“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
on 02024-04-06adding an emergency exit to the “#spider-hole” #stealth-camping #video #toread
on 02024-04-06the “#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.
on 02024-04-0624 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.
on 02024-04-06digging 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
on 02024-04-06digging a Japanese #spider-hole and sleeping in it, 45' #video #stealth-camping Demonstrates how the right-angle mode of an entrenching tool is more effective than a traditional shovel for removing dirt from the bottom of a foxhole. They seem to have started (pre-filming) by clearing pine needles away from the whole area so they can cover up their digging with them when they’re done, using pitchforks. Apparently the actual Japanese term is 蛸壺, takotsubo, octopus pot; “spider hole” is from the US Civil War. Two people digging for the entire day were able to get the vertical 1.7-meter-deep shaft done, though I feel like they were being rather generous with its horizontal dimensions. To shore up the roof they’re using square-cut “2×4” and “4×4” hemlock (which I thought was pine) which they then sawed to length for “cribbing”, using very simple post-and-lintel construction, with the posts being the 2×4s. The mosquitoes chased them down the hole, and kept coming down the hole all night; a bug net for their heads would have been useful. The horizontal tunnel with its floor 1.7 meters deep is tall enough for the YouTuber to squat in; he knows how to squat even though he’s Canadian. Some fungal growth is visible on the timbers, which seems like it could be a problem. After four days of digging they were just about complete with their unsupported 1.7-meter vertical shaft and 2-meter horizontal shaft. They nailed 13 parallel 4×4s together into a square wooden manhole cover, then cut a recess into the dirt around the hole to support it. Square-cut 4×4s are really 4 inches, so this is 1.3 meters wide, and the hole maybe 0.9 meters wide. Then they cut a small “access hole” in the middle of the panel, three 4×4s wide (305mm) and a few times longer than that, dimensions he later wishes had been slightly larger. Once he’s holed up in his hole, he demonstrates using a flint and steel to strike sparks, and then demonstrates the use of a portable folding stove to heat up a can of beans. Later on they punched some holes in the manhole cover for ventilation. Full of military fantasies.
on 02024-04-05