The Armageddon Blog

Category: Improvements

  • How to Make Soap

    If you haven’t noticed in my writing, I’m very much against being wasteful.  At home, I hate making food from a recipe where you only use a part of something and throw the rest out.  When I explained how to make biodiesel I briefly noted that you could use the leftover glycerin to make all sorts of things.  One of those things is soap.  Don’t get me wrong, soap is absolutely a luxury item.  But ideally, for every liter of biodiesel you make, you’ll end up with 200mL of glycerin.  That adds up, so why not make some soap.  You’ll be clean and you can use it to barter with other people.

    Bar Soap or Liquid Soap?

    Interestingly enough, the procedure for making bar or liquid soap is essentially identical.  The only difference is what type of lye you use.  Something about sodium hydroxide causes the glycerin to crystallize during the saponification process that doesn’t happen with potassium hydroxide (chemists or chemical engineers, feel free to let me know the specifics).  So if you want bar soap use NaOH, otherwise use KOH.

    It should also be noted that if you used a different type of lye in the biodiesel process than you are using to make soap, your soap may not turn out exactly how you planned.  If you are making bar soap, you can add more NaOH to help it solidify, but if you do, you need to let it sit for longer afterwards to ensure all the lye has reacted.

    Ingredients

    1. Glycerin, and lots of it.  This is the ingredient that all others are keyed off of, so it doesn’t matter how much you use.
    2. Water. You need 200mL of water for every liter of glycerin.
    3. Lye.  If you are using sodium hydroxide (NaOH) you will need 50g per liter of glycerin.  If you are using potassium hydroxide (KOH) you will need 75g per liter of glycerin.
    4. Smelly Stuff.  You don’t really need this, but if you want your soap to smell pretty you’ll need something to make it do so.

    The Procedure

    1. First things first, you need to clean your glycerin.  This ensures that you have no particulate matter (dirt, old food, twigs, leaves, zombies, etc.) in your glycerin.  You typically don’t want these things in your final product, so get them out now before your process becomes more complicated.
    2. Remove any alcohol remnants.  Any alcohol left in your soap can be bad for your health, especially methyl alcohol.  You need to bring your glycerin to a temperature of 65C for methyl alcohol or 80C for ethyl alcohol.  FOR THE LOVE OF PETE, be careful when you do this.  What you are doing is boiling of the alcohol and methyl alcohol will sink.  So make sure that you do this in a well ventilated area do everything you can to avoid exposing your flame to the vaporized alcohol.  If your flame turns an odd color or starts to crackle, then disperse your flame and rethink your setup.
    3. Once you are sufficiently sure that there is no alcohol left in your glycerin, begin heating it to 60C.  While you wait you can combine your water and lye.
    4. Add your water and lye to the glycerin.  Stir continuously and heat to boil.
    5. Once at a boil, reduce heat and let simmer.
    6. If you’re making smelly soap, add your smelly stuff at this point.
    7. Once a skin starts to form on the surface of your concoction, check it by ladling out a spoonful and pour back in, if a film is left behind, it is done.
    8. If you are making bar soap, pour into molds.  If you are making liquid soap, pour into the containers you intend to store it in.
    9. Let the soap sit for around 3 weeks.  During this time, the glycerin and lye are reacting and you need to let this reaction complete.  If you try to use the soap and it burns or tingles, it isn’t ready yet and you just gave yourself a lye burn.

    As you can see, making soap is really easy and a good use for the glycerin byproduct of biodiesel.

  • How to Make Biodiesel

    Traditional diesel fuel is made from petroleum, and in a post-apocalyptic world that will be hard to come by.  Thankfully, biodiesel is an alternative that can be made from any organic oil or fat that doesn’t require any kind of modification to your diesel engine.

    Generally, you are adding a catalyst to a triglyceride-rich liquid in order to break a glycerin molecule off of the fatty acid chains in the oil and forcing each of three fatty acid chains to recombine with the introduced alcohol to essentially create a new alcohol.  This process is called transesterification.

