Skills

There are a zillion books out there on various aspects of prepping, and I can’t recommend them ALL. But these are some I consider to be truly important, or they’re ones that have been recommended highly by others. I’m going to stick stuff in categories to help make it easier to look through.

SELF-SUFFICIENCY

• The Perfect Bug Out Bag
• Emergency Food Storage and Survival Guide
• Best Guide to Disaster Readiness
• SAS Survival Handbook
• The Self Sufficient Life and How to Live It

MED/FIRST AID

• SpecOps Forces Medical Handbook
• Where There is no Doctor
• PDR for Herbal Medicine
• Medicinal Plants of North America
• A Book for Midwives

SECURITY/SELF-DEFENSE

• 100 Deadly Skills
• Prepper’s Home Defense
• Holding Your Ground
• Navy Seal’s Bug In Guide

GENERAL SKILLS

• Encyclopedia of Country Living
• Basic Butchering of Livestock
• Shelters, Shacks, and Shanties
• Wildwood Wisdom
• No-Grid Survival Projects
• The Way Things Work (TY CBMTTek!)

CRAFTING/DIY

• The Barefoot Architect
• The Off-Grid Living Bible
• Make, Sew, and Mend
• How to Build a Moonshine Still
• Footwear Pattern Making
• How to Build Wind Turbine (etc)
• Wind Mills and Wind Motors
• Homemade Contrivances

FICTION

• Homestead Bound
• The Collapse
• One Second After
• Going Home
• Getting Out

People do a poor job of creating, managing, and remembering passwords. We are horrible at making random numbers and worse at creating things that are random-like but we can remember.

Part of this is because of the rules put in place by NIST and ISO. ISO 27001 has this to say about passwords:

As computers have become faster, the need for better passwords has also increased. Brute forcing a password has a simple cost formula:
$$\frac{{\mathrm{complexity}}^{\mathrm{length}}}{2}$$
For example, if the complexity is all uppercase letters and the length of the password is 8 characters then we have:
$$\frac{{26}^8}{2}=\mathrm{104,413,532,288}$$

Which might look like a large number, but in computer terms isn’t really. As the complexity goes up, the final number goes up. Adding length causes the number to go up even faster. Consider adding the set of numbers, 0-9 to our complexity verse adding one more character to the length of our password.
$$\frac{{36}^8}{2}=\mathrm{1,410,554,953,728}$$
And adding one more character to the length:
$$\frac{{26}^9}{2}=\mathrm{2,714,751,839,488}$$

Adding just one extra character gives us nearly twice as many values to test.

Oh, the divide by 2 is the average number of tests before we guess right.

If the characters are not truly random, the number of guesses decreases substantially. Using names or words, even with character exchanges, produces a much smaller search space. Regardless, the formula stays the same, even if the vocabulary changes.

Consider just using a 3-word passphrase:

$$\frac{{\mathrm{104,334}}^3}{2}=\mathrm{567,868,237,365,852}$$

As you can see, using a passphrase increases the search space incredibly. The only requirement is that the search space of the letter search meet or exceed the search space of the word search.

Unfortunately, many password methods do not handle long passwords well. In early Unix times, no matter how long of a password you entered, only the first 8 characters were used.

Which brings us to

Password Managers

A password manager stores passwords in an encrypted form and retrieves them for you on demand.

For a password manager (PM) to be acceptable to the users, it must interface with the users browsers and other tools that need passwords. This means it must have a mobile app. If it does not, it will not be used.

The PM should monitor applications for password requests and autofill those requests.

The PM must lock itself after a certain amount of idle time or browser/device restart.

Finally, and in some senses, most important, the PM must be secure from data breaches.

To be secure from data breaches, the PM should never store credentials in clear text.

LastPass

This is one of the better-known PMs. While it had a good track record, there was a data breach and credentials were exposed.

One of my clients used LastPass, so I used it. I never particularly liked it. When I could, I moved away from it.

One of the big downsides is that it requires a live, active internet connection to function. No network, no access.

Keeper

I have used Keeper. It is a well-rounded PM with all the expected features. It stores all credentials encrypted by your password. They can’t access your credentials even if they wanted to. Since they can, your passwords cannot be exposed in a data breach.

One of the strong points of Keeper is the ability to share “folders.” You can have a folder for passwords related to a single project or client and share that folder with other users, inside or outside the organization.

