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    Poor Man's Wilderness Survival Kit: Assembling Your Emergency Gear for Little or No Money
    Poor Man's Wilderness Survival Kit: Assembling Your Emergency Gear for Little or No Money
    Poor Man's Wilderness Survival Kit: Assembling Your Emergency Gear for Little or No Money
    Ebook197 pages1 hour

    Poor Man's Wilderness Survival Kit: Assembling Your Emergency Gear for Little or No Money

    By James Ballou

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    You don't need to spend hundreds of dollars on the latest and greatest emergency survival gear for your outdoor adventures when you can assemble a functional, well-stocked kit for little or no money! Best-selling preparedness author Jim Ballou shows you exactly how to do it with this guide to collecting no-nonsense, get-the-job-done-in-an-emergency gear and packaging it in self-contained, portable kits that are always ready to grab and go.

    Instead of expensive tents, sheath knives, sleeping bags, and other conventional outdoor gear, Jim focuses on compact, lightweight, and even disposable, use-once-and-discard emergency equipment, and all of it dirt cheap! Learn how to:

    Find standard survival kit components at the lowest prices
    Create a poor man's survival kit for free from common household items
    Collect or create your own edged tools, water containers, cookware, fire- and shelter-making gear, and weapons for very little money
    Assemble a complete kit of new gear for under $10

    Dozens of photos show examples of inexpensive but functional wilderness survival kits, as well as step-by-step instructions for creating your own poor man's gear. If you are a hiker, hunter, camper, preparedness type, homeless nomad, or other wilderness adventurer operating within a narrow budget, this book is for you!

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPrepper Press
    Release dateJan 21, 2018
    ISBN9781939473660
    Poor Man's Wilderness Survival Kit: Assembling Your Emergency Gear for Little or No Money
    Author

    James Ballou

    Jim Ballou has been writing as a hobby for over twenty years. He has over a dozen titles in print. Additionally, he has written more than sixty magazine articles that have appeared in five different periodicals, including The Backwoodsman, Backwoods Home Magazine, Wilderness Way Magazine, Primitive Archer, Modern Survival Magazine, and The Survivalist Blog. Ballou’s career has been in insurance sales, but his hobbies have included (among other things) hunting, fishing, camping, practicing outdoor skills, the shooting sports, archery, blacksmithing, leathercraft, treasure hunting, playing guitar, spending time with his wife and kids, and learning about history as well as so many other things. He first became interested in wilderness survival as a kid when he read the book, My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George, after first watching the movie version in the theater at least forty-five years ago. Ballou served four years in the United States Army during the mid-late 1980s. He became a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne Division and left military service honorably after his enlistment ended with the rank of Sergeant E5. Although his four-year enlistment was entirely during peacetime, he considers the training he received, which included armorer’s school, jungle operations training in Panama, etc., to have been valuable on many levels. He calls North Idaho home.

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      Book preview

      Poor Man's Wilderness Survival Kit - James Ballou

      The Poor Man’s Wilderness Survival Kit:

      Assembling Your Emergency Gear for Little or No Money

      by James Ballou

      Copyright © 2013 by James Ballou

      ISBN: 978-1-943544-08-0

      Published by Prepper Press

      Post-Apocalyptic Fiction & Survival Nonfiction

      www.PrepperPress.com

      TABLE OF CONTENTS

      Title Page

      Warning

      Introduction

      Chapter One - Poor Man’s Kit Container

      Chapter Two - Poor Man’s Edged Tools

      Chapter Three - Poor Man’s Water Containers

      Chapter Four - Poor Man’s Wilderness Cookware

      Chapter Five - Poor Man’s Fire Kit

      Chapter Six - Poor Man’s Shelter

      Chapter Seven - Survival Cord for the Poor Man’s Kit

      Chapter Eight - Poor Man’s Improvised Fishing Tackle

      Chapter Nine - Poor Man’s Survival Weapons

      Chapter Ten - How Much Survival Gear Would a Poor Man Carry, Anyway?

      Chapter Eleven - A Few Examples of Inexpensive but Functional Wilderness Survival Kits

      Chapter Twelve - Additional Poor Man’s Survival Kit Tools

      Final Thoughts

      WARNING

      The information in this book is based on the experiences, research, and beliefs of the author and cannot be duplicated exactly by readers. The author, publisher, and distributors of this book disclaim any liability from any damage or injury of any type that a reader or user of information contained in this book may incur from the use or misuse of said information. This book is for academic study only .

      INTRODUCTION

      The purpose of this book is to offer the reader a variety of ideas to create or acquire wilderness survival gear on a strictly limited budget, then organize the pertinent gear into self‐contained, portable, emergency survival kits. Readers will certainly find no shortage of books and websites these days that provide comprehensive information about survival kits, bug‐out bags, and all the latest and best outdoor gear, but throughout this book we will explore the prospect of assembling usable wilderness survival kits at very little cost, or in some instances with no money investment at all.

