Home Safety

Owning a knife can be really helpful, especially if you go camping or engage in any other outdoor activities that may require you to use a knife. Still, a knife comes with many benefits regardless of use – and this is why you have to protect it properly or know what to do when such a tool has been rendered useless.

Naturally, we refer to rust – Iron (III) Oxide which is formed when the Iron of the knife’s blade combines with the Oxygen present in the atmosphere. While some of you may prefer using a survival knife, given that these don’t rust easily, most of the knives we own will most likely be affected by rust – depending on the environment we keep them in.

Therefore, in today’s article, we’ll be taking a closer look at rust, rusty knives, and we’ll give you 5 tips to help you fix a rusty blade and make your knife look brand new!

The Cause of Rust

Before talking about how to fix it, it’s important to know what exactly causes rust so that you know how to prevent it from happening.

There are three main ingredients that cause your knife to rust, namely water, oxygen, and iron. Obviously, all of them are required to come in contact. Iron is found in the knife’s blade, oxygen is everywhere around the knife itself, and water – mostly in the form of moisture – will favor the formation of rust.

Naturally, you have no influence over the first two ingredients. You can’t keep the oxygen away from a knife and you certainly can’t use it if it has no blade. What you can keep away from the knife is moisture.

However, keep in mind that moisture does not have to be liquid, so to speak. For example, humid air is enough to cause rust. 

Basically, you have to keep these three ingredients away from each other if you don’t want your knife to rust – shortly put, keep your blade away from moisture.

Types of Steel

The material from which the blade of a knife is made can influence the time when rust forms. The blade can be made of either Stainless steel or Carbon steel. Carbon steel comes with additional carbon in its composition (around 0.5% to 1.5% carbon), while Stainless steel comes with Chromium (12.5% to 13.5%).

Carbon steel knives, while durable and very strong, are also prone to corrosion if they are not being taken care of. Such knives will easily rust in acidic or humid environments.

On the other hand, the Chromium inside a Stainless-steel blade creates an oxide layer on its surface, preventing the steel from further oxidation. Therefore, the corrosion is slowed down – hence the name Stainless.

Ways to Fix a Rusty Knife

Given that a high-quality knife is a valuable – and sometimes pricey – tool, you must know how to fix a rusty one. However, if you don’t, then you’ve come to the right place.

In the following lines, we’ll show you five of the best ways to deal with a rusty knife and make it as sharp and shiny as it was when you first bought it.

 

• Baking Soda

 

The use of baking soda is one of the easiest ways through which you can fix a rusty knife. First, you have to apply water to the rusted area and then sprinkle some baking soda on it. 

The baking soda that comes in contact with the wet area should stick to it. You should also remove any excess baking soda by gently tapping the knife.

After a couple of minutes, scrub the area covered by baking soda with a wet scrubbing pad. Remember that the scrubbing pad must be wet at all times while doing this so that the blade doesn’t get damaged.

With a few minutes of scrubbing, the rust should come off. If required, you can repeat the process. After the rust is gone, rinse the knife with water and then wipe it dry.

 

• Vinegar

 

Just like baking soda, this is yet another item that you can find in your kitchen – no need for you to go shopping.

Start off by pouring white vinegar into a pan or a wide container. Then, take your knife and soak it in the vinegar – you can choose whether to soak the entire knife or just the blade. Keep it there for about 5 minutes. 

After that, wipe the blade with a cloth, rinse it with water, and then dry the knife.

Do not leave the blade in vinegar for too long, as the latter can damage or stain it.

 

• Chemical Solvents

 

Naturally, you can find numerous chemical solvents that can be used to remove rust from the blade of a knife. However, you have to make sure that they are not toxic, especially if you plan on preparing food with that knife.

Before spraying the knife with any solvent, make sure to clean it with oil in order to remove impurities or stains. After spraying it, use thin sandpaper to remove the rust stains. 

Repeat this process until the rust is gone, then wipe, rinse with water, and dry the knife.

 

• Sandpaper

 

Keep in mind that sandpaper is usually used for small rust stains. The rust stain has to be rubbed gently with a piece of fine sandpaper. Thicker sandpaper can damage your blade and larger rust stains can take quite some time to remove.

We recommend you use a 3000-grit product when scrubbing off the rust – any bigger value could remove the finish of the blade, scratch it, dull it, and damage it.

 

• Natural Products

 

Some methods don’t require any special products or equipment. For example, you can simply stick your knife in a potato and leave it there for a few hours. Potatoes contain oxalic acid, which is known to dissolve rust.

