What are the challenges to a scalable, open product development methodology – which has the power to transform the entire globe to an open economic system – within a few years, if not months? Open-sourcing the entire economy is a well-bounded problem, if done collaboratively.

Of course we cannot look to existing power players to lead this task. Thus, this task is relegated to the peer-to-peer decentralists – of which there are many in the ranks of the movements for open source software, open source hardware, transition towns, economic localization, and resilient communities, among many others. So why is this not happening? I don’t think many people find eating their own dogfood – in the sense of entering the subsilience lifestyle – a savory proposition.

Most people do not see that the world in general is very close to availing the Maker, subsilience lifestyle to everybody. Read Plenitude, read The Homebrew Industrial Revolution, and read The Unplugged. Zombie – wake up and smell the coffee.

The subsilient eating of our own dogfood is close to our hearts here, and it does connect closely to the hairball conceptual diagram above.  Allow me to give you a personal view of how the scalable, open product development process really works.

Today, I sit-on-ass documenting The Liberator Master Bill of Materials. This is hard work, but it must be done for easy access to The Liberator, and it must be done only once. Sean and I will do complete video documentation of the build starting next week.

Add Will to the picture. He produced the complete 3D CAD, and we went from there to produce the complete bill of materials for the open source tractor. We got design review from the local fab shop, and they helped in the design of the 150 ton hole puncher – for stramlining fabrication, which we already tested in a fabrication task. We bought the materials for the tractor, and now it’s time to build. For additional resources, we put up crowd funding baskets, and they are filling to support our work. Add Sean to the picture. Sean is documenting, and we put up plenty of video updates on our blog for transparency. The prototypes are coming out one after another.

The above demonstrates a basic process of design-build-fund-review-test-document-iterate cycle. It’s our daily life. To go faster, we only need to have more people. We’re doing the above with only 2 technical developers.

Add further resources and people, and this could really scale. Can we find more people who care deeply about the world – and can do things like design, CAD, building, using the phone, writing down Bill of Materials, documenting, welding, networking, drilling, baking bread,pickling, pipping the pips, working the land, and so forth? These are all generalist skills, which take only desire to acquire, based on a motivation of resilience. Look what we’re doing with 2 people – and imagine what we could be doing with 10 or 20. I think, personally, that with about 10-20 people specializing in generalizations, our quality of life here could explode. I also believe that if we build a community of about 200, we could sustain a technology base up to microchip fabrication at the level of 1990s computers.

People and resources are still key. Now we have 92 True Fans, and things are looking good. For other updates – we will transition to beex.org for crowd funding support – because those folks are particularly interested in post-scarcity economic development, and they are offering marketing and collaboration incubation services. Another collaborator volunteered to apply to the Buckminster Fuller Institute Challenge for us. It appears that we’ll have a Dedicated Project Visit on developing our True Fans program. Another collaborator wants to co-auther an academic paper on transformation towards resilient communities, and we may be presenting at Resilience 2011. We are still planning on the northern California tour, in November. The influx of positive assistance offers is on the rise – which means that more of them will go to fruition. These are indeed exciting times, and as we always say around here, we ain’t seen nuthin yet.

Join us. We like to say, just quit whatever you’re doing, and join this game. We did. We wish it were that easy for others.

When the ragweeds grow to 12 feet at Factor e Farm, I guess it’s time to mow the lawn.

In the usual bootstrapping fashion – today’s experiment was building and using an 8-foot diameter string trimmer powered by LifeTrac, with 1/2″ wire for the cutter. Did you ever wonder what it would be like to supersize a string trimmer? We do not recommend that you do this at home.

This video shows fabrication of the string trimmer, with assistance from our recently open-sourced 150 ton hole puncher – in practical use for the first time. The trimer is then taken into the field – for some powerful exterior trim.

Music by DLDN Instrumental care of ccmixter.org.

Supersized String Trimmer from Marcin Jakubowski on Vimeo.

The video shows how we took the hole puncher for its first field test in actual production, this time with a 3/4″ hole die for punching 1/4″ steel. We made the single-string rotor for the string trimmer from a spare soil pulverizer tine.We were taking it easy on the hole puncher until we are sure we’re not going to crack the dies from misalignment or other caveats. We still don’t have the stripper installed on the hole puncher, so we have to take the metal off manually off the punch element once a hole is punched.

