Tag Archives: DIY

MacGyver is my spirit animal

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Well, its been hovering around -15 the last couple days and, despite my best efforts: frozen pipe.

The hot water pipe to my kitchen sink appears to have frozen. Now, this is an old house (ca.1915~) so getting into the walls isnt really a thing unless you wanna have big repair job afterwards. So, what to do?

Well, first thing I did was head to the basement and put the kerosene heater in the area that I believed was right below the frozen area. No joy. Let it run all day and still no water.

Alright, next step was to take a small electric space heater, put it in the space under the sink and close the cabinet doors. Let that run all night. No joy.

At this point I’m rather irritated and somewhat worried. How do you heat a section of wall without setting fire to the house or having to rearrange everything?

As it turns out, there is a small hole in the wall in the cabinet below the sink. The drainpipe for the sink has a small opening  next to it from a plumbing nightmare a few years ago. Could I somehow pipe hot air into that opening and heat the wall from the inside?

I channeled my inner MacGyver……”Talk to me, Goose Mac..”

One hair dryer + one roll of packing tape + one empty cardboard tube from Christmas wrapping paper = intrawall heat injector:

Took one minute to put it together, and five minutes for it to work and get the water flowing again. (And 24 hours to come up with the idea after exhausting other ideas.) Remember, kids: if its stupid and it works, it ain’t stupid.

He was a simp for his gun aversion, but other than that MacGyver had some tolerable  survivalist cred.

 

Sunday outage(s)

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This paid off.

Yesterdays power outage was not an anomaly, it seems. Power was out for about an hour today but over a much broader area of town. I went ahead and ran the generator for that hour, mostly because it was just time to unlimber it and let it get some exercise. However, buying the new UPS’ yesterday for the security cams worked perfectly. Cams, monitor, and DVR stayed up quite a while as I fumbled around getting the generator out of it’s Hardigg case and out into the yard. Very pleased.

Just a few blocks away, a friend of mine is without power and has been for an unusually long time….several hours now. I brought over the desklamp/batterybox combo referenced at the beginning of this post and said to go ahead and not even worry about using up the battery...running it six hours a night it’ll last a freakin’ month.

And, should the power continue to be spotty, I also have this little gem I fabbed up on a whim.

Not sure what’s going on locally in regards to this two days of spotty blackouts…Im guessing its something fairly minor…but it does give me an opportunity to test out gear and theories, and it also points out some holes I need to fill. Most notably, a better base-unit-style police scanner…..with UPS, natch.

Propane, and propane accessories

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Number one propane accessory: road flares.

It’s a staple of movies. Good guys need an explosion so the McGyver a barbecue bomb and a few road flares into…ah, you know what…its just easier to show you:

Here’s the thing. Propane canisters, like you and I, are under tremendous pressure. Poke a hole and they go off like a rocket. Any ignition source has to be already in place and at full heat or the sudden explosive force of the propane releasing will just shove the propane tank away. So you (usually) need an ignition source on the tank itself that will, if the tank rockets away, go with it.Tracer ammo? Maybe in the movies, but practically it doesn’t seem to go that way. But…let’s look at some folks who have tried:

I actually found several videos of people trying to blow stuff up with propane and tracers and the results are almost never what Hollywood would have you believe. It was a little harder finding videos with people using incendiary, though.

If your End Of The World plan for clearing out a Times Square on New Years Eve size crowd of zombies is to chuck a propane tack at ’em and light it up with tracer ammo. Well…it looks like you’re going to be in for a disappointment. But…securing road flares to your propane tank and shooting it? That seems to deliver…kinda:

What’s interesting is that the propane tanks don’t really explode like they do in the movies. There’s a huge fireball, no doubt…things are gonna get crispy..but there’s no real bowl-em-over concusive explosion. Holes aren’t blown in the ground and other than the tank itself there isn’t any explosive shrapnel a-flying.

This isn’t to say that propane, used creatively, can’t be used for purposes other than running your turkey fryer. Rather it means that if you think firing a round of tracer into a propane tank is some sort of poor mans remote claymore…well…you’re in for a disappointment.

