#bushcraft #video on making two-ply #rope from dandelion seed stalks after they’ve gone to seed. Dude hung them up to dry in his shed, but they dried too slowly and got moldy. The rope is much more supple than I would have expected from unalloyed dandelions. He doesn't do any real testing.
on 02026-04-22#Primitive-Technology #video about drying roof tiles on the heated ondol floor of the new heated-floor hut. He used his heated-floor chimney to smoke some firewood stacked inside the hut (to get rid of insects?) but then it collapsed in the rain, so he rebuilt it with dry-stacked fired bricks, which was more economical in material as well. He made a new lightweight mold for roof tile curvature from bark whose tree had rotted away, and having laid out some 45 roof tiles on the floor, he heated it back up to dry them out. #bushcraft #bootstrapping #scouting
on 02026-04-09#bushcraft #video of how to climb a coconut tree with a towel, the slow way and the fast way. And then how people climb without any equipment. And then a demonstration of going up and down insanely fast. Also demonstrates scraping coconut flesh out of the shell with an improvised coconut spoon.
on 02026-04-05Kap of the Polynesian Cultural Center demonstrates how to climb a coconut tree with hibiscus bark. #bushcraft #video
on 02026-04-05#video of surviving for 5 days on a desert island (no source of fresh water) without bringing food or water. Unfortunately Madison Clysdale doesn’t know the #bushcraft of how to climb a coconut tree, so she’s struggling with hydration the whole time, drinking out of partly-full PET drinking-water bottles that wash up as flotsam. #survivalists
on 02026-04-05#video about #primitive-technology #bushcraft which claims to be “knitting” a bamboo fan, but it’s actually weaving, from flat bamboo strips. Still #fiber-arts?
on 02026-01-03#bushcraft #video of making a stone axe from Graig Lwyd (?) flint (?) #toread
on 02025-11-11#video investigation of fake #bushcraft channels, exonerating Primitive Technology itself
on 02025-11-11#Primitive-Technology grass mat loom #video. The loom is horizontal so it can be three meters long, but I feel like it is at an inconvenient height for working at, and also involves a lot of walking back and forth. Then he uses the mats as thatch for a small lean-to shelter, which seems like a pretty suboptimal use for them (“Gaps will let rain through”, as he says, so he folds them double), but I guess he doesn’t sleep out in the bush. Also I think he probably needs to treat them with some kind of preservative to keep them from rotting, smoke at least. #scouting #bushcraft #bootstrapping
on 02025-10-07#video by “Rob the Nomad” about surviving homeless long-term. “This type of lifestyle is no joke.” Recommends a tent because bugs never stop coming. Getting wet or dirty in the winter is a serious problem if you don’t have heat. Things that get wet don’t dry out without heat. “It’s a nightmare out here. It’s not fun at all.” He says he just sits around and doesn’t do things because there’s nothing to do. He seems like he’s maybe suffering from depression. His tent is lined with cheap “fleece” blankets to keep the cold out. Lining the tent with aluminized reflective blankets creates condensation, which is very dangerous. #bushcraft #stealthcamping
on 02025-06-29#video about Christopher Thomas Knight’s 27 years as “The North Pond Hermit” #bushcraft #toread #homeless
on 02025-06-13#bushcraft #video on Kap Tafiti #firestarting with the fireplow technique, Samoan style, from “PolynesianCulturalCenter” with hibiscus wood and coir tinder.
