apocalypse

No power tools or forges: Here’s how to make a survival knife using just the stuff in your garage

The looming threat of a nuclear attack launched by North Korea has brought about a resurgence in Cold War era anxieties about survival in a post-infrastructure America. If such an attack were to take place, it may not mean the end of the world, per say, but it could certainly mean the end of yours, and in the days, weeks, or months that followed a nuclear or EMP strike, there’s a chance help wouldn’t be on its way.

When you mention such an apocalyptic scenario to many people, the first thing they want to regale you with is a list of their firearms, ammunition stores, and food and water supply. That stuff all matters, and while I too maintain a laundry list of those sorts of things, many tend to forget about what I consider to be among the most important survival tools a man or woman could ever have: a good quality knife.

As I’ve written about before, knives serve a number of purposes in a survival setting. Whether you’re building a fire, preparing a meal, or fighting for your life, having a knife in your hand could mean the difference between today being an easy day, and today being your last one. Even after years of training in knife fighting techniques, armed, and disarmed defenses – I’m arguably more afraid of a skilled combatant with a knife in his hand than I am of the same man armed with a pistol in close quarters. If I can get a grip on that pistol, I’ll probably get out of a fight alive. Try the same thing with a knife, and I may lose a few fingers before he leaves me in a pile on the ground.

The most valuable part of carrying a knife, however, is that you don’t need to have trained to use one outside of the kitchen to be effective. Knives are simple, they don’t jam, they require very little maintenance, and as long as you remember which end is pointy, you’re dangerous when carrying one. For those of you who live in states that are not particularly firearm friendly, or if you’d just prefer to keep your home boom-stick free, knives offer you a legal, inexpensive and relatively safe means of defense to keep inside your home or go bag.

But what if the worst were to happen… and you find yourself without your trusty knife? Is it possible to make a passable survival knife without a forge, power tools, or even electricity?

That’s exactly what I wanted to find out.

Last year, I posted a series of videos depicting all the ways in which I wouldn’t be able to make my own knife. These guys made some incredible pieces of cutlery, but each of the projects were just too far outside my skill set, my budget, and the equipment I have available to me. If making a survival knife is something that’s possible for the layman, it means it’s got to be cheap, simple, and effective using only the sort of things you could easily scrounge up after a disaster.

With that in mind, I swore off of using the internet for guidance and headed into my garage to find whatever I could and see if I could make a passable knife out of it.

Here’s what I came up with:

-One pair of work gloves
-A hack saw with two blades
-One C-clamp
-One hand clamp
-A heavy duty file
-A sharpie

For optimal results, you’ll also need a good knife sharpener of whatever sort you prefer, but in a pinch, you could get away with just the file.
As for the knife itself, I found an old piece of scrap steel that’s been in my basement since I moved in – it was a lucky break, but it likely wouldn’t be too difficult for you to find a decent piece of scrap steel after the world ends either. Mine was about three feet long, one and a half inches wide, and maybe a bit more than 1/16 of an inch thick.

Step One: Cut the steel to the appropriate length

Raw steel next to a Smith and Wesson Search and Rescue knife for scale

Now, you could almost certainly use a ruler or measuring tape to determine the exact length you’d prefer to get started – but in keeping with my overall approach to this project (using as little as possible) and the general demeanor I’ve developed as a new father (“I haven’t slept in six weeks and I don’t care how long it is.”) I opted to just eyeball it, draw a line with my sharpie and go after this poor piece of steel with my hacksaw. The end result is shown above.

Step Two: Draw the basic shape of the knife onto the steel with your sharpie

Using the corner of one side of the steel as your knife tip, draw the basic shape of your knife blade onto the steel. You’ll be using this as your template as you cut the remaining steel away using your hacksaw. Because I did this outside in 20-degree weather, my trusty iPhone shut itself down before I could take a picture of my artwork.

Step Three: Use the hacksaw to cut along your drawn line

Clamp your steel to a secure surface – I used a good sturdy wood table, but if you happen to have a vice it could make this process much easier. Once the knife is secure, put on your work gloves and eye protection and set about sawing along the line you drew on the steel. Depending on the quality of steel and the state of your hacksaw, this step could be both times consuming and count as your cardio for the day. When you’re finished, the steel should resemble a knife in profile, despite lacking an actual edge.

