Monday, February 18, 2013

How to make concrete or mortar that can harden underwater, from scratch.


 

Have you ever wondered how people made concrete before there were bags of ready to mix cement? Well good news, you're about to learn.

 

Concrete is one of the strongest, and most versatile building materials that mankind (or womankind, I irritate them, but I don't discriminate against them) has at its disposal. It's instant rock. "Just add water". Kind of like the Wal-Mart brand corn tortilla mix, only it doesn't smell funny. The problem with concrete is the price. The high price tag stems mainly from the fact that industrial concrete plants require massive amounts of energy. This is no less true of homemade concrete however, due to the smaller scale, it's more manageable. That said, you really need one heck of a bonfire for this one.

 

The main ingredients of cement are quicklime (which is made from limestone), sand, and aggregate, which is normally gravel. To make "hydraulic cement" (cement that can set underwater), you'll need terra-cotta in place of sand.

 

Making Quicklime. Limestone, seashells, bone, and chalk are all made of calcium carbonate. Any of these materials can be used to make quicklime, although limestone is more readily available in large quantities. Limestone occurs all over the world.  You may well have limestone on your property and not even know it. After all, it makes up about 10% of the sedimentary rock this side of the Earth's crust. It is also available at most lawn and garden/home improvement stores relatively cheap for use in landscaping. But with limestone, remember that the whiter the stone the more pure it is. Purity is especially important if you plan on making hydraulic cement. If you only need a small quantity of hydraulic cement, I suggest using chalk for that reason.

To make quicklime, you’re going to need to build a really hot fire. You're going to have to get your material glowing white-hot for this to work.  This is easier in a kiln, but can be done with a bonfire. Take your limestone, seashells, or chalk and place them in the fire. Be sure to keep the fire burning hot around them, while also raking coals around them to get them as hot as you possibly can. If you're using powdered chalk or small pieces of limestone, you may want to place a steel plate in the fire to place your limestone on.  The calcium carbonate (CaCo3 ) will go through a chemical reaction in which carbon dioxide (CO2) will be cooked off, leaving calcium oxide (Ca0), a.k.a. quicklime. Once your quicklime has cooled, use a brush to remove any impurities it may have picked up in the fire. It's important to remember that although you can store quicklime in an airtight moisture-free container, quicklime is highly caustic (so use gloves when handling it) and unstable. (Relax, it's not gonna blow up. I'm not going to teach you how to make anything that blows up for three reasons. One: I'd rather teach you something useful. Two: my family made me promise not to.  In the words of my mother, "Please, don't put some poor parent through what I had to go through when you were growing up". Three: It’s just too easy. So, if you are one of the small contingent of people who know what I do for a living, and are waiting around for me to teach you how to make a bomb….You're a moron, grow up). By unstable, I mean is difficult store to for long periods of time without it slaking.

When water is added to quicklime, it becomes slaked lime. This creates an exothermic (that's fancy talk for it gets hot) chemical reaction in which the water is expelled leaving behind a solid rock. (The hissing and bubbling are not a part of the chemical reaction. That's actually black magic, so draw a cross on your forehead to keep the devil from climbing in through your butt and taking over your body.) This is where the magic happens. By adding aggregate and/or sand, you can create a concrete wall mortar to suit any application. Again, use gloves.  This stuff can take your skin off.

I'm going to give you recipes for several basic mixes; however it is important to remember that different mixes work better in some areas and climates than others. To find out which mix work best in your area, you can look it up on the Internet. (Unless you get extremely lucky, this won't work). You can do some small-scale experiments of your own. The best way I have found to do this is to ask an old-timer. I'm serious.  They have done all this stuff before. In most cultures, the elderly are held in a place of honor. One of the many downfalls of our culture is that we toss them away in "homes" and stop listening to them. They’re old.  They are not children, nor are they stupid…unless they were stupid before they were old. Anyone who is interested in homesteading, survival, self-sufficiency, gardening, building or hell, anything else for that matter, can obtain a wealth of all but forgotten knowledge for the price of a cup of coffee.  Oh wait, most places give seniors free coffee!  Knowledge is, without a doubt, the single greatest resource humankind has access to. To ignore those who have almost a century of that knowledge is completely, and utterly asinine. Young people, let's not forget that they were at one time farmers, construction workers, sailors, soldiers, housewives, welders, cooks and doctors. They were brilliant inventors, brainless jocks, dirty little schoolgirls, and they were that weird guy that everybody likes and nobody understands. They were the loved, the hated, the strong, the weak, the courageous, the cowards.  They were us.