on 02025-06-13#bootstrapping #bushcraft #video #firestarting with a standing dead snag, split into kindling with an axe and then shaved into a feather stick for tinder, then using ferrocerium to ignite the feather stick. #DIY
on 02025-06-13#bushcraft #video with #firestarting using a log to weight the bow drill. Uses a saw to cut the notches in his hearthboard. #bootstrapping #DIY
on 02025-06-13#video on #bushcraft myths (widely believed falsehoods), showing among other things the use of a tree trunk as a weight to put pressure on a bow drill for #firestarting. Also demonstrates using a sandwich bag full of water for firestarting. But the video is mostly about safe berry foraging. #bootstrapping
on 02025-06-13#video on 13 #firestarting techniques: rubbing a roll of ash inside a cotton ball between two boards, spontaneous combustion of “boiled” linseed oil (two hours of oily rags in a cardboard box on a cold day started to smoke, then burst into flames at 4h25m), steel wool and 9V batteries (or 3 AAs), a firepiston, KMnO₄ and glycerin, ferrocerium rods (with cotton balls, steel wool, jute twine, or magnesium shavings), fire-plow style (at which he fails), fire-saw style with bamboo (sort of an inverted fireplow) at which he also failed, beating steel on an anvil with a hammer until red-hot, a flashlight reflector as a non-imaging optical concentrator on charcloth, a bow drill (commercially sold with ball bearings, or improvised with paracord, which failed), and finally a hand drill, which he didn’t even really try. And then a rope lighter, which is like a cigarette lighter that uses rope for fuel. #DIY #bootstrapping #bushcraft
on 02025-06-13#firestarting #video by #CrazyRussianHacker using the fire-plow method. #DIY #bootstrapping #bushcraft
on 02025-06-13#PDF #paper on prehistoric #firestarting, “Wood Usage and Fire Veneration in the Pamir, Xinjiang, 2500 yr BP”. “People also specifically chose inflammable Populus wood to make hearth boards and hand drills (both are used for making fire by drilling), rigid Betula wood to craft wooden plates.” The hand drill spindle isn’t very straight! #DIY #bootstrapping #bushcraft
on 02025-06-1325-minute #WIRED #video on #firestarting by an anthropology professor using hand drills or bow drills, with a notched hearthboard with a divot, and a spindle. He recommends using bone-dry wood, and not using a resinous wood for the hearthboard, nor anything that’s too hard, something you can dent with your fingernail, like basswood or tulip poplar or (contradictorily) cedar. For the spindle he suggests cattail, horseweed, mullein, or goldenrod, because it needs to be straight and also somewhat soft. He suggests splitting a stick to make the hearthboard, either twice, or once while shaving down the back. He likes cedar inner bark for tinder, and he uses birchbark under the notch to catch the ember. He breaks the spindle. “Son of a bitch.” He spits on hands to improve friction with the spindle. Looks exactly like Primitive Technology’s technique, except that he uses a tiny stick to remove the hearthboard safely from the ember without breaking it. The cinematography (cuts between spindle changes, etc.) greatly interferes with seeing the technique clearly. For natural fibers for a bow drill, he suggests dogbane, but prefers brain-tanned deerhide. #DIY #bootstrapping #bushcraft
on 02025-06-13#TKOR #video on #firestarting by rubbing sticks together, linearly, fire-plow style. Not very convincing but he claims to have made it work. #DIY #bootstrapping #bushcraft
on 02025-06-13#video on #bushcraft cordage, making rope out of banana peels and whatnot
on 02025-03-11#weaving with a string heddle tied out of clove hitches and a waistband loom. #textile #bushcraft #scouting
on 02024-11-07#bushcraft 14 months in the forest #video. He starts with a pickaxe and bedroll and dog and shovel and stuff, though. Saw, bowl, backpack, rope, bread, aluminum cooking pot, lanterns, sleeping bag, pliers, axe head, nylon line, etc. So he cuts a sapling as a handle for the axe, digs a 2-meter-deep hole in a clearing (breaking the pickaxe), and lines it with polyethylene sheeting and baling wire using fencing pliers, and pegs the polyethylene to the walls; I suspect this is a cistern. He delimbs more saplings with a machete, cuts them to length with the saw, and lashes them together with the wire into a lattice lid for the cistern. Then he hangs a second polyethylene sheet over it on four poles perforating its center so it will collect water for the cistern, weighting the center with a rock. Bandages the dog’s injured foot with a strip cut from his T-shirt with the machete, bifurcating the end of the strip to permit tying it tight. He clears a square on a slope with the shovel and uses some chalk from a dry wash to lay out a door on it; at this point I am getting skeptical about night not having fallen! Then he begins to dig terraces out of the rocky forest soil there with the pickaxe and shovel, uncovering a long-buried terra-cotta pot with gold chains, coins, and a ring in it. Poor pickaxe technique. As it begins to rain, he seeks out fragments of quartzite from the streambed, striking sparks from them. The camera cuts from him crushing one of them on a rock with the back of the axe in the middle of a cotton ball to a shot of striking already-ignited and charred cotton in the same way with the axe, a clear indication of #fraud, so I’m not going to watch the other 35 minutes of this video. In the comments he explains that he charged his phone with solar panels, which are never seen in the first 12 minutes of the video. There may be some interesting ideas here, but because of the fraud I have to say #plonk to “Ramiz in the wild”.
on 02024-05-10#bushcraft stone house #video continued. He seems to have given up on arches at some point; the final window is sort of a corbelled arch, and the doorway appears to be unashamedly topped with a rather slender wood lintel. And the roof, rather than being any sort of arch or stone, is evidently corrugated sheet metal (or actually fiberboard composite?) laid over wooden poles, posing the question of why he doesn’t use glass in the windows. In this video he’s mostly adding adobe mortar and stone to chink up the gaps. #construction
on 02024-05-09#bushcraft stone house #video; not sure these adobe-mortared stone arches are really safe, especially since his adobe seems to have far too much expansive clay in it, judging by the cracks. What happens when it rains, and the wind wets one side of the building more than the other? Where did he get all those nice angular blocks of limestone of a consistent thickness? Why do I never see him use a plumb line? He uses a pair of supple saplings bent into an arch shape for his “centring” — but then never strikes it, instead plastering it with adobe. Then just in case he puts a big wood lintel over the top of the arch so it doesn’t have to bear any weight. #construction
on 02024-05-09#stealth-camping in a forest with a tarp, camo netting, a bivvy sack halfway into a bush, a space blanket, etc. Also different kinds of small, well-hidden fires. #bushcraft
on 02024-05-01#Primitive-Technology downdraft kiln #video #toread #bushcraft
on 02024-04-11#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
on 02024-04-06building a secret dugout #bushcraft #stealth-camping #video #toread
on 02024-04-06#bushcraft breakfast cooked on a rock in the rain #video #toread
on 02024-04-06smoking 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.
