Essential abilities...

[Spade]

Good posts guys I ment to follow this tread closer but my internet has been down. I agree about the insuranse post, a good way to put it. It's funny that the dad thing got brought up. I was just talking with my father-in-law the other day how my dad did not teach me alot of the skills I now wish I had, such as hunting, skinning, & the sort. However my father-in-law jumped in & took me under his wing a lot of this. I have only been hunting whitetail for the past four years. So here is my father-in-law trying to teach a 30 year old guy how to skin a deer. Good times. Just goes to show you that if you really want to learn something it is never to late.

[Bill Bryant]

• Safely and accurately run a table saw, router table, and compound sliding miter saw
• Safely and accurately run a metal lathe, end mill, and drill press
• Pilot a single engine aircraft
• Kill, skin, cook, and eat a rabbit, squirrel, and rattlesnake
• Run a welder
• Solder a resistor or capacitor into a circuit board

[MSP "Sarge"]

Ride and take care of a horse.
Milk a cow or goat.

[RogerinTPA]

Make a fire without matches (Fire saw, bow, spindle, static electrical, using car bat, etc..)

Make/collect water and make potable (Solar still, boiling, iodine tabs, filtering, etc..).

[Abraxas]

Also remember to make this a family project. With their 'buy in" you'll probably find a lot more support than if you were doing this on your own. Just find the balance.

That is a trick in and of itself. Mine does not care that I have this interest, she simply sees it as silliness.

[Gutshot John]

Like farting the theme to "Jaws".

I'd pay good money to see that.

[MarshallDodge]

Another one-
Understanding the basics of how an internal combustion engine works including fuel, spark, compression, and how to check for them.

When I was younger I would pick lawnmowers out of the trash and take them home. Most of the time they just needed a minor tune up or the carburetor cleaned. One of them was a really nice Honda that just had the blade put on backward. I would sell them pretty quick which helped put the down payment on my first house.

Recently the maintenance guy at my office was tossing two generators. I brought them home and got both of them running in about 10 minutes. One of them does not make any power but I plugged a sawzall into the other one and it runs it just fine. I will probably hold on to them in case a neighbor or friend could use one in a catastrophe.

[jtb0311]

I delivered my own daughter last November. We'd decided on a home birth, assisted by licensed nurse midwives.

I could deliver a baby again.

[Honu]

I guess prepared for what ? *since this is a disaster prepared forum ? I will go with prepared for a disaster

most important in some sense is medical !! know how to set a broken bone properly and or most other medical emergencies etc..

you can be the toughest most accurate shooter who can milk skin and make clothes out of the bear you just killed

but if you break a leg and cant set it proper you are dead !!!!

have you ever severed a artery then fixed it and mended yourself up on your own ?

not that the others are not good and cool to learn as I would like to learn more about preparing food for long term storage that I shot ! OK I got a dead deer now what can I do to keep the meat and use it a long time ?

but to me its medical emergencies that are going to be the most vital thing to know in some sense ? hope to never use them

maybe be prepared in basic stuff for your area ? I know I can live on a tropical island since I am from them
and have lived off the land for some time with my buddy just to see how it would be !!! and its tough to do !!
but we did it and learned a ton from it

[MSP "Sarge"]

Honu makes a good point. Medical Emergencies