Before we get into actual recipes, it's important that we first discussed the mason's paradox. It is thus, "The more water you add to the mix, the easier it is to work. The less water you add to the mix, the stronger the final product will be." You have to add enough water to get the entire mix at least damp. But beyond that, the choice of how much water to add is up to you.

Basic Cement Mix

1 part quicklime

3 parts sand

3 parts aggregate

Slake the quicklime the first, then add your sand and aggregate.

Basic Mortar Mix

1 part quicklime

3 parts sand

Slake the quicklime first, then add the sand.

Hydraulic cement, or mortar, is a cemented wall mortar that will harden underwater. It's not quite as strong as normal cement or mortar, but when you need hydraulic cement not much else will do. This is good for preparing swimming pools, building ponds, cisterns, or dams. It is important to note that your quicklime must be incredibly pure for this to work. Also, instead of using sand, we will be using crushed terra-cotta. If you don't have enough terra-cotta or really like your flowerpots, you can use fired clay instead. Either way, it must be crushed into a powder.

Hydraulic Cement Mix

1 park quicklime

3 parts crushed terra-cotta

3 parts aggregate

Slake your quicklime, then add your crushed terra-cotta and aggregate

Hydraulic Mortar Mix

1 part quicklime

3 parts crushed terra-cotta

Slake your quicklime, then add your crushed terra-cotta.

 

I'm going to build a concrete Darth Vader statue. But you can build a castle, or dam, or something useful like a patio. Whatever you build, please tell me about it. As always, I hope this tutorial has taught you something and sparked your imagination. I hope you put to use.

Friday, February 15, 2013

Wild Breads, Part Two - How to make great tasting and nutritious breads from the edible plants in your backyard.

A.k.a.: Wild Breads Two, the Quest for More Money…… Wait … What… Oh yeah, I’m not getting paid for this.  Forgot that for a second.  Well in that case, I think I’ll go get a drink, then see if there is any ice cream. I mean, what the heck, I’m not on the clock.

Remember, it is up to you to properly identify the plant in question. I have chosen what I think are easy plants that most everyone should know.  I cannot and will not identify it for you in this blog.  I will help you along on this, but the job of being sure you’ve got the right plant rest squarely on your shoulders. (There wasn't any ice cream.  There's never any ice cream. It was supposed to be under the bag of frozen rats. But my significant other must've eaten it.  I can't, however, complain because, after all, that's my bag of frozen rats in our freezer.  And she puts up with that.  If I was a normal person and had to put up with me, I think I'd shoot me.)

Dandelion flour

If you don’t know what a dandelion looks like, either A: look it up; or B: give up, go back inside “where it’s safe” and  tweet about how much you love the outdoors and how you think we should be as in touch with nature as you are.

The entire dandelion plant is edible and quite nutritious.  Although the leaves can be bitter, they are a good addition to a salad.  But I wouldn’t try a salad of just dandelion leaves, although it would be hard to be worse than iceberg lettuce.  I mean, hey, at least it would have some taste.  The flowers are actually semi –sweet, and that’s what we will be using here. 

When you pick your flowers, be sure to leave as much of the stem behind as possible.  You will fail at this. But don't worry.  After they've been dried, you can pick out the now rock-hard pieces of stem.  There is a green cup at the base of the flower that the petals grow from.  Don’t worry about taking it with the flowers.  I don’t.

Spread the flowers out on a baking sheet and dry them in the oven.  This is the hardest part for me because every fiber in my being wants to batter and fry the flowers.  If you haven’t tried it, you can’t know. If you have tried it, you know how I feel.  Remember, dried flowers equal flour.  Not quite dry flowers equal a pasty mess.

