Mon 20 Oct 2008
Posted by Brittany
What do you do when your family visits? We put up a silo. Here is the footage my brother Andy put together of the house tour and silo experience this summer. It’s out of line in time – but it’s the most entertaining that I’ve seen in the Factor e Live series. Thanks, brother!
Thu 28 Aug 2008
Posted by Marcin
Here is a video update on the solar turbine project and the open source tractor – plus other fruits of Factor e Farm:
Stay tuned for the next episode. The front-end loader is already on LifeTrac, we connected the Factor e Liberator CEB press to LifeTrac, and we’re in the process of making sample production runs of compressed earth blocks.
Sun 17 Aug 2008
Posted by Marcin
We showed the construction of our open source tractor frame in Factor e Live Part 3. Here we show LifeTrac running under the power of its own motor:
Next steps: mounting the front end loader, building a rototiller, and mounting a backhoe. In the meantime, the Solar Turbine Convergence is here – Elliot is here, and we are picking up Stuart tomorrow.
Wed 6 Aug 2008
Posted by Brittany
In part one of “Digging for Water”, we drilled a hole 85 feet deep, hit water, and tried to insert a 6 inch casing (pvc pipe) into the hole. When the 6 inch pipe didn’t fit, we decided to use a 4 inch casing. Although the 4 inch casing dropped much deeper than the 6 inch one, to our chagrin, it wouldn’t extend the full depth of our hard-earned hole.
With a little trial and lots of error, we eventually submerged the 4 inch casing 25 feet into the ground. Fortunately for us, we could see water trickling into the hole, not more than 10 feet below the surface. All in all, we now have a supply of 1000 gallons per day.
So, now the ground water was sitting in the hole, but how do we get it out? The fit was too tight for our 4 inch diameter submersible pump. And we couldn’t easily find a smaller size. In desperation, we turned to a hand pump. Everyone used to have hand pumps, why couldn’t we. It’s a good tool for learning to appreciate water after all.
This short clip is of our adventures in learning how to get water out of a well. Mainly, making a cylinder, a $50 project with open source plans from Hydromissions (which would have cost us several hundred dollars otherwise) and attaching the hand pump.
So, grab a glass of water, sit back, and enjoy another episode of Factor E Live!
Tue 1 Jul 2008
Posted by Marcin
This installment of Factor e Live focuses on LifeTrac – the open source, life-time, design-for-disassembly articulating multipurpose tractor/loader. It is the key to powering the CEB Press, permacultural operations, as well as: well-drilling, sawmilling, powering the Multimachine, power generation, tree planting, back-hoe work, hay baling, combining, and other tasks too numerous to mention. LifeTrac is perhaps the most important tool in our operation – and is highly relevant to any land stewardship operation.
I am counting down the days until the tractor is finished – so we can begin our CEB construction.
LifeTrac was mentioned on Jeff Vail’s Rhizome within the context of decentralized production systems. Check out my personal fabrication story for yourself:
Wed 18 Jun 2008
Posted by Brittany
The last two weeks were primarily spent on the well, which is now (almost) finished. So, our biweekly video focuses on our voyage into the earth, in a search for ground water. We begin with a homebrew rig that is difficult to use because we cannot easily raise and lower it. We end with an 85 foot hole, that is reduced to 25 feet through weak equipment (resulting in a crooked hole) and some mistakes (like pumping out silt without any casing, causing sand to fill-in the hole).
This is not a “how to” video, but more a taste of what it would have been like to help us dig our well. We plan to more fully document our experiences here and on the wiki once we’re truly pumping water from the well.
Enjoy!
Mon 2 Jun 2008
Posted by Marcin
Change is continuous at Factor e Farm. You may have seen this post on how our place has evolved from a plain soybean field to rich diversity on many fronts.
To record these changes as they happen, we have begun the Factor e Live series. These are videos, aired every two weeks, that show the ongoing changes – and serve as a future record of the process of building a village. As the titles say – we are Farm Fresh Ideas – for sustainable, regenerative, and transformative development – through open source collaboration.
This is our first in the series. Enjoy. Click below, or download the file (28 MB). Please comment profusely.
