Skills

I know that “taking heat” means something different to 2A people, but I’m talking about temperature heat today. I’ve heard a lot of people whining (and yes, I’m using that term on purpose) about the heat, of late, and I want to address it from a prepping perspective.

So, over the past several weekends, I’ve been at a variety of reenacting events. None of those events were “modern” or had A/C. Very few of those events had even an electric fan, never mind anything more cooling than that. During the events, temperatures have ranged from 86*F to 104*F, with humidity in the 75% or higher range. One particular day, on July 12th, it was 104*F and 95% humidity where I was. I had no modern means for dealing with that heat.

When talking about the heat, several people (not on here) have told me…

• I’m just better at dealing with the heat than most people (which is laughable considering I am sodium deficient at the BEST of times, which is a dangerous thing in high heat situations)
• the heat has killed people and I’m not taking it seriously enough
• some people require air conditioning just to live
• people in the past didn’t have heat like this

I do agree, the heat has killed some people. I am not the sympathetic ear most people expected when I was told that. I feel bad for the elderly or very young when intense heat happens, because they’re not cognitively able to do the things necessary to not suffer from it. Then again, we more able bodied folks can certainly do things to make their lives easier, and so I don’t consider it a big argument. It’s also a very small number of people. In a major disaster, those people are frankly going to die. I don’t like saying it, but it’s true. If you’re celiac, prone to medical issues, elderly or very young, the likelihood is that you’re going to die. While I work very hard to mitigate that fact in my own prepping, it’s still a fact, and I have dealt with it to the best of my ability. If I die, I die, and I’m not going to whine about it.

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Bread is often called the “staff of life,” and that’s because a man can survive on bread and water. We think of this, in today’s world of Wonderbread and fake food, as a cruel punishment. In medieval times, bread and water was fairly standard fare for a person. In the 1750s, bread was 60% of the average colonist’s daily food intake. Today, that would be considered outrageous and possibly dangerous. Then, the wheat was whole, and even when finely ground (very doable along the many rivers in water-powered mills), it contained all of the natural protein and fat of the kernel.

This recipe is one that I’ve developed on my own. It’s a blend of several recipes that I’ve worked on over the years. It combines a pain de mie recipe, a no-knead recipe that I love, and the “beginner’s loaf”  from a book of Chris’s, Bread Alone. It’s the culmination of about 20 years of practice, learning, failures, successes, and surprises as I learned enough about bread baking to casually consider teaching myself to use a wood fired beehive oven at the Fort.

This is not an easy recipe. It is a simple recipe, however. The beginner bread recipe I mention above is the best place to go for instructions on how to bake bread. If you do what the authors tell you, you will eventually make amazing loaves of bread, every time. It will take a few years of practice, though, and you will probably make up new swear words as you go along. This recipe here, is not as difficult as the beginner loaf, but will not teach you as much about baking as you make it. I heartily encourage you to make it entirely by hand at least a half dozen to a dozen times before indulging in the use of a MixMaster or other bread making machine. Getting your hands onto fresh dough is good for you mentally, and the resulting bread will feed you physically and spiritually. There’s definitely something “more than human” about creating a loaf of bread.

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One of the most interesting things I’m currently discovering, is how to move back in time. What happens when there is no electricity? What can we do, how can we do it?

One path is to learn how to live off-grid. This is part of where I am. This is why I spent the time learning how to make a steam expansion engine, learning how to run it, and then learned how to build a 2 HP boiler.

That steam engine is intended to run a generator or a lathe, depending. Yes, I have some generators, but water and wood will be easier, in some situations, to get than other fuel.

But there is another entire type of skill set, that of taking a step back in time.

Let me discuss just one part of this, I want to make some items, such as a table-top. That’s easy, just drive to the lumberyard and buy the lumber, do the glue-up, feed it through the plainer, sand it and a bit more. Easy stuff.

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I posted about prepping a bit back on GFZ. I think it’s a topic that needs to be covered on a regular basis, and even if you have been doing it for a dog’s age, the reminders help get you in the right head space. Now, I don’t do the whole “deep state bunker prep” thing. First, I don’t believe the world will go into that much chaos, that quickly. It’s going to be a slow decline (and in my very strong opinion, the pandemic proved that). Second, and more importantly, bunker prep isn’t sustainable.

