Category: Skills
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Shop Improvements
The goal is to make my shop a usable space again. I used to have around 8 square feet of workbench, of which 2+ were taken up with the bench vise. The wielding table is outside. The hydrologic press is outside. The blast cabinet is outside. Normally, they are under tarps, but that isn’t a…
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“Prepping” vs. “Resilience.”
A great many moons ago, when responsibility for “Disaster Preparedness” landed on my desk, I lobbied for “Business Continuity” instead – how do we keep the business functioning, meet customer demand, protect and pay employees, support our suppliers and contractors, etc.? Not a simple task and in our extremely complex manufacturing business, more than a…
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Prepping – The Rule of Threes
The Rule of Threes is pretty simple. Three minutes without air. Three hours without shelter. Three days without water. Three weeks without food. Three months without hope. I’ve heard that this was designed by FEMA, but I have no idea. My family has been using it for close to two decades, and maybe longer. It’s…
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What is Prepping?
I’m a prepper. The term “prepper” means different things to different people. For some, it evokes images of old underground bunkers filled with canned goods and wall mounted, folding beds. For others, it’s more akin to what grandma did when she put away the harvest from her kitchen garden. Still other folks consider it to…
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Achieving Precision in Woodworking: Traditional and Modern Tools Compared
There was a remark about the lathe flywheel I recently worked on. Something about the precision of previous eras. They had more precision than you might think. Today, one of the tools we use to measure accurately is a micrometer. This magic device allows use to measure down to 0.0001, all because of a screw.…