Over the past few days, Marcin and I have been working on the design of The Liberator 2 - the second prototype of our high-performance CEB press. The design is now up for review. The main changes are an enlarged, stationary hopper structure, guide rails that use cam followers, and an anti-bridging auger in the mouth of the hopper.

The main review point is the cam follower roller bearings that guide the motion of the soil-loading mechanism. (more…)

You can see our past presentation from the Oekonux Conference here.

Edward Miller, one of our True Fans, has organized a university lecture for us at Monmouth College in Illinois on April 22, 2009. If you’re in the surrounding area, please consider attending:

We are going on a lecture circuit to spread the word about our work. Please help us organize other lecture events if you are affiliated with universities or other groups.

Also upcoming is our presence at the Linz Festival in Austria on May 14-17. Sam Rose and I will be presenting a poster on the work of Factor e Farm at the Subversive Fair portion of the Festival:

Franz Nahrada, the leader of Global Villages - has coordinated this event for us - and we’ll b meeting with other leading groups in the Global Villages movement during this pleasant Austrian getaway. If you’re in Austria - contact Franz or me if you’d like to organize a meeting.

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What follows is my personal experience and my evaluation of the design, if you want a quick read jump ahead to the evaluation at the end. According to Marcin and Jeremy I’m the only person to have slept in the Hexacube in below freezing conditions. (more…)

If you can proint 3D objects at home, that may be the end of Walmart. Yes - RepRap - the DIY open source 3D printer - is a major political statement.

You can actually use RepRap to recycle - by reusing plastics as feedstocks for RepRap.

My encounter with RepRap, in the aftermath of the Oekonux trip - was transformative. This space age stuff is real - and it works - today. You can use RepRap to print a copy of all the non-metal components to make another RepRap. For a total of $400 in materials, you’ve got yourself another RepRap. At 0.1 millimeter positioning accuracy, RepRap is not just a toy.

Listen to my interview with Chris Palmer - one of the RepRap developers - who is known more for his well-documented HydraRaptor project - which is a more advanced version of RepRap.

To give you more flavor of the memorable Oekonux 4 conference of last weekend in Manchester, UK - here is a presentation given by Charles Collis that I reposted at the OSE wiki.

Charles presented and supported several contrarian views - namely that we already have abundance of energy, material, intelligence resources. That’s exactly what we say at Factor e Farm - and we are on our way to demonstrate that these resources can be tapped on the scale of a single, small land parcel.

See further supporting information on Charles’ presentation at adciv.org.

Six revolving tubes filled with eggs; the Hexahatch Revolution Incubator design is done and we will be building it tomorrow as part of a workshop. The design is open source on the wiki, complete with bill of materials and implementation plan. The cost looks to be about $70. Here’s a quick animation of the design and some pictures below:

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Here is my talk from the 4th Oekonux Conference. You can download the slides and see a transcript here.

Start with an introduction by Franz Nahrada, leader of the Globally Integrated Village Environment:

And here is the main body of the presentation.

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That’s the title of Michel Bauwens’ post on the P2P Foundation blog regarding the recent conference, where I discussed our program for building the world’s first, replicable, open source, off-grid, Global Village. Read the rest of Michel’s inspiring post here. I share the feelings completely. It was the most engaging and inspiring convergence I’ve ever attended in my life, as I got a chance to meet many of the heavy-hitters from the P2P world for the first time in person. In short, a few of the many treats for me were: Smari’s crazy talk on the future of governance - the establishment of the Association of Peer to Peer Researchers - collaboration with C’mm’n, the ambitious open source car project - plus we’ll be building RepRap here within a few months. RepRap is part of a reality that will allow us to eliminate our trips to Walmarts and others in the near future. That’s a major political and practical statement. The future is here. I’ll post a video of my presentation and the RepRap adventure soon, and I will fill in the rest of the details.