This post brought to you by the five-dollar summer fill-up discount at the local RV place…where I saw way too many propane tanks of all sizes to not have these kinda thoughts.

 

ETA: ALthough it was a terrible, terrible movie, the gun fu in Sucker Punch was pretty great. Especially against the WW1 Nazi Zombies.

Fuel can tags

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I looked for it but couldn’t the post I had about the tags I use for fuel cans. So…let’s do that again.

Here’s the thing: I store my fuel cans outside. Usually under some type of cover, but always outside. Since I try to rotate fuel on a fairly regular basis, I need to know when a particular can of fuel was filled. Any written paper tags would disintegrate from moisture, plastic tags would crack and fade from sun and UV, chalk marks are wildly temporary, and that really leaves only one option – metal tags.

Here’s what I do. It works for me, it might work for you. YMMV.

Tools and materials:

  • Pointy thing..nail, screwdriver, etc.
  • Empty pop/beer can
  • Pair of scissors you don’t mind getting dull
  • A few inches of paracord

I cut up a pop can and get myself a piece of aluminum about 1″x2″. Pick a size that works for you.

Put the aluminum flat on a firm but somewhat yielding surface…a piece of wood, a phone book, etc. Using the pointy object, scrive the date into the soft aluminum. Punch a hole in the tag youve just created and loop the paracord through it.

Tie tag onto fuel can.

End of story.

I’m sure someone is going to say “I just write the date on a piece of duct tape with a Sharpie and slap it on the gas can. Works fine because I keep my fuel cans in a garage/shed/bunker/etc.” Well yay for you. Thing is, you don’t know with absolute certainty those cans will always be in that sheltered location until such time as you use them. You may have to hurriedly heave them in the back of your truck at 3am on some rainy night, or leave them sitting in the snow for a few hours as you shuttle them to another location, or you may have to store them outside for some reason. Point is, to my way of thinking it makes sense to plan around the more-worse case scenarios. I keep my gas cans as covered and protected as possible…but the real world has a way of throwing a monkey wrench into plans…so, for me: metal date tags that are impervious to sun,UV, moisture, snow, etc. And, yeah, I could ziptie them to the gas cans but then we’re bag to the UV/sun/freezing damage that occurs to plastics…paracord works for me although a true suspenders-and-a-belt guy will use a twist of wire to affix the tags to the can.

This has been your DIY tip for the week.

Sealer replacement

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Years ago, I picked up a heat sealer and a selection of mylar bags in various sizes. One of the ideal uses I found for them was to create small, environmentally-impervious first aid kits that could be slipped into a pack, pocket, or pouch unobtrusively. It worked quite well. So well, in fact, that I loaned out the heat sealer and a supply of bags to someone and…never got it back. I’d remind them periodically about it and they’d ignore me. So…lesson learned. It occurs to me that since I have these new small bags to test out I need to put together another few of those small FAKs to put in them. So..since I’m apparently never getting my other heat sealer back, or being compensated for it, I’ll have to order a new one. So..this arrived today. I still had a stash of bags from my last experiments, so I’m good there although if I need more the go-to guys seem to be Sorbent Systems.

Absolutely you cold do something similar with the vacuum sealer but the bags used for that are, in my opinion, not as durable and rugged as the Mylar. However, if you’re not worried about having difficulty opening a layered package, you could achieve great results by vacuum sealing the contents to reduce space, and then sealing the vacuum sealed package in a mylar pouch for protection. Suspenders and a belt…but if you only have one hand you’re gonna have a heck of a time one-handing your way though all that packaging. Gotta weigh the pros and cons, I suspect.

Anyway, to thats my project for the next couple days – put together a few decent small FAKs and seal them up for carry in the new bags. Nothing fancy, but certainly something more comprehensive than just some bandaids and bactine.

FlexSeal and gas cans

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This is turning into quite the series of posts, isn’t it? I’d mentioned that I’d used a spray-coating on the bottom of my gas cans in order to protect the base of the cans from paint-removing scrapes and the resultant rust that would occur. I had done this before the arrival of Flex Seal which is, basically, spray on rubber coating. Seemed logical to go ahead and try it out on the new cans.