I also chose to make the handle portion of the knife more narrow than the blade itself for the sake of an improved grip. I had to go back inside for my where my weak-willed iPhone was resting by the fire to snap this picture, but as you can see, I also cut notches on the top and bottom of the handle portion in order to make it easier to secure my paracord handle later on.

Step Four: Use the file to create an edge

With the basic shape of the knife established, now it’s time to get your second cardio session in for the day. Clamp the knife down at the end of your table or secure it in your vice and set about filing the steel into an edge. You’ll have to re-position the knife a number of times as you work to ensure you’re achieving a fairly even grind throughout the length of the blade, then flip it over and repeat the process on the other side. If you’re anything like me, you’ll likely have to flip it back and forth a few times as needed to ensure a reasonably even edge emerges.

Step 6: Finish the edge with a knife sharpener

If you have a knife sharpener available to you, use it to refine the edge you started with the file. The sharpener will help you to do away with any small burrs left behind by the sawing and sanding process and create a sharper edge. Although stabs and thrusts are important elements of a knife fight, you can actually do away with an opponent much faster with effective slashes to the carotid artery, for instance, rather than a stab to the gut. Likewise, a sharp edge will make the knife more useful in everyday applications, like making tinder for a fire or cutting meat.

Step Seven: Fashion your handle

The raw steel handle my knife was left with would probably chew up my bare hand almost as quickly as the blade would, so it was important that I fashion a handle for the knife that protects these old callouses I’ve worked so hard to develop over the years. I’m a Marine, so there’s paracord in a dozen places in my house, but there are a number of materials you could feasibly use to the same end: leather straps, cloth, duct tape, even shoelaces.

The sailors among us may have some better suggestions for knots, but because I wasn’t using the internet for guidance, I was forced to rely on what I could remember – so I tied what is commonly known as a “perfection loop” at the end of a length of paracord, then fed the other and through the loop and tightened it onto the top groove of the handle. I then wrapped the paracord around the steel as tightly as possible and secured it again on the other end before repeating the process.

What I was left with is a pretty passable survival knife. From start to finish, the project took about three hours, though it may take you longer if you find yourself gassed from the sawing and filing. All that’s left to do is see how well it holds up when put through its paces. My testing of this knife will be the subject of a subsequent article, so you can see how well it holds up to real-world use.

Hopefully, we won’t find ourselves needing this sort of know-how before then.

Originally published on NEWSREP and written by ALEX HOLLINGS

My disaster preparedness secret weapon: Hydrogen Peroxide

When putting together a disaster plan, it’s important to prioritize human needs in the way that you prepare. To put together a solid short-term survival plan, you need only to address the most basic of human necessities: water, shelter, food, and security, but as short-term survival transitions into “well I guess this is what’s left of the world now,” it’s important to have a plan in place that can help you get by a bit longer than just the first few days after a disaster.

While ensuring you have adequate food and water will prevent death from hunger or dehydration, it’s important to remember that those are often the very easiest forms of death to avoid. We worry about supply lines drying up after the collapse of our infrastructure for good reason, but humans have been surviving without grocery stores and running faucets for millennia… what tends to kill us in such situations often isn’t a lack of food, but rather a lack of hygiene.

Enter my favorite survival item: hydrogen peroxide. Most of us are familiar with the brown bottle of bubbling goodness from our childhoods, when our mothers would pour a bit of the elixir onto our scraped knees to disinfect it before armoring the wound with a Batman band-aid and providing an emergency booboo-kiss for pain relief. While wound care is certainly one of the things hydrogen peroxide is good to have around for, it’s far from the only thing.

In order to discuss some of the other important uses for the magic brown bottle, I’m going to have to delve into some of the health issues that may impact a person in an extended survival scenario; some of which are likely to sound gross, but it’s important to plan for potential health hazards other than gunshot wounds and zombie bites, because dying of an infection all by yourself will leave you just as dead as the sexier alternatives we see on TV.

