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Getting iron from the ground and transforming into something useful is definitely not something you can do alone. But you are onto something, scrapping things

Getting iron from the ground and transforming into something useful is definitely not something you can do alone. But you are onto something, scrapping things from the outskirts of society might be something you would be able to do, albeit unless we are talking about total societal collapse this would still put you on the production chain, on the far end of it, as a scrapper

runjake 3y ago
Right. But again, you don’t need iron tools to survive. It just makes thing much easier. You can certainly live primitively in nature without the scraps of civilization. Again, it isn’t fun and it will be much harder. Remember, total societal collapse is going to result in most, and perhaps the mass majority of humans, dying off. If not from the collapse, then from the realities of shifting into primitive living unprepared (including but not limited to: finding enough calories, disease, famine, etc). If you have kids, like me, you and your family will probably be dead. I figure I will be. But my threat models are more concerned with pandemics, natural disasters, and loss of power/water/gas/law, so I focus on those. And yeah, all of those threats have occurred at this point (I am in a rural area) :-/
eep_social 3y ago
> definitely not something you can do alone Counter-citation: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dhW4XFGQB4o https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dhW4XFGQB4o we could argue about how useful the output is but this is a clear demonstration that one can, in fact, do it alone.
- augusto-moura 3y ago
  I also follow Primitive Technology, but in my opinion it only proves that it needs more people or time than that. The channel is experimenting with smelting iron ore for some years now and still doesn't have a good recipe for doing it at scale. Also note that he is only producing cast iron at the moment, which is not particularly useful for impact tools (like axes, pickaxes or weapons). Getting the iron sufficiently hot for smithing is very hard to do, and require a lot of infrastructure non existent on nature.

runjake 3y ago

Right. But again, you don’t need iron tools to survive. It just makes thing much easier. You can certainly live primitively in nature without the scraps of civilization. Again, it isn’t fun and it will be much harder. Remember, total societal collapse is going to result in most, and perhaps the mass majority of humans, dying off. If not from the collapse, then from the realities of shifting into primitive living unprepared (including but not limited to: finding enough calories, disease, famine, etc). If you have kids, like me, you and your family will probably be dead. I figure I will be. But my threat models are more concerned with pandemics, natural disasters, and loss of power/water/gas/law, so I focus on those. And yeah, all of those threats have occurred at this point (I am in a rural area) :-/

eep_social 3y ago

> definitely not something you can do alone Counter-citation: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dhW4XFGQB4o https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dhW4XFGQB4o we could argue about how useful the output is but this is a clear demonstration that one can, in fact, do it alone.

augusto-moura 3y ago
I also follow Primitive Technology, but in my opinion it only proves that it needs more people or time than that. The channel is experimenting with smelting iron ore for some years now and still doesn't have a good recipe for doing it at scale. Also note that he is only producing cast iron at the moment, which is not particularly useful for impact tools (like axes, pickaxes or weapons). Getting the iron sufficiently hot for smithing is very hard to do, and require a lot of infrastructure non existent on nature.