new #Primitive-Technology video, building a new hut with previously fired clay bricks and mud mortar with a little bit of wood ash added to grout it. He makes a plumb bob and shows why he should have had it before. Also he shows an unsuccessful #firestarting attempt before the successful one, saying that this is common in humid weather.
on 02026-06-14#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#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#Primitive-Technology #video from two years ago with a wood-ash-insulated smelting furnace with a dried-clay tuyere, smelting 34g of iron. 50cm total height, ¼ below ground. Using reciprocating-rotation forge blower powered by pullstring.
on 02025-12-06#Primitive-Technology #video on #bootstrapping iron smelting from just a natural-draft wood fire: no bellows, no blower, and the only charcoal was mixed into an ore brick.
on 02025-12-05#Primitive-Technology #video on firing #ceramics in a downdraft kiln of George Wright’s “Phoenix” design
on 02025-12-05#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#Primitive-Technology #video on cylindrical water bellows made from fired clay #ceramics with folded-leaf check valves, sunk in a clay-lined puddle to use as two liquid pistons. One of his undersized fired-clay handles broke off, so he lashes on wooden handles. He’s still doing a lot of unnecessary work lifting massive fired clay vessels. Then the spout broke off.
on 02025-10-05new #Primitive-Technology today, with a bottlenecked 2.5-m-tall “natural draft furnace” for smelting; 250mm inside diameter, 125mm inside chimney diameter. With four tuyeres pointing down into a pit, it has a draft velocity at the chimney of some ten meters per second: at 32fps the flame is about one meter tall and about three frames long. Late in the process he discovers that he can prefabricate horizontal slices to add to the chimney and dry them before adding. It looks like a blowtorch pointed at the sky! He had to lash up a ladder to finish the smokestack. He says it’s only 2.5m tall (where the chimney would wobble if bumped) but it looks taller than 3 m to me. For smelting he first built a charcoal mound with a new “triangular log-cabin chimney” approach to, I guess, cut down on the latency, allowing him to light the mound in the bottom center, but he still had to wait until the next day to break it open. There was a lot of overburning. He says iron oxide bacteria bloomed in the wet season when the waterlogged ground “leaches out iron”. The smelt completely failed.
on 02025-09-04latest #Primitive-Technology #video on “belt and pulley blower” covers bark twine, leaf-fiber-reinforced dried clay, crushed-ceramic grog, clay bats, etc. Dried-clay pulleys break, unsurprisingly, even with crushed-leaf reinforcement, but do work for a while. 17-warp larger cane wicker pulley doesn’t break. Wood stake frames lashed with bark. Split-stick crank clamps shaft. He sets up a wicker “floating wheel” which permits his twine belt to fan the fire somewhat higher. #ceramics #DIY #bootstrapping
on 02025-06-12#Primitive-Technology #video on a smelt (#bootstrapping #materials) with a flywheel-driven blower, giving disappointing results.
on 02025-02-06#Primitive-Technology downdraft kiln #video #toread #bushcraft
on 02024-04-11#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#Primitive-Technology #bootstrapping fired-brick hut #materials #video #bushcraft
on 02024-04-03