One perk of life at Factor e Farm is that you run into some really interesting people. Liora and Andrew Langford, co-founders of Gaia University and also True Fans, visited yesterday.
We covered lots of ground on collaboration between OSE and Gaia U. First, I should explain what Gaia University is about, because its uniqueness is not evident from the website.
Gaia University is an international school-without-walls with about 100 students. This means that education occurs not on a physical campus, but wherever the student chooses. There are mentors and the school is accredited. Gaia offers Bachelor’s and Master’s programs, and it is also introducing their Ph.D. program this year. Gaia has the capacity to provide credit for applied work and studies. There are other low-residency programs, such as Goddard College and Union Institute in the USA.
The PowerBook G4 Mac in the house finally quit working. We splurged $300 on a brand new laptop recently. We got a 3 year old Dell Latitude D820 from Craigslist. With 2.16 GHz Intel Core Duo, and 1920×1200 screen resolution – that makes for an impressive system with Ubuntu 9.10 installed.
The install was straightforward. You just download Ubuntu 9.10, burn the download onto a single CD. You then install from the disk – in our case by pressing F12 to enter the boot menu and select boot from disk. You just follow instructions on the screen to get it going, and that’s all.
The laptop came with Windows Vista. I considered dual boot, (more…)
This winter, we had 1-2 feet of snow, and the cover lasted for about a month. This was harsh on the orchard – because an army of rabbits thus had a 1-2 foot pedestal and could reach above the existing tree guards. There was significant damage, but the trees will grow back – from below the damage at the very worst. Here is an example, which I covered with chicken wire after the damage was done already:
The rabbits, which for some reason exploded in population this year and kept the crockpots busy – were not the only issue. Subterranean creatures exploded, too. Look at these tracks, which to my guess, are voles or moles:
How could this happen if the ground is supposedly frozen during this colder-than-normal winter? (more…)
We are now officially using Open+Pario as our project management and design repository for Open Source Ecology. The most active project at present is the CEB press, and we are beginning project management of the Open Source Induction Furnace. Anybody can view any of the projects – including design files, technical discussions, etc. The content is entirely transparent and open to the greater community.
If you want to get involved in any of the projects, you can sign up as a Project Member by registering and joining a given project. (more…)
Kevin Carson, Research Asociate at the Center for a Stateless Society, just published a book called The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low Overhead Manifesto. This is a progressive review of industrial history, culminating in the present option of post-scarcity economics. Open Source Ecology is featured as one of the Case Studies in the Coordination of Networked Fabrication and Open Design in the Appendix of Chapter 5. If you are interested in a comprehensive overview and of the technological ecology that we’re pursuing at Factor e Farm, this is a worthwhile read. It’s an insightful and quite accurate third-party analysis of our work, and the chapter provides a more in-depth understanding of the relationship between access to cheap, modern tools and collaborative design repositories – and how these combine for radical democratization of industry. Thumbs up for this important work. It is one of the cultural creative writings of the times, aimed at breaking through society’s limited consciousness on technology and production as a means of evolving to freedom. Read more about it on Kevin’s blog.
William Cleaver will be joining us at Factor e Farm on May 1 for a Dedicated Project Visit. He’s coming from across the big pond – from the United Kingdom – and we are planning for a 3 month stay.
William is not a novice to creative dexterity – he’s involved in repair and demolition of industrial chimney stacks and natural draught cooling towers – at heights. See for yourself:
He has experience with various tools, welding brickwork, ropework, woodwork, and general shop. He’s traveled the world, studied Romance languages, taught English in Chile, and is certified to teach high ropes courses. He is now showing great interest in the deeper message of post-scarcity, resilient community creation.
We discussed the following tentative plan, with both of us working in the shop and as needed:
May – Work on finishing or building Sawmill/LifeTrac II/MicroTrac II/ anciliary implements for construction – all in preparation for building.
June – begin building autonomous, zero energy housing with solar space. Experiment with CEB floors, CEB masonry stove and chimney, stabilized bricks, stabilized reject lime bricks, stabilized brick walkway and driveway, stabilized retaining walls, and others. We plan on winter food garden and sprouting in the solar space. If progress on the steam engine goes well, we’ll aim to install combined heat and power on the masonry stove.
July – continue building until comfortable accommodations for the winter are ready for several people.
We’re looking at building zero energy homes that look tentatively like this:
Other than this, William is learning Kdenlive on Linux for movie editing, as well as and QCad for CAD work. These are staple tools now at Factor e Farm. William will begin preparing some of the technical drawings for the sawmill, so we can collaborate on making that happen over distance until his arrival.
We do want to consider bringing in additional help from the CEB general contractor, Floyd (see last blog post). We will consider hosting a CEB workshop if progress is good. If the CEB fabrication is going well – there could be resources generated to really get things moving forward, and continue to build more structures. I think now is the beginning of really settling into the land – and getting the place to look half-way presentable. We’re open to all kinds of ideas, such as the proposed CEB vault construction and others – but we’d need other people to get involved to push those projects forward. Otherwise, we’re sticking to basics and all types of experiments in the process.
