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.

Morning Meeting - Marcin, Josh, Mike, Van

• We’ve started doing morning meetings to keep everyone on the same page.

• Lots of action going down in the workshop, we’ve been building out work tables and the refined metal is piling up. Those bags are full of hydraulic fitting pieces, nuts and bolts.

• Van has been going nuts assembling LifeTrac frames. During downtime, he’s been awesome coding up some project management related stuff. We’re experimenting with different systems for this, getting ready for scaling with the huge influx of new people coming!

• Speaking of new people. This past week Josh and David came by for an awesome visit. David helped us get these lifetrac frames drilled, and Josh has been doing a lot of CEB plate cutting.

• Josh and Van have been working on a jig for welding LifeTrack tread chains together, which should massively increase our production speed.

• Mike is back with us, welding up a storm on the power cube.

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• We’re scaling up our electrical infrastructure to support our upcoming Welding Frenzy (2-3 welders going full-time), so Marcin has been busy getting everything set up for that.
• Kat came by and was very kind in planting a new tomato planter for us. Two months from now, we’ll have fresh yummyness to enjoy!

• We’re also getting ready for the Kickstarter Microfactory project launch.

Life is good!

So!

So for me personally, my week so far.

• Lots of SketchUp

• Designed a very basic muffler, (drilling holes today)

• Power cube IV proposal (in progress).

• Sketched Up a generator, generator Lifetrac mount, hydraulic motor=>generator assembly, muffler assembly, engine, workshop pieces, etc…

• First Time Cooking! Pasta w/sauce (tomatoes, onions, mustard seeds, and BACON!).

Design files for PowerCube III, IV and CEB buildings (along with everything else, will go up on OpenPario soon.)  Looking forward to everyone’s feedback. Feel free to contact me at Factor (dot) Chris (at) gmail.com.

There’s talks of organizing going on with a CAD squad so we can properly get everything up to speed.

We’ve hit a few issues on the power cube design. While fully functional, it is apparently a bit more difficult to fabricate than anticipated. We hope to address this with prototype IV currently under design. (Note: the Factor e Industry Standard is 3 prototypes per product release, so going to the fourth prototype is a new procedure)

Next up, we’ve got designs for the new CEB building (which will likely be quite different from the last blog post). We’re aiming for a flexibly modular design with uber-fast construction times.  I have  list of those who have filled out the team culturing and listed anything architecture related, we’d like to contact you soon and get you involved in helping us design the new building. I’ve also contacted some architecture mentors.

We’ll hopefully be able to assemble a design team that can really do some cool stuff here. If any of you would interested in that discussion, please email me. Hopefully we’ll be having an online meeting here within the next week or two. Life is currently bit crazy with the production run, but we’ll see what happens!

So that was Week Two for me here. I’m exhausted, but having a blast. Stay tuned for more fun from Factor E Farm!

Goodnight!

-Chris

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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:

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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?

Start with this encouraging viewpoint from TED – that gaming can save the world – which for me was an eye-opener:

So the short story is, there are people making an honest effort to make gaming useful to society. In particular, one of our new collaborators, Isaiah Saxon, has proposed a new social media “real-world gaming” platform dedicated to the DIY movement, and is working on a major, mainstream movie, DIY in 3D: Make Your Own America. These are exciting times of convergence.

Back to the CEB house. The current concept is still a design concept like in the above visualization:

• Double CEB walls, with 1-2 feet of hammer-milled straw for insulation
• CEB floors
• CEB stove – though we’d need help on this to get it done right
• CEB rainwater catchment cistern – or at least a small prototype
• Wood trusses for the roof as shown here

We have other CEB house plans from Susan, one of our True Fans. We’ll consider these more ambitious plans if we feel confident about our resources and about our building team.

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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.

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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.

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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.

The Liberator has come a long way since its initial, manual prototype, to our not-so-effective building adventures, to Prototype II, to the soil pulverizer, to the first prototype of the automatic CEB controls, to beta version product release with manual controls, to the second prototype of automatic CEB controls, to initial results for the automatic machine indicating 13 bricks per minute, and to optimization resulting in the present Full Product Release – with fully automatic controls, with a maximum demonstrated pressing rate of 16 bricks per minute. You can also view our compressive strength testing results.