      I believe this is a legitimate and very useful focus for a survival book in our present economy, where so many people are unemployed, losing their homes to foreclosure, having to pay more than $3 per gallon for gasoline, and simply struggling to make ends meet. Regardless of the financial stresses, outdoor survival gear will always be important for hikers, hunters, campers, firewood gatherers, homeless nomads, or other wilderness adventurers, because the right equipment could be a contributing factor affecting an individual’s well‐being in the elements.

      Basic survival kit items displayed in several of the fundamental survival requirement categories. No single item in this photo cost more than $2, and that wooden whistle, which is very loud, was homemade.

      Even those who can afford to assemble an elaborate survival kit consisting of the latest and most expensive components may wish to assemble a few additional kits for backup survival caches. Those extra kits ideally will consist mainly of low‐budget supplies, because as strictly backup systems they will most likely not be needed.

      Ready‐made kits are available from numerous sources, but they can be costly and their scope is very generic. Because survival requirements can be different from one person to another, it seems logical to customize your survival or outdoor kit to address your own unique priorities. A kit for someone living in southern Alabama will differ from one intended for use in northern Minnesota. Hunters in the fall season would have different weather concerns than summer campers or winter cross‐country skiers. A knife and a shoelace could be lifesaving tools to the guy who knows how to build and use a bow drill for making fire but totally useless to someone without the necessary skills.

      Assembling a personalized, comprehensive wilderness survival kit with the highest quality or the latest, most innovative, or most efficient products available can easily add up to well over several hundred dollars, and I know an awful lot of people who would not easily be able to afford that kind of an investment. Fortunately, we do not have to spend big bucks to accomplish the basic task.

      There undoubtedly will be those who read this book and wonder why anyone would willingly opt for inferior or makeshift poor man’s gear to trust his life on while clearly superior equipment is available. And I think that’s a valid question to ask. Readers might wonder if, with this book, I am advocating always going cheap. I would answer that with a no—at least not advocating always going cheap for everyone. If you can afford the best outdoor gear on the market, by all means get it!

      What I am mainly trying to achieve with this book is to illustrate some workable ideas for those who may be forced to operate within a narrow budget and provide some hopefully intriguing and entertaining tidbits in the process. And even if you do happen to have the resources and end up acquiring all the latest and best gear, there are no guarantees that you would actually have that equipment with you when an emergency survival scenario occurs. You might have to assemble your adventure kit in a place and time not of your choosing, for whatever unforeseen reason, with whatever you find available then. So the distinction I would stress here is that the equipment described in this book would not necessarily constitute my first choice items. They are merely additional possibilities.

      So this book is really about exploring as many alternatives to the more conventional gear as its scope will allow and introduce you to a variety of intriguing ideas on the subject. I hope it will inspire you to devise your own great wilderness kits and assemble them as economically as possible.

      CHAPTER ONE

      Poor Man’s Kit Container

      Regardless of what size we aim to build our kit or the specific purposes we want it to address, it makes sense to start with what to pack it in. Every type of kit—be it a first‐aid kit, a field shaving kit, a gun‐cleaning kit, or a wilderness survival kit like we are talking about here—needs to be housed in some type of container to keep its components together and secure.

      Small, pocket‐sized kits have been packed by wilderness travelers in such containers as belt pouches; those old metal Band‐Aid cans; tough plastic waterproof boxes; and even compact tobacco tins, spice tins, tea canisters, and Altoids mint tins. Larger kits are commonly housed in shoulder bags, duffel bags, fanny packs, or backpacks.

      In my view, the most important criteria for the kit container should be that it serves to securely retain and protect the important contents in the most conveniently portable way possible. For this discussion, our chosen container should also be obtainable at little or no cost.

      Some examples of survival kit containers for small- to medium-sized kits, including a nylon cloth belt pouch, an aluminum box with locking lid, Altoids mints tin, small metal coffee can, metal spice canister, metal Band-Aid box, cat food can with plastic lid, small plastic first-aid kit box, and a plastic bottle with screw-on lid. Of these, the belt pouch at $12 was the most expensive.

      Either a daypack or a canvas bag, commonly found on the cheap at secondhand sales, will serve as a conveniently portable kit container for a medium large survival kit.

      An Altoids mints box can be a convenient container for a very small pocket outdoor survival kit because it is relatively small and flat.

      DEFINING THE APPLICATION REQUIREMENTS FOR THE KIT

      The first variable you should define before settling upon one type of container or another is the anticipated scope of your individual kit’s application, which will help you decide on the size parameters for the completed kit.

      For example, if its intended purpose is merely to help us survive a night or two

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