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Comment by sheeeep86 | Hacker News Reader

Thank you for this, I always knew that if I had to restart civilization from scratch I would have to go without anything digital because I understand the way thing work abstractly, but I could never make it happen. At least now I can think back on this video and wonder what magical tricks he did during those moments when the scene fast forwarded and magically progress was made.

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Probably easier to just scavenge stuff, if you're fortunate enough to survive the initial fallout/disruption from say a nuclear war there's going to be a lot of stuff and not so many people.

David Gingery's book "Build your own metalworking shop from scrap" is a very fun read though

There will be lots of stuff, but what are the odds that exactly the thing you need will be available and in working condition? If you can make something entirely from scratch, you can make any subset of it from scratch. More generally, developing the means to do something yourself gives you a much deeper understanding than simply utilizing someone else's solution.

Sure I’m just saying smelting ore would probably not be necessary as there would be lots of iron aluminum etc laying around for casting for example

This is "Primitive Technology". It sounds like you're looking for a "Post-Apocalypse Technology" series. I would watch that as well.

In the description of the video on youtube he often explains how long the full project took, and clarifying what took longest, it's always much longer than I expect (in the trebuchet video I think the problem was that collecting bark to make the rope took a very long time)

I think those deleted scenes are hours upon hours of tedious labor.

Exactly - he'll show you the step, and then either ff the waiting, or ff the repeating the step over and over and over again.

His blog will usually tell you how long he actually worked on things. Some of them are surprisingly fast. But he is also probably not posting all of his failures.

sure, notice how he says things like "3 double handfuls of charcoal, 3 single handfuls of iron-bearing sand", or "dry fire for one hour before trying to smelt", etc. Any time he mentions a number or a ratio, I guarantee it's hard-won knowledge that took ages to come up with (even if it was one of his ancestors that did it, and he just learned it from a book).

And/or a combination of "it worked with 3 handful; I'll note it down and not mess with it"

Like what? He’s pretty assiduous about showing everything on camera or explaining it in the cc. Do you have cc turned on?

He shows all the processes in great detail, but he definitely cuts out the extremely long hours of repetitive hard work he puts in that would be boring for the viewer to watch. For instance, when he makes bricks, he'll show one trip to the creek for the water, all the mixing, shaping and drying, etc. for one batch, then he fast forwards through the dozen more batches he does.

Watch the video with subtitles on - he explains everything he's doing and why he's doing it.

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