    Transesterification: ester + alcohol = different ester + different alcohol
    Transesterification: ester + alcohol = different ester + different alcohol

    Ingredients

    Organic Oil/Fat

    This can be nearly any kind of oil or fat (I’ve seen biodiesel made with rendered pig fat).  There are a few considerations to take into account though:

    • Peanut oil, coconut oil, palm oil, tallow, and lard all have a higher clouding point than other oils, meaning that they start to crystallize and gel at a higher temperature.  This means that they will work perfectly fine in warmer weather, but may cause problems in cooler temperatures.
    • Olive oil, peanut oil, palm oil, tallow, and lard have a higher acidity.  This can interfere with the transesterification process and means you probably want to titrate a sample (explained later) to determine if extra lye will be needed.
    • If you are using used oil, you need to process it before going forward with the recipe.

    Rapeseed (or canola) oil, corn oil, soy oil, and sunflower oil are considered to be the preferable choice for biodiesel production.

    Alcohol

    It is possible to use either methyl alcohol or ethyl alcohol for biodiesel.  Methyl alcohol is preferable because there is less work involved with methyl alcohol.  Either way, you want as close to 100% pure as possible.

    Lye

    There are two types of lye potassium hydroxide (KOH) and sodium hydroxide (NaOH).  Either can be used, but KOH is preferable since it dissolves easier in alcohol.  Also, conveniently enough, it can be made per the instructions I give in How to Make Lye.

    Proportions

    • 10 parts oil
    • 2 parts methyl alcohol or 2.7 parts ethyl alcohol
    • 3.5 grams NaOH or 4.9 grams KOH per liter of oil used (plus any excess lye as indicated in titration for used oil)

    The Process

    Biodiesel and Glycerine separated into layers
    Biodiesel and Glycerin separated into layers

    Mix your alcohol and lye in an HDPE container (like a milk jug) and swirl occasionally until all the lye is fully dissolved.  This could take as little as 10 minutes for KOH and as much as overnight for NaOH.  This creates you methyl or ethyl esters.

    Blend the ester mixture with oil/fat heated to 55C for roughly 30 minutes.

    Let the mixture settle for 24 hours.  In this time, transesterification will occur, leaving behind glycerin as a by-product.  Three distinct layers will form, the heavy (bottom) layer is the glycerin, the light (top) layer is the biodiesel, and the middle layer is a soapy emulsion created by the reaction of lye with oil.  You can keep the glycerin, as it is useful in other situations, but unneeded for the rest of this recipe.  Move the biodiesel into a different container, ensuring that no glycerin or soap is carried along, and either store the glycerin or through it out.

    Quality Testing

    • The Wash Test – Put a small amount of fuel in a PET bottle with water and shake vigorously for  approximately 10 seconds.  Let it sit for a half an hour.  If water separates from fuel with a very thin, foamy layer between (or no layer at all), then you’ve produced quality fuel.  If they don’t separate or there is a thick foamy layer, then your fuel is of poor quality.  This can be caused by too much lye or contaminants present acting as emulsifier.
    • The Methanol Test – Mix 25ml of biodiesel with 225ml of methanol.  If anything is going to separate, it will happen nearly instantly.  Each milliliter of biodiesel that separates from the methanol equals a 4% impurity.  Ideally, nothing will separate, meaning your fuel is 100% pure, but a little bit won’t hurt.

    Washing

    After testing to ensure your fuel is good you need to “wash” it.  This process removes any physical impurities or unconverted ingredients from the fuel, as these can all cause problems in your engine down the line (lye can corrode the fuel injectors and fuel tank, glycerin and soap can clog any number of parts, etc).  Mix 1 part fresh, clean water with 2 parts biodiesel until it appears homogenous.  Let the mixture settle for several hours, then drain water.  Move fuel to new receptacle and repeat process 2-3 times.  Let the fuel sit for several days. once it is no longer cloudy, it is “dry” and ready to use.  If it doesn’t clear up, you can try washing it again.

    Processing Used Oil

    You can use “certified pre-owned” oil to make biodiesel, you just need to do some things to it first.

    Cleaning Old Oil

    Some people recommend filtering the used oil first, but I say that it is unnecessary.  All the gunk and goo in the old oil will sink to the bottom and since you are usually working with the top layer of a separated liquid, you are naturally filtering it as you work with it.  However, there is a significant amount of water suspended in used oil (typically from the food cooked in it) and that can be a problem.

    To remove the water, bring the oil to a boil at 100C and leave there until boiling slows, then boil at 130C for approximately 10 minutes.  This should ensure that most of the water is removed.

