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Dehydrating hummus is a good lightweight tasty lunch treat for me. I use it with ryveta crackers and sometimes add a little piece of dried tomato and cheese.

Carrie describes how you make dried hummus.

I decided to get a 'light my fire' scout fire lighting steel. It's designed to easily light a stove or fire even when wet. It's "approved by the International Survival Instructors Association" so should be a good bit of safety gear when playing in the wilderness.

So does it really work when wet? We tested it in this video

Recently I posted about making my own Biltong, which is a dried South African meat. We often have used this meat to take on hiking or bushwalking trips. It's lightweight and delicious.

Well the good news is that our test run worked great. The meat took about 5 days to dry, due to it being cut in larger strips and that I wanted a drier meat.

I learned that some of the steaks were a little to wide and curled over. One had to be thrown out as some mould had grown on it where it had curled around.

For flavour I used a coriander seeds, chilli flakes and some black pepper. The weight savings is at least 1/2. I'll have more specific before and after weights next time I make some.

The video below will help you to make your own biltong.

We've tried out the Durafix Welding system. Have a look at our video review so see how we went with it. The manufacturer claims it can weld/solder any non ferrous metal, apart from stainless steel. So that means aluminium, die-cast, pot-metal, white-Metal, zinc based alloys and even galvanised without specialist welding equipment.

In brief, Durafix...

1. is low cost - about $60 for 22 rods
2. is simple - no flux and all you need is a clean flame such as a Bhutane burner
3. appears to be quite strong - but we'll need to test this further to see how far it can go
4. has a multitude of uses in the campers shed - repairs and small construction jobs.

Also, the Durafix website has some instructional videos that are worth checking out.