A string trimmer is essentially a rotor with a string attached. We bolted the 1/2″ wire after punching the holes. The inner part of the rotor is stiff – made of 1/4″x3″ steel 24 inches long -  such that centrifugal force allows the wire to extend outwards instead of getting wrapped around itself upon startup.

The performance of the initial string trimmer prototype shows promising results. A number of improvements need to be made:

1. We used braided, 1/2″ wire. At he end of the day, the wire has unbraided, even though we weded the ends to prevent unbraiding.  This needs to be corrected – perhaps by running a bead of weld along its length to prevent wire separation. Another option would be using a chain for the cutting element.
2. The rotor starts to vibrate excessively when in heavy brush. This is an artifact of our existing quick attach plate, which has manually-insered pins for locking. Since the pin holes are oversized, small implements like the Unversal Rotor tend to wobble. This point will be addressed with our improved version of the quick attach plate with LifeTrac II.
3. Additional safety features are desirable. The spinning string is almost invisible, and awareness of this must be maintained to avoid injury. Some kind of safety guard should always be used – whether it be keeping distance, using the trimmer with tractor remote control – or more traditional ways such as additional guards on the tractor or on the trimmer.

It could be that the super-sized string trimmer should be replaced by a mower like this:

We have this brush hog, and it’s converted for use with LifeTrac by eliminating the PTO shaft and adding a quick-attach hydraulic motor from our LifeTrac infrastructure:

We have not yet tried this brush hog since modifying it this past winter, but it looks like we will use it soon unless we get the super-sized trimmer bugs worked out.

In summary, the super-sized trimmer is a low-cost, brute force way to go for rough mow-down of vegetative growth. It certainly works. It could probably be a quite effective in-situ shredder – for example for hay bales. One could scale this device to a large number of whacking strings, or chains.

We recommend the concept because it is a good example of using existing infrastructure. The basic trimmer costs about $20 to make – because the other components are part of the LifeTrac infrastructure already. It can also be scaled at negligible cost – perhaps up to 12 feet diameter for use with LifeTrac. This is significantly larger than the 5-foot diameter brush hog cut width. The super-sized trimmer practicality depends on the heavy, multipurpose build of the Universal Rotor – the motor for the trimmer. In the limit of a super-heavy build on the Universal Rotor – the string trimmer can gain extra scalability or flexibility. The purpose of the Universal Rotor is to accommodate all types of imaginable purposes.

Our existing prototype of the Universal Rotor is only Prototype I. We’ll be returning to an improved version thereof as soon as we get a chance. We’ve yet to run it as a tiller, cultivator, and post-hole digger, metal cutoff saw, tree saw, washing machine (though the honey extractor, interestingly, could probably double as a washing machine auger if automatic reciprocation controls are added), and possibly stump grinder. Outside of the post-hole digger and washing machine function, the other tasks require one to address considerable structural and other creative challenges.

Everything on this planet spins in one way or another, down to electrons. The Universal Rotor and open source string trimmer are a part of this important trend.

Open Source People from Marcin Jakubowski on Vimeo.

This leaves us in a good position to start construction of Solar Village 2010. Design work is occurring in the background. We need to build another CEB press, since we sold our first one. We have had a number of apparently serious inquiries, but so far, no money has crossed the table. We suspect that people want to see real product come out of the machine – ie, houses. Maureen still has not used her machine, and we’ve been busy in the developments of the above paragraph. Plus, we still need to finish LifeTrac Prototype II, build Power Cube Prototype II, and build the Soil Pulverizer Prototype II – all in preparation for building, which we were hoping would begin on August 15. We just burned $3800 to procure LifeTrac II parts, and we’re out of cash. We’d like to announce here that we are returning to the crowd-based funding baskets – with which we had decent success in our previous session of village-building adventures. Now this is Take Two on CEB construction, where Take One was a great learning experience. Now we’ve got Will with experience in brick laying, we’ve got mature technology on the CEB press, and Prototype II is forthcoming on both the Soil Pulverizer and LifeTrac. The CEB Build is straightforward, now that we have Full Product Release. This means that we can predict how long it will take to fabricate – about 2 weeks. We already have the hydraulic cylinders. The $2500 covers the balance of materials – minus some outsourced labor costs which we can now avoid because we have the hole puncher ready to use. The price structure for materials was around $3600 for The Liberator Beta v2.0 – and now we expect about $500 savings by doing hole punching in house. We do not expect to change anything on The Liberator build, as it’s a stable release. We may omit the soil sensor, since we found out that for practical considerations, activation of the hopper shaker works best when it is pre-set – such that the hopper is shaken after every brick pressing cycle.