Hydrogen Peroxide for Mouth Care

I’m not normally one to close my eyes during a rough scene in a movie – but watching Tom Hanks remove an infected tooth with an ice skate in “Cast Away” was tough for me. I don’t like going to the dentist, let alone the idea of serving as my own using bits of trash I found on a beach, but I have to credit the movie for including an element of survival that is often ignored in movies and television: dental hygiene.

An infected tooth is a serious issue. If left unchecked, and infection can spread throughout your body, possibly even killing you without antibiotic treatment. Beyond that, an infected tooth can make eating an excruciating endeavor and can serve as a serious distraction when you need to keep your wits about you. If at all possible, one should avoid having to do their own oral surgery, and hydrogen peroxide can help.

That same brown bottle you use on cuts and scrapes is also a FDA approved mouth wash. Pouring a mix of hydrogen peroxide and water into your mouth and swishing it around once in a while may not give you the same fresh breath you’d get from a tooth-brush and a new tube of Crest Whitening, but it could keep the bacteria in your mouth from going rogue and rotting you from the inside out. Keeping your teeth intact will keep you eating, and hydrogen peroxide can help stave off infections and even cavities.

Hydrogen Peroxide to Fight Fungus

Athlete’s foot and other fungal infections of the hands and feet can be serious trouble for the long-term survivor. The reduction in available means of hygiene that may come after a disaster could leave you more vulnerable to this sort of ailment, and yet again, hydrogen peroxide can help kill the fungus causing itching and burning on your extremities.

Perhaps more important though, is hydrogen peroxide’s ability to combat yeast infections. While we tend to think of such things as a uniquely female issue, and in today’s world, we even see it as more of an inconvenience than a matter of life and death, developing a yeast infection in a survival setting is bad news and must be addressed.

Hydrogen Peroxide is safe to be used as a douche for women suffering from a yeast infection after the stores have long stopped stocking Monistat, and can be used externally for men suffering from the same ailment. Didn’t know men could get yeast infections? They absolutely can – and the resulting itching, burning and open sores could lead to any number of further infections, or simply leave you too distracted to handle your day-to-day survival needs with the level of focus they require. Hydrogen peroxide will not work as well as traditional anti-fungal medications, but as a multi-use tool, it’s good to know that you can keep the swamp-rot off your fingers and toes as well as out of your underoos with the same bottle you keep around for wound care and oral hygiene. I’d just recommend cleaning the spout before switching between uses (just kidding, do not put the spout inside any part of you, use a different means of application).

Hydrogen Peroxide for Cleaning (everything)

If you wear contact lenses, hydrogen peroxide and water can be used to clean them between uses – extending the life of your contacts and possibly your ability to see if you don’t have access to your glasses. It can also be used to clean food containers and utensils, water carriers, or even cooking surfaces to kill things like salmonella.

You can also use a mixture of hydrogen peroxide and water to clean and disinfect your clothes. A clean pair of undies may not sound like the most important thing after the end of the world, but remember, we haven’t evolved to prefer the smell and touch of clean things for no reason. Cleaning your clothes will help prevent skin irritations and even infections. In fact, using hydrogen peroxide to clean your underwear could prevent you from having to using hydrogen peroxide to treat a yeast infection in the first place.

Hydrogen Peroxide for Farming

In a long-term survival situation, cultivating your own food may be a necessity, but if you weren’t blessed with a green thumb, you’ll likely need all the help you can get in order to turn your little garden into something that’ll feed your family. Believe it or not, hydrogen peroxide can also help you start to grow your own food.

Adding a small bit of hydrogen peroxide to the water you pour on your plants can help fertilize the soil, prevent mold and mildew from developing, and even help an ailing plant regain its health. Soaking seeds in water that contains a small amount of hydrogen peroxide will even make them germinate faster. It’s important to use the correct amount of hydrogen peroxide however, otherwise it could kill your plants before they have a chance to grow. Check out this chart to help you determine how much peroxide you should mix with water for various agricultural needs.

These handy uses for the old brown bottle in your medicine cabinet are far from all of the ways hydrogen peroxide can benefit a disaster victim attempting to transition from short-term to long-term survival. I highly recommend doing some research and attempting to use hydrogen peroxide for things like oral hygiene once or twice before the world comes crashing down on you.

And maybe grab an extra bottle or two of the stuff the next time you go shopping. Just in case.