The ability to share passwords means that the administrator can update a shared password, and every member with access to that password gets the change immediately.

Shared folders requires a paid tier.

There is also the ability to store small files securely.

The one downside I discovered with Keeper is that it too requires an active internet connection to function.

We were on a long road trip when my kid ran us out of data on my mobile plan. They consumed nearly 10GB of data in a little over 6 hours.

This left me in the position of attempting to log into my provider’s website using credentials stored in Keeper. Except that the amount of bandwidth available to me was so low that it took 30 minutes to get that password and login.

BitWarden

This is my current PM of choice. It provides all the features of Keeper with a few that appeal to me.

First, it is can be self-hosted. This means that all the data security is provided by me. With the self-hosted version, I can offer PM services to anybody at cost to me.

When you move up to any of the paid tiers, the lowest being $4/user per month, you get the ability to create organizations and then share a collection (folder) with that organization.

The mobile application does not need to have Internet access to function, though you might need to request a sync if there are recent changes to your vault.

All data is stored encrypted. The key to decrypt your vault is your master password. Even if there were to be a data breach, your password would still be secure because decrypting your passwords requires your master password.

The BitWarden allows for the use of a Personal Identification Number, or PIN. Unlike most PINs, the BitWarden PIN can be any number of digits. I find that it is easier to remember a number sequence than to remember random character strings.

You can set when the master password is needed to unlock the vault.

If you happen to forget your PIN, you can still unlock your vault with the master password.

Like all good PMs, BitWarden offers two factor authentication (2FA). It supports YubiKeys and TOTP options. TOTP is commonly referred to as an authenticator.

You can use a secondary authenticator for your 2FA to access BitWarden. But you can also use BitWarden’s integrated TOTP generator.

The pricing appears to be reasonable: $4/user per month for “small teams” and $6/user per month for enterprise-level features.

Psono

This is another self-hosted option. It does not seem to have the same polish as BitWarden. It would be my choice if I were just playing.

Conclusion

If you are not using a Password Manager, now is the time to start. For my readers, I’m willing to give you a free account on our BitWarden server, though you are likely better off using BitWarden’s free offering.

If you live in or near New England, you may know of the very Northern experience of canned brown bread. Cylindrical and sweeter than regular bread, more dense, and yet so delicious when camping! Canned bread has a long history in New England, and is deeply entrenched in our culture (The Takeout). The reality is that canning only made this steamed version of bread more easy to disseminate to the public. It had long been part of the New England colonists’ food culture. So here is a recipe based firmly on the 1908 version of The Rumford Complete Cook Book.

Ingredients:

• 2 cups whole wheat or Golden Wheat flour
• 1 cup yellow cornmeal
• 2 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1/2 cup molasses
• 1/2 cup raisins
• 1 egg
• 2 cups whole milk

Sift together the flour, cornmeal, salt, and baking powder. Add in the raisins and molasses. Whisk together the egg and milk, then add that to the flour mixture.

Have ready several well greased tins with oven-safe lids, and fill these 2/3 full of the batter. Grease the lids and fit them onto the tins. If you don’t have appropriate tins, you can use #3 (large bean) cans or even coffee cans (which are generally #10). For can sizing, you can check out this site.

There are two methods you can use for steaming your bread: stovetop or oven.

To steam your bread on the stovetop, you need a pot that is sufficiently larger than your can that you can put a lid on the pot. Put a steamer rack (a metal trivet, even balled up aluminum foil will work) in the bottom of the pot, and put your can on top of your rack. Add enough boiling water (yes, boil it before you put it in the pot with your bread) to come about a third of the way up the side of your can. Cover the pot and turn the heat to its lowest setting that will still maintain a simmer to generate steam. Steam the bread for three hours.

To steam your bread in the oven, pre-heat your oven to 325°F. Find a high sided roasting or other pan that will hold your can of bread and still allow you to pour in enough boiling water to reach a third of the way up the side of the can. Again, steam the bread for three hours.

You can check your bread for doneness by inserting a toothpick. If it comes out clean, it’s ready. I would suggest you start checking your bread at the 2 hour mark, especially if you’re using smaller cans. Continue to steam until the bread is baked through. Let your steamed bread cool on a cookie rack on the counter for at least one hour before removing it from the can. It should slide out fairly easily after it has cooled.