Another note on The Liberator build is that if we are building one, it takes about the same amount of time to build two machines at the same time. That’s the nature of flexible fabrication ergonomics. Thus, if you know somebody who wants to buy one, send them our way.

The soil pulverizer Prototype II budget covers primarily the structural steel for the rotor and bucket, plus a larger PTO motor. The improvements in Prototype II include: (1), improved motor coupling to attain quicker slip-on attachment of interchangeable motors without using coupler pins; (2), 60% increase in torque on the motor over the former 6.15 cubic inch motor; (3), smaller bucket and reduced pulverizer width to improve weight balance and structural robustness, and (4), height control stops to maintain the pulverizer at the correct soil depth. Points (2), (3), and (4) are intended to address stalling of the motor – a problem which we had frequently when the pulverizer was moving forward too fast or going in too deep. Overall, these improvements are intended to combine for a more robust device that requires less skill to operate – such that it is more user-friendly and such that it can attain widespread use. It is worth mentioning that nobody else that we know of is utilizing the same soil pulverizer strategy – relegating this function to dedicated, stationary soil pulverizers. Our experience with Prototype I of the Soil Pulverizer has demonstrated that the design like ours – with integrated digging, pulverizer, and dumping functionality – is indeed sound. We believe that it can lead to a simplified CEB infrastructure – both in the equipment requirements and ergonomics of brick pressing. See further discussion on this point in our Soil Pulverizer blog post. Because we have demonstrated the feasibility and attractiveness of our approach, we don’t really understand why nobody else is using the same. We suspect that the flexibility of our modular design of LifeTrac make our approach feasible.

The Power Cube II budget covers the structural steel, hydraulic filters and bypass, hoses, quick couplers, and battery. We already have a 17.5 hp gas engine. Any engine size can be used, but we’re choosing a small one for reasons of cost and easy sourcing. Indeed, if you have a large lawnmower, we suggest ripping out the engine and upgrading to a more flexible LifeTrac Power Cube. Improvements over Power Cube I include: (1), a frame-integrated hydraulic reservoir and gas tank; (2), addition of a pressure bypass in case of accidental hose disconnection; (3), 2 sets of quick-attach fingers for moving or attaching to the quick connect plate of a tractor, so that the Power Cube can be moved or attached to one tractor with another tractor – instead of using hoists and human muscles; and (4), quick-attach hydraulic pump, so that larger or smaller pumps can provide either more fluid or more pressure, as needed. Point (1) eliminates the bulky hydraulic reservoir and gas tank of Prototype I, allowing for looser packing of the remaining components into the cube lattice. The overall improvements, in addition to the safety feature, focus around a much more transparent-looking design with easier interchangeability of the Power Cube between different devices. Power Cube II should also be easier to fabricate because of the additional space. Note also that we intend to replace the gasoline engine with a modern steam engine after we deploy the latter. We believe that the steam engine has not only caused the industrial revolution, but also that it carries tremendous significance for decentralizing power and producing decent(ralized) electricity. The steam engine may be powered by local biomass pellets, or solar concentrators – both of which are non-strategic resources. If you do not believe that deployment of a modern steam engine is an extremely worthwhile endeavor, then you are probably under the influence of centralization propaganda. The decentralization aspect of steam engines comes more from access to fuel, not from ease of fabrication – because a good steam engine is only slightly easier to fabricate than an internal combustion engine.