Preparing for disaster? Here are 5 unusual things that’ll help keep your car running in an emergency

In any prolonged survival situation involving a vehicle, the most important things to look for aren’t speed or even ground clearance — the first things you should consider are reliability and ease of repair and maintenance. After all, even the most badass of vehicles tend to lose their appeal when you can’t change a flat or find a replacement alternator when yours goes bad.

Regular maintenance will likely become even more important after a large-scale disaster, as you push your vehicle harder for longer and are forced to make compromises like using dirtier sources of fuel. A clog in a $5 fuel filter can leave a million dollar vehicle permanently planted where it is unless you have the resources and skills required to swap in a good one.

Whether we’re talking about post-apocalyptic survival or just evacuating from the scene of a local calamity, having an emergency set of tools (and coinciding know how) in your vehicle could mean the difference between having a ride and being forced to continue on foot. Some things can’t be repaired in the field, but the right tools could also help you get another vehicle you come across running (I’m not going to go into how to steal a car but suffice to say I’ve gotten barn cars started with the tools listed below before).

Aside from a regular toolkit (I recommend a half-inch drive rather than 3/8 for leverage’s sake) with a full complement of standard and metric sockets, and the rest of the usual emergency vehicle gear (jack, flashlight, tire iron, etc) here are a few tools you may not have thought of, but that deserves a place in your car’s emergency kit.

A Spool of Wire

Although most modern vehicles have complicated electrical systems governed by one or more onboard computers, you’d be surprised how much you can get accomplished simply by grounding a circuit and running a lead to the positive terminal of your battery. A failed driver’s side power window switch, for instance, can render all the windows in your car immobile (all switches run through a primary in many applications) so the only way to get your windows back UP may be to run that lead. In older model vehicles, you can circumvent a number of steps when diagnosing a fuel issue simply by running a lead from the battery directly to the fuel pump (it’s important to include an in-line switch or to remove the lead when the engine isn’t running to prevent burning out the fuel pump motor).

Understanding that most of the electronics in your vehicle operate via a simple mechanism (power on or power off) means that in an emergency, you can hack up some temporary fixes using little more than a spool of wire and some electrical tape. I also recommend carrying a test light to help you ensure current is moving properly when diagnosing electrical issues.

<br />

An Impact Driver

Even under the best of circumstances, a seized screw or bolt can make common repairs or maintenance a big problem. In an emergency, a stripped screw or bolt could be all it takes to leave you stranded — but an impact driver can turn the tides in your favor. These tools usually have a 3/8 or 1/2 inch drive at one end, and a flat striking surface on the other. Place the impact socket or screwdriver bit on one end and place it on the stuck fastener securely – then smash the hell out of the other side with a hammer or rock. The impact forces the bit onto/into the fastener as it rotates, breaking bolts and screws loose while avoiding stripping them.

For less than $15 bucks, you won’t find a more versatile or valuable tool when working on vehicles that may be a bit long in the tooth (or that just exist in the Northeast where winters wreak havoc on the vehicle’s undercarriage).

<br />

A sturdy pipe

As I mentioned above, I recommend carrying a half-inch drive socket and breaker bar in your vehicle’s toolkit — they occupy more space than a traditional 3/8 drive, but I’ve always appreciated the extra leverage I can exert via the heavier hardware. Just like with the impact driver, a good pipe can mean the difference between breaking something loose or not — sliding the pipe over the handle of a wrench can help increase the length of your lever, thus increasing the force you can exert. Be aware that using that much muscle may well break a bolt that’s seized in place, but that isn’t always a bad thing. A cross threaded lug nut could make it nearly impossible to get your wheel off when changing a flat, and while breaking a cross threaded lug stud may not be the best case scenario, your vehicle will have no trouble getting you home with the 4 remaining studs (on a 5 lug vehicle). The same principle applies to cars with only four lug studs, though spirited driving on only three lug nuts isn’t recommended but then how often is surviving about keeping things within the “recommended” parameters?”

The same pipe can also serve as a hammer for striking your impact driver or for leverage when trying to shift the engine within the limits of its rubber motor mounts to reach something deeper in your engine bay. Trying to swap rotors but they’re seized on? Bash it with a pipe. Car starter not working properly? Believe it or not, banging on it a few times with a pipe might do the trick as well.