Serve this up as is, or “toast” it in a frying pan with a little bit of butter or margarine. This is very dense, very filling bread, and is in NO WAY a reduced calorie item.

Last week’s project was to make a shooting board.

I had all the stock prepared and had started assembling it when I realized that the screws were too long. They poked out into the part my plane slides down.

This is not good. The project is on hold until I receive more screws.

A Joiner’s Box

This is a simple box to hold my tools. It is about 38″ wide, 15″ deep, and 13″ tall. I think. The design calls for a simple till, an internal box for small parts. I think I will do the more period-correct and have two sliding trays the length of the box.

I brought in my first glued-up panel for my wife to fuss over and tell me nice things. Ego stroking for sure.

She came clean and told me that it was just a board to her, not really worthy of praise.

This led me to think about that simple panel.

To get to the point where I could make that panel, I needed to build my workbench. This was a big build; it is done.

I needed work holding for the bench. I installed a leg vise and drilled holes for hold-downs. I made a batten to hold boards in place as they are planed. This was more than a bit of work.

The first step of making a panel is to be able to cut it to size. My skills at handsawing have gotten good enough that this is no longer an issue for right-angle cuts. It is fast enough that I’m not interested in using a power tool.

Next, the stock needs to be planed smooth and flat. My smoothing plane made short work of the smoothing, and my jack plane got the boards flat. I was able to quickly check for twist and flatness with my winding sticks and a straight edge.

The first board I attempted to smooth and flatten took me hours, and I did a poor job. Today it went quickly, with low effort.

That is because I’ve spent far too many hours sharpening plane irons and chisels. My slow-speed grinder now puts a 26-27° bevel on an iron or chisel; the three stones then bring that to 25°, and the strop polishes the bevel to a mirror-like finish. It is to the point where I only need to use the fine, extra-fine, and strop to bring an edge back to razor sharpness.

You can hear and feel when the blade is sharp. If I would only put the time into sharpening the irons of all the planes every day before starting, my life would actually be better and easier.

Even with a sharp iron, you need to know how to adjust the plane. Before I started this journey, I didn’t know how to do that. My planes fought me constantly. Now they are a pleasure to use.

Besides knowing how to tune, sharpen, and adjust your planes, you need to know how to use them. It is to the point where the process of smoothing and flattening a piece of stock is easy. I start with the #4, make it smooth, and move to the #5 Jack plane for the flat. Using the Jack plane at an angle to present a shearing action also makes the boards flat from side to side.

It only takes 5 to 10 minutes to make a board smooth and flat.

The next part of stock prep is to square an edge. Again I start with the #4, knock down the high spots until I have a smooth edge from end to end, and then I switch to the #5 again.

Checking for squareness is easy but humbling. Except that more and more often the edge is square after the Jack plane.

I’ve been playing with the Jointer plane. It is a huge, heavy, and long plane. The iron is wide enough to cover 2+ inches of wood in a single pass.

For my first panel, I clamped the finished faces together with the squared edges aligned with each other. Less than 4 minutes in the vise with the Jack and Jointer, and the edges are jointed.

The glue-up went very smoothly. There was a very thin bead of glue that came out of the glueline, as wanted. The final product is pretty darn good for my first glue-up in many years.

After the glue had dried for a few hours, I took the clamps off and gave it the once-over. It is not flat enough to plane the finished surface, so I worked on the back surface.

I think that this will be the last panel that I glue up that is full thickness. From now on, I’ll either rough plane the back surface or feed it through the (cheating) bandsaw to take 3/16 off the back face to reduce the amount of chips I make.

So that very unimpressive 12×13 panel represents an entire series of new skills. I’m looking forward to doing still more.

First, a huge shoutout to CourtListener.com. These guys are doing an impressive job of exposing the inner workings of the legal system.

They haven’t hit the state-level courts yet, but at the federal level, they really can’t be beat.

They are a part of the Free Law Project. FLP has managed to get contracts and access to many court filings. They have created software to scrub court filings and collect them in one place. They have created a good search engine that just works.

Recently they announced a new feature: voice-to-text transcription of circuit court oral arguments.

In general, it is much faster for me to read a transcript than to listen to it. Plus, knowing who is speaking makes a difference in understanding what is happening.