You could also stick the blade in rich soil – actually, plunge it in dirt – and then wipe and rinse it. However, make sure that the soil isn’t too rough, or you’ll damage the blade.

If you have a lemon available, cut it in half and rub it across the part of the blade that has rust on it. If you have to deal with a larger rust stain, you can let the lemon sit on the stain for an hour or so. Remember to scrub after you’re done!

Finally, if you don’t mind some tears, then you can stab an onion with your rusty knife, saw back and forth into it, and then scrub off the rust. The sulfenic acids within the onion will help dissolve iron oxide – the main compound of rust.

The Bottom Line

As you can see, you don’t need any special products to fix a rusty knife. In an emergency, you can just plunge it into the closest patch of rich soil and see the results for yourself.

Still, even if fixing a rusty knife seems quite easy to do, it is important that you know how to prevent rust from forming on the blade. In short, keep moisture away from it – avoid storing the knife in humid environments and, obviously, don’t leave it outside during the rainy season.

December 17th, 1905 was the birthday of Simo Häyhä, who was the world’s most successful sniper. Using an iron-sighted Mosin–Nagant in Finland’s Winter War, he had an astounding 505 confirmed sniper kills. He died April 1, 2002, at age 96. — SurvivalBlog Writing Contest Today we present another entry for Round 86 of the SurvivalBlog non-fiction writing contest. The more than $12,000 worth of prizes for this round include: First Prize: A $3,000 gift certificate towards a Sol-Ark Solar Generator from veteran-owned Portable Solar LLC. The only EMP Hardened Solar Generator System available to the public. A Gunsite Academy Three …

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Believe it or not, though Christmas is now only two days away, you still have time to order last-minute stocking stuffers from Amazon. If you’re looking for one last gift for that happy hiker in your life, there’s still plenty of time to download the Kindle e-book version of my book, Ramble On: A History of Hiking!

Ramble On: A History of Hiking is a great gift idea for anyone who loves hiking, and wishes to learn more about the rich and amazing history of one of the world’s top pastimes.

For more information on the book, and to purchase, please click here.

Thank you very much, and hope everyone has a very Merry Christmas!

Jeff
HikingintheSmokys.com
RockyMountainHikingTrails.com
HikinginGlacier.com
TetonHikingTrails.com
Ramble On: A History of Hiking

The boog may kickoff in VA if this idiot gets his way. CBSWTKR Reports that Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring has responded to the trend of Virginia counties passing Second Amendment sanctuary resolutions ahead of next year’s General Assembly, saying they are being “ginned up by the gun lobby” and that any new gun laws passed will […]

The post VA Elected Officials Threatening Citizens With Violence Over Gun Control! appeared first on Tactical Sh*t.

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I recently discovered that Google had banned / de-indexed this article. Apparently it is unsuitable for your consumption. Do you want to read it?

Original source: Gathering Intelligence And Collecting Information Of World Events

A pizza delivery driver shot and killed one teen and injured the other after they tried to rob him at gun point. There may even be speculation that the teens lured the driver into a trap using the address at a nearby apartment. FoxNewsHouston reports that a grand jury will decide if a pizza delivery driver […]

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What is a simple, fun, and free activity that you can do with your family that will help your children physically and mentally? Getting your children outside! Can I shout it any louder? Here at Hiking Lady I work to convince people that sometimes the simplest things are the best. Getting outside with your children …

The post Get Your Children Outside! New Study Proves They Will Be Happier Adults appeared first on Hiking Lady.

Delivering millions of gifts around the world is a complex and difficult task, even for Santa. Consider for a moment the impossibly short time he has to deliver these presents, coupled with the fact he has eight flying reindeer to manage along the way, it’s also a journey filled with many health and safety issues.

So what does Santa need to do to make sure he’s safe and that we all have a Merry Christmas? To answer that question we’ve compiled a list of 10 festive health and safety training solutions which those from the southern hemisphere might want to incorporate before implementing the world’s fastest delivery service:

1. Lone Workers

Ok, Santa’s got his herd of reindeers, but let’s face it, flying through the sky is a pretty lonely way of working. Moreover, it comes with added dangers – sudden illness or accident, abusive Christmas Eve revellers, or even mental health issues exacerbated by social isolation. Luckily for Santa, RoSPA offers a consultancy service for lone workers to help him deal with these challenges.