We are extremely excited about the results to date. We claim that our design is the simplest possible to build, to attain the functionality desired,  and to maintain. This transparency and serviceability offers the user the highest level of control over the machine. The electronics are based on well-documented components from the open source RepRap and Arduino projects – meaning that the electronics design is transparent. The machine is designed-for-disassembly (DfD), and and we expect that the user will be able to keep the machine in working order for many decades, passing the machine down from generation to generation. The wearable parts cost $40 in materials to replace, and the entire machine can be taken apart in about 2 hours with a set of 4 ratcheting wrenches. Moreover, the external power unit choice is  great contribution to lowering operating costs, as an interchangeable unit such as the PowerCube can be used to power a number of other devices.

We are producing these machines on-demand, and it takes 3 weeks to produce one. We can produce up to 4 machines in a production run at present. We already have one order for the fully-automatic machine.

Note also this important point – we are proposing an open source business model - which we believe is one of the first, if not the first, true open enterprise plan. Read the OSE License for further discussion on the philosophy behind it. Our motivation is that if we contribute open source business models into a commons, and others do the same, then we can all benefit from a robust economic base for flexible production – and be on a fast track towards transforming the world to post-scarcity.

We underscore that 100% of our earnings are going back into further product development in the public domain. For purposes of absolute transparency, we state here that our material costs were $3.6k for the fully automatic version, and we are charging between $30 and $45/hour for labor, which is expected to be between 100-150 hours per machine. We have the capacity to perform all the labor in-house. Thus, if we do not outsource any labor, that means that we may capture up to $4.4k of value per machine produced. We are putting 100% of this back into future product development, including addressing infrastructure issues for optimizing our productivity. Our overhead is about $200 per month for the entire facility. William and I are now partners in committing all product earnings to fund the development of further products for the completion of the Global Village Construction Set (GVCS). We invite others to join us. As stated before, it will take about $2M to complete the GVCS – and set the world free in terms of material scarcity. The task to be done costs peanuts. I once heard somebody say, ‘if this work does not make someone wet their pants in excitement, they must be sleeping.’

We emphasize that we are not like a typical nonprofit organization, which may spend perhaps 5% of its budget actually accomplishing its goals. In our work, that figure is just about 100%. We’re off-grid, and you already paid for our production facility with your donations, and our overhead is low. Thus, we’re able to give back to the world. We are an NGO, declared as a private, voluntary organization. We also believe that our True Fans base of 75 is way underrepresented, so sign up now if you want to see this work go faster. We can scale the rate of our work by a factor of about 4 using our existing physical and organizational infrastructure, if we had additional resources. We hope that CEB sales may provide such fuel to our operation, but we are not intending to monopolize production – as we have an open source business model that encourages others to replicate the same. If we do not get many sales, we can still function because of our True Fans and other donations.

There is plenty of work left to be done on the documentation front with respect to the CEB Full Product Release. Over the next two days, we’ll finish fabrication documentation and operation instructions – such that anyone interested in building The Liberator on their own is fully equipped to do so. We have a more or less complete set of technical drawings, but they need to be cleaned up and made user friendly. We need to get to a point of professional CAD and fabrication drawings, such that the entire Full Product Release documentation package includes:

• Technical drawings
• Exploded part diagrams
• Hydraulics schematics
• Fabrication drawings
• Fabrication procedure – mechanical and electrical
• OSE Label documentation for The Liberator according to the OSE Specifications score
• Official presentation on the work of OSE
• Product Release/Marketing website
• Model and architectural drawings for CEB housing structures
• Open Business Model documentation
• Bill of Materials and sourcing
• Promotional video for recruiting True Fans
• A CD/DVD for The Liberator Full Product Release

If you can offer assistance on any of the above, contact us and let us know what particular results you propose to offer, along with your qualifications and samples of your work.