Tire pressure gauge

A tire pressure gauge comes in handy any time you’re filling your tires up with air, but that’s not actually the value it provides in a survival situation. Driving on low traction surfaces like snow or mud can mean having to take your time to cover terrain, but if you find your vehicle struggling to maintain traction, letting some of the air out of your tires can actually make a big difference. If your car’s tires are rated for a maximum of 41 PSI, try dropping 10-15 pound of air pressure from your drive tires to increase the tire’s footprint on the ground, and as a result, adding a bit of traction. This method won’t get you un-stuck (you’ll still need kitty litter or sand and a shovel for that) but it can hopefully help you avoid getting stuck in the first place.

<br />

Duct Tape

You can fix anything with enough duct tape — but if you’re just trying to keep a car running long enough to get you out-of-town, it can really be a lifesaver. A vacuum leak on any of the lines leading into your Mass Air Flow Sensor or cylinder head could wreak havoc on your car’s performance or even kill the engine completely. Identifying the leak and sealing it with duct tape could get your vehicle moving again. The same can be said for leaking fuel lines in a pinch, though gasoline has a nasty habit of eating its way through temporary fixes of that sort. Duct tape won’t make your vehicle reliable but it might keep it running for long enough to get you to safety.

<br />

Feature image courtesy of Flickr

Prepper Paradise: A bit more than a million dollars could buy you this entire military installation

Mankind has always harbored a macabre fascination with the end of the world. Doomsday predictions litter humanity’s history, and for each new prophet promising the end of days, you could find a disappointed congregation, maligning the world’s existential persistence when his promises of fire and brimstone have failed to manifest.

For a long time, doomsday prophecies often centered around astrological events, transitional dates between centuries or millennia, and various religious beliefs regarding higher powers and their interventions in the affairs of man… but in recent decades, that spiritual sense of foreboding has been replaced by a very practical one. The Baby Boomer generation grew up under the very real specter of nuclear war, conducting duck and cover drills in school houses and devoting tax dollars to massive underground bunkers America hoped could deliver its government unscathed to the other side of the world’s end. For the first time in mankind’s history, the fear of the end of the world was finally matched by our capability to actually bring it about.

It’s little wonder, then, that many of the men and women that grew up training to climb under their desks in the event of a nuclear attack have now taken to an often-scoffed at hobby: “prepping.” Preppers come in a variety of sorts, of course — ranging from the pragmatic to the delusional — but if there’s one thing just about every prepper will agree on, it’s that money can help you “be prepared” for the apocalypse a whole lot faster than good intentions.

If you’re able to secure a remote piece of land and outfit it with all the things you need to survive before the world ends, you’re in pretty good shape by most prepper’s standards — but if you’ve got the passion and the pocket book, there are some options that even put that idea to shame. Options like a surplus military SATCOM II intelligence gathering and communications post in Scotland, for instance.

The property, which is listed for sale at just $1.22 million (a bargain compared to most hardened facilities), has actually been on the market for some time — meaning you may be able to haggle the owners down a little if you’re on the market for your own rural military installation, complete with air filtration system to protect you from nuclear, chemical, or biological attacks. The facility is even hardened against electromagnetic pulses (EMPs) that are known to render electronics unusable after a nuclear blast.

According to the listing:

SATCOM II Satellite Ground Listening Station is situated on the S side of the World War II airfield ( ) and B918 public road and set within a high double fenced compound. The Station stands on the former taxiway of the airfield.

Known locally as the ‘Golf Ball’ on account of the radome covered in fibre glass panels. The radome is linked by corridor to the equipment building and mess and recreation/office building. Within the ‘golf ball’ is a large dish antenna on a servo assisted rotating base, the mechanism allowing the dish to move up and down as well as around. The other buildings are connected by a main corridor which have NBC doors at each end. There is an emergency power generator room, containing two 180KW output diesel engines.

A MoD Police Post was built at a slightly later date near the main gate to guard and control the first fence line.

And in case your primary concern is nuclear attack, the sprawling 9 acre compound comes complete with a currently inactive NATO Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) early warning radar system aside from its complement of offices, garages, guard houses, living spaces and even recreational areas.

