Re-learning hand tool operation is a challenge for anyone who grew up in the age of power tools – sure, you might know how to work a hand drill, for example, in principle, but have you ever actually spent time using it?

In a dire survival scenario, hand tools might be all you have at your avail and that means you have to have some basics, at least, and you have to know how to use them; her are some hand tools you should have in your tool collection at a minimum.

Cross-cut saw:  Very few people today have tried to cut through a large tree with a handsaw, imagine a SHTF situation where you can’t use or don’t want to use a noisy, smelly chainsaw.  Not hard to imagine actually, but as you look at the tree blocking the road, laying across your roof, or soon to be turned into your bug out cabin, you’ve got a lot of sawdust-making ahead of you.  This country was built with cross-cut saws, and while not as efficient as their internal combustion descendants, a pair of muscles and a sharp cross-cut will make short order of any tree outside our national parks.

Cross-cut saws come in one and two person versions that differ by length and handles. If you live in a place where you know you will need to cut trees, the two-man version is best. For some strange twist of physics, twice the manpower is more than twice as fast. But if space is an issue, the one-man version is smaller and a makeshift second handle can be bolted onto the end of the blade if needed.

Large Hand Drill: Hand-powered drills seem to be something that has fallen off the radar of the same “antique” hand drill can be found in larger hardware stores for less money.  Hobby shops often have a few on hand as well, but either way, there are plenty of options still in production.

Larger hand drills come in two popular designs. One looks like a bigger version of the standard small hand drill which is little more than a vertical shaft with a geared-crank wheel attached to the center, a handle above it, and a chuck below it.  The other design called a brace drill looks like a bowed shaft of metal with a chuck on one end, a spin-able knob on the other and a rotating grip in the middle.  Either design will allow you to place a considerable portion of your body weight on the shaft while drilling, but the cost of the more complex geared version increases exponentially as it goes up in size.

Brace drills are much less expensive and often have a ratchet mechanism like a socket that revolution of the offset handle is not possible. Most brace drills have chucks that take up to half-inch bit shafts, but reduced-shaft wood bits give your brace drill up to a two inch diameter drilling capacity assuming you have a bit that size, let alone a need for a hole that big and the time to drill it.

Hand-powered Grinding Wheel: From plow blades to hatchet the stone instead of the blade. Even at just a few hundred RPMs, the spinning stone will spit enough sparks to set your shop on fire if you’re not careful.

The spinning inertia of a hand-powered grinding wheel is only enough to do very small tasks. For any job of substance, the cranking must accompany the grinding so for those times, which happens to be all the time, an additional hand or two is helpful. And spinning the grinding wheel might be the most post-apocalyptic fun a kid can have.

Due to the extremely high chance that a speck of stone or metal will fly into your eye, your kid’s eye, or your dog’s eye, exercise caution by putting a transparent barrier between any living cornea and any remotely conceivable missile trajectory launched from the other side.

Hand-powered Air Pump: In case you didn’t know it, you can use a bicycle air pump to maybe the wrong valve connector-which is an easy fix.  Motorized vehicles use relatively low pressure tires with cars, trucks and motorcycle tire manufacturers suggesting something in the 25-45 psi range. But vehicle tires are also incredibly high volume spaces to fill compared to bicycle tires.

Most bike pumps are designed for lower volume but much higher pressures, some over 200 psi.  Either way, you’re SOL if all you’ve got is one air compressor and zero electricity.  No matter how many hours of pumping it takes, a bike pump will get the job done.  Raft pumps, on the other hand, are designed very high volume but extremely low pressures like 2 psi, so don’t bother going there except for air mattresses, and rafts of course.

Hand tools in a survival situation just might be the only way you can get anything completed.

Obviously, this is only a partial list, you should have at least one hand tool for every type of power tool you own, but it is a start.

For more information on hand tools that you must have in case of a long-term survival situation, please check out Survival Cache.