    Titration

    Every time you use or heat oil you create free fatty acids, which are basically broken-down triglycerides.  This means that there is more work required to convert your oil into biodiesel than with new oil.  This work is done by adding extra lye to the process.  To find out how much more lye to add, we use a process called titration.  This process should also be used if you are using ethyl alcohol instead of methyl alcohol, or an oil with a higher acidity.

    First, make a 0.1% lye solution by mixing 1g of lye into 1 liter of distilled water.  Now dissolve 1ml of oil in 10ml of isopropyl alcohol.  At this point you need to choose a way to determine the pH of the oil/alcohol mixture.  You can use a pH tester, phenolphthalein droplets, or (if push comes to shove) red cabbage juice – seriously it indicates pH really well..  Add the lye solution drop by drop until pH is around 8-9.  If you’re using phenolphthalein, this is indicated by the liquid turning a pinkish color, if you are using red cabbage juice you are looking for a blue/blue-green color.  The number of milliliters of lye solution added to the oil solution equals the additional number of grams of lye per liter of oil to use in the transesterification process.

    Addendum

    If you want to get super technical in your measurements, the amount of KOH used depends on the strength.

    Purity Measurement (in grams)
    99% 4.9
    92% 5.3
    90% 5.5
    85% 5.8

    Red Cabbage Juice

    pH 2 4 6 8 10 12
    Color Red Purple Violet Blue Blue-Green Greenish Yellow

    [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-SaPRccSDE?feature=player_detailpage]

  • How to Distill Alcohol, part 3: How to Make Methanol

    [error]DISCLAIMER: The following is highly dangerous or illegal and it is not recommended to be used under any circumstances, except zombies.[/error]

    Methanol, or methyl alcohol, can be used primarily as a fuel source or feedstock (a chemical used to make another chemical).  For our purposes, we can either use it to fuel cars, trucks generators, etc. or to create biodiesel (both very useful in a post-Apocalyptic world).  In this part of our series on alcohol distillation, we discuss how to use your still to produce methanol.

    Methanol is more commonly referred to as wood alcohol because, until breakthroughs in modern chemistry, the only way to produce it was by extracting it from wood.  You shouldn’t drink methanol EVER.  Not only does it taste bad, but it can kill you.  In fact, methanol is used to denature ethanol products, rendering them undrinkable by making you violently ill when you drink even that small of an amount.  If you want to make drinkable alcohol read about it here.

    Producing methanol is a much less involved process than producing ethanol.  Put wood chunks or shavings (or paper) into the bottom of your cooking vessel and add enough water to cover the wood.  Heat the cooking vessel to around 78C and wait as the methanol vaporizes from the wood and out the condenser coil and into your storage container.

    If you are making both ethanol and methanol make sure you label them.  I can’t stress to you how important it is that you don’t drink methanol.

  • How to Distill Alcohol, Part 2: How to Make Ethanol

    [error]DISCLAIMER: The following is highly dangerous or illegal and it is not recommended to be used under any circumstances, except zombies.[/error]

    In Part 1 of this article series, I showed you how to make your still.  In this part, we go over the specfics of how to make actual ethanol, or ethyl alcohol.

    Ethanol is most commonly known for being the ingestable alcohol in liquor, but there are plenty of uses for it aside from drinking.  First and foremost, everybody likes alcohol, so if you can make your own, you have a valuable commodity to trade with other people.  Beyond that, it is a disinfectant, an antiseptic, a solvent, it is flammable so it can be used as a fire source or a fuel source, and interestingly enough – it can be used to treat alcohol poisoning from other, more toxic, types of alcohol.

    Fermentation

    Fundamentally, all that distillation does is seperate the alcohol from everything else.  So in order to distill ethanol, we need to create something that contains ethanol.  You need to create a mash using some sort of starchy substance.  Pretty much any type of grain will do, corn is a good starch source and is probably the most prolific option.  Rice will also work, but may be in short supply.  The fermentation process for distilling alcohol is very similar to that of making beer but has more leeway, since you don’t really care about the flavor that the mash itself develops.

