Fri 27 May 2011
Posted by Chris
Greetings from Factor e Farm.
Life has been busy around here.
We’re in the middle of a production run, so we’re working pretty much round the clock. What’s cool is that as we’re building things, we’re finding all these things to improve about the process. There’s a lot of room to grow, and we’re pumping out a lot.
Here’s a few photos of the past week. (more…)
Fri 5 Nov 2010
Posted by Marcin
We have finally started construction after spending most of the year developing equipment. We finished the CEB press on Tuesday. The open source Tractor, CEB press, Power Cube, and Soil Pulverizer are now in action. The main obstacle of soil handling has been declared solved.
CEB Construction Time from Marcin Jakubowski on Vimeo.
We began building the columns for the modular construction system as described in a previous post.
We have until November 14 before we cut off our building experiments due to weather. We have an open invitation to anyone who wants to help. We will be out there until Nov. 14. By then, we aim to complete 2-4 modular sections, 16×16 feet each. We have the concrete pads already prepared. Whatever we don’t finish we will take up in spring starting April 1, 2011 – towards a complete workshop as in the former post.
We still need materials for the remailing 3 truss sections and 4 roof sections. We reported that the trusses total $250 per section ($750 total). Sheet metal roofing is $300 per section, for about 400 square feet including 3 foot overhangs ($1200 total). This covers over 1000 square feet of floor space, and the entire workshop will be three times this size – to allow comfortable production of 4 CEB presses or tractors at one time. The workshop is intended to help fund the revolution, under the assumption that we get our ducks in a row with marketing.
The interesting part is that we aim to demonstrate that it takes only 3 full days per 16×16 foot section with only 2 people working, including roof and columns, but no infill walls. We aim to get to this point as a result of the next 9 days of practice. We’re shaking down all the parts of the method, and so far the soil pulverizing workflow is solved. Our optimization includes installing the automatic controls for the CEB press by Sunday. Chip in:
Sun 1 Aug 2010
Posted by Marcin
Construction should start at Factor e Farm on about September 1. Out of nowhere, one of our readers from Germany produced this 3D walk-through of the CEB house that Will and I drew up in Qcad in 2D:
The 3D walkthrough is this:
Solar Village 2010 in 3D from Marcin Jakubowski on Vimeo.
Sound track credit – Mind Field by DJ Blue. Game engine editor used was Sauerbraten.
This led to a very interesting discussion regarding reality and virtual reality, and how massive multiplayer online gaming – believe it or not – could help save the world? (more…)
Wed 7 Jul 2010
Posted by Marcin
Fabrication optimization for The Liberator open source CEB press involves designing and deploying four, heavy duty, open source fabrication tools: (1) drill press for drilling 1″ and larger holes directly in metal without pre-drilling; (2) 120 ton hole puncher/ironworker for punching up to 1.5″ holes in 1″ thick metal, and shearing up to 12″ wide slabs of 1″ thick steel; (3) torch table for cutting meta via computer control; and (4) heavy duty lathe for making motor couplers. The reason for the above developments is a significant reduction in fabrication time – such as a second to punch a 1/2″ hole in The Liberator frame, as opposed to a minute required for drilling. And, where we do have to drill 1/2″ holes, the time is reduced by avoiding switching of drill bits for pre-drilling of starter holes.
We have completed the initial prototype of the heavy duty, open source drill press. We are glad to report encouraging results, and a good addition to RepLab – the open source Fab Lab. It contains a hydraulic motor for the drilling and a hydraulic cylinder for the down pressure – so this is a literal press, and it is not short on torque or power as the motor can sustain up to 20 hp. We are using our Universal Rotor for the motor. This same rotor was already used for the lathe, tree auger (report forthcoming), and honey extractor (report forthcoming) – as it’s part of our LifeTrac infrastructure. This is part of our modularity concept in action – a key feature of the Global Village Construction Set.
You can see our wiki work page for the design and bill of materials, and the .dxf design file is at the Open+Pario repository. See the video of the build with explanation, plus demonstration of drilling a 1″ hole, without pre-drilling, in a 1″ steel slab. The workshop fireworks are extra, as we just passed the Fourth of July in these united States.
Join the forum discussion on this post
Tue 6 Jul 2010
Posted by Marcin
Sean is here for a part of the summer to gather footage for his documentary on the beginnings of Factor e Farm. The time lapses in the last blog post are also part of his work. Here is a 3 minute video about Factor e Farm and The Liberator open source CEB press.
