Comments by "Thump Er the Sweaty Fat Guy" (@SweatyFatGuy) on "RUSSIAN MISSILE MAGNETS AND DAD BODS" video.
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@FoxtrotFleet hypothetical: What if you cannot get cooking oil and there are not enough feral hogs around to chop up for fat? What if you do not have a diesel?
Here is an answer to the first question:
Hemp seed produces a good bit of oil per acre, and it grows exceptionally fast. It also provides you with fibers that can be utilized for textiles and paper.
Sunflowers are another good one, and they also grow profusely. However with diesels you have the problem of fuel gelling in cold weather. Pig fat will work great in Texas, but it will not work in Michigan, North Dakota, Montana, or Canada. No hogs, not enough bears, and cold starting issues.
Diesels are great where you can make fuel for them. They will run on all sorts of things, but if you have to find it, and its something like Walking Dead without zombies where all the infrastructure is gone, producing fuel is going to be dicey.
I really like the hemp idea, because the plant provides so much more than just seeds for oil.
I tend to think worst case scenario, because the more I can make for myself, the less I have to buy. Thats how I got into this subject. Lets say I was forced into poverty (divorce) and still wanted to enjoy life (drag racing) so I had to find ways to spend as little cash as possible so I could use it for things I could not make.. like tires, cylinder heads, camshafts, etc. Even though I am a machinist (among other things) I would need the equipment and electrical power to run it if I wanted to produce parts.. then I need raw materials like cam blanks and the like.
I figured ethanol was the easiest, because any starch or sugar can be used to produce fuel, and it will run in any engine, even a diesel if you ditch the diesel injector, put spark plugs in it, and run a carb or EFI. I've been testing for corrosion problems since 2007.. I am wondering how many decades it takes for it to show up.
I built some Pontiac 455s that I can change the static compression from 7:1 to 13:1 with only a head swap to test things. At 11.5:1 I get the same mileage on ethanol as I do with pump gas at 9:1... and I get to enjoy a lot more power.
Working on a 3800 Buick V6 version and a hand built vehicle to utilize parts from donor vehicles with that engine. Think Ariel Atom with body work and you'll get the idea.
I wanted to go racing again, but my 2004 deployment left me unable to ever run again, and barely able to walk, living in pain, and existing on a fixed income set by Congress. Started on the ethanol project in 2007 when I converted a Qjet for the 455 in my 1970 GTO. In 2015 the ex was paid off, and I built my shop and house. Paid those off in Feb 21, and while I could get E85 for $1.70 during the Trump years, I worked on testing, carbs, EFI, and building ethanol maximized engines with lots of compression to take advantage of the fuel.
Now I am back to producing it, but I got screwed by weather again... so now I have to go with the other method.. coffee grounds. This fall I will harvest cattails and use them to produce fuel for next summer. I am building a pond just for them. One acre of cattails provides 1000 gallons of fuel. More than enough for me to drive everywhere I need to go, run a generator if I want/have to, and go racing. So I might make two 1 acre ponds, or four half acre ponds to farm my fuel.
In the south you can use Kudzu to make ethanol. Also you can drink it, use it as hand sanitizer, antiseptic, and its a wonderful degreaser. Add some turpentine and it is a very nice clean burning light source. So its more useful than just fuel.
Making vodka should be part of every prepper's inventory of things to do and learn.
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@torgranael the whole reason cannabis was outlawed was hemp. Since they look similar. William Randolph Hearst.. you may have heard of him, newspaper tycoon. Well he had massive forests he wanted to use as paper, but hemp was being used for paper instead.
Cotton benefitted as well, because hemp clothing lasts longer, doesn't mold, and holds its color far better without fading, its also more comfortable than cotton or wool.
The US Navy uses hemp rope, and thanks to prohibition it must all be imported through licensed importers, meaning they can set the price, and nobody else can produce hemp rope.
They took a page from Rockefeller's playbook, he pushed through a Constitutional amendment to outlaw his competition for transportation fuel. The Volstead Act, aka prohibition. Before that, most vehicles ran on ethanol, and a few could run on ethanol or gasoline.
Like Ford's Model T. They overheated on gasoline, made less power, and drove worse, but all you had to do to run ethanol was move a lever on the steering column that advanced the timing, and turn a knob on the dash that richened the air fuel mix at the carb.
Why would anyone run gasoline when it ran worse, overheated, made less power, and you could not make it at home? So Rockefeller used the legal system to outlaw his competition... and now people think gasoline is wonderful and the only way to fuel a vehicle.
Even now you can find videos and articles about how bad ethanol is, how bad green energy is, and that is to keep you guying products from other people. If we all start making fuel ourselves they lose huge amounts of money.