    Your first step is to heat up a volume of water at a ratio of 3 liters of water to 1 kilogram of starch source to around 65-70C.  Add your starch source to the water and maintain temperature for around an hour or so.  Larger quantities will take longer to get to temperature and longer to drop temperature, it’s not unheard of for home distillers to let the mash sit for days before proceeding.  What this does is convert the starches in your starch source into fermentable sugars (mono- and disaccharides).  Let it cool to a temperature no greater than 27C (the maximum tolerable temperature for most yeast) then add 0.5kg of yeast per 200 liters of mash.  You can also add table sugar at this time to aid in fermentation, but it isn’t terribly necessary.  Let the mash sit for around 10 days to ferment.  A rough indicator that fermentation is done is when the mash stops bubbling.  Fermentation continues passed this point, but unless you have equipment like a hydrometer available to test the specific gravity of the mash, no bubbles is a good enough indicator.

    Distillation

    First, let me clue you in on how dangerous this part of the procedure is.  You are playing with alcohol, a highly flammable substance, over an open flame.  If there is a leak anywhere in your system, it will literally go up in flames.  Which means you could just as easily go up in flames.  Add the fact that you are working with a closed system, you are essentially pressure cooking a flammable substance.  If your system isn’t balanced properly, pressure will build up inside your cooking vessel and eventually cause it to explode.  You are basically standing next to a bomb for several hours, if not days.  Be vigilant or your still could rain fiery death on you at incredible rates of speed.

    If you didn’t ferment your mash in your cooking vessel, place it there now.  Bring your mash up to a temperature of around 79C and maintain tht temperature for the remainder of the process.  As described in part 1, you are keeping a temperature that allows the ethanol to vaporize without any of the rest of the mash vaporizing as well (for the most part).  The alcohol vapor then escapes through the condenser and is cooled down to liquid form before exiting into your storage container.  If you intend any of this to be drank, you’ll want to seperate the first few ounces from the rest of it because this first bit generally contains all kinds of impurities and all-around nastiness.

    That’s it!  That’s how to make ethanol.  It’s a ridiculously simple method, but incredibly dangerous if you aren’t paying attention.

  • How to Distill Alcohol, Part 1: How to Make a Still

    [error]DISCLAIMER: The following is highly dangerous or illegal and it is not recommended to be used under any circumstances, except zombies.[/error]

    Generally, when people think of a still, they think of liquor or moonshine.  While being able to make these items in a post-Apocalyptic world can make things easier for you.  A still can be used to make other products as well (all alcohol related, but more useful than drinking).

    Basically, a still is just a sealed cooking vessel with an outlet pipe that allows the alcohol to cool.  Some stills get more elaborate than this, but they all follow a similar premise.

    1. Put a substance containing alcohol into the vessel.
    2. Heat it up such that the alcohol evaporates, but nothing else does.
    3. Wait for evaporated alcohol to exit vessel via tubing.
    4. Alcohol goes through tube and cools off, trickling into a recepticle for storage.

    Cooking Vessel

    Keg Still and Copper Condenser

    The most important thing to consider when creating your cooking vessel is size.  Remember that you’re going to be cooking off a lot of stuff in order to get a small percentage of final product.  Think of ethanol production: Your typical mash will be between 5% and 10% ABV, so you generally won’t get more than 10% of your original volume as a final volume (depending on your still efficiency).  Basically, the bigger the better.  As far as material goes, anything that can transfer heat is good, copper being one of the best things.  You also want to make sure that as much surface area as possible  is exposed to heat.  The faster to temperature, the faster you’re done.

    Condenser Tube/Coil

    The condenser coil is what allows the alcohol vapor to cool down and convert back into a liquid before dissipating in the open air.  The thing to consider with your tube or coil is that you need to get the temperature of the contents of the tube down to near room temperature before it leaves the tube.  So you either need an incredibly long tube (which is where a coil comes in handy), or an external means of cooling the alcohol down (e.g. ice, cool water, etc).  Either way, this needs to be considered when scrounging or making your condenser.   As with the cooking vessel, if you have access to a material that easily dissipates heat, use it.

    The Procedure

    First, put your alcohol bearing material in the cooking vessel.  If you are fermenting something, you might as well do it in this vessel, just make sure you don’t completely close it off or else pressure will build up.  Next, close off the vessel and attach your condenser.  Light a fire underneath the cooking vessel.  Maintain the temperature of your material as close to the boiling point of the type of alcohol you are extracting.  Ethyl alcohol boils at ~80C and methyl alcohol at ~65C.  The amount of alcohol you can distill is completely subjective.  Basically, you’ll start out getting barely a trickle of alcohol out of your condenser, then you get a steady stream of it, then a trickle again.  The trickle at the end will be less concentrated than the rest of your batch, but viable nonetheless.