Finally, the LifeTrac II budget involves completion of quick-attach plates, fabrication of steel wheel tracks for added traction, and outsourcing wheel coupler lathing, since our open source lathe has not reached practical functionality. Improvements on LifeTrac II include: (1), monolithic design, as opposed to articulated design, for ease of fabrication; (2), dual loaders, for doubling implement-handling capacity; (3) quick-connect wheel motors, such that these can be used on other devices as needed; (4), quick-connect hydraulic control valves – such that these can also be used in other applications; (5) quick-attach Power Cubes as the engine units – feasibility of which we have already demonstrated; (6) stackability of Power Cubes, where 1-3 Power Cubes (18-54 hp) are a good match for the tractor, and up to 6 can be attached to the tractor for up to 250 horsepower (not practical, but possible, with larger Power Cubes); (7), wheel tracks for extra traction, which was not possible in the articulating LifeTrac I, (8), improved quick-attach plate coupling mechanism for automatic locking of implements in place with a lever, and (9), cross-ties on wheel-mounting plates for added strength, which may be required for forceful skid-steering. The above improvements for flexibility make LifeTrac II a true life-size lego set – for real equipment. Complete with the dual-loader, is this a flexible dream machine – possibly to rise as the Peoples’ Tractor?

In summary, the Tractor-CEB-Soil Pulverizer – and the infrastructure for their fabrication – is an important product package that should be taken to Full Product Release as soon as possible. Only the CEB has reached Release status, so there’s much work ahead. If we get more people like William to join us, we can really put the operations into high gear.

Our prospects are looking good. We have already had initial discussion with one of our partners on setting up an open source flexible fabrication facility for producing tractors, CEB presses, and soil pulverizers. Fabrication of these constitutes a small but robust economic development package relevant to addressing the agriculture, housing, power, and fabrication issues of resilient community development. We are in discussion on this package with high level officials of a particular South American country, which is apparently interested in genuine progress – free of IMF-type swindles. We are leaving the details of this out deliberately, as there are no promises here and the discussions are young. We know from experience that open source economic development is a high-risk endeavor, and there are many dead ends on the path to glory. However, it is quite encouraging that there exists at least one political leadership on this planet that is willing to even consider the type of economic transformation that is the substance of OSE. If we don’t score at this time, then it’s only a matter of time – as our work is based on creating the substance of prosperity, free of compromise.

The stakes are high. We are positioning the tractor-CEB-soil pulverizer package with the above in mind. The recent additions of the open source drill press and hole puncher to the open source Fab Lab, RepLab, are substantial progress towards closing the industrial divide between and within nations. Our initial negotiations as above may lead to a first, economically-significant instance of open business model replication. Careful documentation would be built into such a package, as such documentation is somewhat lacking at present for lack of resources.

People – the above is worth supporting. Contribute to these projects, and you can certainly feel good about contributing to the generation of significant results. Thanks for your support in advance, and we look forward to an exciting Take Two on CEB construction.

Guitar improvisation credits: Up the Dark Mountain We Go, by Lucas Gonzalez

Our infrastructure for flexible fabrication along the lines of the Open Source Fab Lab, RepLab, is evolving nicely. We reported recently on Prototype I the heavy duty, open source, drill press, and here we are reporting on Prototype I deployment of our 150 ton hole puncher. Both of these are critical to fabrication ergonomics optimization for resilient communities in general, and, in particular – for Factor e Farm’s present fabrication of The Liberator open source CEB press and the LifeTrac open source tractor. For comparison, see earlier notes about our off-grid flex fab facility in a blog post from 2 years ago.

Here is a video on the hole puncher, with explanations.

Open Source Metal Hole Puncher – Prototype I from Marcin Jakubowski on Vimeo.

The implementation required a high level of attention to the  extreme heavy build and die positioning precision requirements – much more than anything we’ve done with the open source tractor, automated CEB press, or other devices. This is our first device that required at least some consideration of structural engineering – beyond brute-force overbuild. The local fab shop helped on the design. You can download the dxf design file at our design repository.

Regarding the hole puncher, the video showed the first hole punched – a humble 1/2″ hole in 1/4″ steel. The machine is designed for punching 1.5″ holes in 1″ thick steel, which we will test after procuring a larger die set. Future work involves adding a metal shear blade – a big scissor for trimming slabs of 1″ steel up to 12″ wide. In case you don’t know why this is relevant – a combination ironworker machine like this is the center of any flexible fabrication shop. This is especially relevant to lifetime, Design-for-Disassembly (DfD) products such as ours – which focus on holes and bolts instead of welding as the principal method of achieving lifetime DfD.

