How To Live On Nothing part 2

by Douglas P. Bell

No one is born knowing this stuff and there are beginners trying to get started all the time who need this stuff, so bear with me on this, you had to learn it at some point too. OK, the first thing I always get asked is have I done the stuff I write about and does it really work? The answer is yes.

I have done and I do do the things I talk about. I’m not a “Duncan”, long on BS and short on accuracy, who does his shooting, survival testing and reviewing with a typewriter, and knows nothing about or has never even seen, much less shot, the guns or other things he “reviews” or writes about, not by a Long shot.

I shut off my furnace for a month in an upper mid-west winter with almost no change in my lifestyle, just before I wrote the first part of this article so I know it will work! Well yes. I did keep the electricity and water on so I could keep using the lights and computer and didn’t need to use the well, but if you have a steam engine like Mike Brown is building and selling, you could live like that too after the rest of the city is SOL. I’m cooking dinner on the wood stove now.

What to burn

Now that we have that out of the way, first things first. I talked about a wood stove so let’s start there. For a wood burning stove you will need fire wood, or barring that, something else that will burn, like paper, bones, old furniture, tires, waste oil, coal, well the list is endless. Let’s just say after you get started taking care of your own heating needs that you will never look at trash the same way again. Then you need a way to reduce it from its current state to where you can use it.

For most things, like paper, coal, bones (pick up the garbage at the chicken joint, those greasy bones will burn hot and fast if you need to start a fire NOW!). This isn’t a big problem as far as getting them small enough to stuff in to the stove. For that couch that the people across the way threw out, it may be a problem. The obvious thing to think of is a saw, and we will get around to them as you will need them later, but here a nice 16oz ball peen hammer will work great. Not only will you get some much-needed exercise, but you can blow off some major steam as well. It’s fun!

If you have a big item, whack, cut, or smash it into parts about two-thirds to one-half of the maximum size you can stuff into your stove. This way you wont get stuck with a chunk of something that won’t quite fit in that last quarter inch and has already caught on fire. Once you have some things put in the stove, you are reducing the size of the inside of the stove, and need to reduce the size of the rest of the items you can put in, so if it’s already small you don’t have to worry. I like to keep a fire going pretty much all day and all night, every day, in the winter so I’ll give you some tips to get a fire going and keep it going.

To build a fire in a wood burning stove, first wad up enough paper to fill it, and them throw in some kindling, which is any completely dry wood under two to three inches in diameter, rotten wood, twigs, vines, brush, and the like as you can now stuff in and still leave enough room to put in several larger chunks of wood. Throw in a match, which you got free at the gas station, restaurant, etc. and adjust the damper so there is a good burn but no smoke leaking out of the stove and it isn’t burning full blast. Let the kindling catch on fire so it is going good, and then throw in whatever you’ve got to burn. Since most stoves have some way to feed from both the side and the top, put it in from the top if you can.

If you need a fire RIGHT NOW and don’t have time to wait, well then you can use an accelerator for your fire, of which gasoline and charcoal lighter fluid are the best known. However most everything will burn, alcohol (use rubbing, save the booze to drink by the roaring fire), aftershave, paint, motor oil, paint thinner, anti-freeze, transmission fluid, look around you. Some people may tell you that some of those items won’t burn, but believe me, get them hot enough and they will all do nicely. Look for anything that says “FLAMMABLE” on the label and that’s your emergency accelerator. Always have a flame of some kind to ignite the accelerator when adding it to the fire however. Do NOT allow fumes to build up or it will explode when ignited!

Once the fire is going nicely, turn the damper down to the minimum airflow setting that you can with out it smoking you out. This way the fire will burn much longer and will still put out a good amount of heat, rather than heating the stove red hot for a short time. If you want heat around the house, you can shovel up a metal bucket full of hot ashes to set on a couple of bricks as a “space heater”. A minnow bucket with the lid that has the holes in the top will work great for this as it greatly reduces the chance of spilling it or dumping the ashes all over.

Making the cut

Since we mentioned saws, and everyone thinks of them first, let’s start with the various types of saws and what they would be best at. The first saw is a ripping saw and used to “rip” with or along the grain of the wood. The next saw is called a cross cut and is used to cut across the grain. A buck saw is a large saw with large, even “H” shaped teeth used to cut larger pieces of wood. A bow saw is a saw that has a bowed or “C” shaped frame that attaches to each end of the blade. Other saws would include the Japanese style saws that cut on the backstroke instead of the forward stroke so you can get a finer cut because the blade is thinner. Folding camp saws may be of this type. For the amount of damage that it can inflict on the human body, few things that are legal to buy can match a chainsaw; so if you are using one you will need to be especially careful.