I don’t know if any of you have watched Love, Death, and Robots (it’s on Netflix if you haven’t, and it’s well worth the watch), but there’s a couple of fairly amazing shorts that cover prepping topics. The one I’m personally thinking of is in season 2, when the three robot friends are touring America after the death of all the humans. They walk around an area where a bunch of people lived in bunkers. They’re all dead, too. Another show, can’t remember the name of it, shows a couple who stays two years in their bunker, and when they open the door they find out that the entire Earth has been destroyed and they’re just floating around on a chunk of ground. These both illustrate the problem with bunker prep.

If you set up a bunker for short term emergencies, that’s fine. It is not, however, a solution for surviving TEOTWAWKI. Eventually, you run out of food, water, or air. And then you die. Bunkers, pre-pack food (like MREs or emergency buckets), and hoarding ammo and firearms are basically just a way to die painfully and slowly.

Real prepping (yes, I said what I said) is learning enough skills to survive after TEOTWAWKI. Real preppers don’t waste time figuring out ways to try and survive a planet buster bomb or other doomsday scenarios, because there’s no point. If the planet is destroyed, you’re just going to die. If a plague comes through and you catch it, you’re possibly going to die. If someone bombs your city, you may die. These are not things to prep FOR.

Prepping is what you do after you survive. Yes, have a bunch of food stores set up, because that’s important. There might not be a grocery store to go visit, or it might be empty, or being run by a despot (who isn’t the current government). You may need to shelter to avoid a firestorm or waves of nuclear fallout or insurgents or invaders. That’s short term stuff.

After the firestorm or fallout or aliens move on, you’ll come out of your hidey hole, and then the real work begins. Surviving is easy. Living is a lot more complex and difficult.

I’ve talked about it before, saving seeds, learning skills, putting food up that’s shelf stable, making short, medium, and long term plans for emergencies. But how to you go about it all? There’s no one answer for how to prep for surviving and thriving. You have to come up with your own plan, that fits your family and your part of the world. The emergencies that I plan for likely aren’t the ones that should be planned for in a big city like Boston or NYC, for instance. I live in the boonies, and there are other issues I’ll have to deal with. City people will have to deal with zombies (the name for those who wander about robbing and pillaging during emergencies) and rationing and figuring out how and when to escape. People near the equator will have to plan for hot weather, and people farther north will have to plan for cold winters, possibly without electricity or dinosaur squeezings.

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Back in May, I decided to attempt a new recipe while out in the field, cooking over a fire at a Renaissance Faire. I do this a couple of times a year, when I know I have time to play with new things. Not all fairs allow me the time to pay attention to details, and so quite a lot of the time I stick with a standard rotation of recipes. But this was a new fair, and one which I had no other responsibilities at. I was just there to cook and talk about history, and maybe sell a few cookbooks. So I picked a new one, and ran with it.

The result was incredibly delicious. I had people trying to steal pieces off of each other’s plates. They scraped the bottom of my dutch oven with bits of bread, to be certain they’d eaten every last drop. It was an impressive sight, to say the least. It seems to me, this makes a wonderful first recipe for my weekly recipe post.

To make Alloes of beef

Take lene beef and cut hym in thyn pecys and lay hit on A borde then take sewet of motton or of beef and herbys and onyons hackyd small to gether then straw thy leshes of beef with powder of pepur and a lytell salt and strew on thy sewet and the herbys. And rolle them up ther yn put them on a broche and roste them and serue them up hote. — Transcription of original receipt (Source: MS Pepys 1047)

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I like to learn new things. My goal is to be able to fix anything at The Fort At #4. A large part of that is learning how to turn wood.

This is not as difficult as it could be because I have experience with a metal lathe. The concepts are similar, but very different.

In metal working, we look at the type of metal, the amount of metal we want to remove, and the speed at which we wish to do it. This informs us of the type of tool to use.

Steel likes larger nose radius than aluminum. The chip breakers are different, the rake is different. The cutter shape defines speeds and feeds. What tool I pick is dependent on what I am doing.