With this new feature, I expect to be paying more attention to oral arguments at the appellate level.

I am biased towards them; I contributed a small bit of coding a while ago. They have just gotten better since I found them.

Supreme Court Terms

The Supreme Court term runs from July 1st to July 1st. The old term ends on June 30th, and the new term starts on July 1st with the court starting business in October.

In practical terms, this means that the case numbers change on July 1st. We are now seeing cases with a “25-” prefix, indicating the case was filed in the 2025 term. We won’t see anything really happen until October.

During a term, motions are filed on the docket and the emergency docket. These motions request certain actions of the court. The one we are most familiar with is a motion for a writ of certiorari.

Normally these are filed on the main docket. If a stay or injunction is requested, that will normally be done through the emergency docket.

Occasionally a motion for a stay or injunction will turn into a motion for a writ of certiorari.

Over the course of the term, the Court will hear oral arguments on 60 to 70 cases. These cases encompass all areas of law. Constitutional issues, business law, property law, criminal law, and all the other areas that I don’t know anything about.

The case that overturned Chevron was an administrative case. It just happened to be incredibly important to dismantling the administrative state.

Because of the breadth of types of cases, SCOTUS does not like to take on repetitive cases nor too many cases in the same area. They would rather pick one to three cases that address issues significant to the Nation.

We can expect two or three Second Amendment cases to be heard in a term. The cases chosen will address large issues that advance jurisprudence in Second Amendment law.

Will there be an assault weapons ban case? At this point, I believe the court has indicated that it will not. The refusal to grant cert to Snope (Bianchi) is a strong indicator.

Snope has been an ongoing case since 2017. It was one of the cases looking for cert before cert was granted in Bruen.

The case was brought in the Fourth Circuit to get a favorable ruling to reverse Kolbe v. Hogan.

Bianchi made it to the Supreme Court. Was granted cert after Bruen. The opinion of the Fourth Circuit Court was vacated. The case was remanded to the Fourth Circuit for a “do-over” in light of Bruen.

Two years later, the en banc Fourth Circuit decided they had gotten it right the first time around.

A motion for cert was made to the Supreme Court. That motion was denied.

Why Didn’t The Supreme Court Take These Second Amendment Cases?

Because they are a do-over.

Bruen was a licensing case. The question asked was does the Second Amendment-protected right to keep and bear arms extend outside the home? The resounding answer was “YES!” The right to keep and bear arms does exist outside the home. All states are now must-issue states.

The rest of the opinion is dicta. In that dicta, the Court explained how to evaluate Second Amendment challenges. They stated that when there is a constitutional challenge, the first step is to determine if the plain text is implicated. If the plain text is implicated, then it becomes the government’s burden to prove a history and tradition of that type of regulation.

Note, this is for all constitutional challenges. This is the basis of originalism in jurisprudence.

Because the question asked had to do with the right to keep and bear arms outside the home, it was not a repeat of Heller. The Heller methodology was and always has been: is the plain text of the Second Amendment implicated? If yes, then the burden shifts to the government to prove a historical tradition of matching firearms regulations.

Bruen did not change that in the least. It affirmed the Heller methodology.

Heller‘s dicta talks about how to find matching historical firearm regulations. It also discusses every word of the operative clause of the Second Amendment and why the operative clause is controlling and not “well regulated militia.”

In their research into the historical laws of this Nation, the Supreme Court could not find any regulations banning firearms that were in common use. Because there are no matching regulations, there is no history nor tradition of banning firearms in common use, such as the pistols at issue in Heller.

The opinion held that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms. The specific question allowed the gun-grabbers to limit that to “in the home”.

The gun haters then created a two-step shuffle where they would first decide on the level of scrutiny required to balance away any practical Second Amendment-protected rights in the anti-gun states.

Bruen extend those protections outside the home and explained that the two-step shuffle was not allowed.

So what is Snope? The question asked in Snope is can the state ban a firearm in common use?

This is the same as Heller. The observed fact that the lower courts are not applying Heller correctly does not make the case significant to The Court.

Misbehaving inferior courts can be slapped down via other means.

Types of Second Amendment Cases

I believe there are a few types of cases that are making their way up the court system that will interest The Court.

The first is “sensitive places.” While SCOTUS gave examples of “sensitive places” and examples of what were not “sensitive places”, the states have decided on their definition.

