Many times in past installments, I’ve emphasized the importance of doing things discreetly. That’s because anything you do as a fascist is subject to interference by the system. Just because they don’t prosecute moslem rapists or try to police migrant crime doesn’t mean system thugs won’t spend millions of dollars and countless man-hours tracking down people who want to live away from the system, and doubly so if they have politically incorrect opinions.

When it comes to stealth, the gold standard is invisibility. What we really want is for ZOG troops to stand right in front of our base of operations and still fail to find us. This can only be achieved by digging underground and hiding the entrance. The problem, of course, is that conventional underground construction requires heavy machinery, enormous amounts of concrete and masonry units and makes an absolute mess of the area being excavated and built on. Isn’t there a way to create underground spaces without spending a fortune and attracting a lot of attention? In fact, there’s several.

Mike Oehler’s PSP system

In the 70’s, a hardcore hippie named Mike Oehler published a book called “The $50 and up underground house”. He advocated a return to nature, and a method of building houses that made them blend into the environment, which was a good thing because he mostly built them illegally and wanted to avoid attention.

The basic idea of his construction method is to dig a little bit in the earth, then build a wooden frame to keep the dirt from collapsing in on the house, with some polyethylene sheeting to keep the moisture out. The structure is then buried under dirt, keeping the entrance pretty well hidden.

His system is clever, but he had some very different priorities from us, and as such we can make significant improvements on his design in terms of both stealth, durability and performance. But let’s start with an explanation of the original system.

Post, shoring and polyethylene
There are several big problems when trying to build anything underground. First is that the dirt wants to cave in on you. Which, obviously, will really mess up your day. The second problem is that the underground tends to be a damp place, which rots wood and other organic construction materials. This is why underground areas are normally built of stone, concrete or bricks. The third problem is that excavating dirt is a real pain, especially if you’re doing it by hand.

The moisture problem can be solved fairly effectively by the use of polyethylene sheets, also called tarps. These are the blue sheets usually used to cover vehicles and cord wood from the rain and snow. Polyethylene is an absolute moisture barrier and will last for millennia if not exposed to UV rays. So the basic idea is to cover the wall and floor with these tarps, then shore up the wall with wooden planks. The planks are held in place with big wooden beams that are planted in the ground (over poly tarps, of course) and buried. The floor is then covered in either carpets or wooden planks. The roof gets similar treatment.

The site is dug in a hill, with the entrance facing uphill. This makes the entrance (and thus the rest of the house) completely invisible to people who are downhill from it. With some clever design, it can make it very stealthy even from uphill as well, as well as from the air. The problem of excavation is also lessened, since the construction is merely embedded into an existing slope rather than dug out completely from a flat area. The excavated dirt can simply be piled up on the roof and the sides of the house later to completely hide the structure.

Problems
Mike Oehler is a romantic, not a fascist revolutionary. He places more value on aesthetics than on immediate practicality. His design is based on the necessity of having great light, a good view and his abhorrence to concrete. We share none of those prejudices.

While having no windows (relying on led bulbs for illumination) may not be romantic, it sure beats being found out by the system. Ventilation can be managed with a simple convection-operated chimney that can be manually opened and closed as required (more on this concept in a later installment).

Also, while wood is not that expensive, it’s prone to rotting and is very weak. It’s weak because it can only be assembled in rectilinear shapes. The key to making solid underground structures is the “vault” shape, where a round shape is used to support vastly more weight than a straight edge. Thus, if larger structures are to be built in this style, using the wooden shoring method would make them much more vulnerable to collapse from earth pressure.

Potential improvements

Each wall which will be subject to pressure from the surrounding earth should be rounded rather than straight. Of course, this could be easily accomplished using the cob technique, but since cob is vulnerable to moisture, it would be unwise to rely on it for underground construction. The ideal material for this, short of highly skilled vault masonry, would be ferrocement. Ferrocement is cheap and relatively simple to make, and is extraordinarily strong (almost as strong as solid steel!).

Windows should be kept to a minimum, both for heat conservation and stealth considerations. The conventional stove he recommends should be replaced with the high efficiency rocket mass heater covered in an earlier installment. The rocket stove will also be used to power the ventilation system, which is crucial underground to prevent mold.

The floor could be made cheaper by foregoing the wood and the carpeting altogether, and simply compressing the earth with a tamper and soaking in some linseed oil to make it waterproof. Wall to wall carpeting is a nightmare anyway, and a dust and mold accumulator.

