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…)
Sun 31 Jan 2010
Posted by Marcin
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.
Thu 28 Jan 2010
Posted by Marcin
Hats off to our collaborators from Poland for open-sourcing a manual, dual-block CEB press. It is in the pre-alpha v0.1 release stage.
Open Source MANUAL CEB PRESS beta I from Cohabitat Platform on Vimeo.
You can download the existing CAD files here. The files are in Polish, so they still need to be translated for the broader audience.
Meet your developers from the Co-Habitat Platform: Pawel Sroczynski and Remik Karbowiak.
These guys are pretty good. They also developed a model open source, prefab, straw-bale house design, and they will be buildng it this year at a budget of $7k. I always thought that straw bale is too exotic in practice because of the huge labor requirements, but these guys are showing otherwise with OpenSTRAW:
Here is the building sequence. Click on the following images to enlarge:
Both the manual CEB press and the straw bale work are a major contribution to open source economic development – and to humanity. See their website for more information. Congratulations to the Co-Habitat team. We’d like to add the manual CEB press to the Factor e Farm product line as soon as the machine is tested in the field, and we may end up building some straw bale here after all.
Wed 27 Jan 2010
Posted by Marcin
Here are the initial CAD drawings for the CEB press, The Liberator Beta v2.0. 
You can download these drawing interchange format (dxf) files at the Open+Pario project repository. You can view dxf files with QCad, AutoCAD, Lx-Viewer, or many other applications. Note that this is work in progress, and the drawings will be updated as time goes on. New files will appear at the repository as soon as they are available.