If all that isn’t enough to convince you that this property is just what you need to survive the end of days, the realtor points out that, until the world ends, this facility is also conveniently located near highway access for a short jaunt into town to resupply your stash of survival Twinkies. Check out the realtor’s listing if you think you may have found your new summer home.

Images courtesy of AmazingResults.com

There’s a serious problem with most of your ‘survival vehicle’ plans…

Although I spent the better portion of my twenties running around the world with a fresh fade and my boots bloused, the line of work I was in both before and after serving in the Marine Corps was in the racing industry. Most folks might be surprised to know that there are some real parallels between racing and military service – the aloof and pretentious drivers (officers), the salty old enlisted guys with decades of experience (master mechanics), and the ever-present tension between the folks that bust their asses in the air-conditioned offices, versus the folks that busted their asses on the tarmac.

Yeah, I said some folks busted their asses in the air-conditioned offices. Having worked on both sides of that divide, I can honestly report that changing tires on a scorching hot day in black Dickey’s is rough, but so is trying to survive budget cut meetings in a pair of Khakis. The misery comes in different forms, but it’s there nonetheless.

Working in the racing world gives you a different perspective of the vehicles we drive around in every day. The exotic cars that most of the world sees as precious and fragile tend to get the farm equipment treatment in the warehouses I worked in, for instance. Dodge Vipers, Porsche 911s, BMW M3s – all really cool cars, but working on, in, and around them all day tends to knock them off of the kid’s poster-pedestal and squarely into the “stuff I bitch about at work” category.

Viper’s side pipes run god damn hot, so prolonged highway driving is sort of like going places inside an Easy Bake Oven. My size 13 shoes make it so I can either press all the pedals in a Porsche, or none of them at all – so I usually had to drive them barefoot with my toes. These aren’t things that make me not like these cars, they’re just the stuff that widdles away at their legendary status until you start to see them for what they are: pieces of equipment with a specialized purpose – just like a rifle, a plunger, a forklift, or an Apache gunship.

A room full of tools for different tasks.

This distinction is an important one to make for a number of reasons. In the realm of survival preparation, where my professional experiences turning wrenches meets my professional experience slinging lead, knowing that those awesome pieces of equipment you pine for are going to break down, need repairs, and in tough circumstances, require a whole lot of love informs the type of vehicle you want to bring with you into a fight for your life.

As awesome as this scene in “I am Legend” is… a Mustang isn’t actually very practical for getting around after the apocalypse.

My brother, whose racing pedigree runs far deeper than my own, buys cars the way I buy guns: sometimes because it’s one he’s always wanted, sometimes because it serves a specific purpose, and sometimes, because he found a great deal. While I drive around in a beat up old SUV, his mountain garage houses an SRT-10 Viper, a Dodge Charger Hellcat, a supercharged 350Z, a turbo-diesel Ram 2500, Audi S4 and so forth… It’s like pulling up to a car show whenever I stop by at his house, and if I’m honest, I wouldn’t actually want most of his incredible rides to be my primary mode of transport in a disaster.

Although my brother and his son will likely be riding in matching style.

Modified cars, like cars built for the race track, are pretty touchy. Forced induction (which can come in the form of superchargers, turbochargers, and in practical effect, nitrous oxide sort of serves the same function) requires the careful management of the air to fuel ratio to ensure the engine doesn’t start running too lean or too rich. High boost or compression situations requires the use of extremely stable fuel (as measured by octane rating) and unless you’re near a race track, it can be tough to find gas with better than a 93 octane rating (fine for most unmodified forced induction applications, but not for those of us with a boost controller and the Fast and Furious on DVD).

Have you ever changed a tire? I don’t mean pulled the lug nuts and then swapped a tire and wheel onto your vehicle, I mean, have you ever used a machine to separate the rubber from the rim, then put a new one on, inflated and balanced it? If you haven’t, it’s honestly not a terribly difficult job… until you have to do it with 350mm wide, low profile performance tires on a 20 inch rim (like you’ll find on most high performance vehicles nowadays). If the equipment you’re using is old or cheap, it may not even be able to support wheels that big. And, of course, that’s assuming you have access to equipment at all.

