Skills

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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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 bit of a challenge. Which is why I embraced the concept of a good, detailed SWOT Analysis: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats, all the way down to the Department level and in some cases, a separate analysis down to critical functions within a department. A good SWOT Analysis, even for a family, won’t be done in 30 minutes, it’ll take a couple of weeks of thoughtful work, needs periodic review and updating as conditions change. It can be as detailed as one wants, which is probably the best way to proceed, weeding out the unattainable and unnecessary when the analysis is complete, or nearly so.

I went through the same 3 hurricanes in 2004 Bob F (above) did, and other than not having whole-house AC for the 6 days we were “electricity challenged” after Charlie – some neighborhoods were dark for almost 3 weeks – it was a “campout at home” (Francis knocked out power for about 24 hours, Jean for about 18 hours) a small ultra-quiet RV generator (3K watts) kept the fridge and some fans running, powered a small window AC at night for more comfortable sleeping in one bedroom, all for about 2 – 2.5 gallons/day, a Zodi camping propane water heater provided low-flow, but warmish, showers on the back porch, the propane grill handled the cooking, etc. We didn’t lose county water, which was a really big thing, and when one lives in Hurricane Country one maintains alternatives, like an old-timey coffee percolator, kerosene lamps (the older Aladdins are great, the newer ones seem…a bit chintzy, but that’s pretty much the default for everything now). The only damage suffered was a lot of shingle tabs gone, but no roof leaks (houses in Florida, even those built to the older code are considerably different from those built elsewhere) and a couple of trees down in the neighbor’s yard; not bad for 2–3 hours of 110 MPH sustained winds (Charlie was, fortunately, a “fast mover” and didn’t sit in one place long, grinding up everything).

Which places emphasis on the “Opportunities” part of a SWOT Analysis – when A doesn’t work, what’s Plan B, or C, or D? I had 145 feet of 10MM climbing rope, a Swiss seat and a line brake for safety while smearing cold tar patch on the missing shingle tabs, and that system and the cold tar bucket made the rounds through the neighborhood for several days after Charlie (and again after Francis, and Jean….), a couple of floodlights on poles provided light for a couple of nights of “a neighborhood cookout for everything from the freezer” after Charlie up and down the block. We all ate like kings for several days, including the older retired folks up the street who didn’t have a grill. Walkie-talkies got broken out, charged when a generator was running, and everyone shared flashlights and batteries. We had used simple railroad-style kerosene lanterns for ambient light on the patio for years, by the time Jean hit everyone had a couple.

We understood the Threat, had a good idea of our Weaknesses, had Options, and learned our Strengths; as the Marines preach in Basic School “Adapt, Improvise, Overcome” and while Eisenhower said ”a plan is worthless, but planning is critical,” having a plan forms a “Performance Outline” to direct attention and effort to solutions.

Regarding Planning, I’m reminded of the old, crusty senior engineer who is working at his desk when the staff runs in, crying and screaming that scientists have discovered a giant meteor that will strike Earth in 24 hours, knocking the planet out of its orbit and into the sun. Without looking up, the Old Engineer points to his bookshelves and says, “second shelf, blue binder, Section 4.”

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 not meant to be a “complete list” of what is needed to prepare for emergencies. Instead, it’s more of a mnemonic. It reminds you of what’s most important in your preps. There are lots of mnemonics you can learn.

This is a longish one, folks, so check out what’s behind the cut…

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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 be stockpiling firearms to raid the rest of us. I’m sure there are a hundred or more points in between my three, as well.

So what exactly is prepping? It’s a short form term for “preparing for emergencies” or “preparing for the apocalypse.” There are at least as many ways to prep as there are people on the planet, and maybe more. No one way is definitively right or wrong. As an example, the Mormons are required to be always prepared for the end of times, which they are told will last just under two years. Therefore, their church insists they always have two years of food on hand, along with anything else they need to survive until the end times are over. While I may not be invested in their end times prophecies, the principle is a good one.

I tend to prepare for 18 months of emergency. I try to be fairly flexible in my preps, because I don’t know if TEOTWAWKI will happen like Nagasaki, or more like the recent pandemic. I have a little bit of many things, designed to cover the most important bases for my family. Your preps probably are (and should be) different from mine, because your family will need different things, and more importantly, has different skills than my own.

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