Imagine if we could also produce our own dimensional metal sections. Imagine down the road – with our induction furnace, we’ll roll our own steel from melted scrap and build new civilization – in a workshop of about 2000 square feet in size – at the cost of scrap steel plus pelletized biomass as fuel. Does that sound too simple?

Regarding the present cost of the hole puncher — our bill of materials for the hole puncher is:

1. Hydraulic cylinder:  $285
2. Main frame materials – $315
3. Materials for dies and holders – $62
4. Main puncher pin and guides materials – $170
5. Welding gas and wire – $50

Total came out to $882 in materials, plus $200 for outsourced labor because we don’t yet have our open source lathe. The labor was metal cutting and lathing of the main pressing pin – which consisted of a 1.5″ threaded shaft drilled into the press pin. For comparison – comparable ironworker machines with metal shearing and other functions included cost about $18k. Once again, ours is another major stride at cost reduction.

If we had to list the 10 key tools of a flex fab workshop, these are: acetylene torch, MIG welder, drill press, lathe, CNC torch table, 3D printer, hole puncher/metal shear, plus induction furnace, hot metal working, CNC mill, and small mill/drill for making circuits. We’ve built everything to date here with a torch, welder, and drill, while outsourcing lathe work. This shows that a small tool set can do a lot, even without the more advanced components. Access to induction furnace/hot working would allow us to reinvent civilization from scrap steel, in ample supply from anthropogenic detritus.

Note that all these Top 10 should be open source for the world to become a better place. Distributive economics are founded upon open-sourcing the means of significant production – especially of machines that can make other machines.

To pump this topic further to a level of geopolitical consequences – our basic claim is that for post scarcity, resilient communities that exist on the smallest possible scale for purposes of internalizing responsibility – the main enabling feature is open source, flexible fabrication. The hippies running off into the woods didn’t get this point right, and various modern branches of technological utopians have not gotten the point about appropriate, modern technology – ie, advanced technology without design-for-failure bells and whistles.

There is a number of progresssive economic movements at play – which go by names such as relocalization, post-scarcity production, transition towns, transhumanists, resilient communities, Venus Project, sustainable development, or ‘ousting invading colonials’. Self-determination is a common thread, and we see that effective means of open source production are the foundation for self-determination.  Nobody that we know of has an explicit plan for what an appropriate technology base for the future may look like, though Community for Tomorrow proposes explicit, tangible solutions that are closest in nature to the ‘opensource the entire, critical infrastructure of society’ message that we propose.

Indeed, modern discussion of appropriate technology has degenerated to the applications of third world aid, or has disappeared altogether. The more integrated point of view on this would be to discuss closure of the industrial divide between the ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ worlds – or not causing the problems of wealth disparity in the first place. Post-scarcity economics are a practical outcome of appropriate technology, as the waste cycle is replaced with lifetime design. We discussed this somewhat in our last blog post

Introduction, Philosophy, and the OSE License for Post Scarcity Economics

Completion of The Liberator Beta v2.0 marks the first Full Product Release of Open Source Ecology (OSE). Herein we clarify our intentions and strategic issues behind this product, and future releases, such that any user or beneficiary of OSE’s work, as well as any third parties, may understand our work and intent more completely.

OSE is a non-governmental organization formed for the purpose of active development of resilient communities and economies. We are best described as an open source product development or an open source economic development entity, working for the interest of all of humanity. Our particular approach is addressing the issue of effective production, as a foundation for creating post-scarcity economies. This implies thorough evolution of macro-social psychology towards the acceptance of a post-scarcity mindset – namely, that we can all get along, and that ‘there’s enough for everybody’. To date, civilization has failed in addressing these fundamental points. While addressing these points requires the maturing or evolution of people on psychological and spiritual fields, we believe that addressing the physical needs of humans effectively can be a direct route to promoting such evolution. This belief constitutes a motivation for our approach of developing effective tools of production. We believe further that if material constraints or physical needs were removed as the fundamental struggle of humans, then humanity would begin to have a chance to evolve – to freedom.

