#Mastodon post by Damien Miller showing his radioactivity counter consisting of “a BC-412 plastic scintillator and an imperfectly-matched PMT pulled from some eBay scrap,” tested with a thoriated TIG rod. #scouting #bootstrapping
on 02026-08-18#Blondihacks explains her approach to etching #PCBs for #electronics #hardware with Stephen Hobley’s recipe with vinegar and peroxide. #tutorial #bootstrapping #scouting
on 02026-08-06Emily #Velasco on #Mastodon firing clay into #ceramics for printed-circuit-board #electronics, successfully building an astable-multivibrator circuit. #DIY #bootstrapping #scouting
on 02026-06-03#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#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“Retouch is the act of producing scars on a stone flake after the ventral surface has been created.[1] It can be done to the edge of an implement in order to make it into a functional tool, or to reshape a used tool.” #archaeology #scouting
on 02025-09-29“The Prehistoric Bone Tool Assemblage from Grivac (Central Serbia)”, January 2013, by Selena Vitezović, Archaeological Institute of Serbia, including an antler retoucheur (“retouching tool”). #archaeology #scouting
on 02025-09-29#video on how A-frame tents are making a resurgence among ultralight hikers despite being a thousands-of-years-old design. Ten minutes of mostly overwrought talking-head filler to express one sentence. #camping #scouting
on 02025-09-27#video of how to get back into a canoe by yourself when you’ve flipped it. #scouting #tutorial
on 02025-09-26#scouting #humor #video of Boris cooking with brick
on 02024-12-05#video on #bootstrapping acetylene #materials via calcium carbide from seashells and driftwood in an arc furnace made by winding 50 turns of 8-gauge wire through the hole of a large toroidal transformer from a 110VAC→240VAC converter. The wire turned out to be too thin, so he rewound it with 25 turns of 6-gauge. He kept melting his improvised furnace made from firebrick, so he switched to using a stainless-steel cup and a “skull crucible”. #scouting
on 02024-11-14#video on #Erik-Grankvist turning trees into a log cabin with hand tools in winter, beginning with sawing on a pine near the base (with a push saw), then chopping partway through it with an axe, then sawing on the other side until the tree is almost cut through, switching to a bow saw near the end. He’s doing a lot of work stooped over; once the tree starts to fall, he takes the saw and gets out of the way. Then it’s on to removing branches with the axe. He measures the log with a tape measure and cuts it to length, using a jackknife to mark the cut point on the log. Then he proceeds to do the same with a second tree. Both trees have been blazed; perhaps he chose them previously, or perhaps someone else did. Then a third. A lot of shitty background elevator music. His axe aim is not very good. There are what looks like tufts of wool caught on the third tree bark; after it’s down we see it has also been blazed. At the end of the video he shows what seem to be a dozen logs as “one week of logging using only hand tools”. #scouting
on 02024-11-13#weaving with a string heddle tied out of clove hitches and a waistband loom. #textile #bushcraft #scouting
on 02024-11-07#video #toread by #survivalists on soldier #scouting
on 02024-11-05#video about #bootstrapping pure #materials from fertilizers. Like calcium nitrate from the hydrated double salt with ammonia. (Boiling with slaked lime drives out the ammonia as gas.) Urea he simply recrystallizes with water. Ammonium sulfate he recrystallizes with water by evaporation, which is tedious because you can’t crystallize it by cooling. By #Apoptosis. #scouting
on 02024-10-30#video on #bootstrapping H₂SO₄ from epsom salt with a PbO₂ electrode and a clay pot #materials #scouting
on 02024-10-23#video about #manufacturing #aluminum-air #batteries with #3D-printing ABS. He says potassium hydroxide will eat PLA, which makes sense but which I hadn’t realized. #Mr-Electron here is using steel baling wire for his cathodes. For his anode he cuts up thick aluminum sheet metal with shears and then presses it flat in a vise. Each aluminum anode plate is crimped onto baling wire from the following cell in the battery using a hammer and anvil. He gets 10.2V open-circuit voltage from 8 series cells. I’m unclear how air is supposed to get to his cathodes. He does some load testing with small electric motors but doesn’t actually measure the current. The short-circuit current he measures is 160mA and rapidly dropping. After testing with LEDs for a while the open-circuit voltage has dropped to 3.8 volts. Later he cuts cathode forms out of CDs with an angle grinder and cutoff disc, wrapping them tightly with baling wire to maximize area. His higher-current anodes are aluminum-foil-wrapped popsicle sticks, dimensioned to fit inside the battery compartments, but for whatever reason he didn’t install the plates parallel, resulting in a dramatically unnecessarily high internal battery resistance, which he doesn’t bother to measure, but he gets 240mA out of it. His connections to the aluminum plates are made by torquing a pringled steel washer down onto their non-submerged ends with a bolt. The 6 cells in series ought to give about 9.6 volts open-circuit, but instead he gets only 4.8V (0.8V per cell), which he blames on residual sulfuric acid contamination, but commenter “gsestream” suggests might be due to a lack of oxygen. He uses a DFRobot USB boost converter to charge his cellphone. #bootstrapping #scouting #jugaad