Next time…
Oehler’s ideas are a strong basis to build a hidden underground space. He builds cheap, simple, hidden and functional designs. Combined with the many newer ideas floating around in the off-grid building community, you have a lot of potential.

Next time, we’ll take a look at the ultimate in secrecy, the underground tunnel. Most underground designs involve digging a large hole in the ground, building a structure in there and then burying it. How hard would it be to just start digging straight into the side of a hill and carve out a space for yourself?

The first human need, after breathing, is drinking water. You can’t last long without it. While it’s not something we really need to think about if we live in a city, water is a problem that you’ll have to address if you’re living off-grid. The thing is that water pretty much always has some nasty bacteria in it. Fecal bacteria. And while a little fecal bacteria won’t kill you, if your source of water isn’t pristine, you can get pretty sick on it.

Cities, of course, regularly test their water and add a bunch of chemicals to it to kill the bacteria. They often also have filtering systems. Most people who live away from cities will rely on wells pumping from aquifers below their land (aquifers are large underground reservoirs of water refilled by rain). But increasingly, even aquifer water is getting contaminated. So homeowners will typically have it tested once in a while.

All this is a pain, obviously. Ensuring your land has an aquifer is a pain. Digging a well is a pain. Testing the water is a pain (you need a lab to do this). Using and maintaining a commercial water filter is a pain. Adding chemicals to your water is a pain. Isn’t there a simpler way?

 Rainwater

Rainwater is usually quite pure and immediately drinkable. Plus, it falls on our head for free. Why not avoid messing with wells altogether and just collect rainwater?

By having your own water tanks, you’ll be in full control of your water reserves. There’s no chance of some other asshole over-pumping your aquifer and leaving you dry. There’s no chance of some nearby pig farm contaminating your well. You know exactly how much water you have, and you know exactly where it comes from.

However, there is still one small problem. To collect rainwater, you need a large surface (like your building’s roof). And that surface will probably eventually collect stuff like bugs, leaves and bird shit along with water. So you’re going to have a mild but constant bacteriological contamination.

Filtering

While the water will still be good for most household purposes, it will be a bit short of being acceptable drinking water. Most types of filtering systems will get it clean enough to drink. The problem, of course, is that filtering systems cost money to buy, and need constant purchases of cartridges to remain functional. Additionally, they can’t really be repaired without buying spare parts, let alone be built from scratch in a home workshop.

So ideally, because water is such a basic essential need, our water filtering system would need to meet these criteria:

• You won’t die from dysentery.
• Will purify enough water to meet the needs of a group of 5-10 people.
• Can be built from scratch from cheap or free low-tech materials.
• Won’t break, but could be repaired easily.

Fight fire with fire

You’re going to see a pattern here, but ingenious white people have recently developed a method to allow brown third-worlders to stop drinking shit infused water and die from dysentery by the millions. Why they would do such a thing is still a mystery (I mean, help the third-worlders). But in any case, I’m sure they’ll be happy to know Nazis will benefit from their work.

Enter the biological filtering system. The concept is to basically grow and maintain a large colony of bacteria which feeds on the fecal bacteria found in water. You pour your shitty water in the colony, and as it passes through the based bacteria devour the shitty bacteria. That’s the gist of it.

This may sound like something that involves test tubes and petri dishes. But it’s not. It’s so simply even an African could do it. Well, maybe not, after all, the aid workers really overestimate the Africans. But Africans COULD do it if they didn’t have 60pt IQ’s.

The structure

The filter is a tall box filled with sand of various coarseness. The box it topped with a stainless steel bowl full of small holes. At the bottom of the box is an output pipe, out of which comes the pure water. Simple as that.

The water is poured in the steel bowl, whose small holes diffuse the water slowly and gently, to avoid disturbing the bacterial colony. The water then slowly percolates from the finer sand, which is at the top, to the coarser sand and gravel at the bottom.

Once the water reaches the bottom, it comes out of the pipe and into your container.

Starting a colony

There is no need to find special bacteria to “start” the colony. The appropriate bacteria will already be present in the air and in the sand, though in very small quantities. Thus the filter won’t be very efficient at first.

You will have to feed the colony daily so that the based bacteria will reproduce and multiply. After about 30 days of pouring unclean water in the filter, the colony will be strong enough to kill 90% of fecal bacteria passing through it. The result will be safe drinking water. As with most biological systems, it will only get better with time.

