I was going to rush a new episode of The Practical Woodsman out this week, but I’ve decided not to do it. I’ve probably had more ongoing, simultaneous projects going on this week than at any time since I started Practical Woodsman - and I’ve been turning the camera on while I work on them - but they just might not be very interesting to most folks.

I’ve been working on a DIY backwoods portable solar charger support tilt stand, that has been a bigger challenge than I thought it would be.

I upgraded a 23-year-old cotton canvas jacket by waxing it and making it waterproof (it also now looks a lot sexier). By the way, I used the recycled wax of a large candle for that.

I’ve been working on a DIY oil lantern/stove combination that runs off paraffin, lamp oil, cintronella, etc. repurposed from an old storm lantern. I’m loving this. No more separate stove and lamp, stove fuel and lamp fuel. It can just all be done with a single setup.

I’ve been working on putting together a DIY ...

On December 1976, a crew was filming an episode of The Six Million Dollar Man inside a funhouse at an amusement park in Long Beach, California. There was a body hanging from the ceiling, painted orange, part of the ride. A crew member went to move it out of the shot and its arm came off in his hand.

There was bone inside it.

The dummy was a man named Elmer McCurdy, and he had been dead since 1911.

McCurdy was, by any measure, one of the worst criminals in the history of the American West. He was born in Maine in 1880 to a teenage mother, learned about explosives in the Army, drank heavily, could not hold a job as a plumber, and decided to become an outlaw instead.

His first big job was a train near Lenapah, Oklahoma. He got to the safe. He then used so much nitroglycerin on it that he melted the silver coins inside and fused them to the wreckage. His crew sat there scraping metal off the frame.

He tried a bank in Chautauqua, Kansas next. He spent hours chipping through the outer wall, blew the vault, destroyed...