At best, we are looking for those with fabrication experience or commitment to learning such skills – to join us on a long-term basis as part of the Factor e Farm Home Team. Our open source, on-demand, flexible fabrication business model could pull in $100k/person/year. This would allow our group to complete the GVCS within the next 5 years, and for meme-like replication to occur when the capitalization barriers to replication are annihilated via open source design. Remember that we are paving the way for low-cost access to the tools for which we are paying dearly with our efforts and time. The goal is to enable any interested individual to check into a new, unplugged lifestyle of meaning – free of the Matrix – as soon as possible. Transformation of the world and evolution to freedom can then follow.

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(Sound track produced by one of our True Fans)

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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:

The first block you saw in the video went up to 3000 psi on the gauge, and the last one was the unstabilized brick that reached 1800 psi. This is converted to compressive strength as reported above – by considering the 4.5″ hydraulic cylinder, and 36 square inch pressing area upon the brick.

The experimental method is based on the 2003 New Mexico Earthen Building Materials Code paragraph J of Title 14.7.4.23. Paragraph J defines the compressive strength as load per area, where the load is applied with a ‘swivel head to accommodate nonparallel bearing surfaces’. We used a cylinder with a swivel head, and you can see in the video how that enabled the pressure to be applied evenly over the brick surface. The plate was pressing on a surface of 36 square inches. We increased the pressure roughly at 2000 psi per minute to save time, as there were no immediately visible differences in test results when the pressure increase rate was raised from 500 to 2000 psi per minute.

The closeup of the pressure gauge in the video shows the pressure going up to 1800 psi on the gauge, for a hydraulic cylinder of 4.5″ diameter bore. This translates to 795 psi for the 36 square inches of brick surface area that was receiving the cylinder force.

What does 795 psi mean? It means that we can build a wall at least 795 feet high before the bottom course of bricks would start to collapse under the weight of the wall. Each 4″ tall brick weighs about 20 pounds, and has a surface area of 72 square inches. This implies 0.3 psi created by the weight of each brick. It takes 3 bricks to go up a foot, so every foot of height creates under 1 psi of force from the weight of the bricks. Hence, we can build a wall at least 795 feet high with unstabilized bricks, and over 1200 feet high with the stabilized lime bricks that we demonstrated. If we settle for a single story house in the meantime, we should not have any structural problems.

An example of the stabilized reject lime bricks is the front brick in this picture:

We have heard from Floyd, the local CEB builder, that the reject lime bricks are strong and waterproof when stabilized. They are easy to produce, as reject lime flows easily, and it costs about $5 per ton at the quarry. We have verified the strength, though we must comment that prior to setting, these bricks are extremely fragile, and one must take utmost caution lifting these from the production line. We expect significant breakage from handling these, as they will break in half from their own weight when held by the far corners. That is what we experienced, but there may be tricks for handling these more effectively. There must be a good method for handling these by placing them or rolling them onto trays for carrying.

The cost of cement in the 10%-stabilized reject lime brick was about 25 cents. 5% stabilization, or about 12 cents per brick in stabilizer cost, would probably yield good results as well. In the future, it would be useful to burn local limestone to generate lime for stabilization – as part of a natural economy.

We did not have much luck with stabilized soil bricks. After 2 days of curing, the cement did little to increase their strength. We went from 2% to 14% stabilization by volume, and the best result (about 600 psi) was lower than our best unstabilized, but well-cured, result. We suspect these possible causes: (1),  our soil composition was poor, including presence of some organic matter; (2), we did not have enough curing time; and, (3), the brick moisture level was improper. Unless we figure out why the stabilized bricks are not showing significant improvement in compressive strength, we may use the stabilized reject lime bricks for the bottom course in our building, or wherever moisture stabilization is required. We welcome suggestions from those with experience as to the details involved with successful brick stabilization with Portland cement.

For fun, we also did a compression test on a fired clay brick that we had lying around. It cracked under a pressure of about 2000 psi.

With further experience, we may be able to increase the compressive strengths significantly – where soil composition appears to be the major issue. It is not that our soil is inadequate, but it produces suboptimal results, if we believe Wikipedia. According to Wikipedia, compressive strenghts of 1200-1400 psi are common. As we stand, the pressed bricks that we obtained acquire a strength higher than the strength used to compress them – about 1.5 times as large.