With the above philosophy in mind, OSE has set out to open-source key tools for producing the infrastructures for living and working. Our open source work starts with open-sourcing designs for the tools of interest, and it continues to the open sourcing of the actual business models for their production. Our aim is replication – or productive enterprise being replicated by a diversity of producers. This is the essence of free enterprise, defined as non-monopolistic production by a large number of stakeholders. We aim to encourage competition, and not to suppress it. Our aim is the distribution of economic power to many people, along the lines of Jeffersonian democracy. We believe that scarce resources are not necessary to fuel advanced civilization, as human needs and societal advancement can be fueled by widespread, local resources – under the assumption of human wisdom in their life and in their technology choices.

We set forth these principles as our underlying motivations. We can only encourage adopters of our work – and those who replicate open enterprise – to contribute their improvements, and especially their business models, back to the commons. We do not require it, however, as we do not believe in coercion – defined as acting against one’s own will, even if it is done contractually. We have produced our designs by standing on the shoulders of giants before us, and we do not claim any of our work to be original. We also feel that to claim originality as such is arrogance of ego, and that those pursuing patents to protect ‘their’ inventions are lacking in human spirit.

We believe that ‘sharing’ is accomplished most directly by sharing not the ‘fish’, but by sharing the ‘fishing pole.’ In particular, that ‘fishing pole’ is the open product design – the tool that allows one to reproduce the item of interest by using that tool. Even beyond the ‘fishing pole’ are ‘instructions’ on how to produce the ‘fishing pole’. The analogue of these ‘instructions,’ in the economic sense, is the open source business model. If we  were to apply ancient wisdom of ‘sharing’ to the digital age – then we would share open source business models.

That sums up our beliefs on a tactical approach for bringing about post-scarcity economics. We are using this work to bootstrap-fund further product developments, and all of our energy goes to such development. Our goal is to produce significant contributions to open source economic development. We are positioning our marketing strategy to underscore this point. If you support our work, you are contributing directly to the above stated goals. Our leadership prides itself in its integrity, honor, and commitment to effective development of post-scarcity economics by developing open source versions of key, economically-significant tools for the advancement of civilization without geopolitical compromise.

If you like our work, consider buying our products. If you are not interested in our products but want to see more open source product designs becoming available for addressing pressing world issues, then consider subscribing to the True Fans by going to Support OSE at http://openfarmtech.org. We also need help with documentation (CAD, fabrication drawings, technical writing), Product Release CDs, branding, marketing, publicity, general resource development, and many other tasks outlined at the Remote Collaboration wiki page. If you have these skills and if you are interested in moving our work forward in alignment with our values, please contact us.

We also believe that achieving post-scarcity economics is not a far-fetched goal. The number of goods and services that humans need is well-bounded, and likewise, the Global Village Construction Set (GVCS) is well-bounded – with only 40 key technologies. These technologies are sufficient to build further technologies and infrastructures. Since these are generative in nature, we believe that open-sourcing them is sufficient to create advanced, post-scarcity civilization. It will take about US$2M total to develop all the tools within a 5 year period as of the present date. Once that is done, our work is done, and we can move on to more interesting pursuits as well, knowing that the world is in good hands on the material front.

We are interested in helping you directly with enterprise replication, under the condition that you also contribute to open source product development of enabling technologies for post-scarcity, resilient communities.

We believe that giving our business models away helps us, as opposed to hurting our efforts. On the practical side, we know that we can always produce and capture the high value of effective production – and we have competitive edge because of primacy. We do not intend to compete with remote efforts, simply because it is wasteful to transport things over long distance. We are not threatened by monopolies, first because we are not for sale, and second, for practical reasons of transportation costs, quality of service, ethics, and primacy.

We provide our products under the OSE Label. This is branding intended to verify the desirable features promoted by OSE, or OSE Specifications. The OSE Label shall provide transparent documentation and a score, provided on the label, with a respective logo for each product release. The qualities documented on the label include: localization of production; availability of documentation (plans, fabrication procedure, open business model, user manual, product release CD, etc); lifetime design (design for disassembly, modularity, interchangeability of parts); systems design; ecological soundness; etc.). We are open to others producing under this label as well, if the producer is able to meet OSE Specifications to a degree equivalent or greater than our own product. The OSE Label certification will be administered by OSE or a collaborating organization.

