Elmer Kilred

paul wheaton wrote:

How do we tell an extra hundred million people about rocket mass heaters?  

Getting your videos noticed on Youtube is difficult nowadays.
There are other platforms to upload to. (like DailyMotion, or Vimeo... ).

Maybe, it's time to collaborate with a University and do a "Ted Talk."

One of the varieties of videos that gets noticed a millions are they guys who take old stuff apart and refurbish it without narration. They film their hands and the objects being constructed, an then speed them up to fit in a 15-45 minute video. It's like watching magic. You could do this with one of your actual builds. Film the build of a rocket stove mass heater by yourself, or with a group then edit it down. You will need to think like a cameraman instead of a video maker and change up positions, and limit each shot to about 3-5 seconds (attention span thing) so that your video tells the story without narration. In the end of your video you put in your links, or drop in your statistics.

There is a new feature on Youtube that is called  "short."  This is technically a one minute billboard advertisement for your other videos. It's very effective in getting millions of views. I don't know if it will make them drink, tho.

I haven't been here in a while.
I've been investigating hypocausts and masonry heaters as of late.
There is a cool way of heating and cooling your greenhouse through evaporate cooling that I learned how to do in my zone 6b, and soil structure (Heavy clay with a frost depth of 26").
I haven't abandoned rocket heaters totally, but i think I've got all that I need to successfully construct my own.
Anyway, saw your email, and thought I would post my .02.

I got several kilos of osage orange seeds, and am trying them in a thick forest planting. I think like most trees they grow in a rat's nest because they were planted in hedgerows, not having to compete for upper growth. We shall find out in 15 years, when I am planning on replacing the fence. The good thing is that that is bout the life expectancy on my current posts.  

I can just go out and take a picture of my neighborhood for you if you like. There is one that was grown across the street that was pruned and trained. The rest of the trees are part of a hedge row. They are used for wind breaks but mostly for hedge rows because of the thorns and the cattle will not go near them. The thorns are pure evil and can pierce through solid rubber soles on combat boots. The trees we have are over 30'+ tall growing in heavy clay soil, but they can get larger than that if the soil conditions are nice.

The closest relative to the Osage Orange is the Mulberry tree, and those come up like weeds in my yard. The Bluejays eat the mulberries then poop purple all over the place.

Billy the Kid's mom had a farm house up the street from where I live and few of the original Osage Orange posts are still there holding up what is left of the barbed wire fence. It's tough wood. It's extra smoky when you burn it.    

I was going to say Bois D'Arc/Osage Orange makes a great fence post, but another Kansan beat me to it.


One of the easiest ways to preserve wood fence posts is to coat them with a pitch, but you can have fence posts that last for 30+ years just tamping the soil around them like you're making rammed earth. In 1982 I was in boy scouts and one of my projects, was to get my gardening merit badge. I had a dog so I had to build good fencing to keep the dog out. One of the posts (untreated cedar) I tamped in heavy clay soil as much as I could with a steel surveying stake with a 1" head. I tamped the post until the earth would not move anymore for 20 minutes or more. We have had termites and carpenter ants and trees that have come down in the yard, and lots of wood rotting away, but that post I tamped is still there.

Another unique thing... the city was digging up an area that used to have old rails that connected to some of the buildings downtown. The ties they dug out of the ground were muddy and wet and were over 100 years old, and they didn't have any rot on them, so maybe creosote and a combination of well packed muck preserved the wood... OR - Maybe it is also like 100 year old eggs where the PH of the soil is neutralized with ash and tea leaves and mud?    

Dylan Kirsch wrote:Elmer, I like the way you explained the 2 main ways you can treat wood. Do you think you could completely or at least mostly saturate wood with an oil that does eventually dry?

Hey Dylan,

I'm guessing that drying and then saturating the wood with an oil would be an option. So, say you have lumber that has already been cut, heating up boiled or refined linseed oil might be one way to get the wood to swell and open the cells to get it to accept more oil deeper... A mix of 1 part turpentine to one part linseed oil might also allow the oils to seep in deeper. You would probably have to make some sort of container that would hold enough oil to keep it warm and to hold the actual size of the timber... The only problem with this idea that I think you would run into is that the way lumber may bend twist, or buckle in the curing process because the lumber is being treated after it has been milled.