on 02024-10-18#video #toread of #bootstrapping #manufacturing potassium permanganate from 40g MnO₂, 55g KOH, 30g KNO₃, 5.5% NaOCl, and 31% HCl #materials #scouting
on 02024-08-27#video of #NurdRage making chloroplatinic acid #materials #bootstrapping #scouting
on 02024-08-27#video of #manufacturing #woodworking tools by #3D-printing: templates for a router, an air guide for a router vacuum cleaner, a T-square with holes at 1-mm increments for drawing parallel to an edge (printing the first layer in a contrasting color), screw pattern guides for particular hinges, a drill guide for putting your Forstner bit the right distance from the edge of a plywood panel, a clamp with a rather oversized screw thread, and a scribing tool for transferring the outline of a wall onto the edge of a board you want to cut. #bootstrapping #scouting
on 02024-08-20#scouting #camping stoves: after trying canister butane stoves, white gas stoves, etc., the one he likes best is two chunks of unglazed porous pizza-stone-like ceramic soaked in alcohol. Basically a rock. #video
on 02024-06-26#NurdRage #video on #bootstrapping H₂SO₄ by blowing SO₂ onto a CuCl₂ solution, which oxidizes it the same way it oxidizes PCB copper, precipitating CuCl and also producing HCl as a waste product. Then you can reoxidize the CuCl with air before switching back to SO₂. He also mentions he made a previous video using H₂O₂ to do the oxidation. #materials #scouting
on 02024-06-26another #video on #bootstrapping H₂SO₄ with oxalate and blue vitriol. #materials #scouting Deleted “for violating YouTube’s Community Guidelines”. #censorship
on 02024-06-26#sewing #tutorial #video #toread without a sewing machine. #toread #scouting
on 02024-06-26#NurdRage #video on #bootstrapping H₂SO₄ from oxalic acid (dihydrate) and ferrous sulfate (heptahydrate), and the sun, with 46–67% yield. It’s very surprising to me that this precipitates iron oxalate. He boiled down the resulting acid until the remaining sulfate started to crystallize, then distilled it to 70% of nice, colorless acid. Using more oxalic acid he got 57% yield, and by leaving the defecation beaker in the sun for eight hours to reduce ferric ions, releasing CO₂, boosting the yield to 67%. An attempt with MgSO₄ only gave 2% yield. An attempt with blue vitriol generated a precipitate too fine to filter (maybe because he added the oxalic acid too fast). He says it even works for HNO₃. #materials #scouting
on 02024-06-25#video about #bootstrapping H₂SO₄ from alabaster #materials #scouting labeled as “satire”. He’s going using washing soda for this, which initially made me think it actually was satire, but thinking about it more, it sort of makes sense: calcite is far less water-soluble than alabaster (and he gets something like 50% yield on the calcite, proving it’s calcite with vinegar). But then don’t we just get sodium sulfate (already very useful for #energy-storage phase-change materials, but not the objective)? A water-soluble sulfate is progress, I guess. He converted most of his bicarb into washing soda first, but that seems like an unnecessary step, just convenient to reduce foaming. Then he electrolyzes it at 13.12 volts and 220mA in a hot-glued-together two-chamber cell with some kind of membrane or salt bridge in the middle, using a postage-stamp-sized iron anode (!!) in the chamber of initially almost pure water and a copper chain for the cathode. His objective with the iron anode is to precipitate out the remaining carbonate. Because the current is going up, he infers that soluble iron sulfate is being formed, although sodium sulfate leaking through his salt bridge (?) would be an alternative explanation. After five hours there was a lot of green/black sludge in the anode chamber; from the greenness he infers that the iron has precipitated all the carbonate. Then he runs it through a second electrolysis using a graphite anode, which nevertheless dissolved (I feel that lead would be a better ghetto choice) and electroplated his copper with iron, which is surprising given the presumably low pH. Then he puts it under UV light in a tiny aluminum-foil chamber, which he says is to ensure no remaining SO₃ molecules. No pH or specific gravity measurement.