To sum up, we’ve got a powerful machine on our hands. We’ve gotten outstanding results on the pressing rates, and decent results in compression tests. The prospects for effective construction are great, and now we only need an improved soil pulverizer and LifeTrac II for absolute robustness in our forthcoming building adventures. With the increased brick production rates achieved, the Soil Pulverizer Prototype I may be insufficient to keep up with The Liberator.

The great part about all of this is that our work is open source, and The Liberator is the first authentically replicable device coming from our skunkworks. We finally have product, as opposed to unfinished work in need of improvements. We’re preparing detailed fabrication and operation documentation at present, and we welcome replication of this open enterprise by those with the merit to move the work of creating resilient communities forward. In our view, open enterprise is the only substantial route to changing the world, and we are not being materialistic when we say that. We are just observing historical progress and regress of humanity. We await the positive economic impact that may happen from replication and adoption of this work in a distributed fashion. Openness of the project is one key to this.

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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.

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First, the brick quality can be better than shown in the clip. It rained 2 days ago, so our soil pile is too wet. The edges show mud that squeezed out the corners of the compression chamber, as the soil was too wet. In general, the brick will be as good as the quality of the soil that one uses.

Regarding the control scheme, the Arduino – the open source micontroller that we are using – is quite flexible. It was relatively straightforward to program simultaneous motion of the two hydraulic cylinders to increase the pressing rate. This works to our advantage because we have a bottleneck in the small hydraulic cylinder for the soil-loading-drawer. We are forced to reduce its hydraulic flow, or it would move too fast. In the simultaneous motion strategy, the main cylinder now siphons the excess flow from the small cylinder, simply via a modification in the control code. This is a trivial change to conceptualize – in retrospect – but it was not obvious that this would be desirable until the actual performance of the machine was observed in field testing.

We had issues with what looked like the valves locking up at high speed, which prevented us from getting full rate results in the last trials. It turned out that it was not the valves that were problematic. Instead, the simple problem was such that at increased cylinder speed, the sensors were moving faster than they could be detected in time, so the cylinders ended up hitting their stops. The solution was moving the detector-magnets closer to the detector, to allow proper detection at higher speed.

The above adjustments – namely of the position-detector-magnets – have to be done by the user upon startup. This has to be done only once, however.  Once the machine is adjusted properly, everything works well. These adjustements have to be made because our machine is flexible – and the adjustment compensates for the size of the hydraulic power unit used. If the machine had a dedicated power unit, which it doesn’t – then the settings would all have been adjusted at the Factor e.

Brick uniformity is a requirement for optimized brick laying – which means that one has to use less mortar to lay up a horizontal wall. To address this issue, the machine will operate in two modes.  The first mode is uniform brick mode – where brick thickness is adjusted by making the cylinder compress to a certain position. The second mode is timed mode – where timing, instead of position – is used to determine the brick thickness. The former case assures that the bricks are exactly uniform in size. This means that the compressive strength of the brick will vary – if the soil properties change. In the latter case, the timing assures uniform compression, at the expense of brick thickness uniformity – if the soil properties change.

This is a fundamental limit of a vertical pressing machine like ours. We are presently not interested in doubling-to-tripling machine complexity and cost for the sake of building a horizontal-press machine. A horizontal-press machine produces bricks of uniform height, but variable width. An easy solution to assuring that our walls are horizontal is laying bricks on their sides. We will experiment with this and report on the results.

Overall, the progress to date is awesome. 16 bricks per minute is at the limit of physical possibility of a single-brick machine – and we’re glad to report that we have achieved this rate. We may never be able to lay bricks in a wall – straight from the machine – as fast as it’s able to produce them. We may also have to upgrade our soil pulverizer to keep up with this demand for soil. We’ve achieved serious performance, sufficient for an industrial rate of building. Also, it’s good to note that the next machine comparable in performance to ours costs $70k and up. We spent $3500 on materials to produce the present machine, and so can you. More details on fabrication are forthcoming.

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The run shown displays a pressing rate of 11 bricks per minute, using LifeTrac on medium-high throttle as the power source. These encouraging results also pointed to the need of certain adjustments for control optimization. These changes should allow us to achieve about 2-5 pressing rate improvement over the above result, and they should also allow for easier adjustment of brick size and of brick compression.

