Cooking and leaching Black bean to remove the poison making it safe to eat. A basket was made to leach the poison out in a stream. Also shown are Atherton Oak nuts. The Aboriginal artifacts found near by were probably made by the Yidinji people (if you're reading this leave a comment below). It seems like a lot of effort to prepare black bean to eat but consider the effort that goes into making bread from scratch (plowing, sowing, winnowing, storing, milling, baking etc.). With Black bean it is collected when needed, storage is unnecessary as nothing eats it raw and it can be left in the stream till needed. It contains more energy than potatoes(but less than grain) and contains lots of starch and protein. This was a staple food of the rain forest people once. IMPORTANT EDIT: Always do an edibility test before consuming new bush foods. I left the Moreton bay chestnuts to soak in the running stream for a week (because I was busy) but it only takes 3 days to leach out the poison making it safe to eat.
I estimate that 200 Moretonbay chestnut seeds alone would meet the energy requirements of an adult for 3 days. If you prepared this food on a continuous 3 day cycle it would be as follows: Collect fire wood, get the grated meal soaking in the stream from 3 days earlier, bake it into bread, collect 200 new seeds, bake them in a pit till soft, grate or slice them finely into the basket and put it back into the stream for 3 days. The bread made from this easily stores for 3 days. So you spend one day (probably only the morning) making the food and the other 2 days free for other activities. =>> Click watch video below :
The manufacture of a stone ax including the handle from using only primitive tools and materials. It is a celt (pronounced "selt") a type of ax with a polished stone head wedged into a hole or mortise at the end of a wooden handle (not to be confused with a "Kelt" referring to a Celtic person). The head took about a week and a day to make as I chose to make it from a particularly large piece of basalt. The hammer stone used to shape the basalt was of quartz. This involved hammering, pecking, grinding and polishing the head into the final shape. The handle took a day and a morning to make. A chisel was made from stone and a mallet made from a log. These were used to cut the tree for the handle and shape it once down. Fire was used to harden the wood and also to help shape the mortise. The ax was then used to cut down a tree the day after the handle was a tree itself. It is a more efficient tool for felling trees than the hand ax I made and at the time of uploading this video has cut down 4 trees which I will use later. Because this stone axe is blunter than a steel one, the blade needs to hit the tree at angles greater than 45 degrees- otherwise the blade would glance off. So celts were used more like wedges than modern axes. =>> Click watch video below :
Making fire sticks primitively from scratch, making a fire using the sticks and making and firing a small pot to test clay from the hut.
The species of wood used for the fire sticks is 'Abroma mollis'. In the hibiscus/cottonwood family (Malvaceae) =>> Click watch video below :
I built this thatched dome hut on a mountain ridge using completely primitive tools and materials. The frame was 2.5 m in diameter and 2 m tall. It was made from 8 thin saplings 2.75 m long, the thatching material was split palm fronds and vine was used for tying it all together. A stone hand ax was used to chop the saplings and a sharp stone flake was used to cut fronds. The pointed dome profile is half way between a spherical dome and a ti-pi. This shape sheds rain and funnels smoke effectively while still providing a large inner volume. A moat was dug around the hut to drain water away. As an afterthought I planted sweet potatoes and taro around the moat to hopefully provide some food later on. =>> Click watch video below :
I built this hut in the bush using naturally occurring materials and primitive tools. The hut is 2m wide and 2m long, the side walls are 1m high and the ridge line (highest point) is 2m high giving a roof angle of 45 degrees. A bed was built inside and it takes up a little less than half the hut. The tools used were a stone hand axe to chop wood, fire sticks to make fire, a digging stick for digging and clay pots to carry water. The materials used in the hut were wood for the frame, vine and lawyer cane for lashings and mud for walls. Broad leaves were initially used as thatch which worked well for about four months before starting to rot. The roof was then covered with sheets of paper bark which proved to be a better roofing material (*peeling the outer layer of bark does not kill this species of tree). An external fireplace and chimney were also built to reduce smoke inside. The hut is a small yet comfortable shelter and provides room to store tools and materials out of the weather. The whole hut took 9 months from start to finish. But it only took 30 days of actual work (I abandoned it for a few months before adding bark roof, chimney and extra daub ). =>> Click watch video below :
I built an A frame hut as a large work space for projects. First I made a celt hatchet to cut timber for the hut. The axe head was made of amphibolite and the handle was made of a species of wattle. For the hut the floor plan was 4 X 4m. The height of the ridgeline was 2 m above the ground. +A post was planted in the ground to support the ridge pole at the back of the structure and an A frame was put in the front to support the ridgeline. The rafters of the hut were then attached to the ridgepole. Palm fronds were then collected, split and lashed to this frame. The dome hut was disassembled and its thatch was added to the structure. Approximately 1200 fronds were used in total. For the ridgeline, thatch was lifted in place and rested on without lashing it down. Instead, pairs of sticks lashed together were lifted in place sitting over thatch preventing it from blowing away. These are known as “jockeys” as they resemble a rider sitting on a horse.
