Your very own dagger

You know how you've always wanted a "Bowie knife", or just a big knife for general camping use? Well I do, and having worked in an outdoor store I have a couple already, and they're really nice ones too. Why then make a new, crappy looking one.

Answer is simple, the new and shiny knife from the shop is expensive, and I might be the only one, but I'm a little afraid of damaging them, so I don't actually use them that much...

I was in a charity shop and found this knife for 2€, and thought "heck, so what if I ruin it trying". 

 This knife was slightly bent, but made of decent steel (most kitchen knives over 1 mm. thickness are today). So I bought it. Being a kitchen knife, it was also too big (big knives are good, but even that has a end). It's barely visible, but I've drawn a design on the knife blade. (You don't need one with a metal handle, wood is nicer, and you can always exchange a it for a home made new handle).

 I took a hacksaw to it to get rid of the bigger bits, and was pleasantly surprised to break the hacksaw, indicating a nice hard blade on the knife. After I was done with the hacksaw I removed the rest of the unwanted blade with a grinder (making sure not to overheat the steel, bucket of water nearby is handy). If you don't have a grinder, a coarse wet stone will do. After a little fine tuning with a file, the knife was ready for the wet stone.

Now the knife is nice and sharp, and I need to come up with a way to make a sheath. I would also like to polish the knife, guess I'll do something with very fine sand paper or use some fabric with the dust from the wet stone as abrasive.

Knife is ~15 cm. now, a good length for most wood craft.

The sheath. I forgot to take a lot of pictures of the process, but you'll get the idea.

As this is mostly just to try it out, I just located the toughest wood we had. Some hardwood would be better, but plywood is glued from lots of layers, making stiffer and less prone to moisture damage. I chose a wood sheath, as I did not have any leather of a suitable thickness to make a wrap around sheath. Plywood turned out to be a good choice, one can take of one of the layers at a time, providing an easier way of making even knife shaped hole in the wood. (This is the step you need to imagine).

The sheath is made from two pieces of wood, each with a blade shaped hole in it. These two are glued together to form the sheath.

I'm a big fan of leather for this kind of stuff, so I fashioned some leather to wrap around the wooden sheath. This leather is too thin and soft to function as a sheath in it's own right. The top part, where the belt loop is, is a double layer that ends at the stitch going across the sheath. The rest is a single layer of leather, suede side in, wrapped around the wooden sheath, and pulled tight with stitching.

You can just see the wooden insert into the leather wrapping, and the belt loop as a simple hole in the double leather at the top part.

I'm really looking forward to trying this out in the wild. My hopes are that the leather will protect the wood from the wet, while the wood will provide a snug home for the knife.

At this point, I'm a little bit sad I didn't get a knife with a wooden handle, but that's for another time!

Update!
I have upgraded the handle for the knife. I didn't love the metallic handle (and it was blasted cold in the winter). I did not take any pictures during the process, but I'm sure you'll get the idea.

The original knife handle was just steel. I grinded this off on both sides, and found out that the handle was hollow! This left me with two prongs sticking out from the blade - not a stable handle!
An old broomstick handle to the rescue. I took ~15 cm of the handle, added lots of glue and hammered the round wood in between the two steel prongs. All this I then wrapped (tightly) in leather string and covered it in glue to make the wrapping permanent and waterproof.
I like this result better!

About yeast

So I was visiting my friend (a chemical engineer), and it was beer brewing day. to control the temperature he uses a little "Arduino" board, that can communicate with e.g. MatLab.

We wanted to find the best way of "starting" the yeast for the brewing, so I looked online, and found that yeast is actually pretty tough - I told him to add a little sugar in some water with the yeast.

This answer of cause does not satisfy anyone, so I decided to do a little home experimenting. Knowing that I wouldn't want to spend the whole week, I opted for the little experiment, using no replications and only 20 samples.

The experiment was as follows:

Find out how best to start your yeast. I assumed that sugar and salt were deciding factors, sugar speeding up the growth and salt slowing it/killing it. The concentrations I tested were of the top of my head (no literature search here), so only one of the parameters had good values.

For testing salt and sugar I used beer bottles, as they are easy/fun to come by, and to measure yeast activity I used balloons. Yeast produces CO2 as it ferments sugar, so the bigger the balloon, the healthier the yeast.

See the setup in the picture below.

The result are pretty clear I think, though they deserve a little commenting.

• It seems that no salt and 4% salt are worse for yeast than 0.5-2% salt.
• For sugar the it seems that the sweeter the better, and my 4% were not high enough to inhibit the yeast growth. The yeast article on Wikipedia seems to indicate that sugar should inhibit the growth at some point.
• Yeast doesn't do anything in salt water.

