Build a brick wall
When it comes to rebuilding after the cataclysm of the apocalypse, you will need to relearn ancient crafts such as brick-laying and how to build a safe, sturdy wall.
Category: How To Guides
Make a voltaic pile
Chapter 8, Power to the People, explains how the fundamentals of electricity can be redeveloped. To produce an electric battery, all you need is disks of two metals with different reactivities and some cardboard soaked with salty water. Here is a demonstration of building a ‘Voltaic pile’ from old coins.
Want to read more about the behind-the-scenes fundamentals of how our modern world works, and how you could reboot civilisation if you ever needed to...? Check out The Knowledge - available now in paperback, Kindle and audiobook.
Turn an electric drill into a generator
Chapter 2 deals with how you can use scavenged materials to keep your world electrified once the grid goes down, including converting the permanent magnet motor (PMM) inside a hand drill into an electric generator. Here’s one demonstration of that process.
Want to read more about the behind-the-scenes fundamentals of how our modern world works, and how you could reboot civilisation if you ever needed to...? Check out The Knowledge - available now in paperback, Kindle and audiobook.
How to make birchbark tar
Birch tar or pitch is a truly ancient substance – used as long ago as the mesolithic stone age to attach an axe head to the handle or fletching to arrows, and is also useful for creating torches. This video demonstrates a more convenient method for collecting the tar, using scavenged tin cans. In the book, we explore other examples of the dry distillation of wood in producing valuable substances, or even for powering a car.
(PS: Yeah, I don’t know about the smoked badger fur either….)