Dear Black Bag Confidential Reader,
Today’s roundup focuses on DIY projects and learning new survival skills. These articles provide a great opportunity to roll up your sleeves and get the whole family involved in prepping.
Let’s get started.
1. Learn One Survival Skill a Day for Five Days
This is a fantastic post from our friends over at Survival Sullivan. It covers five critical survival skills everyone needs to know and gives step-by-step directions — complete with videos and links to additional resources.
Click on the article above to learn how to build a fire, construct a “hobo stove” for outdoor cooking, make homemade oil lamps, erect an emergency shelter and forage for wild edibles.
When you complete this five-day challenge, you will be much more capable of handling any emergency. But like all new skills, it takes practice to master them. Once you’ve got a handle on these survival techniques, take your family camping and put your newfound knowledge to the test.
2. How to Build a Faraday Cage
With all the recent talk about a potential EMP strike and the capacity for widespread disruption, keeping critical electronics in a Faraday cage is not a bad idea.
Check out this piece from Reality Survival, which includes a complete list of the supplies you’ll need, comprehensive instructions to construct a nested Faraday cage and 10 items you should consider storing inside.
3. A Simple and Cheap Solar Shower
One modern luxury many people take for granted is hot showers. After a long day, nothing relaxes and rejuvenates you quite like a long, steamy soak. But when the SHTF, a lot of the creature comforts we’ve become used to will fly out the window.
Take a look at this five-minute video posted by Tiny House Listings that shows you how to create a simple 5-gallon solar shower on the cheap. Even if you never need to use it in a survival situation, you can always put this handy invention to work in other ways.
Take it camping or put it up in your yard so your kids can clean up before coming inside. You can even use it to give your pets a hassle-free bath outside. The possibilities are endless.
Pemmican is “a concentrated mixture of fat and protein used as a nutritious food” — often in survival scenarios — originally produced by the indigenous peoples of North America. It may not look appetizing, but it will keep you alive. And pemmican can last for upward of several years (sometimes decades) without going bad.
This article from Skilled Survival gives detailed directions on how to make and store your own supply of this survival superfood. There are also links to additional resources, including a step-by-step video guide.
Take a look, give it a try and see if you can’t develop a delicious recipe of your own. This is a great project to undertake as a family — especially if you want to get your kids into the prepping mindset.
5. How to Make Your Own Distiller at Home
In the Weekly Drop, I’ve fielded a few questions about desalinating water, which you can only do by distillation. Unfortunately, the distillation process is very slow — one survival distillation system I’ve looked at produces only about one quart of drinkable water each hour.
If you’re looking for a challenge and willing to put in the time, you can learn how to make your own distiller at home. This post from Ask a Prepper gives you all the information you’ll need to filter and desalinate water with your very own homemade device.
Remember — you should still have at least a week’s worth of water storage on hand as well as a survival water filter. But since water is one of the most crucial elements of survival, it doesn’t hurt to have multiple ways of producing clean, drinkable water.
Stay safe,
Jason Hanson
