Iconoclast

I intend to trim the feathers a bit but I didn’t have scissors with me and didn’t want to attempt it with a knife.

Yeah I actually thought about meltin some spruce resin over the thread to prevent it from coming undone.

I’ve been getting into slingling a bit. It’s wildly inaccurate but you can reach impressive distances and it packs quite the punch.

The primitive way is to use animal sinew instead of a modern string. You apply it wet and once it dries it shrinks tighter and glues onto itself.

Yeah it’s quite a bit of work. I don’t think I’d have the heart to actually shoot this even if I did have a bow. I put way too much effort into it. They recommend making these in batches of 5 if you’re actually intending to use them too. This is more of a proof of concept.

Damn, these are really cool. I was just practicing rope-making from nettles last summer myself.

You just wanted an excuse to mess with the winch and pulleys didn’t you?

I recommend checking out Vancouver Carpenter on YouTube. Everything I know about plastering I’ve learned from that guy though it’s perhaps a bit more focused on plastering over drywall seams.

Steel seems overkill here, I’d honestly just replace that with an NTR-A grade pressure-treated wooden post. Make sure to put the factory-cut end into the ground or treat it with some tar-like wood preservative. Don’t use anything water-based as it won’t absorb into the already wet lumber.

On the top I’d just use angle brackets since those aren’t bearing any load - they’re just keeping it in place. On the bottom I’d bury a few concrete patio slabs into the ground and maybe use some kind of steel post feet to anchor it down.

Well even that’s not untypical. The standard way to do this is to just have a 110mm sewer pipe sticking from the floor. You then cut it to a floor level and install the toilet on top of it. The difference is that in the US they use this “wax seal” which is a complete mystery for me. Here we just take an adapter that’s pushed to the inside of the sewer pipe and then the toilet is lowered on top of that one. Water would need to climb uphill past the seals in order to leak.

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We don’t use “wax rings” here. Leak from the sewer connection is virtually impossible. I’ve been doing plumbing for 15 years and I’ve never seen or heard it happen.

The toilet is attached to the floor with adhesive and then it’s made pretty by caulking the seam. In some apartment buildings they want a little gap left into the adhesive and caulking to let out any water that might get under there when washing the space but this is rare and is almost never done.

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Are you saying with the handle version you can screw on a can and use it every now and then?

The foam gun seals at the very tip of the nozzle. Once you attach a foam bottle, the entire gun effectively becomes part of the pressurized bottle, and you can store it like that for months - but probably not years. However, if you set a reminder a couple times a year and spray some of the foam out from the gun to “freshen it up,” then it should stay in operating condition for the next time you need it.

That said, if you only need it once every few years, there’s probably no reason not to just buy a single-use bottle even if you don’t use all of it.

If you’re going to use it all at once, then just buying the bottle with the straw is fine.

However, if you’re going to need it every now and then over a longer period, or you want better flow control and a narrower nozzle, then the pro gun is the way to go. You can (and should) just leave the bottle attached to the gun permanently. It’ll stay good for a few months like that.

If you need to store it longer, just periodically spray some out, then close it up again and it’ll keep fine. In my experience the cleaning solution doesn’t fully clean the gun and it will eventually clog. That said, I just heard one guy say he hasn’t cleaned his gun in 3 years - he just swaps in fresh bottles when they run out and it’s been fine.

The important part is to tighten the flow control knob after use, because simply releasing the trigger won’t fully seal it for long-term storage.

Is that where you keep all your scrap steel?

Oh, it grips!

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That might be the original pot… …and soil. Maybe I should repot it.

While definitely not the cheapest and probably not hugely efficient either, just getting one of those Ecoflow, Jackery, Bluetti style power banks and hooking it up to a solar panel would likely be the easiest solution and comes with the benefit of being able to easily be moved elsewhere and the powerbank itself is a good off-grid power source to replace a generator.