On the other hand, you can’t continuously pour water through the filter; it needs to rest for a few hours in between each “feeding”. And if you fail to feed the colony for a few days, they could die and you’ll have to start over. Thus daily use and proper maintenance is necessary. But you need drinking water every day anyway, so this shouldn’t cause any problems.

Conclusion

Why bother with this? After all, for a few hundred dollars you can have a similarly effective commercial system you can install in your building. The problem is that these things add up quickly. The more of your essential infrastructure you can get for free and build independently of the system, the less interaction with the system you’ll be forced to have.

If you decide to use the system to purify your water, I recommend you check out the following manual:

Sand biofilter implementation guide

It should answer all your questions. The manuals are meant for aid workers who will mass produce these things for African peasants.  Happy filtering!

Among the first order expenses and logistical problems to address when you have infrastructure is the question of energy. The conventional model of energy management is that a building should be some flimsy and empty box with energy, water, gas and oil being piped into it from the outside. In other words, conventional buildings are useless without being connected to a grid of electric cables, gas pipelines and sewer systems. This is obviously not appropriate for our projects.

The focus of this installment of the fascist workshop will be heating, which is usually the primary component of power consumption in northern climates. If you take care of heating and cooking, the rest of the power needs can be met with a minimalistic electric system involving batteries and solar panels.

The easiest source of fuel for heating is undoubtedly wood, especially in the countryside. But conventional fireplaces have many disadvantages:

• They’re expensive and complex to install
• Hard to maintain, and dangerous in case of creosote build-up
• Lots of wood is required
• Fire needs constant maintenance
• The temperature will fluctuate wildly between too hot and too cold

But in the past decade, the DIY crowd has been working on a completely new type of wood heating system: the rocket mass heater. This is an adaptation of the great rocket stove system, developed by whites to help brown people in the third world. The rocket stove is a way to use high speed air currents to burn wood at high temperatures. The higher temperatures means the wood burns more efficiently and cleanly. This makes it great for cooking, especially indoors in mud huts.

The problem, of course, is that the rocket stove burns wood VERY quickly. Far too quickly to properly heat a space; you would have to start new fires every 30 minutes to keep the room temperature at a comfortable level. So how do we take advantage of the rocket stove’s high efficiency and clean burn, without having to constantly monitor and adjust the fire? Enter the rocket mass heater.

The basic concept is that instead of heating the air in the building, the rocket stove will heat a large, heavy mass, which will in turn slowly release it’s energy over time to keep the room temperature stable. This way, it doesn’t matter that the wood burns within a few minutes; temperature fluctuations will be kept minimal. Another advantage is that since the fire’s energy is stored inside the mass, an air leak will not immediately require additional heating to restore the ambient temperature.

Materials

You can’t just buy a rocket mass heater system; the only way to get it is to make it yourself. But the good news is that doing so is accessible to the average bad goy, both in terms of money and skill requirements. The materials necessary are as follows:

• Chimney piping
• Steel drum (a used oil drum will do)
• Fire-resistant bricks
• Cement for the bricks
• Source of mass (cob will do fine here!)
• Insulation (for the combustion chamber)

As always, you should try to get these materials for free (look for classified ads giving away free bricks, or demolition sites throwing away bricks and piping). With a little bit of searching you should be able to get the necessary materials for next to nothing.

Concept

The rocket mass heater has several special features that distinguish it from a conventional stove or fireplace. Let’s look at them in turn.

First, the rocket stove has a pipe for a fuel intake system, situated at the bottom of the stove. This is unlike a normal stove, in which you just put logs in the combustion chamber. Instead, you put smaller sticks in the fuel intake pipe, and only the tips will burn in the combustion chamber. As the sticks burn, they slide downwards until all the fuel is consumed.

Second, the gases and smoke from the combustion chamber don’t escape directly through the chimney and outside, but are instead trapped in the steel drum. This means that no hot air is lost through the chimney, but instead is radiated through the steel drum. Also, the trapped gases and particles are eventually burned as well in the high temperature, which increases the stove’s fuel efficiency.

Third, once the air leaves the steel drum through the output pipe at the bottom of the drum, it doesn’t go straight outside (which would also waste heat) but instead the chimney is embedded in a mass of cob, concrete or bricks, which absorbs any remaining heat before the chimney leaves the house.

Fourth, several aspects of the design are tweaked to maximize the air-flow inside the combustion chamber. There is an air intake vent, typically near the floor (where the air is coldest). The chimney above the combustion chamber is insulated to increase the temperature of the air. By increasing the temperature difference, a stronger air-flow is generated, which makes the fire burn hotter. As a result of this cycle, the rocket stove burns at much higher temperatures than a conventional stove.