Chainsaws and buck saws are most useful for cutting down trees and cutting up other large pieces of wood and are not well suited to trimming small branches or cutting small pieces of fire wood. Bow saws are excellent for cutting up small trees or pieces of wood too small for the buck saw but too large for the folding saw. The way I generally do it is I cut up the trees with a chainsaw into lengths I want to deal with when dragging them out of the woods, and finish cutting the wood up at the house with the bow saw so as to not bother the neighbors. The folding camp saw is mostly used to cut up the smaller stuff and anything I’ve already brought in that is slightly too long to fit comfortably in the stove. One tip: when cutting up logs with the chainsaw, make a cut across the log at the distance you will want to cut the logs later. Let’s say you keep the logs no longer than six feet when cutting them up out in the woods so you don’t have to deal with lots of short pieces of wood, when carrying the wood out of the woods, and your stove can burn logs no longer than eighteen inches. When you get home you are stuck with cutting up the logs into lengths from sixteen to eighteen inches long at the longest when finished.

So what you want to do is when you are out in the woods, make three cuts from half to three quarters the way through the log sixteen to eighteen inches apart and then cut the log off at the fourth cut. The log will still be about six feet long and the cuts mark where y
ou need to finish cutting them with the bow saw when you get home and you won’t have to cut as much. If you are going to get most of your wood from a construction site, and there is always lots of good wood free for the taking (ALWAYS ASK FIRST), you are probably going to be running into a lot of nails. For this you will need a claw hammer. I like the Stanley-roofing hammer, but a good Sears (Craftsman) hammer – so if you break it you can get it replaced free – is also a good pick.

The nails won’t hurt as far as burning goes, but the nails are always getting caught, snagged, poking holes in things (your feet, your hands, your clothes), so they are a pain to deal with. Also if you burn wood with nails in it, you won’t want to dump the ash on the driveway or anywhere where you might step on them either. If you have a cache site fairly near by you might dump your ashes with the nails in it on your cache. The ashes will make anyone around think that you were just burning junk and the nails will provide metal content for the metal detectors. Since the nails have had any protective coatings burned off them will also rust quickly and leach into the soil so a metal detector might react like it ran into an iron mine.

If you want to reduce the couch or other furniture that the people across the way just threw out, and it will have a lot of wood in it, a ball peen hammer will be a better choice then the claw hammer. When beating on something and having the hammer bounce back and belt you, you will be glad you had that ball peen! What you want is any wood or other readily flammable material to stuff into your stove, but the cloth generally either won’t burn well or will smoke quite a bit, even if it does burn well, so get what you can and then throw the rest back out.

Wooden pallets are available at most department stores, furniture stores, newspapers, discount stores and the like, so ask around and haul any of them away you can. Some of these pallets are incredibly tough, so they can also be made into excellent workbenches, shelves, and many other useful items. In college when we wanted to have a fire for a party, we would get wooden pallets and then have “pallet smashing parties” a few days before the real party. We used 16 oz ball peen hammer to break them up and it was a lot of fun. Kind of dangerous with several of us swinging hammers and broken wood flying everywhere, but a lot of fun.

The next item you will need is a splitting maul. This is sort of a cross between an ax and a sledgehammer. The ax head provides the “bite”, and the hammer provides the weight to drive it on in. I’m sort of divided on the use of splitting mauls. First off, any chunk of wood that is just small enough to get stuck in the stove will burn longer than a piece of wood that is broken up into smaller pieces. If you want long lasting heat and are willing to take a lower temperature to get it, go with as large a log or piece of wood as will fit in the stove. However, if you want to get a good hot fire going as soon as possible and don’t mind adding wood more often, then split the logs into halves or quarters.

Another tip: if you have a piece of wood that just will not split, don’t waste your time on it trying to split it manually, get the chainsaw out and cut it up that way. As far as the log splitting machines go, if you borrow or rent one, sure as night follows day some part “that has never failed before” will bite the dust and you will be responsible for it. You’ve already got a chainsaw, so you might as well use it. The chainsaw can also earn you extra money by cutting up blow downs, or other storm damage, and you get to haul the wood away to burn.