Buying a Tesla still requires you to use coal power to charge it. Unless you can produce your own electricity. I can take a rusty heap, rebuild it, make it run on ethanol, have a greater range than the Tesla, run faster than the Plaid, and spend less than $10k doing it. Then I can produce the fuel to run it, and I only need tires, brakes, lubricants, and other wear items.
I'm not saving the planet, I am saving money so I can spend it on fun stuff rather than energy.
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@Bacteriophagebs I didn't say the Volstead Act was about cannabis, I said Hearst and the others took a page from Rockefeller's playbook in getting their competitor outlawed rather than providing a better product.
The target was hemp, cannabis was the justification, and the propaganda like 'Refer Madness' was how they got people to support it. They threw the race card in there as well, just because they could. If you haven't seen that little movie, you gotta watch it, its some of the best comedy ever.
Both weed and alcohol were prohibited to make people rich, because they were competing with them. Hemp grows fast and dwarfs trees for biomass, it also sequesters a shit ton of carbon in the soil which should make all the climate change people happy... but they are idiots who don't understand how it all works.
I never hear any leftists admit that Trump did a wonderful thing by removing the ban on hemp so we can grow it now. You'd think they would stop caring about cannabis with how other substances are far worse... but the DEA needs its funding and justification for being here.
We can grow our own weed, hemp, and produce ethanol to fuel our vehicles, which is why they are none too excited about us doing it. If we produce it, they can't profit from it.
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@Bacteriophagebs one aspect of my project is keeping it inexpensive, mostly because I haven't had much cash for the last 16 years. You can built a water filter from gravel, sand, charcoal and screen door screen in a barrel. Its easy to make charcoal, you stuff a steel barrel or Dutch oven full of wood, seal it so it doesn't burn, then build a bonfire around it. You can also build a stone kiln like they did around here in the 1800s, don't use sandstone though, it will crumble, has to be something metamorphic like granite, not sedimentary rock or igneous like lava, the lava rocks will work too, but often they are porous.
I spend $250 a month on wood pellets, they are a lot easier and cleaner than firewood, also since I don't want to cut down all my trees I have to get wood from others. I've only found one guy out of hundreds around here that sells actual face cords. Everyone else shorts you. So I found a way to heat water to 140F without burning anything, a big compost pile of woodchips and sawdust with 600' of plastic sprinkler tubing run through it.
Propane is $1000 a month minimum for my house, and that was three years ago when I priced it, it has tripled in the last year.
Electric is out because the power grid around here is less stable than my bipolar ex wife who is addicted to oxy, AND its hideously expensive. That also precludes an EV if I could afford one that had the range for me to get from home, to town, and back again on one charge.
I got into ethanol because it cost me less cash to produce and I can run race engines on it.. then I found out race engine compression ratios get better mileage. So now all the engines I built have as much compression as I can get out of them, so I can use less ethanol making lots of power.
Buy a still? Go to a hardware store and get the stuff to build one. Right now I am making a 30 gallon boiler for my channel. Its going to be a simple pot still for distilling water, you could use it to produce low proof shine, but I just want it to distil water. I have many uses for distilled water, batteries, my brix meter, fermentation, etc. If you have to buy the solder, flux, propane torch, and copper sheathing, its around $200. If you buy a still that $200 will only get you a tiny one, not a 30 gallon boiler. You can build it with simple hand tools, metal shears, a hammer, an old wheel, and a propane torch.
Did some of the metal shaping yesterday, doing the soldering today when it warms up a bit. Video should be out soon.
Caveman tech means anyone can do it, sure I have other tools I can use to shape and cut metal, they make the job go faster, but the investment for them is higher, If you have those tools already, you are ahead of the game.
I grew up on a farm in the 1970s and 80s. My father, grandfather and great grandfather were all very adept at a wide range of disciplines. Carpenters and welders, mechanical engineering to biology. To live 20 miles from the nearest town, with no vehicles until the late 1930s, you had to know how to do things. My uncle learned plumbing in the late 1940s after he got out of the Army so he could put running water in the house we all grew up in... in 1952. There was still an outhouse out back when I went to the military in 1988.
Its not like humans haven't lived without all the easy convenience stuff like turning up the thermostat rather than building a fire in a huge stove in the basement. People today are too soft, and they want it right now rather than putting in the effort to build it themselves.
When the trucks stop running and the power goes out, all of those people are going to have a very rough time. When gasoline is $12 a gallon, they won't be able to move much, they'll be scrounging for food, having to choose between eating something and being warm. City people are screwed when something like that happens. Then the morons go buy all the toilet paper. Now because of those idiots I have to stay stocked up on that too, just in case they all go stupid again. Stuff takes up a lot of space.
Most people have a throw money at it mentality, what can I buy. They are the ones who think having a certificate that says they own some gold or silver will mean something. You cant eat gold and silver, and if they actually have it in hand when it runs out, then what. No electricity, no crypto. Seems like many people always assume the power is going to be on.
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