  • Found on the Internet: T-Shirt Shoes

    In the modern world, we don’t need to worry about worn out shoes.  They get too worn out and you just go to a Foot Locker or Walmart and buy a new pair.  But what happens when these stores no longer exist and you have to make your own shoes?  Agy from Green Issues shows us how to make a pair of flip-flops out of old t-shirts.  All you need is a t-shirt, some string, and some glue.  With a little ingenuity, you could probably improve on the design and make full blown shoes!

    T-shirt slippers via [Green Issues]

  • How to Make Mortar

    Mortar is, quite literally, the building block of society.  It is the material used to bind construction materials together and fill the gaps between them.  From building a brick wall to a building, you’ll need to know how to make some form of mortar to make a reasonably sturdy structure.

    It has been used since ancient times by civilized people to build buildings and walls and more.  If ancient people can make mortar, why can’t you?

    Clay Mortar

    In ancient times, the Babylonians used a mortar based of mud and clay.  Just get some clay mud that is wet enough to be a thick paste.  If it isn’t that malleable, add water.  If it’s too thin, add more clay or dirt to thicken it up.  This isn’t a very sturdy mortar and you can expect it not to last all that long, but it will do in a pinch and last long enough.  The key benefit of clay mortar is that clay and dirt are more abundant than any other resource for making mortar.

    Gypsum Mortar

    The Ancient Egyptians made mortar from gypsum and sand.  If you’ve ever worked with plaster of Paris (gypsum plaster), you’ll know that gypsum is makes a soft material, but when added with sand becomes a little more sturdy.  To make gypsum mortar, mix gypsum powder with water to make a slurry and add sand until it forms a thick paste.

    Lime Mortar

    Limestone is a clear rock mineral that can also be found in hardware/home improvement stores, but it can also be found in rock quarries as well.  To make the mortar, you will need to bake the limestone.  It will expand and turn white.  Even though you can make lime mortar without this step, it is very important to include it.  The reason being that untreated lime mortar is susceptible to water and can collapse.  Whereas, when treated in a kiln the lime becomes “hydraulic” and is much more resistant to the weather. 

    After you let it cool off, add water to it.  The solid stones will collapse and hiss, this is normal.  Stir it to make an opaque slurry.  Add sand until it makes a thick paste.

    Cement Mortar

    This is the most abundant mortar in modern times.  You can find quick set cement in any hardware or home improvement store near you.  If you can’t find any (it’s likely someone else had this idea and looted it all after TEOTWAWKI.  If you’re lucky enough to have cement on hand, mix according to the instructions on the bag.

  • How to Build an Oven

    In the P.A.W., it would be nice to be able to make a nice loaf of bread or even just cook something without using a campfire and risking burning your food all the time.  This isn’t as far-fetched of an idea as you may think.  In fact, you could build an oven to use while you’re travelling if you have the time.

    The basic premise of cooking in a conventional oven is cooking by convection.  When you bake a loaf of bread in a modern conventional oven, the heating elements in the oven heat the air closest to the flames, causing it to rise, moving the colder air near the flames and repeating the process until the air inside the oven is a relatively uniform temperature.  You then place the bread dough in the heated air of the oven.  The heated air transfers its heat into the dough, causing the temperature of the dough to rise to roughly the same temperature as the air around it.  At this temperature, the ingredients in the dough cook and eventually you have bread.

    Earth Oven

    The easiest and quickest oven you can build is an earth oven.  You don’t need anything too special or permanent to build it – just some mud and a fire.  The basic concept of an earth oven is that you are creating an enclosed space that holds the heated air required to oven cook anything.

    Because dirt/mud is exceptional at holding, we’ll use mud to build the shell of our oven.  We use mud because it is malleable until it drys, at which time it will hold its shape.  The first thing we need to do though, is find a way to make our oven space hollow.  The easiest way to do this is to use wet sand.  We can shape the wet sand into whatever form we want and the mud won’t destroy that shape, and dry sand is just as easy to remove from our oven as wet sand would be.  So we first make a mold for our hollow space, then we coat the mold with several inches of mud.  The thicker the mud walls, the more heat it will retain for longer.  Let the mud dry into a hardened mound, then cut an opening into one side of the mound all the way to the sand/molding material.  Dig out all of the sand/molding material and you now have an oven!  Build a fire inside the oven to heat the walls of the oven.  Once your oven is to temperature and the outside of the oven is hot to the touch, put out your fire and remove all of the fire material from the inside of the oven.  Place your food inside the oven and cover the hole up to avoid letting any heat escape.  Eventually, your food will be cooked.