Now grind the flowers into flour.  (Love saying that, and that's coming from a guy who managed to use "peedrinking numbskull" in the literal sense in a previous post.)  You can use a mortar and pestle, grinder, heck you can use hammers and rocks to grind the flowers.  But again, choose your rock well and go easy there, Grog.  It can make your flour gritty.  (Whoa. Two "wild breads one" references in one paragraph.  Okay, no more.)

Uh……..TA DAAAAAAA! I have, to at this point, admit that I haven’t tried dandelion flower , which by going ahead and posting this, I’m breaking a rule of mine.  However, having eaten many a dandelion and made, at this point, quite a bit of flour, I’m confident it will be good.  I have about half as much flour as I need to make a loaf of bread.  I was planning to pick more flowers and grind them, but instead I blew my back out rebuilding a magnetron.  Why is it that old crappy small appliances lasted for decades, yet new crappy small appliances seemed only last a few months?  I don't know, maybe it's because they want to buy a new one. I say, FIGHT THE POWERS THAT BE! Fix your broken stuff!  Let's send a message to these manufacturers of foreign-made, domestically assembled, overpriced, under-engineered kitchen gadgets!  Don't fall into their trap!  Save your hard-earned money, have a little fun, and learn something in the process. After all, it's already broken.  What have you got to lose?  (Yes, that was coffee I got to drink. Why do you ask?)  I plan to finish the flour and make bread as soon as I can.

Clover flour

Now this one I have done many times. Clover flour has a sweet, but subtle vanilla taste.  In my opinion, it tastes better than the "imitation, or more accurately abomination" vanilla and more like the real thing.  But wait, that's not even the best part.  The best part is that it's not made from paper mill waste runoff.  Seriously, that's what "imitation vanilla" is made from.

Again, the whole clover is edible raw, but we will be harvesting just the flowers, because we like flowers.  They make us feel pretty inside.

 

Here goes the recipe, quick and dirty like a waitress at… You know what?  That's just too easy, and there might be kids listening. So I'll just leave that one alone.  Pick the flowers.  Dry the flowers.  Grind the flowers into flour.

Sounds just like the first recipe, doesn’t it?  That’s because it is.  Gonna let you in on a little secret.  Anything that is edible, which you can dry and grind into a powder, can be used as flour.  From wheat grains, to clovers, to locust (Yes, you read right.  People make locust flour.  Not saying I wouldn't try it.  It's just that I really don't want to.), anything can be made into flour.  Heck, if you could dry it enough, I’ll bet you could make flour from leftover bacon.  Bacon bread.   There are no words, no words in the English language, to describe that level of awesome.

With that in mind, here are some wild edible plants to try.

Plantain: the whole plant is edible, but for taste stick to the young leaves.

 Lambsquarters: use the leaves or the seeds.

Daisies: I’d stick with the flowers.

Nettles:  use the young leaves, but watch out for the stinging mature leaves, which you can eat if you get the spikey thingies off.

And so ends "Wild Breads, Part Two," a.k.a. Revenge of the Wild Breads, a.k.a. Wild Breads Two: the Quest for More Money. I hope this has helped teach you the basic idea of making breads from edible wild plants. That said, in the fall I may, perhaps, do a third installment "Wild Breads, Part Three" a.k.a. the Wild Breads Strike Back. Until then, I urge you to try making your own wild bread.  After all, even if you decide you don't like the bread you made, at least you learned something.  And that is a powerful thing.

Tuesday, February 5, 2013

How to make and mold bio-plastic


Let’s face it.  Ninety-nine percent of everything is made of plastic these days.   I’ve seen multi-million dollar companies come grinding to a halt over a piece of craptastic plastic no bigger than my finger.   Plastic parts are not always synonymous with quality.  And complaining about it ain’t gonna change a thing.  I know.  I’ve tried.  (I’m good at complaining.  After all, I’m a guy.)

To make a long story short, plastic parts break.  Don’t believe me?  Look around your house.  I’d be willing to bet you can find something that is: a) plastic; and b) broken.  If not, I can only conjure two possibilities for this.  You’re either in a prison made before the 1950s and everything around you is steel and concrete, or you’re living in a primitive brush hut somewhere.  Either way, how are you reading this?