If you were to construct a Styrofoam box and steam the wood to heat it to a higher temp, or maybe a serious heat gun... Or somehow construct your own kiln or hillside fire pit to heat treat the wood to get the oils to seep in deeper. You start running into risks of messing up your wood when you start doing prolonged exposures to anything that will make the fibers in the wood separate.

Another thought would be in the way something is traditionally constructed... instead of trying to impregnate a 4"x4", why not engineer veneers so that you coat out side of two 2"x4"s and the inside is then technically treated. I'm constructing a greenhouse using appropriated locally sourced upcycled materials. Mostly pallet wood, RR timbers, and old glass window sashes... (One of the reasons I ended up on this site is because I was investigating the 'possible' dangers of Creosote) Since, I am limited to the scale of materials I can source, I have to re-think how things things are constructed and question things I may not have normally questioned had I just run to the lumber yard and purchased what I needed... So, yeah, linseed oil will harden and act as a binder (not a super strong one, but one like a flexible film) So, you could make laminated lumber that is treated all the way through (provided that you have the equipment to take the stock down to the sizes you want and the time a patients it take to do this). This is probably the most cost efficient method unless you are opening your own lumber yard.

If your lumber is over 2" wide, the process for treating the interior of the wood is probably going to have to be heat or pressure treated in some sort of a kiln. or vacuum chamber.    

(I really like Daniel's post from Sweden above that explains a 4 year process... If I only had a woodland forest in my backyard, I'd be set).

Boiled linseed oil is pretty good for tool handles, fast drying window putty, paint...

Lumber is different. You would have to go old school and boil a vat of linseed oil and soak the lumber to get the oil to saturate and penetrate the wood enough to become more than a surface hardener/protectant. Linseed oil eventually dries, so you may be wanting a non drying oil like mineral oil (To keep wood from splitting on cutting boards, etc...) In the 1880's gardeners used this method to treat their lumber before they used it in the construction of their greenhouses... (One of their other treatments was two-three thick coatings lead white paint, and that was cutting edge technology back then).

For posts, the trick isn't so much about treating the wood, but tamping the soil enough around a post to prevent moisture from reaching the post for a long time, and then the species of wood can be important too. (Example; In Kansas, it's pretty typical to see a barbed wire fence with posts that are made from Osage Orange. Some posts have been in the ground since the days of Billy the Kid... All because, some farmer used a tamping rod around the fence post for half a day, maybe tossing in some lime as a soil binder, and creating rammed earth around the base of the post.)

There is a farmers treatment to treat lumber that uses mineral spirits, boric acid, and radiator fluid, but I have never tried the application, I read about it online (so, you have to know it works...) I 'may' have mixed some of this mixture up once to get rid of a termite problem in a rural building I had leased, and I could probably say that it works so good that the neighbors all had to call a pest control service... and even after that process of elimination happened I 'probably' never had termites again for the few years that I was in that building.  The great thing about that particular building was that the ground water was already contaminated from years of being a fuel pipeline area, and heavy agricultural run off from feed lots, and a major pipe line was laid not too far from that particular building, and a Titian II missile base that has been decommissioned since the late 80's was also within a mile or two...  I was really surprised that anything lived around the soil in that area. -Anyway, you are supposed to heat up the mixture of coolant and boric acid in a well ventilated area and then thin it out with turp/mineral spirits... Coolant is more of an oil-like product, and the spirits are more of a saturation type of chemical, and the boric acid is the magic dust that insects do not like... I think Diatomaceous Earth is the other one.

Real old school wood preservatives for interior furniture are beeswax, heat, and turpentine. I've seen furniture from the 1100's in German that looks as new as the day was made because layer upon layer of wax and stain was layered for days, months... and then set into the sun each day, then buffed out and repeated. (It looks highly polished when it is finished)

...so you're doing one of two things. Completely sealing the wood, or saturating the wood with a non drying oil that insects, fungus, etc do not like (This is why Cresote is popular with the Railroad... You are sealing off the sent of whatever attracts the insect/fungus to dine on the wood... So, you could use something more modern like two part epoxy like marine paint, or tar... (If I don't stop thinking about it it I will end up writing an essay...)

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