This last comment might seem obvious, but it is not so as it was not only salt I had in the top five bottles. My first attempt on this set-up used dry yeast, which I had dissolved in water at 1% w/w concentration. All of the yeast died! So now you know that you should never try to start dry yeast in pure water (in Denmark there's no additives in dried yeast, while in other countries you can get it with e.g. ascorbic acid and growth medium, in which case it might work with pure water). This dead yeast concentration was added to the bottles prior to the live yeast being added, the latter only added after 6 hours of no activity. One could argue I should have redone the whole thing, but I thought it interesting to see if live yeast could "eat" dead dried yeast (the top row). It doesn't look like it.

So to sum up: If you want happy and strong yeast in your dough, use 0.5-2% salt, and at least 4% sugar. Word of advice, I'd go for 2% salt, as it tastes better, and improves the structure of the bread (less dry, tougher).

Feel free to copy and improve on this. In my humble opinion it's a great little experiment for school as well as for the curious kids at home.  

How to make a leather bottle al á Viking (or whatever oldschool badass culture)

I was at a Viking market south of Odense, Denmark, and I saw a guy with an awesome bottle!

Next step was to try to make one, so I made some coffee - one to get me going, one to keep me going.

 Using my kindergarten scissors and trusted Leatherman I fashioned two pieces of leather (bought at said Viking market) into the shape of a bottle.

 Because I did not have an awl, I used hammer and nail to make evenly spaced holes in both pieces of leather. To hold them in place use pegs, clamps or similar.

 I stitched them together using something called saddle-stitch, it's strong! The thread is hemp with bees wax. When stitching use two pliers, as it's almost impossible to pull the needles through with your fingers.

 Adding water to the thing causes it to "ballon". This one took about a litre of water. As you can see it's far from waterproof at this stage. If your stitch is tight enough though, the only place it won't leak, is your stitches!

 Playing with hot wax. I used bees wax, it's natural and it smells great. Melt it and pour it into your ( now dried) bottle, swirl it around, and empty the excess back into your melting cup. Repeat this to make sure you have a good coat.

 I chose to wax mine on the outside to, it makes the bottle really hard (think Nalgene bottle), and means the outer is waterproof too.

 I made a wooden cork for mine, I'm sure you can find other ways of closing yours.
The wooden cork is made to fit by heating up the opening of the bottle, then inserting the cork and afterwards tying some string tight around the neck of the bottle.

My bottle now hold mead more often than water :)

So I had some "Sugru" lying around

It had normal "flat/cylindrical" eye pieces. Using something called Sugru, a curable moldable rubber, I made new ones - they keep the unwanted light out!

Beer can stove, for when you should have listened to your girlfriend and brought a stove in the first place...

I had seen one of these made in a video once, making one in real life proved quite easy.

First step is the best - drink two beers (look for little "AL" sign on them, to make sure they're not laminate cans).

Then comes the somewhat harder part, you have to find a can with the same diameter as the rim of the beer can, red bull cans work, but are hard to drink... (try and pawn it of at a techno-party and have some vodka to go with it).

Cut the top of the two beer cans so that one is ~1.5 times as tall as the other. If you make a really tall one, you can cook longer before the fuel runs out, but it'll be more unstable as well. Try to cut really neatly. Now make evenly spaced holes (Ø<1mm) around the side of the tallest bottom part. In this same can take out the inner curved part that was the bottom of the beer can. Then cut the redbull can to the combined height of the two beer cans, when they're stuck fully into one another (this can be tricky).

After this you're good to go. Fill about 2/3 with ethanol and light through big centre opening. Let the stove heat up. When the ethanol is boiling put your desired pot on it, closing the top opening and forcing ethanol steam out the side "jets". This is the whole point of this stove design, as it preheats the fuel, and by only burning the ethanol steam in little jets, it makes sure the combustion is well oxygenated - hot stuff!

All well and good - it worked great in the kitchen, but real life has wind...
I resourced some metal and made a windscreen. If you need to do this, make sure there is no holes in it under the handle of your pot! (handle will melt)

And now, just add your favourite travel food to your trusted pot, and leave to simmer.
On a side note here, my girlfriend came up with a way of shortening cooking time for pasta/lentils/rice when you're on the trail. Simply put today dinner in a half litre bottle, fill with water, and leave it in your backpack until it's dinner time (works especially well for high altitude).

Thoughts on Vegetarianism - please comment, but think first!

Some of the (i)logical reasons for being vegetarian - some I though of, some I was told...

“It is morally wrong to take the life of a sentient being”

This is probably a big point of disagreement, since it is hard to logically prove that killing a sentient being is inherently wrong.

What is easy to agree on though is that it is wrong to cause suffering.

For further notice, “suffering” is referred to as a form of mental pain, that can be brought on by physical pain, by the expectation of pain in the future, the remembering of past pain, and pain brought on by stress because of the environment or the fellow organisms behavior.