In wood turning, there are two major types, “spindle” and “bowl”. A spindle is a long, round thing. Think of round legs on chairs, or the spindles in the back of a chair. Round chair rungs. All of those are spindle turnings.

Bowl turning is just about would it sounds like. You are carving out wood from the center of a round, thick piece of wood. The difference is grain orientation.

In spindle turning, the grain is oriented end to end. In bowl turning, it is side to side.

When cutting the outside of a spindle, you are always cutting away the along the grain. The easy way. In bowl turning, you are cutting side grain, then end grain, then back again.

The tools are different. A bowl gouge and a spindle gouge have different shapes and different sturdiness.

The Fort has been trying to recover from the lack of visitors during covid. It is also working with volunteers that know much about their area of interest, but not so much about other parts.

Consider power transmission. We have been working with power transmission since ancient Roman times. What is power transmission? It is how you transmit movement from one place to another.

In the modern era, we will convert running water, high heat or a dozen other things into electricity. That electricity is then transmitted over wires to a motor. At the motor, the power is converted back to motion.

Another part of the transmission of power, is the simpler physical transmission. Consider a water wheel. The wheel rides on an axle. The axle sits in bearings. When the wheel turns, the shaft turns. Anything attached to that shaft will also turn, doing work.

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I am attempting to learn a new skill. Wood turning.

This is a Craigslist find. The cost was good enough. The motor and lathe chuck are worth more than I paid for it. So I wasn’t concerned about it working.

The lovely people we bought if from were ready when we arrived, s

Tuesday, I spent a few hours turning a log into a shaped spindle thing. It isn’t for anything, it is just practice.

Yes, I pulled that piece of wood out of the wood pile. Biggest issue? When I spun it up for the first time, the bark came off at speed. I wasn’t anywhere near the line of flight

I played with a bowl blank, was ok with what I was getting, decided I wanted to do something a bit better. Watched a half dozen YouTube videos.

That is my new bowl blank. It is two big, by far.

This morning, it was a fallen tree, the sort that kills kids. It was up high enough that kids will walk under it, it wasn’t stable. That is why it became a donor for the wood project.

Instead of my normal 20″ logs, I cut one thin. Or at least I thought it was thin. When I got the disk up to the shop, it turns out that it was a little to big to spin up.

The bandsaw did a good enough job cutting it down to a size I could mount.

Once mounted, I started roughing it to round. That was fun. The entire lathe was vibrating like mad. The roughing gouge peeled off chunks of wood.

It was fun watching the chips go flying. Well, until I turned around and saw that I had wood chips to the back wall, 20 feet away.

Once it was mostly round, the vibrations died out, and I started making it smooth and round. It looked like ribbons of wood flowing down a sluice gate.

The bowl like shape that I have there is smooth. I did an ok job. As they say, a grinder and paint make me the wielder I ain’t. In this case, a decorative cove and some sandpaper.

Unfortunately, it is too deep to turn unsupported. I’m going to cut part of off to make a top, then try again.

It is a learning curve. I’ll be up at the Fort at #4 on Saturday, I hope to use some of the skills I’m learning to make some spindles to repair some broken artifacts.

There are a BILLION skills to learn when you’re talking about reenactment or prepping for TEOTWAWKI. I’m going to touch on the top five today, but if there’s a specific skill set you’d like me to write about, drop me a note in the comments below.

Fire

Knowing how to make a fire is probably the single most important skill you can have when in a primitive environment. Fire is how you sterilize first aid instruments, sanitize your water, clean your wounds, clean your body, cook your food, and keep yourself warm. Heck, fire even keeps most animals at bay, which means you’re safer when you have it.

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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 long-term solution.

Mind you, the cost of those three tools was about $50 in raw steel.

The shop is really two shops in one. There is the wood shop and there is the metal shop. The wood shop consists of jointer, plainer, table saw, freestanding drill press, shaper, mortising machine, small belt sander and 12-inch disk sander, two vertical bandsaws.

There is 8 sq foot of cabinet top for all of that, 4 square feet of which is taken up by my bench grinder.

The other cabinet is supporting my wood machinist chest.

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