How to pull out a car from a frozen lake… Russian style

By Lloyd Kahn on December 16, 2013

From Lew Lewandowski

About Lloyd Kahn

Lloyd Kahn started building his own home in the early '60s and went on to publish books showing homeowners how they could build their own homes with their own hands. He got his start in publishing by working as the shelter editor of the Whole Earth Catalog with Stewart Brand in the late '60s. He has since authored six highly-graphic books on homemade building, all of which are interrelated. The books, "The Shelter Library Of Building Books," include Shelter, Shelter II (1978), Home Work (2004), Builders of the Pacific Coast (2008), Tiny Homes (2012), and Tiny Homes on the Move (2014). Lloyd operates from Northern California studio built of recycled lumber, set in the midst of a vegetable garden, and hooked into the world via five Mac computers. You can check out videos (one with over 450,000 views) on Lloyd by doing a search on YouTube:
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7 Responses to How to pull out a car from a frozen lake… Russian style

  3. I had the privilege of watching the last full-time builder of wooden covered bridges as he put one up in rural Georgia (replacing a 150-year-old one local morons had torched for fun). He and his crew built the whole thing on one side of the creek. Then, they built a temporary scaffolding out of cribbing, put rollers atop it, and used a capstan (like these Russians are using) to pull the whole thing inch-by-inch across the creek using the power of one rather old mule. Ancient works like the pyramids look impossible to us, but I'm guessing early Americans understood that human being can move nearly anything by combining patience and leverage – the latter in the form of capstans, levers and pulleys.

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  5. Lloyd, thanks for the kind words! Here's the guy I watched. I am going to go out on a limb here and guarantee 1) you'll like this, and 2) if you and Mr. Graton ever met, you'd have a hell of a lot to talk about: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IP9zyrc6ykE.

    And I stand corrected – the bridge I saw being reconstructed, this one: http://www.thomastonchamber.com/auchumpkee.html was taken out by a flood, not a fire, in 1994, I saw it being rebuilt in in 1998. Graton told me he often replaces burned bridges, hence my confusion.

    BTW, I am a great fan of your blog – what we find interesting in life seems to perfectly coincide. I commend you on all the good you are doing to spread your knowledge to the next generation. I recall your writing here that you saw something very special in the current crop of 20-somethings, and I believe that might be the first positive remark I've read on the internet about that generation – thanks for giving me hope! Brad Lemley

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  6. I grew up in the 1970's on David Macaullay's books – 'City,' 'Pyramid,' 'Cathedral.' I especially loved the renderings of the human hamster wheels used to build the French cathedrals… glad to see some things can't be improved-upon!

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  7. a frozen story, of survival…wow

    http://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/23/frozen-patients-being-brought-back-to-life.html

    He was found frozen in a snowbank, with no pulse — and he survived

    Thanks to new technology and an evolving understanding of what it means to be dead, doctors are increasingly able to bring “frozen” people back from the brink.

    “We’ve learned that there really is no temperature so low that you shouldn’t try to save someone,” University of Manitoba thermophysiologist Gordon Giesbrecht, informally known among hypothermia scholars as “Professor Popsicle,” told Outside.

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