These aren’t the only problems you’ll run into when driving your freshly claimed Corvette ZR-1 through the post-apocalyptic wasteland. Ground clearance on high performance cars would undoubtedly mean you wouldn’t get far anyway, so you may not even get to having to worry about finding enough synthetic motor oil for the frequent fluid and filter changes you’ll need to do to keep the stressed-out motor happy, or the fact that supercars like Ferraris often require things like an entirely new clutch to be installed every few thousand miles.

By now, you may be thinking, “okay, so I can’t drive around the apocalypse in a souped up Supra or a even a bone stock 488 Spider… but that’s not what I’d want anyway. THIS is what I want!”

I’ve driven a fair number of expensive Mercedes in my life, but admittedly, I’ve never driven their 6×6. Nonetheless, I can glean a number of things simply by looking at this picture:

The suspension travel of this vehicle will require one hell of a jack to get one of these wheels off the ground, and before you say, “it can raise its own wheels off the ground electronically!” I remind you that nothing works the way it’s supposed to three years after the world ends.
Simply swapping out a wheel and tire on this will require specialized tools that almost certainly come with the vehicle when you buy it, but may not when you “liberate” it from a suburban neighborhood crawling with zombies.
Finding replacement parts for this vehicle will be damn near impossible.
When you high-side this thing, it’s going to take one hell of a truck to get it un-stuck.
It is… honestly pretty rad anyway.

Listen guys, I’m not saying that exotic and modified race cars aren’t cool (in fact, I love them) nor am I saying that you shouldn’t buy that Army surplus M939 6X6… I also love those… but remember that a survival situation, by its very nature, is brutal and unforgiving on not just you, but your equipment as well.

An Ar-15 is a valuable tool in a survival situation, but none of us would be surprised to learn that its value begins to drop significantly if you don’t have the means or the know-how to properly maintain it. Without proper maintenance and a steady source of ammunition, your AR-15 quickly becomes a club, and without replacement parts and the ability (both in terms of equipment and knowledge) to maintain your vehicle, it too quickly becomes useless. In a survival situation, it’s not about what will work best in the next three days… it’s about what will keep working for the long haul.

You’re better off with your old Jeep Cherokee, assuming you know how to change its oil and its running standard sized (and easy to find) tires, than you are with an up-armored Humvee you couldn’t replace a ruined tire on even if you had a spare. In a long-term survival setting, you’ll probably see me tooling around in a just about stock Toyota Tacoma that’s not much younger than I am. After all, if the world’s already ended – who are you trying to impress?

Feature image courtesy of Pexels.com, all other images courtesy of the author unless otherwise noted.

Not the ‘preppers’ you see on TV: America’s wealthy take ‘prepping’ seriously

Depending on the circles you run in, the word “prepper” has different connotations. Its use in the media on shows with exaggerated premises about crackpots building camouflaged tree houses has made the idea of “being prepared” for disaster somewhat laughable, but among people that have spent some time in failed states, impoverished nations, or places with nefarious and brutal governments, “prepping” isn’t a hobby or a recent trend. It’s just a part of your day.

I don’t consider myself a “prepper,” but I’ve certainly been referred to as one in friendly conversations with my less security minded friends. If you’re the type of guy with extra water storage and some firepower, you’ve probably heard the same jokes:

“Well, when the zombie apocalypse comes, I’m heading to your house!”

Here in the United States, where we only pretend this week’s raging hashtag is the end of the world, the idea of being prepared for a bad situation seems laughable — after all, the police are a phone call away, the fire department doesn’t charge for their services, Netflix is streaming and your local Wal-Mart is fully stocked with everything you could ever need. By the standards of much of the world, the United States is a bountiful Utopia… what on earth could change that?

Well, honestly, it wouldn’t take much. Our confidence based economy relies on confidence. Our domestic missile defense apparatus relies on mutually assured destruction and the perception we cultivate of invulnerability, our ability to stop the spread of apocalyptic illnesses that once ravaged civilizations is based on antibiotics that are proving increasingly ineffective against new strains of old bacteria, and according to the U.S. government, Russia has already successfully infiltrated the American power grid on more than one occasion. I don’t want to misrepresent our current situation: the wheels of a foreseeable apocalypse are not necessarily in motion — but just like carrying a firearm, being prepared is about mitigating the risk of possibilities. I don’t expect needing to use my firearm as I run errands this afternoon but if the situation were to arise, I’d be ready.