So, we take a new can and do a poor job of taping off the edge of where we want to spray:

Hit it with a goodly amount of FlexSeal and let it dry:

Seems to be just what the doctor ordered.

Battery-in-a-box buffoonery

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I was up at CostCo the other day and saw this:

The semantic part of me recoils at the advertising calling this a ‘gasless generator’. A generator…generates…electricity. This thing stores electricity, it doesn’t make it. Calling it a ‘gasless generator’ is at best a stupid mistake and, more likely, at worst, misleading. Its like calling a 55-gallon drum of water a ‘portable well’.

What is it? Basically its a big lead acid battery with a built in inverter and some bells and whistles. What does it do? Absolutely nothing, as far as I can tell, that you can’t do for a fraction of the price with some wires, a couple AGM batteries, and a battery charger.

It’s 55Ah, which is, really, kinda puny. What it does have is a built in ‘solar controller’, the ability to be used as a UPS, visual metrics, and a few bells and whistles. But, really, it’s just this with a nicer casing:

If you zoom in on the packaging you can see it boasts that it’ll run an LED lamp for 48 hours. Color me unimpressed. I ran one for almost 4x that long with the battery jump box and it cost 1/5 the price.

While I like the turnkey plug-n-play approach this thing represents, the frugal part of me is aghast thinking what I could (easily) put together for $500 that would perform the same basic functions (albeit without the bells and whistles of automatic low-discharge shutdown and solar controller) at an exponential increase in capacity/runtime.

Light work

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About three years ago, I picked up some AGM batteries off Craigslist. My original intent was that I wanted to rewire a common house lamp to use 12v LED lighting. The idea being, naturally, that in a power outage I would have a ‘normal’-looking source of light, rather than the stark and brutal harsh lighting that we get from just standing a battery lantern on top of the refrigerator or something.

So, my initial forray was…meh. I wound up buying an adapter to let me use a bayonet-type socket in place of a normal screw-in bulb socket...basically following these directions. But, in that case, it turned out there was a much easier way to do things – simply buy an LED desk lamp and remove the ‘wall wart’ AC-to-DC inverter and simply run it straight off 12v. Which I did…and it worked awesomely.

And that’s fine. My own testing showed that off of a battery jump pack the lamp would run non-stop for over a week. But try lighting an entire room with a desk lamp…it’s not really up to the task. So, I had a cheapo ‘dorm quality’ lamp sitting in the corner that I decided to experiment on.

First thing was to cut off the existing plug, determine where + and – were (you have a 50/50 shot of getting it right on the first try), and attaching some method of connecting to the battery. Bare wires work, but if you can make things neater, why not?

Next step was the bulb. Here you can see the previous bulb, and the bayonet adapter, that I had used. It worked, yes…but it didn’t put out enough light to seem like the lamp was ‘normal’ in its output. The other bulb is a Made-in-China (just like Covid!) bulb ‘designed’ for low voltage 12v systems. A somewhat more elegant solution than a bayonet adaptor and odd-attachment bulbs. All this required is a) bulb and b) changing the plug on the wire.

So, hows it look? Not bad.

(Yes, I have Archer on DVD. Do you not?)

Thank you for smoking

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Johnny Trochmann,, he of Militia Of Montana fame, puts in an appearance at the larger gun shows in these parts. He has about a dozen tables covered with what could best be desscribed a ‘survivalist’ gear…potassium iodide pills, surgical kits, QuickClot, books on everything, specialty ammo, and that sort of thing. At some point he must have found an in with someone in the cruise line industry or a subsidiary thereof because he always has parachute flares, hand flares, and smoke generating devices for sale that clearly came from someone’s lifeboat emergency kits. These items are usually a couple years ‘out of date’ but that doesn’t really mean much in materiel like this.

Invariably, I pick up a buncha parachute flares and smoke cans. Why not? Both can come in handy if something goes wrong in the boonies and you need to indicate your position to the ‘copter people, and, honestly, there are some tactical applications as well.

Despite having a pretty large store of these items squirreled away, I’ve never actually gotten around to trying the smoke devices. The reason was simple…I can’t very well touch one off in town without attracting a  large amount of attention (thats what the dang things are designed for, after all) and I never seem to have the time to head to anywhere remote to try them. Until today.

