Factor E Farm Blog

William and I have been hashing out the details of construction for the coming year. Our plan is at this wiki page and further details on techniques to be used are here. We are currently planning on a CEB-straw bale hybrid – a double CEB brick wall with straw bale inside. We expect the R-value to be at least 40 – making it a super-insulated house. Add the solar space in front, and we would not need a pile of firewood for winter, as shown in the following video. The video shows the location for this construction – close to the water well so we can have year-round water without doing too much trenching for water pipe.

Noteworthy features are CEB floor, masonry stove, living roof, rainwater catchment, greenhouse in front, open source air-powered water pump, our own lumber, CEB water cistern, and keyhole growing space right in front. This means that in May, we will build LifeTrac II, PowerCube II, and the dimensional sawmill. In June and July, we’ll test the toolchain – cut lumber, test stabilized and lime bricks, do the well pump and prepare water lines, do site preparation, build trusses from our lumber, prepare brick rollers, test slurry mixes, and other details. If we’re on top of it, we’ll begin the wall-raising on August 1st, and hold a CEB hybrid construction workshop.

In the meantime, we invite open architecture collaboration – coming up with technical drawings and models, as well as working out the details on all the other house subsystems.

William and I have been hashing out the details of construction for the coming year. Our plan is at this wiki page and further details on techniques to be used are here. We are currently planning on a CEB-straw bale hybrid - a double CEB brick wall with straw bale inside. We expect the ...

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William Cleaver will be joining us at Factor e Farm on May 1 for a Dedicated Project Visit. He’s coming from across the big pond – from the United Kingdom – and we are planning for a 3 month stay.

William is not a novice to creative dexterity – he’s involved in repair and demolition of industrial chimney stacks and natural draught cooling towers – at heights. See for yourself:

He has experience with various tools, welding brickwork, ropework, woodwork, and general shop.  He’s traveled the world, studied Romance languages, taught English in Chile, and is certified to teach high ropes courses. He is now showing great interest in the deeper message of post-scarcity, resilient community creation.

We discussed the following tentative plan, with both of us working in the shop and as needed:

May – Work on finishing or building Sawmill/LifeTrac II/MicroTrac II/ anciliary implements for construction – all in preparation for building.

June – begin building autonomous, zero energy housing with solar space. Experiment with CEB floors, CEB masonry stove and chimney, stabilized bricks, stabilized reject lime bricks, stabilized brick walkway and driveway, stabilized retaining walls, and others. We plan on winter food garden and sprouting in the solar space. If progress on the steam engine goes well, we’ll aim to install combined heat and power on the masonry stove.

July – continue building until comfortable accommodations for the winter are ready for several people.

We’re looking at building zero energy homes that look tentatively like this:

(Credits: Aigars Bruvelis in Blender)

Here is a CEB floor example from Abe at Vela Creations:

See more of his photos here.

Other than this, William is learning Kdenlive on Linux for movie editing, as well as and QCad for CAD work. These are staple tools now at Factor e Farm. William will begin preparing some of the technical drawings for the sawmill, so we can collaborate on making that happen over distance until his arrival.

We do want to consider bringing in additional help from the CEB general contractor, Floyd (see last blog post). We will consider hosting a CEB workshop if progress is good. If the CEB fabrication is going well – there could be resources generated to really get things moving forward, and continue to build more structures. I think now is the beginning of really settling into the land – and getting the place to look half-way presentable. We’re open to all kinds of ideas, such as the proposed CEB vault construction and others – but we’d need other people to get involved to push those projects forward. Otherwise, we’re sticking to basics and all types of experiments in the process.

William Cleaver will be joining us at Factor e Farm on May 1 for a Dedicated Project Visit. He's coming from across the big pond - from the United Kingdom - and we are planning for a 3 month stay. William is not a novice to creative dexterity - he's involved in repair and demolition ...

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Work on the open source sawmill is moving forward.

