Psychlonic · Regular

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Psychlonic
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  • Right. Mead is fairly simple but it's also the most expensive to make since honey prices are outrageous right now. Hopefully it's better over on your side of the pond. Find a recipe online to figure out how much honey you'll need for however much you're trying to make and from there I find the best thing to do is add the…
  • I'm probably going to overcomplicate the whole process by making a big purpose built still that can be hauled around but knowing me when I get started on distilling spirits I'll want to keep doing it repeatedly so it could be worth it. Pretty much just a matter of getting motivated to do it. Spinster, are there many fruit…
  • How did you make your still and how well did it perform? I've been wanting to make a copper one for awhile now but keep pushing it to the back burners.
  • Yeah it took me awhile to get something that honestly tasted as good as a $5 merlot or white zinfandel. The real disaster was my first bottle of mead. I didn't let it sit long enough and my yeast failed so the end result was this overly sweet but still alcoholic abortion of a drink that was absolutely awful. Of course,…
  • You should really give it another go, it's fun. I'd actually love discussing homebrew on here with you guys, I'm always bullshitting with a friend about it who makes just as much as I do. If it makes you feel any better, my first batch of wine was made in a bunch of individual 1.5L bottles because I didn't have any larger…
  • Safe to say it almost always boils down to this. 95% of the time I use my rake, sometimes busting out the diamond to set the last pin if it's being stubborn. Seems a lot of people do the exact same thing. Most of the other designs are pretty redundant and I think there's some gimmicks involved in a few of them as well in…
  • Homebrew comprises 90% of the stuff I drink now, to be honest. It's easy, cheap, and you pick up on improvements fast for the next batch. It's interesting that chippy finds beer easier to make than wine, as wine in my opinion is almost impossible to screw up. You can practically make it on accident. The only hard part is…
  • At the expense of sounding a bit nutty, I think it would be advantageous to use electric vehicle technology down there after covertly destroying fuel reserves. The only way you're going to defeat a force that large with such small numbers would be grounding their air power and nullifying their mobile armor at all costs.…
  • Padlock shims may be another item to look into since you run into so many padlocks. They work magic on a lot of lower end ones that most people seem content to use. You'll thank yourself for finally taking the plunge and learning to pick. I think a lot of people are intimidated by all the myth and uncertainty surrounding…
  • It's been a good weekend. First off, all of my knives have been hardened, tempered, and assembled. They're finished. The kukri and companion knife turned out excellent and they're going with me on my next camping trip. I submitted the kukri to a battery of tests against my tomahawk to see if it was worth packing around and…
  • Cheers man, I really appreciate it. Others hopefully will too when they read it and see what it's all about. As for wanting more like it, I've really been hoping for an eventual release of Mounted Combat: A Guide for Training Horse and Rider by Richard Alvarez. That would be one of those things I've got no problem…
  • Awesome man, that's great news. The best way if you don't mind mass distribution would probably be to upload through an uploader service. Currently, MediaFire is one of the better free ones as links stay active long and there's very little hassle. You can either drag and drop the file onto the page or click the upload…
  • Sure thing. I'm interested in those too albeit on a different level than the earlier ones so long as they deal with western martial arts or even recent views of past warfare and combat engineering. I've got most of the works by guys like Alfred Hutton and Jakob Sutor. There's a manual out there written very recently that I…
  • It's not specifically geared towards the architecture itself but MS Thott 290 2º - perhaps Hans Talhoffer's most complete Fechtbuch sometimes referred to as "Fight Earnestly" - has a large section that includes basic defensive structures and war machines meant to overcome similar ones. It also has fairly decent…
  • That's fucking perfect, thanks man. High quality and untouched. I had only been able to find a few that weren't scattered around or thrown into PDF with notes jammed in that required me to export and ditch the excess.