on 02024-04-0615 #bushcraft tips for surviving 100 days alone #video #toread
on 02024-04-0660 #bushcraft tips #video #toread
on 02024-04-0612 best #bushcraft projects #video: mug carved with a Dremel from a cow horn (which becomes flexible at 110° from the heat gun) with a bottom cut from wood sealed in with food-grade epoxy, degassed with a blowtorch (“Bushcraft”?); restoring a garage-sale axe by stripping and revarnishing the handle and then riveting together leather into a sheath, sealed with boiled linseed oil; forging a flint striker from a car leaf spring (so it can be quench-hardened) cut with an angle grinder; etc. #toread
on 02024-04-05#Primitive-Technology natural-draft iron smelt #materials #bushcraft #bootstrapping #video with a 1.5-meter-tall 250mm-inside-diameter mud furnace built over the course of a week with four or eight tuyeres; only got a few grams of iron
on 02024-04-05#Bushcraft Filipino guy smelting iron into a fishhook #bootstrapping #video
on 02024-04-05#Bushcraft Filipino guy #Primitive-Life smelting iron to make a knife from natural materials, and I think Roman cement too. Lashes members to live trees to make a hut, which greatly simplifies climbing (no tripod needed). Early footage was originally shot in an interlaced format (1080i?) before upload to YT. This guy seems like he might be the real deal; no steel saw marks or backhoe marks visible. Bamboo is a huge win for cutting difficulty vs. stiffness, especially for drilling with stone flakes and for splits. Makes a green bamboo chair and table; holes drilled in bamboo enable a sewing-like lashing technique to secure butt joints, but lacking diagonal braces results in undue stress on lashed joints. Uses ground-squatting technique. Grass hut permits indoor work in the rainy season. Tropical climate permits outdoor work in rain. Fishing lines provide food to cook on spits over fire to serve on leaf plates. Bamboo water vessel permits boiling water next to fire; requires towel to grip. Firestarting technique not shown. Bow and arrow demonstrated. All that was from 02017. In 02018, river rock path and brick masonry well shown. Bamboo latticework fencing is built to protect what looks like a chicken coop. A score sawn with a stone saw around green bamboo facilitates clean breakage. In addition to celt axe, lashed-head stone axe is shown to split bamboo. Bamboo caps fit tightly onto bamboo pipes or other vessels with appropriate choice of diameter, making a nearly watertight seal. A gourd-bucket dipper on a bamboo handle is used to draw water from brick well with protective cement roof supported on wood rafters. Ramrods are used to break out internal partitions in long bamboo to make a long vessel. Stone saw is wedged into split-wood handle which is lashed tight to provide better handling. Some yam harvest is on floor; perhaps more is in large wicker and lashed-bamboo baskets. Hand drill is used not for firestarting but for drilling a round hole in large bamboo (side or partition); stone point lashed into split end improves drilling action. Split bamboo vessel permits melting adhesive (pine pitch?) over fire with charcoal filler; poured over bamboo–bamboo joints of small bamboo fit into round hole drilled in larger bamboo, it yields watertight joint seals for automatic vacuum-controlled trough for watering chickens. Chicken coop seems to be adobe (or, more likely, wattle and daub) with narrow latticework bamboo doors and windows, perhaps to keep out varmints; the door hinge is a round vertical member of the door in a round hole. Bamboo trowel facilitates plastering with adobe to hold trough in place atop bricks inside chicken coop. All that was 02018. He’s got an awful lot of bricks that look awfully gray, including what may be a water tower, and this video doesn’t show making them; these may be cheating. Bamboo rake serves to gather dry forest litter. Roof thatching clamped into split bamboo is shown; a smelting shelter with thatch but no walls has large river rocks around the edge of a raised floor made from red clay brought in in wicker baskets, then tamped down by beating with poles. Fire pit in floor is built up with adobe; flexible paddle hand fan (a cut banan leaf?) fans fire. Adobe grille over fire (presumably to permit eventually moving the fire on top of it so it can get fed with air from below) is initially supported by bamboo rafters. Yes; charcoal fire on top of grille is shown later. Then he uses actual anthracite coal for a smelt, which is possibly also cheating, but smelts many grams of iron. He seems to mixing the iron ore with some kind of a flux as well as crushed charcoal. He has a gazebo made of masonry with river rocks with gray mortar that must be close to a tonne; it’s unlikely he’s made that from wood ash! Fresh banana leaves serve well to support clay discs as they are rotated and moved from place to place. A second smelting furnace of a similar design is built next