Cooking

As long as we are talking about the wood stove, here are some other helpful tips. If your cast iron skillet, Dutch oven, or whatever is looking a bit rusty, encrusted with slag, or just too grungy to deal with, build a nice fire in the stove and drop the offending cast iron object in the fire. This will not hurt the cast iron at all and the fire will burn the cast iron clean. The encrusted slag and other grunge is probably nothing more than burnt grease, so the cast iron will come out looking nice and clean except for a few ashes. After burning the cast iron clean, let it cool slowly. I just leave it in the stove over night. You will need to re-season it, which means letting the cast iron soak up some grease, oil or fat again so it will not rust and forms a non-stick surface. Wash the cast iron clean and then heat it until it will melt the fat, oil or whatever, just to the point that it will melt without smoking. Coat the cast iron all over and let it heat for a while at a slightly lower temperature. Cook something with a high fat content the first few times and the cast iron will absorb more oil. Cast iron pots and pans will last literally generations if cared for. About the only way to hurt cast iron is to cook “blacked” food that requires an extremely high temperature.

Cooking on a wood-burning stove is no different then cooking on a regular stove. Generally the areas in the front over the fire, and you might have to experiment a few times to find the hot spots, are for fast heating and cooking, the back of the stove, where the term “back burner” came from, is cooler and you can warm or simmer on the rear of the stove. The rest is pretty much the same as with any stove top range as far as cooking is concerned, make sure nothing boils over, stir the pot so it doesn’t stick and so on.

To make emergency fire starters, take a tuna fish or small cat food sized can and cut a length of cardboard so it is just slightly shorter (less tall) then the can. Roll the cardboard into a tight roll and make the roll just small enough to fit in the cab. Pour paraffin that you melted in a double burner over the cardboard and let it soak into the cardboard and harden. If you want, you can add wicks to help get the fire starter going easier by taking string and dipping it in to the melted paraffin and after the string has hardened, inserting it into the cardboard coil after it is in the can, but before you pour the melted paraffin over the cardboard.

Feet

Now to keep you warm when you have to go out in the cold and wet. Your feet are where the rubber meets the road, so to keep your feet warm, get four bread wrappers (or other fairly strong plastic bags that will cover your feet with out a large amount of bulk left over), two for each foot, and a roll of duct tape. You should keep a roll of duct tape, the handyman’s secret weapon, around at all times anyway, as it is ideal as a patch on a hole torn in your clothes, and repairing just about everything. Put one bread wrapper over your foot, colored or right side out, the ink may contain lead so you don’t want it next to your skin, and fold the excess wrapper around your toes, then lay a strip of duct tape down that is long enough to go all the way around your foot under your toes.

Put the duct tape under your toes and stand up on it while folding the duct tape over and around your toes. While standing you will keep putting strips of duct tape over, around or under your toes until the area from the ball of your foot and the entire toe area is covered with duct tape with no plastic wrapper showing. This is your inner foot liner. You will put the inner foot liner on and then put your socks on over it. Next you will put the second bread wrapper over the sock. This keeps your foot from getting wet, well actually it is sort of a wet suit as you will sweat, but your body will keep the water warm so it doesn’t matter, while the sock will provide insulation and the outer wrapper will keep the sock from getting wet. You can stand in freezing water with out discomfort now.

Paper or plastic will also keep you warm in harsh weather as well. Get garbage bags and either put them over or under your clothes, depending on if you need to stay dry or warm. A good way to do it is to put o
n a pair of pants, put a garbage bag over each leg and then put on a second pair of pants over them, basically like you did for the foot liners. Punch a hole for your head and arms and put a garbage bag over your body and put a shirt on. Put a second one over your clothes for a raincoat. The same with paper; just wrap yourself in newspapers under your clothes to say toasty warm.

Housing

Now on to housing: In most areas there is some sort of low rent housing, either called that for low income people, or rent controlled apartments, or something. If you cannot or do not want to get involved with that, and I recommend you keep out of any govt. program where they get to come inspect your home whenever and however they want, then you have other choices which we will discuss here.

Travel trailers

If you live in an area where you can buy and park a travel trailer in a trailer park or someone’s back yard, see if you can find a good used one and a place to park it. Check this out first however! Many areas are getting to the point where the mobile home parks will not take travel trailers, or older mobile homes, say ten years old or older and trailers in back yards are NOT welcome.

Other areas require you to own a certain amount of land to park a trailer on it. The up side of this is you can do pretty much everything to a trailer as you can with a house if the parks and local regulations will let you. If the rents are high (and where are they not?) get an apartment and several roommates to move in with you to share the costs. Look for sleeping rooms in private houses, or houses that are broken up into rooms, flop houses, old hotels, and the like for cheap rents.