I just got back from The Crucible in Oakland, CA where I spoke to Nick DiPhillipo.  Nick constructed their foundry and has designed and built foundry equipment such as kilns and cupola furnaces at The Crucible, UC Santa Cruz, Artworks in Berkeley, and elsewhere.    We talked about setting up a basic foundry, electric induction furnaces, and appropriate technology.
Nick recommended some great sources of further information I want to pass on:  Steve Hurst’s book Metal Casting: Appropriate Technology in the Small Foundry and the publishing houses Development Publications and Lindsay Publications.   Steve Hurst’s book talks about doing lost wax with bee’s wax and using cow dung mortar in mold making.  I’m really excited.

According to Nick, Factor E should get started by building  a training setup:  A gas-fired crucible in the 10-30lb range plus the infrastructure for lost wax casting- A ceramic slurry batch mixer and a system for melting the wax out.  Building an induction furnace is by all means possible, but the crucible furnace is a great system for small casting and is simple to build and operate.  It’s something that will continue to get use even with an induction furnace around.
Induction is definitely the only way to go if we want to do serious work with iron and steel.  The Crucible used someone else’s home-made induction furnace to cast the stainless steel funnels in the kiln (I’m going to try to contact the individual who designed and built this induction furnace).

Ok, well I’m headed back to the East Coast. Thanks for all the help, California.

Check out Arthur’s coverage of our work in their daily blog.

Here at Factor E Farm we’re trying to grow all our own food. However, it’s a daunting task to grow and process enough food to feed ourselves. That’s why we have a simple policy this spring to help us get closer to 100% food sufficient: Every Body Plants One Raised Bed A Day.  It’s the new industry standard. It helps us chip away at our goal, day by day.

Check out what we’ve planted so far and please give advice if you’ve think we’ve made some terrible mistakes or if we’re missing some great opportunities in our fenced off garden.

We’re also trying to gather more perennial vegetables.  If you have any perennials that you’d be willing to share with us (either a root or a cutting or even a whole plant) we’d be very happy to have them. Check out our wish list for our complete 5 kingdom Community Gene Bank.

Before reading this post, we invite everyone to write a message about what you feel Open Source Ecology means to you, and your ideas on how this can be communicated effectively to others. How do you feel about Open Source Ecology?

Open Source Ecology’s latest core message is “Building the world’s first replicable, open source, modern off-grid global village - to transcend survival and evolve to freedom.” But what does that mean? Here are some explanations of what we think the message of Open Source Ecology means:

Replicable means that the entire operation can be copied and ‘replicated’ at another location at low cost. (more…)

I’m leaving for the Oekonux Conference today. You can see my abstract under the 2nd day program at 2:30 PM. Here is a copy of my presentation, minus the transcript. If you want to meet up, just let me know.

Finally, the factorefarm.org Drupal site is starting to look coherent. Alex spawned it, Jeremy owned it. We are starting discussion on the second CEB prototype there. Log in, join the forum, and we’ll have the second prototype done in a jiffy. Once the second prototype is done, we’ll be taking preorders.

MicroTrac is the power source for The Liberator II CEB press - and we’ve got an 18hp gas engine already taken out from our former ride-on lawn-mower. That will be a good reuse for the engine - as the old lawnmower chassis is ready to join our pile of industrial detritus. Industritus is the new word we coin. We’re collecting piles for meltdown once we get the induction furnace going. We apologize in advance for using a throwaway gas engine, but until we begin producing steam engines, there’s not much we can do about it, since a 20 hp steam engine costs $6500 made in the USA by Mike Brown, and $1700 plus shipping in India by TinyTech Plants. Oh yes, we’ll put the comfy seat from the lawnmower on LifeTrac, so I could sit on ass better.

We will begin building the MicroTrac power unit in the next day or two - a hydraulic Power Cube that will be interchangeable with LifeTrac and life car named UniMOS. Extreme modularity is our game.

There are a few issues left on CEB development, technical and operational. First, let’s adress the operational.

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