The automatic controls have been described in previous posts. In essence, the micro-controller uses Hall effect probes and magnets for position detection to sequence the hydraulic solenoids in the order required for brick pressing. We are using two position magnets for each hydraulic cylinder. These magnets are also used to change the brick thickness and brick compression strength – by moving the magnets. These are Nd-B supermagnets, so it is sufficient to slide the magnet to a new position to make adjustements. Since the position magnets are set at the beginning and midpoint of each stroke, the endpoint of the stroke is determined by timing.

Our next step is to install 3 magnets instead of two, since it turns out that this is an easier route for making adjustments. Moreover, it turns out that we can run the two cylinders not in sequence, but in parallel – to gain in brick pressing rate. The last point is feasible because we are reducing the flow in the secondary cylinder so it does not move too fast. We can tap the remaining flow more efficiently by allowing the 2 cylinders to operate in parallel.

These are all details, and the control code needs rewriting. All together, we look forward to impressive improvement in our second day of system shakedown under field conditions. We had Sean and his crew do some documentation on the brick pressing day, so more higher quality video footage should be forthcoming. Sean will also be joining us this summer on time as a full-time documentor for the skunkworks.

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We finally have the machine ready to run in field tests. The basic operational description is here, from the front:

and from the back:

Some noteworthy features are:

• Full automatic controls usiing Arduino and RepRap components.
• Machine runs from any external, hydraulic power source up to 28 gallons per minute (25-55 hp max)
• Turnkey operation – just turn it on and machine self-calibrates for any power source and brick thickness.
• Brick size easily adjustable from 2 to 4 inches in height by adjusting the placement of a magnet. Brick size – 6″x12″x(2″-4″).
• Machine is reprogrammable for special soil or operating conditions
• 13 bricks per minute shown in the lab to date.
• Machine is designed for disassembly, including hopper, so that it can fit on a 3′x6′ pallet, less than 2′ high.
• Legs are adjustable for uneven terrain, and main cylinder may be lowered below ground level to lower loading height.
• Secondary leg positions allow low footprint for transport – machine can fit in the bed of a 1/2 ton pickup truck
• All off-shelf, readily available components used, for a de facto lifetime warranty of service
• Soil loading drawer rides on self-cleaning v-groove rails, for zero friction operation to extend machine life.
• Main cylinder has adjustment screws so the press plate never touches sides of compression chamber, to extend life.
• Near-zero friction design in the two points above eliminates need of using abrasion lining.
• 6′ by 3′ hopper opening allows loading with a tractor loader. Size is readily extendable by increasing side hopper panels (extra).
• Automatic vibrator – automatic soil sensor detects soil during loading, and activates hopper shaker.
• Safety kill switch is implemented as a rope around the machine – pull on it and power is cut off.
• Machine loads from one side, and bricks are picked up from the other side for workflow and operator safety.
• 12V operation of the electronics powered by any auxiliary battery. Weather tight electrical enclosure.
• Hopper grate eliminates oversize clods and rocks
• 5″ diameter main cylinder and 2.5″ soil-loading drawer cylinder
• Soil-drawer speed is adjustable.
• Weight approximately 1600 lb.

Next is field testing, to be published next.

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To boost morale, we started by pressing thin, 2 inch bricks (2″x6″x12″) – as their rate of production is higher than that of 4″ (4″x6″x12″) bricks. The thin bricks are the size of bricks one would press for making CEB floors. We ran the machine dry (without soil) in order to obtain baseline data. Results from runs with soil should be 5-10% lower if our calculations are correct.

This test run yielded 13 bricks per minute with LifeTrac as the power source, for the 2″ tall bricks. See this insanity in this one minute video:


Our results from today’s runs are incomplete but sufficient to move forward. Due to practical considerations on LifeTrac pressure relief settings, we ran into the limit of pressure valves beginning to crack open when running in medium-high throttle. This means that we could not obtain any meaningful data on pressing rates at the upper power limit of LifeTrac, so we may need to return to this analysis in the future.

