Prepping

Some survival topics seem to be a little more “out there” than others, and one of those is definitely canning food in steel cans, otherwise known as tin cans.

Communications is one of the few topics here that has no real end. After the collapse, or the big reveal as I like to call it, all of us are going to want for resources. You just can’t store enough food to last forever, and as great as “living off the land” might sound, it ain’t easy, even when you know what you are doing. At some point, whoever survives is going to want to connect with others who have survived. You are going to want to have an ear to the ground.

I’ve recently learned something new that I think I should share with you. It is survival computing. In general I am not a big fan of power inverters, and I think you should run as much off of 12 volts as possible, but there are a lot of benefits to having a laptop available, and phones and tablets are priceless if you have kids. I’m also going to cover a $25 low voltage/low amperage computer solution that is currently being used to build perimeter security systems, remote listening posts, and even balloon lifted radio relay antennas. This is pretty cool stuff.

The most difficult part of writing this column has been to condense down everything I have learned into small, bite sized chunks, but when it comes to radiation, I think I have failed. Everyone wants to talk about nuclear bombs and EMP strikes, but getting someone to pay attention to what happens next is nearly impossible. Radiation, whether it be fallout from those initial nuclear strikes that may or may not happen, or from the nuclear plants that will melt down shortly after **whatever** burns down our current reality, will be a part of survival. If you are unprepared for it, you are going to die. I don’t see how I can make it more simple.

Guns are not toys, get this crap out of here, I’ll never buy another product from you guys again. Gun owners have spoken. As if the products themselves were infected, the zombie guns phenomena was eradicated.

This week I’m returning to the subject of beekeeping, because the last one didn’t go as I had planned. If you watched the videos for that article, it turned out that one of my hives had gotten extremely aggressive, and I’m sure it turned a lot of people off to beekeeping. In this video I am rewinding to the beginning, where most people start, by “installing” package bees into a brood box. As you can see, I am bare armed in the video, and up until I discovered that one of my hives had become aggressive, I had worked my bees exclusively with bare arms. And that includes removing frames and extracting honey.

Some of you long time readers here may remember that I found a killer deal on a copy of a 100 round Beta C-Mag at the height of the Sandy Hook gun boom in 2013. It was at the Sportsman’s Guide. Other sporting goods retailers were price gouging and SG was selling that mag for what was at the time less than suggested retail price. I thought it was pretty cool. These days that mag is even $50 cheaper, but that isn’t the point of this article. I’m on the SG mailing list now, and just sitting around today I opened their current flyer and found a few prepping products that I have actually reviewed, at really low prices, and a couple I haven’t, but that I know are also really great deals. I’m going to be light on this column for a few weeks because my kids are out of school for Passover, so I figured I would just share this information, and give you my coupon code. ;)

It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.
-Mark Twain

This is my second installment in two weeks on stovetop baking. As promised, this week we take a look at a variety of kerosene stoves that I run with diesel fuel, using ovens made for the stovetop. It is not by accident that propane has become ubiquitous in camp stoves, because propane is never smokey and regulating the burn is easy with modern equipment. The problem is, propane requires a pressurized tank to store it, and by the gallon, propane is two to three times the cost per BTU of gasoline and diesel. Of gasoline and diesel, diesel is safer and easier to store, and of stoves that will burn diesel, the wick varieties are easier to control, and they don’t need pumping.