on 02024-06-25another #video about attempting #bootstrapping H₂SO₄ from sulfur #materials #scouting #toread
on 02024-06-25#CodysLab #video on #bootstrapping H₂SO₄ #materials with the chamber process. He gets 20mℓ. #scouting
on 02024-06-25#video #toread with complete build of masonry stove and stairway. #scouting
on 02024-06-24#video another “haversack” #scouting video. Mostly he’s showing off his camping equipment: oilskin tarp, folding saw, ferrocerium rod, cigarette lighter, space blanket, tent stakes, etc. Seems like an 18-minute very boring ad by “A Way in the Wilderness”. Plonk.
on 02024-06-1601950s #video of how an oil refinery works, demonstrating fractional distillation, vacuum distillation, cat cracking with fluidized-bed silica/alumina sponge, catalytic reforming with platinum supported on sapphire to raise octane, etc. #materials #bootstrapping #scouting
on 02024-05-26minimalist wilderness #scouting kit #video of 6–8 “pounds” in a fanny pack, plus some food in a “little foraging pouch” and a steel bottle of drinking water suitable for cooking in. Work gloves, emergency whistle with button compass and thermometer on a lanyard, a baseball-cap-clip-on headlamp with a long LED bar, Rite in the Rain notebook, ink pen, water sterilization tablets (one to kill, one to neutralize, materials unspecified), two hanks of army cosplay cord, emergency poncho, duct tape, survival space blanket, small first aid kit, another compass, two bandannas, mini binoculars, some sort of unspecified black plastic bag, fire kit containing matches and ferrocerium rod, and a couple of ziploc bags of unspecified tinder. He has a sheath knife hung around his neck, a Bahco folding wood saw in a pouch, and what looks like a huge French-style kitchen knife on his belt. This “Frontier” guy with 2100 survivors is annoying as hell because he keeps saying “There you have it” and “Boom”
on 02024-05-10#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 02024-04-06#video from 02015 by "fullspectrumtechnician3798" on salvaging #microcontrollers for #hardware #electronics projects. Socketed DIPs are easiest to remove from the equipment. Old computer printer boards are one of his examples; he exhibits one with an UV-erasable 8748, which you can also “enable the external access” (I think this is pulling the EA pin high, maybe pin 7) to make it run a program from external ROM/RAM. He also exhibits what looks like a Packard Bell full-length ISA hard drive controller, saying, “normal Winchester drive controllers, pretty much all of them will have either an 8048 or 49 or 8051, usually...labeled, like, Winchester, something like WD1015.” He demonstrates one thus salvaged and hooked up to an external EPROM. Then he exhibits a full-height 5¼ IDE hard drive, saying they usually have an 8051, but this time he’s pointing to something like a PLCC. Then he exhibits an ISA modem card, which he says pretty much always has a microcontroller. He says the Winbond 78C31B on that modem is an 8051 (and therefore also has EA). “Some network cards like this old [ISA] LANTastic have a Zigalog Z80... luckily the serial chip, the RAM, and the CPU are all socketed.” Then he exhibits an old (01980s) UPS control board with a Philips 87C52E socketed DIP, which is another 8051. He says the MC6800 series is also useful even if preprogrammed, by using the “special functions” pins (?) to “tell them to boot off of an external ROM”. Though the one he shows is UV-erasable. Holding up a PLCC chip, he says hard drives, especially Western Digital, use the Intel 80C196 style, which is 16-bit but still has the “external access” pin. And he says keyboards often use the NEC D8048-8C, which is of course an 8048. #bootstrapping #hoarding #video #scouting
on 02024-04-05#TPAI salvaging parts from dishwashers to reuse. The interior is stainless! And he salvages thermal cutouts, water heating elements, a 16-amp 240-volt relay, a capacitor, the power switch, a pressure switch, a shaded-pole induction fan, a 30-watt “extrusion pump” to move water, some smaller relays, a bunch of power electronics (including seven triacs), a rotary switch, an EEPROM, some opamps, some darlington array drivers, a thermistor encapsulated in stainless steel, an electromechanical valve (“Aquastop”), a styrofoam float microswitch, the giant induction-motor-driven dishwasher circulating pump (the single-phase type with a start capacitor), and a Mitsubishi M38027M8 8-bit microcontroller. #hoarding #bootstrapping #video #scouting
on 02024-04-03#Andy-Ward on #bootstrapping clay for #ceramics from dirt, part 2. Recommends looking for “crackle texture” on the surface to locate dirt with a high clay content, then feeling for hard lumps. Later screen the clay to remove large particles, then paint strainer bags for removing silt, and levigation if that’s insufficient. #scouting #video
on 02024-04-03