    Pompeii Oven

    The Pompeii oven is a precursor to the modern brick oven, commonly used in pizzerias.  The Pompeii oven works on the same principles as an earth oven, and is actually the evolutionary successor to the earth oven, but it is more permanent and used with the fire still inside the oven while cooking.

    For convenience, a Pompeii oven is built at around waist height or higher (because who really wants to crouch all the time while they are cooking?).  This is best acheived by building a dais out of brick or stone or some other material that is fire proof and resistant to age and the elements.

    Then you want to build a slab that the oven will be built onto.  You might be fancy/lucky enough to have concrete and rebar to make this slab from, otherwise go for a material that is fire proof and resistant to age and the elements.

    When considering bricks or brick material for building your oven, there are two factors to consider:

    1. Can the material withstand high temperatures? (refraction)
    2. How well can it reflect heat? (conductivity)

    Ideally, you want a high refraction, low conductivity material because it won’t be destroyed by the heat of the oven and it will reflect heat given off by the fire efficiently.  Firebricks (bricks made of a type of clay composed of high levels of alumina and silica) are the ideal material, but ceramic and clay will work just as well.

    Lay out a pattern of bricks on your slab for the floor of your oven.  Most people use an offset pattern for the floor because it prevents a seam in the floor which can cause your food to snag when putting it in or taking it out of your oven.  Ultimately, it doesn’t matter how you lay them out as long as they are tightly lined up with each other to prevent heat leakage.

    To form the dome of the oven, you can either build it free standing, or over a wet sand mold as with the earth oven.  Building the dome free standing, you will lay the bricks one layer at a time and let the mortar dry before moving on, occassionally adding a wedge between rows of bricks to account for curvature.  Don’t forget to leave space for an opening!

    If you don’t have access to modern mortar, you can use clay, mud, pitch (tar), or you can make your own.  Essentially, you just need something that will bind to your bricks to make a solid structure.

    When building the door and door frame for the oven, you want to ensure that your door is at least slightly bigger than the opening in the oven.  This will ensure that the door doesn’t swing into the oven and, when closed, forms a seal to heat and moisture leakage from inside the oven.  Don’t make it an airtight seal.  An airtight seal will cause what is known as backdraft: The flame will go down as it burns through the existing oxygen, then when you open the door the onslaught of fresh oxygen causes the fire to roar back up, potentially exploding out the opening of the oven and burning you.  The door itself can be made from whatever you can manage: a hunk of scrap metal, dried mud, a rock, an old oven door, etc.

    It is also a good idea to build a chimney into the door frame so that smoke and hot air have an escape path that isn’t your face.  _Don’t put a chimney into the oven itself!_  This fundamentally defeats the functionality of the oven.

    After your oven is built, you need to purge it of any excess moisture.  This curing process ensures that your oven doesn’t crack when in regular use.  To do this, build a small fire for 6 hours each day for 5 days.  Start at 300F and increase by 50F each day.  If you can’t accurately guage temperature, just build a small fire and increase the size each day for 5 days.

    Once you’re ready to actually start cooking with your oven, start you’re fire near the front of the oven and once it gets going, push it off to one side or the back and let the oven heat until the outside is hot to the touch.  Then cook to your hearts content!

  • How to Weld

    In a post-apocalyptic world, scavenging is the order of the day and you’ll likely be able to find plenty of scrap metal lying around (or still attached to something that nobody is using).  That metal could be useful by itself, but it might be more useful if you could weld smaller pieces together to form one large structure.  Plus, knowing how to weld is a skill you can trade on, unlike that Cisco certification you spent thousands of dollars on.

    Fundamentally, welding is a simple process – heat two pieces of metal until they’re nearly liquid and force them together meshing one piece to the other.  Most of the time, a filler material (commonly a more maleable, and thus easier to liquify metal than the one being welded) is used to aid in creating a cohesive bond, or joint, in the metal pieces.  Over the years, industrial welding has evolved into a futuristic world of laser welders and using ultra sonic waves to fuse molecules together, but these types of welders are crippling expensive and rare, and thus you are unlikely to have access to them after The Event.  For our purposes, there are three types of welding: forge, torch, and arc.