Agreeing on this basic principle means that most slaughterhouses will have problems not causing suffering in their production of meat. There is a lot of doubt regarding the the level of consciousness of livestock, but giving them the benefit of the doubt, it can be assumed that going (for the first/last time), to the slaughterhouse will be a stressful experience a least.

Opposed to this is the end of life for livestock in small non-industrial populations. These animals will most likely die in their normal habitat, maybe by bolt gun, by the hand that usually feeds them - they’ll most likely not be stressed, as they won’t know what’s coming, and they won’t feel it coming either. No suffering here.

Lastly it can be postulated that dead group members leaves the remaining animals stressed (eg. hierarchical collapse), or mourning (as in elephants).

This is actually one of the reasons for not taking the lives of humans, apart from being a great taboo, it’ll also leave the relatives emotionally devastated.

Sorry for painting this morbid picture, but one vegan suggesting that you might as well kill a three-year-old as a pig, as they reportedly have the same mental capacities and thus suffer to the same extent when killed (no source was cited).

Fact is though that none of the above will know what happened, but death of the hominid will by all standards cause more suffering.

The conclusion for this topic is therefore that suffering should be minimalised, but animals need by no means suffer from being killed for the benefit of human consumption.

“It is healthier to be vegan”

Maybe. Studies like “The China Study” (I’ve only read the wikipedia summary) seem to prove that a vegan diet is more healthy, so surely this is true…

It didn’t take long to find other views on that opinion online, check out: http://rawfoodsos.com/2010/07/07/the-china-study-fact-or-fallac/

(a thorough statistical walkthrough of much of the study or just www.rawfoodsos.com for some light good night reading)

I my opinion/experience any diet that focuses on variety and quality of food is going to do wonders for most people - no matter what the “theme” is. The act of directing your attention to your diet, makes your diet better, everything is an active choice, and bad food are left out in this process.

As most vegans are so by choice, they choose their food with care (often out of necessity, as it can be hard to find). This is a rather stark contrast to the average citizen, who maybe buys more out of convenience than out of nutritional value. Comparing the two groups is a biased comparison, and yields predictable biased results.

“It’s more environmentally friendly”

Can be. Truth is, in most cases it probably is, and i my opinion this the only merit for vegetarian and vegan diets (allergies excluded).

For most endothermic (~warmblooded) animals around 90% of the energy going in one end is used for moving about, and for staying warm. This means that a maximum of ten percent of the energy eaten is fixed in the biomass of the animal (and accessible for our consumption). Obviously producing fodder for animals where human food could have been grown is a waste of resources, and also often pollutes because of pesticides and/or fertilizers (not mentioning the effect a huge monoculture can have on biodiversity in an area). But for getting rid of food waste, chickens and pigs are unbeatable, and together with your garden compost, they can re-fertilize your land effectively.

This is not environmentally unfriendly.

Animals can eat, and thereby convert, non-human food to human food. This can enable humans to source all their food locally, and in truth, the logistics involved in getting food around is probably more polluting than anything else (no source for this yet - working on it). So think about your quinoa from Brazil, your cashews from Vietnam or your lentils from India next time you think about how much CO2 my free range pig bacon has caused. Beef from Argentina fed with soy from USA is of course worse, but so is all production on an industrial scale.

(23/04/2015) An update to this:
In arid regions it can sometimes be more environmentally friendly to have cattle instead of growing the same amount of food as crops. By having extensive grasing of cattle in a big area one can produce a lot of food, without destroying the land and thus biodiversity. If this same land was to be farmed, huge resources would be devoted to watering the crops, draining nearby rivers, and the fields would be devastating to biodiversity.

“Animals are treated as slaves”

A hard one - it’s clearly hard to be objective here. Human slaves most likely suffer both physically and mentally, and “Slavery is a system under which people are treated as property to be bought and sold, and are forced to work” ((Laura Brace (2004). The Politics of Property: Labour, Freedom and Belonging. Edinburgh University Press. pp. 162–. ISBN 978-0-7486-1535-3)

Livestock is bought and sold and as such they are slaves, but surely the point of abolishing slavery is to lessen suffering!?

Think about an average wild boar, in their natural habitat they are threatened daily by wolves, bears, lack of food or the competition for it, hypothermia and if they’re male, fighting the other males and enforcing territories is a major stress factor.

I can’t be certain, but it seems to me that a free-range pig only suffer any of the above to a minor degree - if at all! (a farmer I spoke to thinks free-range pigs are cold during the winter). But, sensibly, it must be fair to assume that the life in a protected free-range pen is less stressful than the wild life. This is true for pigs, but certainly also for chickens, cattle, sheep and goats, they are all better fed, less stressed than their cousins in the wild. Not really slavery in my opinion.