“Handy farm devices and how to make them“, Rolfe Cobleigh, 1912.
Practical Conservation Handbooks: More Excellent DIY Resources
The British charity BTCV has an interesting collection of practical handbooks online. They all concern traditional practices and give a wealth of how-to details, including many drawings. Update December 2: BTCV has taken the books offline.
Related resources:
Exhibiting the Latest Progress in Machines, Motors, and the Transmission of Power (1892)
“Modern mechanism; exhibiting the latest progress in machines, motors, and the transmission of power“, Benjamin Park (1892).
Compendium of Useful Information
“Access to 2 gigabytes of information about sustainable and resilient living that meets the challenges of peak energy, climate instability, economic irrationality, toxic politics, war and violence.”
Compendium of useful information – version 1.0, september 3, 2010. The page reminds a lot of the 13 gigabyte database set up by Alex Weir (previously: How to make everything yourself – online low-tech resources), and from a quick overview I learn that many of the same sources are listed.
However, the list is better organised and also seems to contain quite a few DIY-resources which I did not see before.
Related: the recent launches of the Green Wizard Forums and the UNESCO Traditional Knowledge Base. Picture: totally solar heated house.
Green Wizards
“One of the things the soon-to-be-deindustrializing world most needs just now is green wizards. By this I mean individuals who are willing to take on the responsibility to learn, practice, and thoroughly master a set of unpopular but valuable skills – the skills of the old appropriate tech movement – and share them with their neighbors when the day comes that their neighbors are willing to learn”. Green Wizard Forums. (+ criticism & response).
Chronological and Thematic Database on the History of Information and Media
From Cave Paintings to the Internet is “designed to help you follow the development of information and media, and attitudes about them, from the beginning of records to the present. Containing annotated references to discoveries, developments of a social, scientific, theoretical or technological nature, as well as references to physical books, documents, artifacts, art works, and to websites and other digital media, it arranges, both chronologically and thematically, selected historical examples and recent developments of the methods used to record, distribute, exchange, organize, store, and search information. The database is designed to allow you to approach the topics in a wide variety of ways.”
Illustration: coptic bookbinding.