On idle, with about 7 gallon per minute (GPM) hydraulic flow, we got 7 bricks per minute (for the 2″ bricks). Thus, the pressing rate is about 1 thin brick per each GPM of input. This value does not scale with GPM, however, because at higher flows, we actually need to slow down the thin (2.5″) soil-loading drawer cylinder, or otherwise it would move too fast and possibly cause damage over time.

The thin cylinder produces complications in the control scheme. Not only do we need to reduce the flow going to this cylinder – but also – we need to have a different reduction ratio for the expansion and contraction of the thin cylinder (given the design of a hydraulic cylinder) . This may be accomplished by using a check valve and a needle valve, in parallel, within the hydraulic circuit for the thin cylinder:

To make the machine work, one does not need to account for this complication – but if one is optimizing the machine, such details are important. The difference in the results could be up to 3 full bricks less per minute if one doesn’t account for this detail. This may not seem important with a machine of a 10 brick per minute or higher capacity. However, if one is streamlining operations or building cities – the difference between a 10 brick and 13 brick machine is over 1400 bricks per day. This translates to at least $1000 in productivity lost per day while using an unoptimized machine. We’re talking about serious production with The Liberator – so in the long run – every brick counts.

In any case, now we are doing better than our initial experience with our first, manually-loaded machine, which produced 1/2 brick per minute per person – because we did not know at that time about the difficulties in CEB operations lie in soil handling. Now – if one person loads the machine with a tractor front-end loader – that translates to a maximum of at least 12 bricks per minute produced according to the existing results. I must emphasize that this result obtains without the back-breaking labor.

While our results are incomplete, we still expect the 12-18 maximum as suggested in the former table, where 12 corresponds to full bricks, and 18 corresponds to the thin bricks.

Thus, what is the absolute physical limit for a simple, gravity-feed machine like ours – with a single compression chamber – pressing from the bottom – where the machine produces one brick at a time in a sequence of non-overlapping steps? The limits are determined by 3 factors:

1. Physical speed of the hydraulic cylinders.
2. Velocity of soil free-falling to fill the compression chamber.
3. Speed with which the electronics can respond to the position sensors in the automatic control scheme.

The speed of the electronics is under 7 milliseconds for a detection loop, so it appears that this factor is not as important as the previous two factors – if the motion is on the order of 1 second per half-stroke for both cylinders. Thus, the physical limit will be a balance of cylinder speed and how fast the soil fills the compression chamber by free-falling from the soil-loading drawer and hopper. For the soil to fill effectively, it is reasonable to assume that each half-stroke for each cylinder is at the shortest about 1 second long – slightly faster than shown in the video – or about 4 seconds for the entire pressing cycle. This would be a theoretical value of about 15 bricks per minute – which is consistent with what we’re approaching in reality. In reality, we are approaching a main cylinder speed as fast as gravity is able to fill it.

Thus, we propose that once The Liberator reaches such a maximum limit or close to it, our work on liberating the means of construction is done. If the machine works as expected, there’s no need to make it any more complicated,  and we can then focus on releasing the next product.

Others suggest that a horizontal press machine is a better choice than a vertical press like ours because the former can provide better uniformity in brick height. We will have to determine if this is a problem in our case. One immediate solution for our present machine is laying our bricks on their side. How much does brick-laying orientation matter? Another easy solution is to modify our machine to produce 6″ tall bricks (right now the absolute limits are 2″ to 5″ in height) – such that the other 6″ dimension is perfectcly uniform. I hope we never have to go the route of the horizontal press, due to the added complexity and cost. Our initial reason for choosing the vertical press was that it allows for the absolute simplest machine design. Correct us if we’re wrong.

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The process of adapting, packaging, programming, and debugging the system was one detail after another and took much longer than expected. It requires unskilled labor with a brain – my new term for problemsolving work when one has no prior experience in the art. This is a highly prized skill at Factor e Farm – and also the key to building resilient, post-scarcity communities.

The overview of the automation system is described in this 5 minute video. The CEB machine is half-assembled without the 6-foot wide hopper to show the workings.

The next step is to run the system at the rated hydraulic flow of 28 gallons per minute, to verify the predictions proposed in the initial automation work. It’s time for the rubber to hit the road.

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