A wall of wattle and daub was built at the back of the structure. Wooden poles were planted into the ground and lawyer cane was woven between them. Soil was dug from around the hut forming drainage trenches while also supplying the mud used to daub the wall. No fibre was added to the daub, just straight mud. Pegs were stuck into the wall to form a convenient rack to hold the stone axe off the ground when not in use. Later, pegs were added to support the fire sticks too. A bed was made by hammering in wooden stakes and lashing timber to the frame. This was covered with palm fibre to act as bedding. Atherton oak nuts were then collected and eaten/stored in a pot. Latter, heavy rain fell testing the huts ability to shed rain. The hut stayed dry while the water flowed off the thatch and into the drainage trenches left over from digging the mud for the wall.
The A frame hut is a simple shelter that can be built quickly and simply. It’s basically a large roof built directly on the ground. The shape is strong and should resist strong winds. This hut is the biggest one I’ve built on this channel and could fit both the tiled roof hut and wattle and daub hut inside it with room left over along the sides. It requires no scaffolding or ladders to build. A person can walk right down the centre without ducking while the sides that are too low to stand in are used for storing firewood, tools and other things. A fire lit in the entrance will greatly reduce the number of mosquitoes in the hut though it will get smokey occasionally. To reduce smoke, a small stove could be built to burn the wood more efficiently. A chimney and fireplace could be built also, but would take more time.
The purpose of this project was to test a simplified blower design connected to a furnace. I purposely did this to show that people in most natural environments should be able to replicate this design without difficulty. This blower differed from the previous one in several ways to simplify the construction method.
Firstly, the impellor was simply a stick as a rotor with a 40 cm wide rectangle of bark tied into a split in its end with a bark fibre cordage. A stone with a pit carved into it acted as a socket for the lower half of the rotor to spin in. If spun in the dirt the rotor can drill down and the position of the impellor can reach ground level causing the blades to bump into rocks and dirt. Later, I plastered the stone socket into the ground with mud to hold it securely in position (not shown in the video, just be aware of this solution if the socket shifts around too much).
Secondly, the housing for the blower was made in situ of ordinary mud (dirt and water on site). It was a bit more than 40 cm in internal diameter. The walls of the housing were solid mud and the roof was made of sticks covered with mud. An opening more than half the length of the impellor was left in the roof to remove the impellor for maintenance and to admit air into the blower during operation. In use, the portion of this opening near the front of the blower was covered with a tile. If left opened the blower still worked but covering it improved performance by preventing air escaping near the front. In places where water is not available, a housing shaped pit covered with sticks and dirt might work instead.
Finally, a simple length of cordage was used to drive the rotation of the impellor. This cord was placed in a notch carved into the top of the impellor rotor. The cord was wrapped around the rotor about 2.5 times. During operation the cords were pulled outwards causing the rotation. When fully unwound, the momentum of the impellor then wrapped the cord back around in the other direction. Then the cords were pulled outwards again causing the impellor to spin in the other direction. Note that this is a centrifugal blower with a symmetrical housing, therefore it doesn’t matter whether the fan spins one way or the other (clockwise or anti clockwise), the blower will always suck air in to its open top and force it into the furnace.
This design is easy to make and use. It can be made with minimal materials by unskilled people. The impellor design is simple yet effective. A stick, some bark and lashing of some sort should be available in most areas. The housing being made from mud, is easily sourced also. For the drive mechanism, I chose this method because the first blower I built had too many parts. There was a frame made of wood and vine to hold the rotor in place which kept causing issues with the rotor seizing or jumping out of the socket. Also, the bow that was used to drive the rotor added unnecessary complexity. In the new design, the simple cord in the notch of the rotor did away with the frame and the bow of the old design and the associated difficulties.
Furnace experiments
The blower was used to power a furnace attached to the front of it. Note that with minimal materials, the blower could simply force air into a hole in the base of the furnace and work satisfactorily. But I wanted to test a different configuration so I used clay grate from a previous kiln I made. Fuel in the form of wood and charcoal was used in this furnace by being placed on top of the grate instead of under it. During operation, the blower forced air up through the grate into the burning fuel bed increasing the rate of heat production relative to the use of natural draft (convection) alone.
I made 3 pots and fired them with charcoal. The first pot was painted with iron bacteria (iron oxide being the active ingredient). When fired, the oxide melted slightly showing minimal glazing. The clay became quite hard, possibly stoneware. The second pot was painted with wood ash and placed on a three sided clay plinth to hold the pot in the position of highest temperature in the fuel bed. The pot softened and sagged apart catastrophically. But the ash glaze gave a dark green smooth finish (difficult to see in the video). Finally, a pot was place upside down on the grate and a cylindrical brick made of iron bacteria, charcoal powder and wood ash was put on top of this. The brick melted over the pot, covering it in a viscous blob of slag rather than a thin glaze. On inspection, the slag had 1mm sized spheres of metallic iron in it. Some of these were picked out and stored in a pot. The reason for experiments like these to gain knowledge that might be of practical use in future projects that have not yet been determined.
