Category: Skills

  • The Weekly Feast – Alloes of Beef

    The Weekly Feast – Alloes of Beef

    —

    by

    Allyson
    in

    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,…

  • Learning A New Skill

    Learning A New Skill

    —

    by

    Chris Johnson
    in ,

    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.…

  • For Want of a Nail…

    For Want of a Nail…

    —

    by

    Chris Johnson
    in ,

    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…

  • It followed me home! Can I keep it?

    —

    by

    Chris Johnson
    in

    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…

  • Prepping – Useful Skills

    —

    by

    Allyson
    in

    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…

  • Shop Improvements

    Shop Improvements

    —

    by

    Chris Johnson
    in

    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…

  • “Prepping” vs. “Resilience.”

    —

    by

    Elrod
    in

    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…

  • Prepping – The Rule of Threes

    —

    by

    Allyson
    in

    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…

  • What is Prepping?

    —

    by

    Allyson
    in

    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…

  • Achieving Precision in Woodworking: Traditional and Modern Tools Compared

    —

    by

    Chris Johnson
    in

    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.…