to the first. Severe cracking in the first suggests no fiber was added to the adobe, and too much clay. A conical hole is drilled in a river rock with another rock; the appearance of the dust suggests that the drillee is marble or limestone. The clay discs are wood-fired in the second furnace. A drill bit is ground onto the end of a stone and lashed into a split bamboo rod. A centrifugal blower similar to the Primitive Technology design, but using a split bamboo shaft, is installed in the floor to blow both furnaces, using the conical hole as a bearing, resting on a ground stone point. The fired clay discs are used as blower cover and flywheel; the fan shaft is driven with a pullstring mechanism similar to a yo-yo, with a bamboo pull handle on the end of twine. A second smelt also produced iron. Later a horizontal chimney extension was built (not shown) supported on a river-rock masonry wall with adobe mortar, perhaps in order to be able to cover the top of the furnace. A skimmer apparently made from wicker or a tiny lashed bamboo lattice serves to remove floating debris from the water in a clay decantation pit; levigated clay is removed off the top with a pottery dipper, which seems to be fired from a white ball clay or kaolin, neither of which I’ve seen him dig. The dipped-out orange clay is decanted in a pot to get a smooth, pure, highly plastic clay (with a lot of contraction on drying). He seems to be firing it without any temper! But, miraculously, the pieces survive; these are his crucibles and molds for trying to cast what looks like hundreds of grams of iron prills into a knife, edge down, and a chisel. Unbelievably, this does succeed, and he grinds them sharp on a rock afterward, a huge upgrade for his woodworking. Further heating in an anthracite forge made of river rocks enables some forging, using split-bamboo tongs and rocks as hammer and anvil, forming a tang that permits the attachment of a handle to the iron knife with the pitch-like hot-melt adhesive; the iron knife edge can shave bamboo. All this was in 02019. In 02020 his grass hut had fallen down, but at some point he had built a masonry pool or cistern next to the well. He makes a straw-style broom from bamboo splits using the new knife. Finally at 54'35" he shows #firestarting, with a hand drill and pine needles; he’s using a sharpened wood stick. He removes two trees by building fires at their bases, then pushing them over with a long pole. At this point he’s removed the thatched roof over the smelting furnaces; he repairs their cracks a bit with more adobe. Two wicker carriers suspend wicker baskets from a pole over his shoulder, permitting him to carry a greater load of river rocks back from the river. He breaks up a lot of big limestone rocks and burns them to quicklime, which he uses in a heap of sand (brought in in baskets) to make mortar to build a stone house from river rocks, so maybe all that cement I saw before wasn’t cheating, but that mortar sure does look a lot more like portland cement than it does like lime mortar when wet; but it seems to set pretty white. He makes a third celt-like axe, this time with half a bamboo bent double around the head before lashing tight. Splitting a log with stone wedges and wood stakes is a lot of work. A ground-stone wood chisel (much wider than his iron chisel) is surprisingly precise at surfacing wood, raising quite a respectable shaving, and between the two chisels he cuts some quite respectable mortise and tenon joints for the stone house’s doorframe. Doorframes, plural. He builds a third furnace from the materials of the first two to burn still more lime; when the stone walls are finally done, they have peaks for a pitched roof and notches in them for rafters. Over a packed dirt layer for the floor he lays lime mortar, surfaced it with large river rocks. For troweling the mortar flat before adding the stones, he uses a stone trowel. Bamboo bars in the windows are evidently designed to keep large varmints out, held in place with lime mortar, stones, and lashing. He gashes several pine trees at the base with the bamboo “celt” to produce pine pitch, placing palm leaves to collect the pitch. Young hardwood logs are mortared in place atop the stone walls as rafters. He chisels a round hole in the doorway’s threshold, and a corresponding one in the lintel, for a hinge. After harvesting and splitting numerous three-meter bamboo poles, he pounds the splits flat, then weaves them into several three-meter-square mats. Combining the tapped resin, foraged resin, and pounded charcoal, he makes his glue again, this time in a ceramic pot on a three-stone stove, and paints it onto his bamboo roof panels to be installed in the lower layers of the roof before installing them on the roof, perhaps to stick the layers together. #video (99 minutes long)
on 02024-04-05#Primitive-Technology #bootstrapping fired-brick hut #materials #video #bushcraft
on 02024-04-03