We also hereby declare that all hacker spaces are authorized resellers of our products.  This is a means for other allied efforts to earn from our efforts as well. The details will be negotiated on a case by case basis, so please contact us if you are interested in helping this work.

We believe that ‘saving the world’ is a tangible concept which requires that we simply become responsible for production – as a prerequisite to other forms of responsibility – to the point that we generate widespread access to post-scarcity means of production.  This is a heavy task for a world indoctrinated with dependence, illiteracy, alienation, and impotence – but we also believe that this can turn around completely within a generation. We believe that getting to the point of developing the entire infrastructure for post-scarcity, resilient communities is a 5 year task requiring a budget under US$5M, and that new economies and means of exchange are around the corner for our taking if we choose to do so.

This license is written with the intent of good faith, integrity, and commitment – towards transparency within the process of creating post-scarcity economies. By accepting these terms, supporting OSE work, or by getting involved with the work of OSE, you are accepting to return the same intent.

The honey extraction process involves centrifuging combs of honey, which are opened with a hot knife as above. See our operation in action:

Open Source Honey Extractor from Marcin Jakubowski on Vimeo.

Here’s an operational performance review.

We built this first honey extractor prototype to handle 2 frames at one time. This sounds like inefficiency, but in practice, it works as well as an extractor of, say, 12 or more frame capacity. Why? Because we can start and stop the extractor literally immediately – as the 20 horsepower motor has no problem spinning up and slowing down with a small load – almost instantly. This means that each set of 2 combs takes a total of about 20-30 seconds of extraction time. We could have built a 4 frame extractor, or more, but the 2-frame is faster in extracting than a single person can feed the extractor with uncapped comb.

We produced about 8-9 gallons of honey in a 2 hour run, with 2 people. We extracted directly into a 55 gallon storage drum.

Thus, the 2-frame version suffices, and it would probably suffice to extract honey as fast as 2 people with hot knives can uncap the comb. Thus, we are confident that the caliber of our $25 extractor setup rivals the capacity of honey extractors in the $1000 range. This is another major score for cost reduction via integrated, open source design.

Our design for the extractor rotor assembly involves a 1/4″ wall, 2″ tube with metal grate welded to it, plus sides and bottom made of 1/4″x2″ steel. The rotor is connected to our Universal Rotor with a coupler. Both of these are already part of our LifeTrac infrastructure, and we just demonstrated the heavy duty drill press powered with the same interchangeable rotor.

We posted the full video in a former post. We note for our readers that – while Professor Schor states that we are a resilient community -the more accurate way to describe us is that we are a resilient community in the making. We are far from that goal.

We contacted Juliet Schor by email some time ago regarding collaboration, but so far we’ve had no response. If you have any leads on how to reach her, let us know.

While we are on the topic of our audiences’ perceptions – we frequently receive comments that we are ‘not really resilient/autonomous/sustainable’ because we can’t do things like ‘clean room technology or production of metals.’ Let’s set this point straight: we are very limited in our ‘sufficiency’ all together. We depend wholly on industrial feedstocks, such as metal and hydraulics components, and while we produce some food on the farm, our food still comes from the store. We are off-grid on electricity via solar panels, we harvest our own rainwater, and we can produce biodiesel – but all of these are not truly resilient solutions because the infrastructure used to build these is also largely from the store. Our orchard will be dripping with fruit soon, though it’s still young; and we may have plenty of chicken soon.

What we do here is the open-sourcing of key infrastructure technologies. We have a long way to go before full technological recursion allows us to not only make components, but also the feedstocks. We also emphasize that our commitment to full recursion is a fundamental goal – up to things like smelting metals from clay and semiconductors from sand – not to mention full agricultural resilience up to combines, and energy resilience up to full fuel sufficiency via pelletized-biomass/modern steam engines. These are all proven concepts, which if open-sourced, become economically feasible as the foundation for resilient communities. We don’t really believe that any technological process cannot be done on a small scale – including full-blow semiconductor and microelectronics production utilizing local sand as a feedstock and utilizing our own eenrgy – as the extreme example of what can be done on the scale of a 40 acre farm. RepLab is our main strategy to achieve these goals. Subscribe to support our work.