While popular culture and internet memes might lead you to believe that “prepping” for a large-scale disaster is an exclusive interest for the paranoid or the mentally unhinged, you may be surprised to learn that America’s wealthy and elite have long taken the possibility of an existential threat seriously — and with good reason. History has shown that the wealthiest among us tend not to fair well when the impoverished masses grow desperate.

For the moderately rich, high dollar “survival communities” have begun springing up all over the country — often in converted missile silos or other kinds of underground bunkers. Depending on your community of choice, you can find all the amenities of modern living deep beneath the earth’s surface, and even a few you may not have — like a personal movie theater or indoor swimming pool. Some of these bunker-condos can go for millions of dollars, which is a pretty steep price to pay for a summer home you hope you’ll never need to visit, but it’s important to consider the scale of wealth when dismissing the idea. If you’re worth billions, a measly million dollars may be a small price to pay for peace of mind.

The Survival Condo Project builds luxury suites deep inside former Atlas missile silos, complete with LCD screen windows that can depict any image you want to pretend you’re looking out at while the word above you burns. (Survival Condo Project)

But what about the super rich? Well, they’re just as interested in making it through a disaster as the rest of us, they just do it with a great deal more panache. Some have custom built homes designed around protecting their families from all sorts of dangerous situations – others, like the owners of the very Wal-Marts so many people plan to raid when things go bad, take things even further. After the terror attacks of 9/11, the Walton family built a massive family bunker in Bentonville, Arkansas. Little is known about the interior of the facility, but the exterior, adorned with concrete barriers, razor wire and full-time security detail suggests that the Waltons believe “prepping” to be a worthy investment. They’re far from the only billionaires that feel that way.

A reinforced bunker mansion under construction near Atlanta (courtesy of Sotheby’s International Realty)

“You just need so many things to actually ride out the apocalypse,” Former Facebook product manager Antonio García Martínez told the New Yorker. “I think people who are particularly attuned to the levers by which society actually works understand that we are skating on really thin cultural ice right now.”

Martínez purchased a large plot of land in the Pacific Northwest, and while he hasn’t revealed the extent of his preparations, he acknowledges that it is well equipped with solar and diesel generators, survival equipment, and all the firepower he believes he’d need to defend his stake.

Steve Huffman, the co-founder of the popular website Reddit has even gone under the knife to help prepare for a possible apocalypse. As a part of his preparations, he underwent Lasik to correct his vision.

“If the world ends — and not even if the world ends, but if we have trouble — getting contacts or glasses is going to be a huge pain in the ass,” he explained. “Without them, I’m f–ked.”

He also has his own bunker, complete with utilitarian motorcycles he believes will allow him to get around traffic while evacuating from his home in San Francisco.

“I think, to some degree, we all collectively take it on faith that our country works, that our currency is valuable, the peaceful transfer of power — that all of these things that we hold dear work because we believe they work,” says Huffman. “While I do believe they’re quite resilient, and we’ve been through a lot, certainly we’re going to go through a lot more.”

Of course, just because these folks are wealthy doesn’t mean they’re onto something the rest of us aren’t. The disasters America’s elites are preparing for are as diverse as their revenue streams. Bill Gates, for instance, is confident that a massive disaster in the form of new unstoppable diseases is on the horizon.

“Whether it occurs by a quirk of nature or at the hand of a terrorist, epidemiologists say a fast-moving airborne pathogen could kill more than 30 million people in less than a year,” Gates wrote in an op-ed for Business Insider last year. “And they say there is a reasonable probability the world will experience such an outbreak in the next 10-15 years.”

There may be no way to know that a large-scale disaster is headed for you, but it never hurts to have a plan, do some training, and put a little thought into the possibility that life may not always be as easy as it is right now. The term “prepper” may have a bit of a negative connotation, but connotations won’t matter much if you find yourself struggling to survive in the wake of calamity.

Feature image courtesy of the Survival Condo Project