The state’s definition of sensitive place is any place they don’t want armed people.

The second type of case is a definition of “The People.” There have been several cases where 18-20 year-olds have challenged laws restricting their right to keep and bear arms. There is a clear circuit split.

This case would allow The Court to clarify that “The People” means all the people. They might choose to extend that definition to people under the age of 18 as well as legal residents of the United States.

The more important part of that decision will be the dicta. That is where The Court will, again, tell the inferior courts how to do it right.

Finally, I believe we are going to see a case on the NFA. It won’t address machine guns; it will address infringements when there is no justification.

Remember, the reason that you can’t buy a short-barreled rifle with a 4473 is because the federal government has to collect a tax on the transfer of that firearm.

All the requirements, extra background checks, fingerprinting, and chief law enforcement officer approval exist to make sure that you pay your transfer fee and that you can prove that you have paid, on demand.

And nobody is stopping you from buying a machine gun if you are willing to meet the requirements and pay your $200 tax. The closing of the NFA to new machine guns isn’t stopping you from buying existing (pre-1986) machine guns.

In a few years, we might see something challenging the right to acquire machine guns. Acquiring would include making them.

If it ever becomes possible to add new machine guns to the NFA, I can see a booming business for drill guide jigs.

Conclusion

There are big things coming from the Supreme Court in the Second Amendment area. I’m sure it will be good.

I don’t have many pictures of last weekend, as I was busy as all get-out. I have a single shot of one of my pies, which I pre-made at home so I wouldn’t be so busy. The pies were great, but I was still too busy to do anything but be at the kitchen tent.

Saturday, we had a glorious day. Rumors are floating that we had over 6000 people in fair that day, which is pretty damn fine. I sold several books, which was nice. Tips were good, too. With a beautiful day, though, comes the heat. It’s vastly important to put on sunblock several times during the day, because it does wear off as you sweat and it’s vital. Even more important is drinking enough water and assorted other liquids to balance your electrolytes. Water alone won’t do it, because you’re working much harder than usual, sweating buckets (or worse, you stop sweating, which is downright dangerous), and not peeing nearly as often as you should. You can actually get water drunk (loopy from too much water) and still be dehydrated. As someone with VERY low sodium naturally, I always have Gatorade, sekanjabin (a Persian “gatorade” style drink from the middle ages), Liquid IV, and LMNT on hand. It’s necessary to stay on top of things, in order to continue to be functional.

Why is this in the “prepping” section this week? Partly because I didn’t have anywhere else to put it, but partly because there are actual survival skills that I’m talking about here. Being hydrated during heavy labor, especially a kind you’re unused to in daily life, is something  you won’t think of in an emergency situation unless you’re already in the know.

The first weekend of fair, I managed to get slightly dehydrated. I stopped sweating. I knew how hot it was, and that I should be sweating, and I dosed myself with LMNT to try and fix things. Almost immediately, I started sweating again. My body knew it was going to get what it needed, and voila. How is that done if you don’t have fancy, expensive packets of stuff to put into your water? Add vinegar, salt, ginger, and whatever flavoring makes it drinkable for you. This will quite literally save your life. Salt is necessary, and when you’re very hot and NOT sweating, it means your body can’t naturally regulate your body temperature. Salt makes the sweating happen. Vinegar helps balance your natural electrolytes. Ginger stops a cold drink from causing cramps in a very hot body. Sugar makes it palatable. Know how to make some version of it (sekanjabin, shrub, switchel, haymakers, posca, whatever).

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For me, anything cooked in coconut curry is going to be good. You could easily sub out the whitefish for tofu or chicken or anything else, and this would still taste wonderful. This diet friendly, delicious meal is a great way to use cheap whitefish protein in your meals.

Ingredients:

• 2 pollock fillets
• 1 small onion, diced
• 2 carrots, peeled and diced
• 3 red potatoes, diced
• 2 asparagus spears, cut into bite sized pieces
• 1 tbsp red curry powder (or to taste)
• 15 oz can coconut milk
• 15 oz water
• 1 tsp lime juice
• 1 tsp salt
• 4 tbsp avocado oil, divided (or other neutral oil)
• fresh dill (for topping)

Add 2 tbsp of the oil to the cooking pot and heat over medium heat. Stir in the onion, carrots, and asparagus and saute until softened and starting to become clear. Stir in the red curry powder and cook for about 1 minute. Add in the can of coconut milk and then fill the can with water and add that to the pot.