2. Confined Space

Clambering up and down chimneys is a tricky business, and let’s face it, Santa isn’t known for his svelte figure. Working in a confined space can be a dangerous activity, and the whole process of getting up and down the chimney stack presents a number of challenges – I’m sure we’ve all asked ourselves “Does Santa have 3 points of contact when climbing up a chimney?”

3.  Fire Risk Assessment

It’s going to be cold on Christmas Eve and many of us still have log fires, but do we think about poor old Santa descending the chimney whilst an inferno rages at the bottom? Before every descent, Father Christmas needs to carry out a full Fire Risk Assessment to ensure that he can deliver the presents safely. Otherwise it won’t just be chestnuts roasting on an open fire!

4. Machinery Safety

Whilst Christmas Eve is the culmination of Santa’s yearlong mission, the rest of the year is spent making all of the wonderful presents that make our dreams come true and ensure Dad has enough socks for another 12 months.

A lot of these presents require some pretty high risk machinery to make, so it’s important that Santa has a fully trained army of elves at his disposal. He’d be wise to put them all on a machinery safety training course first though.

5. Fleet Safety

Santa is responsible for a fleet of 8 reindeers and he has a duty of care to carry out the appropriate risk assessments. Of course, each reindeer may have different requirements – maybe Dasher’s a high risk sleigh puller, Comet dislikes working from height and Prancer struggles in icy conditions? Luckily, RoSPA offers a wide range of driver risk assessment options to help ensure that Santa and his fleet stay safe this festive season.

6. Manual Handling

Children can have lengthy present lists, so Santa’s sack can be extremely heavy and be quite the challenge to handle. The last thing we want is for Santa to suffer a work related MSD! Santa would be wise to consider manual handling training before hauling a heavy sack around all night.

7. COSHH

Christmas has always been that time of year when everyone gets a little carried away, exchanging all manner of trinkets and ‘gifts’. Unfortunately for Santa, he’s the one responsible for storing, using, handling and transporting these gifts and there’s no telling what hazardous substances that might be there. Luckily for Santa, RoSPA offers COSHH training to help avoid exposure to any harmful substances.

 8. Banksman

It’s very important for Santa’s little Elves to know how to effectively assist him when carrying out dangerous reversing manoeuvres with his sleigh. After all, driving through the night can be extremely hazardous, particularly through a cloudy sky. The last thing we want is for Santa to have a driving accident on Christmas Eve, so the Elves would be wise to undertake expert Banksman training.

9. First Aid at work

Poor old Santa has so little time and so many mince pies to digest on Christmas Eve. This large consumption of sweet delights could very well become a choking hazard if he’s not careful.  By undertaking First Aid at Work training, Santa can ensure he makes it through the night without any confectionery mishaps!

10. Work related stress

Finally, Christmas can be a stressful time of year for even the most seasoned festive supporter. Santa is no exception, he has a lot of pressure put on him and only one night to make it all happen. To avoid any stress reactions associated to work related stress, Santa would benefit from reading-up on how to prevent Work related stress.

And there you have it. For more information on any of RoSPA’s workplace safety training qualifications this Christmas, you can visit our website, email or call us on +44 (0)121 248 2233.

Tornadoes, flooding, and wildfires are just three examples of localized and very personal SHTF events that we’ve seen in the past year, and they illustrate the devastation of an event for which there is immediate early warning. We can be alerted to a tornado warning and seek cover. We can vacate our homes in case of flooding or an approaching wildfire. As we deal in the likelihood of SHTF scenarios, Mother Nature is 100%.

 

But on a regional or national scale, we’re looking at more unpredictable events for which there is little to no early warning: an electromagnetic pulse, or perhaps a cyber attack on critical infrastructure, or a financial or monetary breakdown that plunges millions into a very real SHTF scenario. The cyber attack on the New York Stock Exchange will have no direct effect on you, but the second- and thirdorder effects will be felt on every level and generate threats to your community. So what we should be preparing for is not the cyber attack itself, but for the follow-on effects of that cyber attack that will affect your community.

 

Regardless of the event, we need to be able to collect information to support decision making so we can keep our families safe. Should we bug in or bug out? If bugging out, which route should we take? If bugging in, how can we get early warning of approaching threats?

