10m

I built a thatched workshop as an area to do future projects in out of the rain and weather. The structure was a 4 x 4 m square covered with a gabled thatched roof where the lowest point was 2 m above the ground and the highest point was 4 m. This is the largest hut I've built to date taking 5 weeks to build. The structure sheds rain quite well and being open and without walls allows smoke to exit... Read more

10m

I made bricks using an old brickmold made in a previous video. The bricks were made from red clay from an old tree throw that became enlarged by when wild pigs used it as a wallow. This red clay was carried to a pit near the work site and tread on till it was the right consistency. The bricks were then allowed to dry. While this happened, I obtained good quality clay from the creek and made a new ... Read more

10m

I built a hut from fired clay bricks and mortared them together with a cement made from wood ash left over from the firing process. When I developed wood ash cement years ago in a previous video, it was in response to the need of a cement made from material other than lime stone, which is absent in my location. Wood ash was suitable because it contains calcium oxide, the active cementitious materi... Read more

10m

In the 6 years since I developed the first forge blower (https://youtu.be/VVV4xeWBIxE) I had made very few improvements to it's design. So I decided to do some research and development to see if I could improve it's efficiency. From my research, increasing the number of fan blades from 4 to 8 yielded an increase of 19% volume of airflow. So I set about building a better fan. Instead of splitting t... Read more

10m

I smelted iron from iron bacteria and then cast the iron in a mold to form a rudimentary knife, making this the first iron tool I've produced yet. The ore was a species of bacteria that lives by oxidizing iron dissolved in ground water. It appears as an orange/yellow cloudy precipitate in creeks and ponds. It's a very common natural occurrence and can be found on all continents. I collected the di... Read more

10m

I built a trebuchet, a type of catapult that uses a counter weight to store gravitational potential energy which is then used to fire a projectile via a sling. I first built the frame which was made of two tripods set close together. They were of wood and lashed together with cane. Then I made a basket from cane to hold the large rocks that would act as the counterweight. For the sling I used bark... Read more

10m

I made iron from ordinary sand in the creek. Sand contains a minor proportion of iron in the form of magnetite (and some hematite), the rest of the sand being other non iron minerals such as silica. In this form it is not concentrated enough to use as an ore to produce iron metal. However, it is possible to concentrate the magnetite grains from the silica sand using gravity separation, as magneti... Read more

10m

I made 3 furnaces from bricks using different configurations to test their effectiveness. The benefit of using bricks to make a furnace is that it's quicker, easier, re-useable and portable relative to a furnace constructed in-situ from clay. This is because the old furnaces crack and need repairs where as the brick ones can be assembled and re-assembled with any broken bricks being swapped out as... Read more

10m

Naturally occurring clay usually has impurities such as rocks and sand in it. There's a way to remove these by mixing the clay in suspension and draining that water off leaving the impurities behind. I started by digging a pit to receive the clay. Then dug clay from the creek bed and put it next to the pit in a pile. Water was mixed into the pile and it was allowed to sit for a while. The water/cl... Read more

10m

I made a small pottery wheel to form pots on. A pottery wheel is a small table on which pottery is formed that is able to be rotated about an axis to form more symmetrical pots. In this case it is a slow pottery wheel meaning that it is turned by hand rather than being turned at high speed by foot power or other means. A wooden frame was made to hold the axle for the wheel and a cane strip was use... Read more