In a skillet, heat the remaining 2 tbsp of oil over medium-high heat. Cook the fish for about 1 minute per side to brown then remove from the heat and cube the fish. Try not to fully cook the fish or it will be too flaky to cube.

Bring the soup pot to a boil and add the diced potato. Reduce to a simmer, then cook for 5 minutes. Add the fish, salt and lime juice to the pot and simmer for 5 more minutes.

Salt to taste, then serve into bowls and top with fresh dill. Add a side of hot, crusty bread and some pickles to make the perfect meal!

It isn’t perfect, but it is better than it was.

Tools To Make Tools

I finished my tool toot Friday. Yesterday I started work on another tool, a shooting board.

The tools I’ve made so far:

• Workbench – Functional, needs more bracing
• Winding Sticks – Used to visualize twist in a board
• Crotch board – A V notch in a flat board used to hold a board on edge for planing.
• A round-head mallet — used for hitting things
• A tooltote — to carry tools more easily

The tooltote is an exercise in barely good enough. There are so many mistakes made, and yet it still works. Not only is it functional, but I want to use it.

Once I clear space on the workbench, this will reside at the back of the workbench to organize the tools I need. The front section is large enough to hold a #4 plane, a block plane, and a #5 jack plane. The back section is a bit narrower. It currently holds my chisels. Marking and measuring tools and a rasp.

I will remove the rasp to make the tote more useful for other things, such as a marking knife, try square, and straight edge.

I need more Planes

I will start the search for a ‘fore’ plane in the near future. A ‘fore’ plane is the plane you use before all the others. This plane is used to remove lots of material rapidly. It is used in a way similar to a scrub plane.

I already have my #4 smoothing plane. I’m still tuning it. The bed isn’t flat enough yet which causes the corners to dig in a bit too much. My #5 jack plane needs some work on the iron to finish bringing it back to life. It is a joy to use. My #7 requires much work on the flats of the iron. Mostly because of rust issues.

Part of the care and feeding of these tools is to keep the soles and plates lightly oiled so they don’t stick to the wood. I’m working towards that.

This leads me to “specialty” planes. There are three specialty planes that are required for general work. The first is a router plane. This plane is used for smoothing the bottom of a hand-cut dado or other pockets in the face of a board. Think of mortising a hinge.

I found a mini version; I’m going to make a wooden version of a more normal size.

The next plane needed is something for smoothing shoulders or making rabbets. I might have found a cheap used version. If so, this will be a huge improvement in my game. In the same vein, there are rabbet planes that are designed to cut right to a shoulder.

When I’m next at the Fort at No. 4, I’m going to see if I can borrow one of the molding planes. A simple roundover or a fancier edging tool is what I’m looking for.

Cheating

If I buy a piece of 1×6 pine from the lumberyard, it will be smooth. It won’t be flat. It is likely to have twist. This means that if I’m lucky, after preparing the board I’ll have something around 5/8 thick, not 3/4.

My sawmill is providing me 4/4 rough-sawn lumber that is not smooth, but it is nearly flat and has almost no twist. Because of his quality, after preparing both faces, I will have a board 15/16 thick.

Because my target thickness is 3/4 (12/16), I have to remove nearly 1/4 of the wood. Turning wood into shavings is fun but requires time and effort.

So I cheat. I resaw my boards from 15/16 down to 13/16s. This reduces the handwork greatly.

Before I sharpened my handsaw into a rip saw I used the band saw to rip a board I used in my workbench.

Pre-drilling and countersinks

While it is unlikely that an #8 screw will split soft pine, it is always better to drill a pilot hole. The all-in-one version I’ve tried using isn’t working for me.

The nice thing about the all-in-one drill is that the drill bit is tapered, leading to a hole that is big enough to not grip the screw in one board but small enough to grip the wood on the far side, allowing the screw to pull the two pieces of wood together. The builtin counter sink acts like a depth stop and does leave a counter sink for the screw.

And it does a horrible job. I will be switching to doing this in three steps. First, drill the pilot hole, then drill the clearance hole in the outside board, and finally countersink the outside hole. If I do it this way, I know that all parts will be done correctly. Fewer stripped holes.