Alternate uses

Being a very high efficiency system, the rocket stove can be put to different uses. As we’ve seen, the most obvious uses are for room heating and cooking. These require little further explanation.

The rocket stove can be connected to a Stirling engine to generate quiet and safe electric power. The Stirling engine, unlike a steam engine which isn’t closely monitored, won’t explode.

It’s also possible to heat a water tank with the rocket stove, providing hot water without having a electric water heater. However, any kind of hot water tank system is somewhat inefficient. Better to use a on-demand water heater using propane or electricity, which insures that only the required water is heated. But if propane and electricity are a rare resource, the rocket stove water heater is a great idea.

A clever builder can create a central stove which serves a variety of different purposes, by connecting the combustion chamber to several different appliances by a system of pipes. Levers could redirect the hot air from one appliance to another.

Conclusion

The rocket stove is a versatile concept that can really make our lives easier if we’re operating independently from the system’s resources. And being cheap and simple to make ourselves, it becomes a key component of our infrastructure.

As with anything, of course, it does have drawbacks. If you’re in a urban environment, access to free fuel will be limited, unlike in the countryside where dead trees, fallen branches and agricultural waste can be acquired without great effort. If you use it as your main cooking system, you’ll forego the convenience of modern gas or electric stoves.

If you decide to build your own rocket stove, there will probably be people in your area who can coach you about it. Otherwise, make sure to read up on the finer details and watch some of the many videos available on the subject.

An important and usually expensive part of any building project, whether it’s a house, a bunker or a shed, is the walls and their foundations. Using conventional techniques, you’ll need materials like bricks, 2×4 wood beams, poured concrete for the foundations, and insulating foam if the building will be heated. Also, even a minor mistake in the carpentry can spell disaster, so a lot of care and experience is necessary to make a solid wall. So how did dirt poor European peasants manage to build their own homes in the past?

One of the most popular medieval techniques for building walls was cob. Basically, it means sculpting the walls with mud. You might think with horror that this would result in the dreaded African mud huts…

But of course, even mud, when shaped with European ingenuity, can be used to make wonderfully solid walls and a comfortable habitat. Some cob buildings built in the middle ages are still in use today, and are quite cozy even by modern standards.

 

Hippies, always on the lookout for ways to save the earth and avoid getting a job, started experimenting with the cob technique back in the 1970’s, seduced by the prospect of having a free house and using natural materials. Many people started building with cob, and improved on ancient techniques. One of the main sources of this experimentation was the Oregon Cob Company, and the modernized, improved cob technique is sometimes called “Oregon cob”.

The material

While I referred to cob as “mud” previously, in fact it’s a combination of three ingredients: sand, clay and straw. The clay makes the material stick together, acting as a cement; however, clay shrinks and cracks as it dries. The sand’s role is to prevent the cracking (sand doesn’t shrink as it dries.). The straw acts like a reinforcing fiber that makes the material much stronger, and resistant against earthquakes (unlike adobe bricks, which crumble during earthquakes). All three of these materials can be acquired for free, or very cheaply.

As a general rule, you won’t want to ferry loads of sand and clay to the construction site; the dirt on the site will be used as a base. All soil already has a certain ratio of sand and clay. You have to test this ratio by putting the dirt in a jar, adding water, shaking the contents vigorously and letting it settle. The result will be a series of layers (sand and clay have different densities, and so the sand will be at the bottom and the clay on top). Then if the ratio is off, just add an appropriate amount of sand or clay (good cob usually has 3-4 parts sand for 1 part clay).

Then straw and water is adder to the mixture until it forms a thick, fibrous paste. Since every soil is somewhat different, it’s a good idea to do preliminary tests with soil from various places on the building site, and experiment with slightly different ratios of materials. Make tiny little walls, let them dry and check which one is stronger to know your best bet for the final product.

The geometry

A structural cob wall (meant to support a roof) will be very thick, often 1.5 to 2 feet wide. It’s widest at the base and tapers as it’s built up. The extremely wide base means that no foundation is necessary; the wall can be built directly on the ground without danger of sinking into the earth.

However, while it’s not necessary to dig a foundation (beyond just equalizing the terrain), placing the cob on a stem wall is necessary. The greatest enemy of cob is water accumulation; if the cob wall soaks water, it can collapse. A stem wall, which is just a short wall built of stones or some other water resistant material, which serves as a platform on which to start laying the cob. A drainage ditch (a ditch filled with gravel) should also be placed if there’s any threat of water accumulation at the base of the wall.