I’ve been using Blender to visualize the sawmill in 3D, in order to help in the design phase:

We’re getting ready to start building. What’s in it for you? The sawmill proposal at the wiki is exploring some important questions:

• Is it possible that widespread access to a low cost sawmill (under $2k in parts, or Factor 10 cost reduction) with the highest production rate of any small, portable sawmills – can empower diverse array of producers to generate lumber that is otherwise obtained from global supply chains in plantations or old-growth forest?
• If so, can that produce a beneficial effect on local economy and sustanability?
• How much of the global supply chain lumber can be replaced with local lumber production?

Possible producers involved in the above include farmers, ranchers, woodlot owners, intentional communities, sustainable woods coops, back-to-the-landers, small entrepreneurs, and others. I can foresee that Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) operations begin offering dimensional lumber as one of their products.

For us at Factor e Farm, we are considering modular housing units, comparable to the GreenForms from the Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems, which has been implemented in the GroHomes:

You can get involved in this by participating at the wiki, where live development from people across the globe can happen. Our main questions now are related to the blades:

• What rotation speed, number of teeth, and blade diameter is optimal for us?
• Blade sourcing? DIY circular blade construction methods?
• Hydraulic motor design and fabrication for eventual technological recursion?

The bill of materials for the first sawmill prototype, with a 20′ bed capable of producing 16′ long dimensional lumber, is about $1500, or about $2500 for turnkey, digitally-fabricated product in the community supported manufacturing model.

We have already collected $200 in the last ChipIn, but got nowhere near our goal. We’re revisiting this, supported by our further due diligence that you can examine at the wiki. Once again, the promise of Factor 10 cost reduction is evident. Chip in to make this happen:

Work on the open source sawmill is moving forward. I've been using Blender to visualize the sawmill in 3D, in order to help in the design phase: We're getting ready to start building. What's in it for you? The sawmill proposal at the wiki is exploring some important questions: Is it possible that widespread access to a ...

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The sawmill project has undergone some changes in design since the last concept. I have taken over development, and based on a comment on the previous concept we decided to pursue a different design, a dimensional sawmill. A dimensional sawmill is one with multiple blades that work on a stationary log. Because they have multiple blades, they can cut out a piece of dimensional lumber in only one pass. This makes them very fast in lumber production.

Industrial counterparts would be the Mobile Dimension Saw (MDS) and the Mighty Mite. Here is a demonstration video of the MDS taken from YouTube:

We chose a dimensional sawmill because it has the highest output, and the simplest design for personal fabrication – a circular sawmill with 3 blades. These two requirements are high priorities for Global Village construction. A circular blade can be fabricated easily, such as by cutting from a sheet with a torch table. Swing blade sawmills – where a single circular saw and motor rotate/swing to make different angled cuts – are apparently not stable enough to provide the output that they claim – according to feedback from two foresters. Plus, the swing mechanism is more complex. A chainsaw mill is the simplest, but it just doesn’t provide the required output for effective Global Village construction. Dimensional sawmills have the highest output of portable sawmills, but the industrial ones are also the most expensive.

The industrial designs use gas or diesel engines and also carry the engine with the saws on the platform, whereas ours will have hydraulic motors – powered by the open source tractor, LifeTrac – for 40 hp of available cutting power. The hydraulic drive allows for great simplification in gearing requirements, as well as great simplification of the vertical motion mechanism, as will beome apparent in forthcoming work. The sawmill project will be another experiment in “factor 10″ engineering, attempting to reduce the cost of machines by a factor of ten. Our goal is nothing short of high performance – a mill that cuts wood like butter.

So far we’ve decided on a design similar to the MDS, with a space frame (for stability) on two ‘I’ beams for x and y axis movements, a chassis surrounding the space frame with bearings to grip it on all sides, a vertical plate or beams on the chassis with another plate attached with bearings and adjusted vertically with a pulley for the z axis, the MDS like saws are mounted on the vertically moving plate and powered with hydraulic motors and pulleys to get the correct RPM.

A 2D top view layout has been done and some research is on the wiki:

The next step is going to be to make a prototype of the space frame, with a bill of materials, budget, and implementation plan. We need some research on space frames for that.

If anyone has advice, suggestions, ideas, questions, or can help on the design please post in the blog comments, or on the wiki sawmill dicscussion page. Please feel free to rearrange the sawmill page for a better workflow, it’s a work in progress.