It turns out that there’s a CEB contractor by Lathrop, Missouri – which is within 30 miles from us. Meet Floyd Hagerman, who has built a couple of very interesting CEB houses. The first one shown here is a hybrid – or a combination of CEB and standard construction. It has a Trombe wall – meaning a South-facing CEB wall, painted black, and glazed over. The wall serves as a thermal collector – and its performance is impressive. Last winter, before anyone moved in, the house remained above 40 degrees Fahrenheit all winter – Zone 5 continental climate – with no supplemental heating! Here’s a look.
Here is an example of DIY concrete blocks that Floyd pressed with his machine, by adding about 2% cement. Floyd used reject lime from the quarry, mixed in the stabilizer – and made an external retaining wall:
This was only 3 shovels of cement for over 1000 pounds of reject lime. So we are seeing the feasibility of stabilized blocks for outside use, especially if we add more stabilizer. Sealing the surface with stone sealer or similar cover would finish the job for complete stabilization from the elements.
With LifeTrac, we could throw a bag of cement in front of the soil pulverizer as we work the soil (80 lb for a 1000 lb load of soil, for 8% stabilization), and we would mix and load the soil in one step – ready to be used in The Liberator. We plan on using stabilized brick for walkways, base courses in buildings, and we are considering the possibility for building a driveway paved with brick.
Here is Floyd’s machine – a Powell and Sons version at $15k for up to 6 brick per minute pressing rates:
Here Floyd discusses the feasibility of building with CEB as a contractor – based on his experience. The big question is, does it work? How much would a CEB house end up costing? Here are some interesting insights:
On the open enterprise front, the field is rich for incubating a number of open source CEB entrepreneurs. Anybody out there considering CEB contracting?
You can download the existing CAD files here. The files are in Polish, so they still need to be translated for the broader audience.
Meet your developers from the Co-Habitat Platform: Pawel Sroczynski and Remik Karbowiak. These guys are pretty good. They also developed a model open source, prefab, straw-bale house design, and they will be buildng it this year at a budget of $7k. I always thought that straw bale is too exotic in practice because of the huge labor requirements, but these guys are showing otherwise with OpenSTRAW:
Here is the building sequence. Click on the following images to enlarge:
Both the manual CEB press and the straw bale work are a major contribution to open source economic development – and to humanity. See their website for more information. Congratulations to the Co-Habitat team. We’d like to add the manual CEB press to the Factor e Farm product line as soon as the machine is tested in the field, and we may end up building some straw bale here after all.
Here are the initial CAD drawings for the CEB press, The Liberator Beta v2.0. You can download these drawing interchange format (dxf) files at the Open+Pario project repository. You can view dxf files with QCad, AutoCAD, Lx-Viewer, or many other applications. Note that this is work in progress, and the drawings will be updated as time goes on. New files will appear at the repository as soon as they are available.
Currently, we are still working on getting our first order of The Liberator high performance, open source, Compressed Earth Brick (CEB) press out the door. We are now upgrading the automatic controls.
We have published a technical paper on the automation problem statement. We are managing the project at the Open+Pario project management site, where you can download a copy of this paper under the Documents tab. The paper outlines the technical issues surrounding effective automation, based on our previous results. It provides the necessary background if you want to collaborate on the project or build upon it – in the name of open source development. Here is the abstract:
Abstract: There are several considerations for the successful implementation of automatic controls on The Liberator*, the world’s first, high performance, open source, Compressed Earth Brick (CEB) press. Considerations include: (1), brick production work flow design; (2), simplicity of control logic; (3), brick thickness adjustability and uniformity; (4), modular, lifetime design; (5), performance optimization; (6), cost, (7), interchangeability of hydraulic power units1; (8) open source standards; and (9), simple user interface. This technical paper documents these issues for the development team and the greater community as part of the open source process. The greater context for this work is promoting the creation of post-scarcity, resilient communities. This paper promotes the greater context by contributing to the solution of one of the most basic needs of humanity – housing – under the assumption that earth construction is the most robust and most widely-used method of housing worldwide2. Revisions of this work are found at Open+Pario3. (more…)
We are farmer scientists - working to develop a world class research center for decentralization technologies using open source permaculture and technology to work together for providing basic needs and self replicating the entire operation at the cost of scrap metal. We seek societal transformation through interconnected self-sufficient villages and homes. This is a stepping stone to transcending survival and evolving to freedom. Factor e Farm is the land-based facility where we put this theory, Open Source Ecology, into practice. More
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I think this is a fascinating project, and one that John Robb has highlighted as an example of the potential for community fabrication. — Jeff Vail, Blog