The top of openings (for windows and doors) should be supported with a wooden brace, to avoid the material above the opening from collapsing.

The technique

The ingredients for the cob are traditionally placed in a basin, and mixed with bare feet by trampling it until a good texture is felt. The Oregon Cob people have better techniques, such as placing the materials in a canvas sheet and mixing it with two people holding the corners.

It’s also possible to use a cement mixer.

Cob is generally placed in lumps, laid down like wet bricks. A layer of cob should be placed on a rough, uneven surface to insure a good bond. For this reason, each layer is poked with a stick to create countless small holes before letting it dry. Each layer should dry completely before placing the next; otherwise gravity will flatten the material, and the wall will “bulge”. If this happens, you can just cut off the excess material with a machete; most cob mistakes can be corrected easily like this, which is why it’s such a forgiving technique. It’s more of a sculpture than a construction in this way.

Cordwood masonry

Cordwood (debarked round logs) can be stacked to make the walls, using the cob as a cement to hold it all together. Since mixing cob is time-consuming, this method will be faster than a pure cob wall, and will give better insulation (since the r-value of wood is better than earth). However, if there’s no wood available on the construction site, this can add hundreds of dollars to the total costs.

Appraisal and further readings

The point of this introduction to cob is to allow you to judge if the technique is appropriate to your project. From the perspective of a fascist group needing to erect some sort of building, the technique offers the following pros and cons:

Positive:

• Dirt cheap (ha!).
• Can be achieved by amateurs.
• Can be done in total secrecy (you won’t NEED to hire a contractor).
• Extraordinary thermal mass.
• Even a rpg probably wouldn’t get through a 2-feet thick wall (… I haven’t tested that one yet)
• Building will last forever if maintained once every few decades

Negatives:

• More labour intensive than conventional construction
• Above ground, so harder to hide than an underground construction system
• Weak insulation unless you add vermiculite to the cob (a volcanic stone)
• Needs careful protection against water in high rainfall areas

If you’re going to go ahead with this system, you should read up on all the technicalities. There’s several books available, and much information online as well. I recommend The hand-sculpted house, which includes information on roof systems and all sorts of interesting advice related to construction, planning and finding cheap/free land.

Some of you may wonder about the relevance of having articles on crafts and construction projects on a fascist magazine. You may think it’s for some vague appeal to “SWPL” interests, or a plea for young people to learn trades to prepare for the future. Well, not quite.

The projects and approaches we’ll be covering here won’t be conventional stuff you could earn a living with in society; it’s all geared towards a specific end. That end is the building and upgrading of your group’s base of operations. If this sounds like an impossibly difficult project, that’s because it would be, without the approaches we’ll cover in this series. But it’s something that will have to be done by your group eventually.

If your goal is to implement the natural order in your life and your community (and eventually, in your nation), you can’t rely on the existing social structures. This is because those structures are inadequate, having been developed to support a modernist lifestyle, but also because the System’s institutions will be hostile to your goals and will deny any attempt to use it’s resources. To build anything of lasting effect, you’ll have to rely on yourself, which is to say you’ll have to develop your own resources. This means staying away from the System and building your own parallel system with your comrades.

The articles in this series will be geared towards this scenario. In other words, the emphasis will be on getting things done within the following constraints:

• Limited or no budget
• No expertise in difficult construction techniques
• Can be maintained without reliance on the System
• Can be built and operated on a very low profile (doesn’t require large machinery, doesn’t produce loud noises, is not connected to the grid, is easy to hide, etc)

The purpose of these articles are two fold. First, if you’re ready to start building infrastructure for your group, you’ll get many great suggestions and avenues for research to help you design and upgrade your structures. Second, if you don’t have a group, or never thought to build structures yourself, this series should dramatically expand your idea of what’s possible these days even with a minimal budget and no skills or experience.

We’ve already got quite a few subjects lined up for the future on these topics. Some of the things you can expect for the future are:

• How to build solid walls using mud and straw.
• How to make high efficiency heating systems for dirt cheap.
• How to make water filtering systems without buying commercial components.
• How to build hidden underground buildings without expensive equipment.
• How to make reliable water and fuel tanks on the cheap.
• How to power tractors and generators with firewood instead of diesel.
• How to grow food without attracting attention.

So hang on to your hats! The Fascist Workshop is opening soon!