Adam Mitchell, one of our new True Fans, will be joining us at Factor e Farm for a one month Dedicated Project Visit on October 18. At that time, we’ll be towards the end of CEB construction, and we will also be working on developing our True Fans and supporters network. We are discussing ways to get our True Fans more involved. Check out Adam’s comments on his vision for collaboration:
Who will be the next True Fan or or other respondent – to do a video response, to introduce themselves, or to pump in some inspiring comments? We will gladly consider blogging your video if appropriate.
Here is an update on the first set of pips from Hexahatch v2.0.
Here is an update on the other peeps of Factor e Farm. In a few days, Sean and I will begin full fabrication documentation video on the next copy of The Liberator open source CEB press, where the funding basket for it is filling as we speak.
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:
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.
As part of our development process. Factor e Farm participants are required to commit to a proposal for their stay at Factor e Farm. When participants arrive here, we video and then publish these proposals on this blog. This is part of our measures to bring further accountability and transparency into our process. Lawrence’s commitments are shown in the last post, and here we have Inga’s belated introduction and commitments. She’s been here for three weeks now, and here is an update after all the dust has settled.
Here is our formal initial announcement of the 10-day Compressed Earth Block (CEB) Vault Construction Workshop. It will be held at Factor e Farm, in the Kansas City area, Missouri, USA, at the end of September, 2009.
Examples: Modern, earth-sheltered vault homes made of compressed earth have been built in Germany and other countries, but we know of no precedent in America. This is an example from Germany:
Here is another vault home as seen from the inside:
Workshop Description: This is North America’s first workshop on the construction of vaults from CEBs. This is a hands-on, immersion workshop in which participants will work on the construction of a vaulted house with a living roof and solar design. In this workshop, you will get hands-on experience in the entire process of building a CEB vault with a structural, arched roof made of the same material. We will be building a triple-vault structure similar to the one shown in a previous post. We are calling it Inga’s House. We will use wooden forms as guides for the vault to make this accessible to entry-level builders. There is a limit of 25 participants for each session of this workshop, so reserve your space early by filling out the 2009 pplication. Preference will be given to those with experience in building. (more…)
May 16th: at 7 p.m. Marcin was scheduled to meet with people at the Villa Kreativ in Neulengbach – I was not part of the official itinerary but a few phone calls by Franz Nahrada cleared the way and Marcin and I were off to the railway station in Linz.
On the train Marcin made that ‘famous’ video showing my transformation from Inga – The English Trainer to Inga – The Village Elder. Not only the train was moving fast towards Neulengbach and points beyond….
What lovely, dedicated and hospitable people we met at the creative villa, (more…)
What’s so special about „Inga’s House“ you ask? EVERYTHING, and when I say everything, that’s exactly what I mean – see here.
Did I hear you say WOW, what a lucky girl? Yes, that’s precisely how I feel. I met ‘by accident’ of course, a man who had studied at Princeton University, pursued fusion energy, he has a PhD to prove it, and almost immediately (it actually took us 10 minutes) we fused. But let me start at the beginning of this incredible story.
I am a German born American, lived all over the world, have done just about everything there is to do (yes, I’ve got plenty of T-shirts to prove it), and after officially retiring from my job in Greenwich, Connecticut, U.S.A. on December 31st, 2004 I moved to Klagenfurt, Austria where I started my own business of translating websites from German to English and held business English courses for people who wanted to improve their English. See my website. (more…)
To our colonic relief, we added a second composting toilet, a public outhouse with privacy. Now no one needs to wonder who is going to enter the vestibule while performing defecation maneuvers. Albeit temporary, it satisfies our immediate needs. Thanks to Orin for helping construct it!
We also moved the humanure compost to south-west of the hexacubes, across from and downstream of the last stream on the west most side of the property. It’s the blue barrel in the picture below:
All of Factor E Farm’s housing, work, and animal facilities have been constructed in the site’s flood plain among major runoff channels. The building zone was chosen for quick delivery and easy access by car rather than drainage. Development has continued under assumptions that the site is only temporary and that a whole new Solar Village will be built to replace the original site. This assumption depends on the tools and techniques under development.
We are farmer scientists - working to develop a world class research center for decentralization technologies using open source permaculture and technology to work together for providing basic needs and self replicating the entire operation at the cost of scrap metal. We seek societal transformation through interconnected self-sufficient villages and homes. This is a stepping stone to transcending survival and evolving to freedom. Factor e Farm is the land-based facility where we put this theory, Open Source Ecology, into practice. More