The sawmill project has undergone some changes in design since the last concept. I have taken over development, and based on a comment on the previous concept we decided to pursue a different design, a dimensional sawmill. A dimensional sawmill is one with multiple blades that work on a stationary log. Because they have ...

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Here’s a ChipIn for the Sawmill Project.

We have added a third project manager to the OSE team, Robert Todd.

Bob has been with us at Factor e Farm since July, on and off. He decided to stay for the winter, committing more deeply to our project. He will take on the sawmill as lead developer. We will get to building it as soon as the workshop is completed – which we are all working on right now. Thus, we’ll house both CEB and sawmill developments in our new, CEB-walled, living-roofed, off-grid facility with CEB dual-fuel wood/oil masonry stove. Sauna is included.

The sawmill project has a history already. I started with a bandsaw mill, and had an essentially completed prototype, with hydraulic motor and even a log cleaner.

I never ran the thing. Closer understanding of the sawmill – after building it – showed me that getting it working is not a walk in the park. Blade guides and wheel tilt must be adjusted carefully so that the blade stays on the wheel. The most difficult issue on a band saw mill, however, is blade maintenance. One goes through several blades in a day. Blade maintenance requires both sharpening and tooth setting. The additional cost for automatic equipment for these tasks is on the order of a few thousand dollars, and manual sharpening and setting means that you’re spending hours after a hard day of cutting maintaining your blades, if you don’t get them done professionally.

That’s the summary of my learnings, and I decided that this is not such a robust sawmilling solution for the Global Village Construction Set (GVCS) – if we are interested in the simplest solutions for quality of life in an advanced civilization. If anyone thinks differently here and would like to take development of this sawmill to completion – we still have the entire sawmill. Come on over and become project manager – we just don’t have enough resources in-house to justify making it a priority.

We moved on to assessing and planning a swingblade sawmill as our next choice. This is essentially a small circular blade which you can rotate by 90 degrees to cut out dimensional lumber from large logs. YouTube videos on this are amazing – a swingblade cutting logs like butter, as it cuts not through a whole log cross section, but only a small section that is turned into a board. Our love affair with the swingblade sawmill ended when a sustainable forestry friend of mine, Ben Hansen, told me that he’s never seen a swingblade perform as advertised. He told me that he’s seen days wasted as logs would shift, and crooked boards were a result. I trust Ben’s ecological and technical judgment. He built digitally-fabricated LPSA trusses from roundwood:

Ben suggested a chainsaw mill, like a Logosol. We are pursuing this option presently. It is absolutely the simplest design. I shied away from it before because of chainsaw costs – the largest chainsaw in the world, a Stihl of Husqvarna 10 hp model, is about $2k. Plus, 10 hp on a rather thick chainsaw blade yields a cutting speed nowhere near that of a swingblade mill.

But, what if we use LifeTrac, with our multipurpose, 25 hp hydraulic motor, to power the chainsaw blade?

This is getting exciting. Cutting speeds, according to Ben, should reach our requirement of 2400 linear feet of dimensional lumber per day. This level of performance is such that it requires 2 days of sawmilling to produce all the roofing and lumber for a structure the size of our present, 1200 square foot CEB addition.

Why is a powerful, affordable sawmill important? The measure of success of the GVCS, in general, is how much market share we are taking away from global supply chains, via return to local production. If people have easy access to a low-cost (<$1k), high production (3000+ linear feet per day) – then I believe that this will have a significant impact on displacing factory forestry and old-growth clearcuts, and promote rainforest preservation. If we have our own resources in our backyard, we don’t need to steal them from neighbors.

We set up a project funding page for the sawmill here. The sawmill prototype and project budget is forthcoming.

People, I think we’re on to something. Are we going to build the world’s largest chainsaw? Open source, of course.

Here's a ChipIn for the Sawmill Project. We have added a third project manager to the OSE team, Robert Todd. Bob has been with us at Factor e Farm since July, on and off. He decided to stay for the winter, committing more deeply to our project. He will take on the sawmill as lead developer. ...

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