    Forge welding is the most primitive form of welding.  To forge weld, you heat the two pieces of metal until they are red hot, but not liquified. Place them on an anvil with one piece slightly overlapping the other and hammer them back down to the thickness of either piece of metal and thus forcing a mesh of the two pieces.  Don’t expect this technique to work on steel, it will only work on more maleable metals that approach or cross the liquification point in forge temperatures (think bronze, copper, iron, etc).

    The next step up is torch welding.  To torch weld, you will need a torch – the most common torch used in welding is an acetylene torch, which is essentially a nozzle that mixes pure acetylene with pure oxygen, which you light as it comes out the end.  An acetylene/oxygen flame burns at over 3000 degrees celsius which is the hottest flame you will get from readily available combustible gases.  If you are making a makeshift torch, you can use any pure combustible gas and you can use compressed are instead of oxygen for your oxidizer, but you won’t achieve the same temperatures as your would with an acetylene/oxygen mix.  Also, you need to make sure you are using some sort of non-return valve in order to ensure that you and your fuel cylinder don’t go up in flames while welding.

    To perform a torch weld, place the two pieces of metal firmly together, turn on your acetylene just enough so that you hear gas escaping.  Light the torch and adjust the acetylene until the flame is barely coming out of the nozzle.  Turn on the oxidizer slowly until the flame turns blue.  Point the flame at the joint and move the torch in a circular motion until the metal begins to melt.  If you are using a filler rod, you can insert it slowly into the pool of molten metal to add more to the pool.  Once you have a large enough pool, begin moving the torch slowly down the seam.  If you go too fast, you will run out of molten metal.  If you go too slow you will have too much.  If you are using a filler rod, you will want to keep it in the hot zone of the torch (not close enough to melt it but not far enough that it cools off) to prevent a weaker “cold” weld.  Turn the torch off in the reverse order you turned it on.

    The final type of welding you should be familiar with is arc welding.  Arc welding uses electricity to heat metal instead of flame and in this case, you NEED a filler rod.  An arc welder is essentially a placeholder for your filler rod that is attached to a power source.  As electricity passes in an arc from the end of the filler rod to the seam in the metal, it generates a great deal of heat, melting the rod and the metal equally.  There are hundreds, if not thousands, of different types of filler rods available.  Each one has a special purpose it was designed for, and sometimes you’ll need a certain type of rod to do any kind of welding on a certain kind of metal.  We won’t get into that here, just be aware that this is a consideration if you have access to an arc welder post apocalypse.

    To perform an arc weld, the first thing you need to do is attach a grounding clamp from your power source to your metal.  This is important because if you don’t do this, the all-important arc will not be generated in order to heat the metal.  To initiate the weld, or “strike the arc,” tap the end of the filler rod against the metal and then hold it at approximately 1/8 inch above the metal.  You will see copious sparks shoot up from the metal – this means you got an arc.  Angle the welder into the direction of movement at approximately 45 degrees and equidistant from each piece of metal (this is important if you aren’t welding two flat pieces of metal together), as if you were dragging the tip of the filler rod along the surface of the metal.  Slowly move the rod across the seam until the joint is complete.

    That covers the bare necessities of welding.  These procedures and techniques will get you by in a situation where you need to weld.  There are dozens of advanced techniques on how to weld in different situations, for different types of metal that I haven’t covered here.  Just remember that practice makes perfect, and if you need to weld something intricate “measure twice, weld once.”

  • Pro Tip: You Can Use Honey to Treat a Wound

    When you think of honey, you probably think of that golden fluid drizzling on a warm biscuit.  But did you know that honey can be used as an antiseptic?  There is an enzyme in honey called glucose oxidase that generates a slow release of hydrogen peroxide under very specific conditions.

    1. It must be in contact with oxygen, which is a very necessary part of the reaction.
    2. The acidity of the honey must be neutralized (which it is when it comes into contact with body fluids).

    It is also more effective when the honey is diluted in the fluids in the wound.  Because the hydrogen peroxide is released slowly, honey becomes a very effective antiseptic.

    In the P.A.W., honey may not be a readily available resource.  In fact, it could be very scarce.  A prepared mind, might learn how to keep bees so that they can have honey available for food and for first aid in that scenario.