  • This is cattle's defensive position against a potential predator. They group the strongest on the outside of a circle and the young and weak on the inside. It's likely you've never seen it because during the day they know what you are and tend to settle down because they think they're going to be fed. At night they can't…
  • I wrote a piece of a guide I was going to make in series back in 2009 that I never completed, relevant to this thread. It can be found here for those interested. If any electronics go bad on me I at least pull the capacitors. Those are just too much fun. I like to keep parts in a huge spare tackle box. Keeps everything…
  • Just grit your teeth and stick with it for awhile. You'll get over it if you keep at it. I'm not sure I buy into the "optimal" theory necessarily, I find my body's "power curve" doesn't really peak out until it hits the afternoon but I work out in the mornings anyhow due to time constraints. Protein and recarb when you're…
  • Certainly. I actually agree with you on that jugg, not trying to go against you by any means just for the record. Merely playing devil's advocate and throwing up the merits of them.
  • True about the pads but I'm thinking of all the people out there with literally zero experience who have no idea what to expect and nobody there to guide them through it. While traditionally martial arts don't use them, there are plenty of effective programs out there that use them heavily because they allow the user to…
  • Haha, my girlfriend from Canada facepalmed at spray cheese too, so I bought a can and made her eat a Chicken in a Biskit[sic] cracker with some on top. She wasn't impressed. That said, this stuff has been around for YEARS here in the states. How else are we going to get fat and diabetic?
  • If I can add to this and hopefully not seem to be taking away from it, if anybody reads this and gets interested you owe it to yourself to practice in real time. You probably already know you should enlist in a proper course to learn these things but at the bare minimum grab a like-minded friend or two. Using basic safety…
  • I saw one of these in the town I live just outside of today and thought of this topic. It was sky blue with a white vinyl top and looked like it had just been sitting out in the elements. Though surprisingly, and maybe I just wasn't up close enough to see better, but I didn't see any rusting really and the vinyl wasn't…
  • I kill, field dress, skin, and butcher both deer and elk almost every year and have done so since I was old enough to hunt - and actually I helped out even before then. I find the smell is usually not a big deal unless the animal has been gut shot. Every now and then I'll come across another hunter who doesn't know what…
  • What brings you to Panama? Tomorrow I finally get some free time to play around again so I'm going to chop up a small canister and get that heating and tempering out of the way. I've also discovered a location filled with scouring rush that I plan to harvest and dry out for primitive craft projects as it makes a good final…
  • Today I started work on a knife I'm going to gift away to a good friend of mine. The blade is already almost finished and I found a good piece of elk antler for the handle. I mocked up the blade behind the handle with some leather to give an idea of what it will look like when completed. Pictures here and here. Steel is…
  • The past week has been mostly more of the same. I'm planning to build my crucible to heat my blades within the week and get started with my axe vs. kukri test. I've also winnowed my amaranth and have been playing around with the seeds before I mill most of them into flour. Learning that they could be popped like popcorn…
  • This was the case with me for the most part. Dark Kaiser put it in a way that I've thought of it as since back in the days of the original &T: when the forum is acting like that, it's like "feeding caviar to cattle." Feels like a massive waste of time trying to post anything useful when it's just going to be lost in a sea…
  • Yeah the thing with cigars is that you're supposed to savor the flavor in your mouth. You will probably inhale a slight amount anyways just as a natural course and that's generally enough to sedate you anyhow, but purposely inhaling the whole thing can really mess up your lungs. I really can't recommend a good wooden pipe…
  • I wouldn't worry too much. It's only normal that what you've done is shown in police logs if you did anything noticeable. It's kind of good in a way because at least you know what they know. There's no possibility of thinking "Well, maybe they thought an employee was fucking around and..." or whatever. Plus considering…
  • Don't worry, this place has it's share of other problems unfortunately. Mostly, being small and out in the middle of nowhere. It would be cool if I could transplant this area like 10 miles out of a larger city. As it stands, I have a three hour drive ahead of me if I want to go anywhere you can't yell across town in.
  • Figures. In a world where once beards and plaid once stood for a lumberjack busting ass in the woods everyday, now it stands for some stupid ass hipster making a scene and being a latte connoisseur. Fake eyelashes? Surprised it didn't come sooner, honestly. Good thing I live somewhere that shuns this sort of sissy culture.…
  • I enjoy a good cigar or pipe full of tobacco every now and then, but nowhere close to regular habit.
