power supply, he uses the “Delon circuit”, a full-wave rectifying voltage doubler with five components. Then he uses it to charge his cellphone and a gel cell from a stream. #electronics