 

How to Remain At Ease in a SHTF Situation

 

I’m going to break down a few ways that we can reduce the uncertainty in an SHTF situation. I spent three years in Iraq and Afghanistan, and both of those countries were real life or death, 24/7 SHTF situations. As an intelligence analyst, my job was to keep the commander informed on the security situation and threat environment. His responsibility was to make decisions based on the intelligence we provided. If we had no incoming information, then we couldn’t produce intelligence. And this is why information is the basic building block of community security. If we want security in an SHTF scneario, then we need to know more about the threats. What we need is real-time intelligence.

 

In 2014, a small group of volunteers and I battle tracked the Ferguson riots. The first step of battle tracking began with a process I call Intelligence Preparation of the Community. (You can watch the entire webinar here.) We analyzed the strength, disposition, and capabilities of local security forces. Knowing what equipment they had enabled us to better understand how they would react to unrest. We similarly analyzed the protest groups and identified associated individuals.

 

What both of these groups had in common is that they were both producing information of intelligence value. Through something as simple as listening to the police scanner, our team was able to plot out the current reported locations of law enforcement and the National Guard. Meanwhile on Twitter, we scanned the accounts of known protestors for real-time information.

 

In the image below, we took information reported on local emergency frequencies and potted those locations on the map using Google Earth.’Warfighter 33′ was the callsign for the National Guard Tactical Operations Center, which was set up in the Target parking lot. We also pinned several National Guard posts as they reported their locations. It wasn’t rocket science, but it started to help us understand the security situation. This is a very rudimentary form of signals intelligence, or SIGINT.

 

Through the night, we continued to use photographs uploaded into social media and news articles in order to identify the photos’ locations. Then we plotted them on a map. Pretty soon, we have a very good idea of which areas were generally safe and which areas had the most activity as the riots progressed and eventually burnt out. Had we lived in Ferguson, we could have used this intelligence to navigate our way to friends and family, or to help friends and family navigate away from the threats. All this information was publicly available, so we call it Open Source Intelligence, or OSINT.

 

So what do I do if there’s a grid-down situation?

 

That certainly complicates things. Before I answer that question, I want to ask you one: on a scale of 1 to 10, how important is intelligence in a SHTF situation? (I would say 10, but I am admittedly a bit biased.)

 

First understand that there may still be electricity in a grid-down environment. As long as there are generators, and given that there’s not been an EMP, then someone somewhere will have electricity. My local law enforcement agency claims to have enough fuel for two weeks of backup power were things were to go sideways. That’s good to know, and is the benefit of intelligence collection before an SHTF event, as opposed to a post-SHTF scramble. If they’re powered up and communicating in a SHTF situation, or perhaps some ham radio operators are, then we still need the capabilities to listen in. Otherwise, we’re going to be at a severe disadvantage.

 

If there’s no power, then we’ll have to rely on Human Intelligence, called HUMINT. That means getting out and talking to people. It could mean a reconnaissance patrol. The horse-mounted cavalry were the eyes and ears of the commander before collection technology. Snipers and forward observers sitting in hide sides, whose responsibility it is to observe and report enemy activity, are often excellent intelligence collectors. An observation post equipped with a field phone, sending back intelligence information is another example.

 

While these are all military examples, there are similar community equivalents. Consider this: technology is a force multiplier. With SIGINT or OSINT, we can be very wide and very deep in our intelligence gathering. That’s a 1:n ratio. We have one collection platform, in this case a radio receiver, and we can scan a very wide band to collect information from anyone who’s transmitting. But when we deal with human intelligence, we’re often on a 1:1 ratio; that is, one collector speaking to one source at any given time. That’s a very slow and difficult way to do business.

 

So instead of 1:1, I want you to consider the scalability of that ratio. If one person is limited to gathering intelligence information from one person at at time, wouldn’t it makes sense to scale that ratio to 10:10 or 100:100? It absolutely would. Every set of eyes and ears is a sensor, so we as an intelligence element tasked with providing intelligence for community security should absolutely be interested in encouraging community members to passively collect lots of information. All that information is reported back to us, and then we’re engaged in the arduous task of compiling and evaluating that information in order to create intelligence.

 

Intelligence doesn’t produce itself, so it’s incumbent on us to build that capability. The more accurate information we have, the more wellinformed we can be. Without first being well-informed, making high-risk, time-sensitive decisions just got a whole lot more complicated.

 

Samuel Culper is the director of Forward Observer, a threat intelligence service that focuses on domestic SHTF issues. He’s a former military and contract intelligence analyst, and author of SHTF Intelligence: An Intelligence Analyst’s Guide to Community Security. You can find out more about the SHTF Intelligence Center at his website.