So, you have this broken plastic part.  Now you have three options.  You can throw the entire thing away and buy another.  You can search stores and the internet searching for a replacement part.  Or, if you want to save time and money, you can make a replacement part.

 

Bio-plastic from potatoes

You can use potato starch, or corn starch if you’d rather eat your potatoes (I know I would). If you go with corn starch, just skip the blending and straining.

 Take some potatoes.  Wash them.  Peel them.  Then cut them up in cubes the size of a …. well, I don’t guess it matters, so cut them however you feel like.

Throw them in a blender with about a cup of water.  Now, blend the crap out of them, about two minutes on the highest setting should do.  I used a Jim Croce song for my timer.  Yeah, I’m that out of touch with pop culture.

Strain off the cloudy water with a coffee filter, tea strainer, or just dump the mix onto a pair of pantyhose and let it drain. (That’s why I own pantyhose.  They are awesome for projects like this.  The fact that they would actually fit me is purely coincidence, I swear.)

Now, to make your plastic.  Pour about four ounces of cold water into a pot.  Add one tablespoon of the potato that you blended, two teaspoons of white vinegar and two teaspoons of glycerin. This is the time to add food coloring, if you want to color your plastic.

Put the pot on the stove and turn it to a low heat.  Start stirring it with a spatula, raking what mixture gets onto the sides back down into the pot.  Let the mix thicken a bit, then turn the heat up to medium.  Add a half teaspoon of baking soda and keep stirring.  Let the mix boil softly for about 10 minutes until the mix is, for lack of better word, goo.

Pour the goo into the mold of your choice (be sure to oil your mold first or you will never get it out….. ever), or spread it out on wax paper to make a sheet of plastic.  I made a mold of a green toy army man out of play dough.  (Soon as I get a camera, you’ll get to see it.  Sadly though, that’s one of the few things I don’t know how to make.)  Let your mold or sheet dry in the sun for a day or bake it in the oven at 150 degrees for two hours to dry it.

 

Making casein plastic from milk

Believe it or not, this technique for making plastic was developed by Leonardo Da Vinci. (Between the painting, inventing, and fixing all of Ezio’s broken crap, I wonder when he had tome to sleep.)

Heat up a cup of milk until it’s hot, but NOT boiling.  (I nuked mine in the microwave for a minute and a half.)

 Take it off the heat, or out of the microwave.  Stir in four teaspoons of white vinegar and keep stirring for a minute.

Now, pour the milk through a strainer.  Be not alarmed, grasshopper.  The lumpy blobs are not an accident.  It’s what we want.  (I’m torn.  The helpful part of me wants to tell you to do this step over the sink.  The sensitive part of me thinks that is so obvious that it would imply that I think you are a moron, thus insulting you.  The logical part of me feels that by not telling you to do it over a sink, those too stupid to do it over a sink will be unlikely to find a mate with curdled vinegary milk all over their floor, thus bettering the species thru natural selection.  The rest of me wants ice cream…. Cookie dough ice cream.)

Rinse off the blobs and mold them together with your hands.  This is the time to color them, if you so desire.  Mold it into the desired shape and let dry.

Making molds

If the item being molded being mostly two- dimensional, you can simply press the item into Play Dough, if you can stop playing with it long enough, then gently removing it.

Three- dimensional molds get more complex.  The best mold I have found thus far is made from caulk.  Take a box just larger than the item you want to mold, or make one out of a cereal box and tape.  Fill the box with silicone caulk. Take the item you wish to mold and liberally spray it with cooking spray, shaking it to remove the excess.  Suspend the item in the caulk and allow several days to dry.  Once the caulk is dry, cut the box in half with a sharp knife to remove the item. Then tape the box back together and fill with your chosen plastic mix.

 

I think it’s important to realize that although my main focus in this has been to replace broken plastic parts, you can make anything you want - forks, spoons, knives, sculptures, or even pink flamingos for your yard.  The only thing that limits you is your imagination.  Believe it or not, molding plastics is kind of fun.  Give it a try, and let me know what you create.