We are planning on putting together a powerful documentary on the core message of OSE – distilling key concepts and filling in with our work as the evoloving substance. We feel that our message is still poorly communicated, largely because we are too busy at work creating the substance to make the message compelling. We may not get around to this documentary until we complete the tractor prototype II, soil pulverizer prototype II, torch table, hole puncher, drill press, and lathe – all open source, of course. The constructions/fabrication that we’ll do with these tools should complete the package of initial results on the Global Village/Resilient Community Construction Set – such that we’ll have plenty of compelling material for an interesting video. We’ll see when we get around to it. In the meantime, if you want to see our work go faster, subscribe to the True Fans.
Sun 13 Jun 2010
Posted by Marcin
We are pleased to announce the official, Full Product Release of The Liberator, the high-performance, open source, Compressed Earth Brick (CEB) press. We are releasing it under the OSE License for post-scarcity economics, and we are now taking orders. You can see the plans here.
Full Product Release indicates that the design is sufficiently mature for widespread replication, based on proven functionality and performance of the designs provided. Improvements may be made, but it is not critical for Factor e Farm to lead this effort. The design is sufficient for us to now focus on developing the next products in line – namely the open source tractor, LifeTrac, PowerCube, and others.
We are offering the fully automatic version of The Liberator with 6 foot wide hopper and hopper vibrator for US$8k, FOB at Factor e Farm, Kansas City area, USA. This machine can produce up to 16 bricks per minute. We are offering the manually-controlled version, The Liberator-M, with a small hopper, for US$5k. This machine may produce 5-8 bricks per minute, depending on the dexterity of the operator and the power source. The design of the manual machine is identical to the fully automatic version, minus the large hopper, vibrator, sensors, controller, and solenoid valves. It may be upgraded to the fully automatic version by retrofitting the missing components. Note that our machines do not include the power source, as they can be plugged into any source of hydraulic power. We achieved 16 bricks per minute with a hydraulic power source of 24 gallons per minute. The next competitors with a machine of comparable soil throughput appear to be priced between $45k (Powell and Sons) and $65k (AECT). You can see our full product description and features here. Our price is subject to change, and we have the present capacity to produce 4 machines at one time, with on-demand fabrication lead time of 3 weeks. If you are interested in building with CEBs this season, you may want to consider ordering a machine now. Email us.
Wed 9 Jun 2010
Posted by Marcin
Here is a 30 second video showing how we crate up the CEB press for shipping, which we dismantled two posts ago.
Thu 3 Jun 2010
Posted by Marcin
One of the features of The Liberator open source CEB press is that it is designed for disassembly. Here we show how we take the machine apart in a couple of hours, down to the main frame section and all other parts. It flattens from 83 inches of height to about a 1 foot high package.
(Sound track produced by one of our True Fans)
Wed 2 Jun 2010
Posted by Marcin
Our compressive strength tests have revealed that we could, in principle, build a 795 foot high wall with our unstabilized compressed earth blocks. Here’s how we arrived at this.
Prototype I of The Liberator lay gathering dust for over a year after it served its initial purpose. We have converted it into a 20 ton shop press, and used it for testing the compressive strength of the blocks produced by the The Liberator Beta v2.0.
We obtained 795 psi as the maximum compressive strength for unstabilized blocks made from on-site soil, and over 1200 PSI for blocks made from reject lime stabilized with 10% Portland cement by volume. The latter cured for 2 days only. For comparison, building code requirements are 300 psi compressive strength for earthen construction. Here are some of the results:
(more…)
Tue 1 Jun 2010
Posted by Marcin
The field testing of The Liberator Beta v2.0 is complete. If you look back at the 8-12 brick per minute goals in the last link, you’ll observe that we surpassed this with 13-16 bricks per minute in practice. I love it when a plan comes together. This deserves a veritable press release, no pun intended.
We will report on compressive strength tests for stabilized and unstabilized bricks in the next blog post, and then we’re ready to ship our first product to Maureen. As one of the last tests, we demonstrate here that The Liberator, about 1600 lb of weight, fits on the back of a 1/2 ton pickup truck. One would probably want to use a larger pickup truck because of the weight, and take off the hopper in traveling so that the center of mass is lowered. The machine is design-for-disassembly, and today, we’ll begin packing it – so it will turn into a package about 2 feet high on a 3′x6′ pallet.
In the picture above, the legs are placed in the inner mounting position, 4 feet apart. During brick pressing, the legs are moved into the outer position for added stability at 6 foot separation.
