My first DIY Bamboo Knife Video went crazy last month, and I got almost half a million views in just a few days. I don’t know what the demographic was, but it included a lot of very interactive YouTubers; there were 10,000 new subscribers, and they left hundreds of comments all over my channel. They posed …
Caveat: This episode does not demonstrate a proper ankle wrap, which requires some basic first aid training and materials. In contrast, it demonstrates doing the best you can with limited knowledge and whatever you might find in your backpack, or maybe the trunk of your car. This is consistent with principles of basic self reliance, …
The key to building an emergency shelter is knowing how to improvise. Whatever the situation, whatever materials you have, if you need shelter from the elements, you’ll have to make do. Be efficient; every calorie spent is a calorie you’ll have to replace, so build your shelter using the least time and energy you can. …
Building an Emergency Shelter With Whatever You Have Read More »
This is Part 2 of the Basic Self Reliance series. In Part 1 we discussed how to select a survival cache location and how to hide it. In this article we’ll highlight the most important aspects of cache recovery. This is a basic approach to cache recovery; for a more advanced discussion, read this post, which includes …
This is Part 1 of several episodes in a series titled Basic Self-Reliance. The purpose of this series is to help you develop some confidence that you can be self-reliant in case you ever need to be. Accordingly, the focus is on developing a habit of experimenting with various skills you don’t normally exercise; not necessarily …
Basic Self-Reliance Series: How to Choose a Survival Cache Location Read More »
While experimenting with the SODIS (Solar Disinfection) method of water treatment, I went off on one of my frequent tangents and tried a couple of ways to filter water before disinfecting it in the sun. For SODIS to work, the water has to be clear enough; if it’s too turbid, the UV rays can’t penetrate …
The trick to working bamboo with a knife — as opposed to a saw — is to control the splitting. If you try to baton a bamboo pole like you do a tree branch, you will crush it, resulting in a number of undesired splits. Instead, you must score a notch gently in the pole’s …
It may seem strange, but you can make a knife out of bamboo. I’m not talking about the handle — the cutting edge itself is made of the woody part of a bamboo stalk. It occurred to me to make a knife out of bamboo when making other bamboo tools because the first step after …
This is the first in a series of articles in which we’ll learn how to make some tools out of bamboo, including chopsticks, tent stakes, a pot, toothpicks, a spatula, and even a knife. To learn a few basics of working with bamboo we’ll start with an easy project — making chopsticks. Bamboo is not …
If you need to approximate your bearings, there are several ways to do so without a compass. One of the easiest and most accurate uses only a stick and the sun’s shadow. The sun traverses the sky from East to West; throughout the day, the sun’s shadow moves from West to East. Place a stick …