I was scouting out some hunting areas that I have not been to for many, many years and since they were hell-and-gone from prying eyes I figured I’d try one of those smoke cannisters. Pop the top, pull the igniter, and toss it for distance. It sputtered and then started spitting out a rather impressive cloud of smoke for a good three minutes. I didn’t take any pictures or video because YouTube has plenty of them showing this exact version, but it lived up to the expectations. Does it have, shall we say, ‘non-rescue applications’? Well, just from what I observed, you throw three of these down a stairwell or hallway and you’re pretty much going to reduce visibility to zero in a hurry. Maybe you have a use for that sort of thing, maybe not. But…like many tools, it’s a multitasker when you have the right mindset.

Johnny T. sells these at the gun shows for about $4 ea although if you buy enough he usually cuts you a deal. I’ve got a couple dozen in storage and I keep a few in the vehicle at all times ‘just in case’.

Buy them new? Man, I’d hate to have to…but, maybe I wouldn’t have to:

When I was a kid, my high school science teacher whipped up a sugar smoke bomb for a class movie project they were doing. He rather…underestimated…the amount of smoke his little device would generate and the fire department rolled up to the school thinking the roof was going up like Dresden. (Protip: instead of a coloring agent, mix in fine ground red pepper or cayenne to create an irritant effect.)

Anyway…if you’re in Montana and happen to run across Johnny Trochmann and his Tables Of Fun, be sure to grab a dozen or so of those things. And tell him Commander Zero sent you.

Not an expert

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When it comes to guns, I’m not ashamed to say that I think of myself as a bit of an expert on most things…history, function, disassembly, etc. Oh, sure, you bring out something esoteric enough like a Gewehr41 or a Rast-Gasser and you’ll probably stump me on something like disassembly, but by and large I’d say I’m pretty darn good.

At least, that’s what I thought until working on the rather plebian Beretta 92. As a good survivalist, I figured I should have at least a couple 92’s laying around since the military uses/used them and therefore there’d be surplus (or ‘liberated’) parts and mags aplenty. But, I don’t like manual safeties on a double-action gun. There’s no need, since the gun is DA and usually carried with the hammer down.

Beretta eventually recognized this and has a variant, designated as ‘G’, where the safety acts as a decocker only. (Much like my dear Ruger P95DC pistols.) Beretta makes the conversion available as a kit for about $55. So..I ordered one. Step one was to disassemble the existing safety from the slide. I did so and as I looked at the back of the slide I saw this:

Well, bloody hell….the slide is cracked. And I kicked myself for not inspecting the gun more closely when I bought it years ago. Alright, let’s go to Beretta’s customer service and see if we can wheedle a new slide from them since this one clearly is broken. Their reply:

It’s supposed to look like that. I have to give kudos to Beretta CS for a) replying within 48 hrs and b) not calling me a dumbass.

I’ve taken apart a lot of pistols in my years of gun fondling. You look at the back of a 1911, Glock, Sig, HiPower, Ruger, etc, etc, and that hole for the firing pin is always solid. I’ve never seen a relief cut in that area of a pistol. But..I’m not a machinist, not a mechanical engineer, and not a metals stress expert. So, if the guys at Beretta, who have been making boomtoys for several hundred years, say “No, no, dude….it’s supposed to look like that”, well, I guess that’ll have to do.

But….it sure looked like a stress fracture to me.

Clearly I need more time tinkering with Berettas. But it was a bit sobering to realize that, maybe I don’t know it all after all. Maybe I should have read the warning printed on the slide:

By the way, the G conversion was a breeze if you ignore Beretta’s incredibly complicated online instructions and just YouTube your way through it. (ProTip: watch video, watch video again.) Took me about ten minutes to get it installed and it works like a champ. A lot of folks carry guns like this with the hammer down and safety off, which is reasonably safe. However, those same people are usually concerned about the safety accidentally becoming engaged as the gun is bumped around or brushed up against things…last thing you want is to grab your gun, bring it up, pull the trigger and have nothing happen because the safety you left in the off position has somehow engaged itself. This G conversion prevents that.