  • For what it's worth, there are other studies that appear related to this one including a hepatoxicity test on rat livers found here that I've took into consideration for all of this as well. If at the end of the day if I can't reach a final product where both LD50s of the toxins and usable extract are much higher than an…
  • Right, I'm already aware of the toxic effects. The plant in question is the pokeweed, the berries in particular are extremely poisonous and cannot be safely ingested by mammals because of the two substances you mentioned. The whole point is to tread the line between deadly and therapeutic. This has been done and tested…
  • I do have some methanol already on hand - I think it's 95% (I'll have to check, it's lab grade with the info paper still banded on the side of the bottle) - that would be enough for several trials. I was planning to mix it with boric acid awhile back for a stupid project involving a flamethrower that shot green fire but…
  • Well the procedures I'm looking at specifically use an 80:20 ratio of methanol to water. I've also read about chloroform being used in this solvent sometimes. But it seems to me that, at a crude level, you could pour 80% alcohol into a coffee filter filled with crushed, dry plant matter and simply evaporate (any no-heat…
  • It's not a complete, satisfying solution but there are special ways to walk across ground covered in leaves that really helps. The trick is to avoid stepping in a manner that crushes down on the leaves which not only produces the biggest noise output but also is more of a telltale walking sound. Instead, send the tip of…
  • Well... I caught a quail this morning. :D I put on a leather glove as it was flailing around against the pole, grabbed it and quickly cut her head off. After I took the snare off her feet, I set the body aside and went in to grab a knife. Dressing the body was pretty easy, most of it just involved ripping the body apart…
  • Circumventing a magnetic switch from the outside is an exercise in futility unless there's some brute force to go along with it. Simple as they may be, they're way too inconveniently located to jumper or even use a counterfeit magnet. The magnet on the door generally pulls - sometimes repels - the switch above into the…
  • In fact, I've got some juniper and apple staves I cured throughout the summer specifically for this purpose. I'm wanting to make some proper bows but keep putting it off. I need to make a tillering rack but I basically have everything I need - the staves, leather cording, means to steam bend, arrow shafts, feathers, and…
  • A little trick for those magnetic switches. They emit a strong enough magnetic field that a good quality compass will pick up on them and the needle will point towards the switch continuously if you move it back and forth along the frame. If you don't have a compass that can get a read upside down, you'll need a mirror (on…
  • Alright so today I got off my ass and accomplished a few things. First, I gathered a relatively huge amount of apples - 20 gallons. Tonight I'm sorting them and might even get some fruit leather and apple chips going. Cider, vinegar, and yeast coming up soon. Second, I threshed the amaranth I cut a long time ago. To my…
  • No argument there, removing the case certainly won't improve your bottom CPU temps it's just a quick fix. Proper upgrades are still the way to go.
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gg8Ne5NhG2Y This seemed like a great excuse to post this. 10 minutes? 20 seconds, bitches!
  • I'd say there's a point where simply being able to dissipate heat trumps airflow in importance. Most people shouldn't reach that point, but when it hits that extreme I'd rather have no case on. It'd be like saying you can expel heat better in a car by running a typhoon fan through the front and opening up the back to an…
  • In my experience, sleep aids haven't done anything except give me extremely trippy dreams and they were definitely not lucid. Most memorable was one that involved me hijacking a Greyhound bus full of cheerleaders at night while smashing through road blocks and individual cruisers. The whole time the cheerleaders were…
  • For what it's worth I'm not really into the whole samurai uberness thing, but I looked at one recently I thought may have been dramatically underpriced by someone who didn't know what they had. So I did some research into various brands to see what was good and what was junk. The item in question I thought may have been a…
  • I have a method in mind I was going to use, but yeah man I'm always cool with learning more ways to do something.
  • Yeah I remember the story you told me about when your dad made biltong but it molded so he just washed it off and sold it anyways haha. That stuff definitely seems pretty bulletproof. Sometime soon I need to smoke some meat, I've heard that in general smoked meat won't last as long but I imagine with a thick layer of it…