Screw Lengths

You’re doing it wrong! Yeah, that’s what I keep hearing in my head.

There are two types of screwed connections in normal woodworking. I.e., ignoring pocket screw construction. You can screw two pieces of wood together face-to-face, or you can screw face-to-edge.

When screwing face-to-face, it looks like the proper length should be the total thickness minus 1/4″. This gives the maximum hold without poking through the other board.

For attaching through a face into end grain, I should be using 2 1/2″ or 3″ screws. I didn’t know.

Nails

Period-correct nails are still available today. I picked up a pound of artsy-fartsy wrought iron rose-head nails to use on the 6-board box. But with what I just learned about screw length, I think I will pick up some two or three inch cut nails.

The only issue I know of when using cut nails is that you have to pre-drill to avoid cracking the boards. But you want the hole to be as small as possible to increase the grip of the nails.

Conclusion

Today I should finish the shooting board. This means I’ll be able to start my first 6-board box soon.

Vinegar is one of those items that should be in every prep pack. It’s useful for SO many things! What can you use vinegar for?

• making drinks (shrub, sekanjabin, switchel, haymakers, etc.)
• baking (you can use it to make a buttermilk substitute)
• all purpose cleaner (AMAZING on windows)
• preservation (pickles, meats, etc.)
• descaling (clean scale from coffee makers, kettles, etc.)
• removes stains (especially yellowing along collar lines)
• weed killer (on its own it’s okay, mixed with Dawn detergent it’s better than most commercial mixes)
• insect repellent (I’ve read this one but haven’t tried it)
• wound cleaning
• treating nail fungus
• cleans chrome and helps windows be no-frost
• soothes a sunburn
• great for disinfecting cutting boards, especially wooden ones
• white vinegar in laundry helps remove general stains

I’m sure I missed stuff, but man, we use vinegar all over the place in our house. From salads to shower drains (where it kills off those little irritating gnats that come from drains), it’s basically an all purpose item to have in your go bag.

But what if you don’t have vinegar on hand? Fear not, it’s not actually difficult to make!

Making vinegar from scratch can be such a sinch, and coupled with its indispensability in the kitchen, makes it a worthwhile endeavor. The process of getting to vinegar is simple:

1. start with a sugary liquid
2. let the sugars ferment into alcohol by way of our friendly local wild yeast
3. then with continued air exposure the alcohol will be eaten up by native acetobacter making it into vinegar. Boom!

An even simpler overview:

1. crush fruit in your fermentation vessel of choice
2. leave it be until it tastes like vinegar.
3. strain the solids. So easy!

From: Ferment Pitsburgh

Basically, vinegar is made from scraps, the stuff you’d normally toss in the garbage. You can use apple cores, skins, bruised stuff even. You can use old wine that’s already starting to turn to vinegar, too.

A very basic apple cider vinegar recipe that I have used:

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I’ve been building. I figured we had all heard Another One Bites the Dust more than a few times.

Today, I put the vise on the workbench. This is a game changer.

The jaws are 11+ inches wide. The vise can open around 15 inches. It is a parallel jaw vise, meaning that the jaw presses against the apron with the same force from top to bottom.

The shiny metal disk at the left front corner is an aluminum planing stop I turned on the South Bend. The handle for the vise is 1″ hardwood from the local hardware store, but the endcaps I turned myself. And then I found my 1″ bit was in such poor condition that I threw it away after it drilled two holes that drifted.

The board at the bottom of the image, on the ground, between the vise and the bench leg, is a wedge. It keeps the vise jaw parallel. It is the fulcrum point of the vise.

There is one of my homemade mallets on the table. Two crap saws, one good saw, and one OK saw. There is a 50″ straight edge and my clipboard with the plans attached.

The next modifications to the bench are to drill 3/4″ holes for side board support and some 3/4″ holes in the top for different hold-downs. Because this is a softwood top and it is thin, I need to add blocking under whatever boards I drill.

I also need to put the braces on the front and a stop on the chop (the moving part of the vise) to keep it from twisting.

I will soften the edges of the vise jaw at some point, but for today, it is fully functional. I’m happy.

On the other hand, I just messed up my tool tote build. Ally wants the broken one, but I’ll make it all work.