A while back one of the TV “newszines” did a report on the well-to-do homeless, mostly women who were dumped for a younger version, who lived out of their cars. They still went to all the places they were known at, the country club or where ever and still used them for showers, to meet people, or whatever, like they always did. As long as they looked the part, no one noticed anything. For make-up they would hit the department stores for “make-overs” or samples. The point is; as long as they looked clean and well dressed, no one bothered them.

Going mobile

Do you like to stay mobile? Get an old bus of what ever size you want, from a VW mini-bus to a full size school bus, and outfit it to live in. I know of a guy who lives year round in a school bus he converted into a home, and another who outfitted his school bus into a traveling custom leather shop/home so he can travel to various shows, events or where the business is and be set up and ready to make you a coat, hat, slippers or whatever it is you want by the next day. These traveling homes can even be outfitted with propane conversion kits so they can run on propane (or methane) for both the engine and to heat the thing.

The same thing is true of a pickup truck with a topper, either bought or home made. You can live in them and except for license plates, gas, propane to heat them if you use a propane heater, and insurance, cost little outside of maintenance. I know a guy and his wife who lived full time in a pickup with topper for about five years, so it can be done.

Living in a storage shed

Still too much? Every so often I read about some person who rented a storage shed and lived in it. Somewhere around there will be lighting, electrical sockets, or some other way to tap into the electric lines and maybe even into the phone lines as well. You don’t want to jack up the electric bills or make long distance phone calls of course, but if careful you can probably get away with it for quite awhile.

If caught, see if you can get the papers interested in your story and you may be able to pick up some change from that. If you are just pulling this as a stunt or joke and get caught trying to make a media event out of it, well all I can say is the jails are full but they can always make room for one more.

Wild man

The other thing I read about every so often is the “wild man” of where ever who lives in a hut, tent, or even trees (in Central Park. NYC no less!) and has gotten away with it for months or years. Of course this is usually dangerous. Not only are you at the mercy of the elements, but also any dopers, nut cases and other scum who feel it is their mission in life to make your life miserable, as well as the cops and park rangers who will be after you. It can he done, because it has been done, but you need to be careful not to get caught at it in most areas.

Stay clean

To stay clean, either find a friend who will allow you to use their shower/bath, or check out the local recreational centers in town. If they have a swimming pool, see if you can get at the showers without paying. Also check out the big apartment buildings, often they will have a swimming pool, sauna, and other things open to the people who live there and you can walk in and use the showers (best to do this late night when there are few people around) with no one knowing if you live there or not.

Check the hotels and motels that have pools for showers. If worse comes to worse, break down and buy a membership at the local “Y” or health club so you can use the showers whenever you want, without being worried out being harassed.

As was mentioned when talking about the storage sheds or buildings, people sometimes move into them to live. First you want to case out the joint, see if there are any electrical outlets on light poles, set in the concrete or whatever as that will make running an extension cord in much easier, and get a storage unit close to them.

If there are no obvious outlets, see if you can find a light and tap into it for your electricity, but be careful to either find the main switch and shut it off or if you have to, unscrew the light bulb and put an outlet adapter in so the bulb can be screwed back in, but there are now outlets available to plug into. Run any extension cords behind, over or around any poles, buildings, or other cover, it would be pretty obvious something is going on if there is a cord hanging from an outlet to a compartment.

Don’t run up a huge electric bill here. If their electric bill doubled over night they will start looking the place over and find you, so use low power, low watt equipment. The 50-watt bulb and hot plate might be overlooked; the refrigerator, washer/drier, microwave and electric blanket might not.

Free phone

As to the phone, you will need a few tools and other items. Get a free-bee throw-away phone, or hit the local thrifts for a cheap phone, as well as a couple of alligator clips. Cut the wall-jack off the cord, split the wires and solder the ends to the clips. You now have your very own linesman’s phone. Now taking your 7/8″ wrench, find the junction box and open it. Clip on to which ever set of lines look good and make your calls. Don’t make any long distance calls however, because if there are a lot of complaints from one area, the phone company might decide they will want to look the place over closely and catch you at it.

Since I can only cover so much in each article, I decided to break this up and will cover several things here that I didn’t have room for the first time around. Some of this may be old hat to a lot of you. After all, the things my Grandmother taught my Mother, who taught me, that I’ve been doing for years is no great secret, but I’m always picking up a newsletter, magazine or what have you, and they are listing a “tip” that someone just discovered and wrote to them about that they “discovered”.

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