Gingery's books, as I understand, have you start from no machine tools and go to a metal shop the way computer hobbyists might start with discrete electronics and breadboards and go to a fully functional 8-bit computer with BIOS, ROM, etc.
A gem for the post-apocalyptic bookshelf. Assuming anyone can still read.
Correct. I’ve done some of this. You start with a metal foundry for melting aluminum. From there, you can build tools tools that help build other tools, up to the ultimate: metal lathe.
It’s a pot of work but very rewarding.
Here are some pictures of ‘the 5 bucks furnace’ i built:
I did. Nothing really notable, so I'll have to look through my pics at some point to see what else I could post. The furnace is extremely heavy and life happened it on it's terms, so that project got iceboxed for a while.
The primitive technology guy would make a shelf out of earth.
Edit: Or he would just hack some bamboo or some thick branches with a stone axe and tie them together using some dried vines to create a pretty good shelf.
I've thought of this when thinking about bringing recently extinct creatures back from extinction via cloning.
Take New Zealand or Hawai'i and try to bring back an animal that humans caused to go extinct. Like the Haast's eagle.
The eagle only went extinct around 1400, but did so because the Maori hunted the moa to extinction. So bring the eagle back you need to bring the moa back. To bring the moa back you'll need moa habitat, which have been radically changed and are in short supply.
More broadly, it shows a central problem with humans who want X but don't want to dedicate the work or resources for X. Take the current issues in restaurants in America. American consumers want cheap and well prepared food, but aren't willing to pay very much for it. So, and entire industry matured using exploitive employment practices and keeping wages below the cost of living let alone a living wage. The business can't pay enough and make a profit with the price consumers are willing to pay.
So yeah, we want pandas and gorillas and the buffalo to roam, but often aren't willing to pay the bill needed to do so.
The problem with object-oriented languages is they've got all this implicit environment that they carry around with them. You wanted a banana but what you got was a gorilla holding the banana and the entire jungle. - Joe Armstrong ... via https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup
I always think of these sorts of things in terms of “what would I do if I was stuck in 500 years in the past?”, how far I could get in terms of making myself comfortable and being able to recreate some modern conveniences.
500 years in the past, metal would still be relatively scarce and precious, where in the notional postapocalyptic future that people enjoy fantasizing about, the ruins of today's world would offer a veritable cornucopia.
Bret Devreux had a very fascinating history of how iron was made posted, long read but it explains a lot of the complications and work that went into historically making iron, and many of the reasons metal was so rare & expensive. Well worth a read.
A gem for the post-apocalyptic bookshelf. Assuming anyone can still read.