Sat 9 Feb 2013
Assembly Videos – Power Cube and Brick Press
Posted by Marcin
Those of you who’ve been following OSE over the years know how seriously we take documentation - it’s in keeping with our open-source principles and we believe it moves our work forward, while also being key to independent replication. On our extensive wiki, you will find procedures, fabrication diagrams, Bills of Materials (BOMs) and user manuals for all the machines we’ve built so far.
And since we’re somewhat partial to the audio-visual medium, we’ve always tried to augment these documents with video instructionals – the latest additions being videos of the assembly procedures of the Power Cube & CEB Press.
Powercube v7 Assembly. from Open Source Ecology on Vimeo.
Liberator CEB Press v4 Assembly. from Open Source Ecology on Vimeo.
We built 6 new machines in 2012 and held 4 collaborative production runs at Factor e Farm (FeF) – 3 for the Compressed Earth Brick (CEB) Press v4 (including the single-day build of the CEB Press in December) and 1 for the Power cube v7.
We first tested the feasibility of using the Power Cube to drive the LifeTrac back in 2010 and presented our findings. Since then, we’ve been consistently using the Power Cube with our LifeTracs at FeF. Daniel and Hayden, who are the first independent replicators of LifeTrac III - also built a Power cube to use with their tractor.
Tom Griffing, one of our remote collaborators and an independent replicator himself, was at FeF in November as the Guest Production Run Director (Power Cube v7). We completed the build–including some collaborative design work with Tom and a remote machine designer, Rahul Dhinakaran–in 2 days.
You can download the CAD files for the Power Cube here and the entire set of CEB Press documentation can be found here, in addition to the assembly videos. Please watch and download them and drop us a line to let us know what you thought. Were the videos easy to follow along? Think the instructions fell short? Were they useful? Do you have suggestions for how to make them better? We look forward to your feedback.
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February 10th, 2013 at 3:56 am
I’m building a powercube (started cutting metal for frame already), but it seems the v.7 instructions are incomplete. The assembly video clarifies a lot, but I’d like some drawings of the frame (relative placement of features). I need to adjust dimensions myself, since I live in the metric world, and I could do a CAD build and usable drawings when I have time (Freecad and/or Solidworks).
Is the linked v.6 cad package up to date in part or whole?
February 10th, 2013 at 5:25 pm
They’re both very good videos. I like that the CEB Press comes with some safety information. I think it would be great if you could also include some testing information for after it’s built, like this: http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/CEB_Press#Testing . A sort of 15-point (or however many) inspection to help verify the building process was completed properly.
February 11th, 2013 at 4:53 pm
Hello From Devon, England.
Great work on the Brick Press. I am interested, can your machine also be used for compressing biomass briquettes for burning in a wood stove. If you had a suitable biomass feedstock, This would seem like an ideal type of heating fuel.
Regards, Leo.
March 8th, 2013 at 9:23 pm
Hi, your work is awesome. Some friends and I will tray to do some of your designs here in Michoacan, Mexico.
I was trying to create an account on your wiki page, but I can’t, its seems that the link it broke.
So this is a petition for some help.
Keep going, and thanks for sharing all this knowledge.