Les Visiteurs (The Visitors)
Andrius (Minciu Sodas) and Jeff (One Village Foundation) helping Ronny and Marcin mix mud for a cordwood house. They joined us for two days of conversation, collaboration, and construction. – ——————————————————————————————————-...
Brick is Born
It was thirty days before Christmas, two thousand and seven. The first compressed earth brick was born from an open source compressed earth block press. It was smooth, it was sleek. Six inches by twelve and four. Wouldn’t give it away for twice...
CEB Day 20 – Winter Migration
On the Compressed Earth Block press, I am looking to press the first brick today. The mounted pressing cylinder looks like this: It got into the 20s on the Fahrenheit scale, so I moved development operations into the greenhouse. We have a good stove in...
Bio-Butter
The cold weather blew in to join us at the harvest Thanksgiving dinner. We had our first snow of the season and our first bio-butter: biodiesel which solidified due to the cold. No, we did not spread it on the dinner rolls. And fortunately, we did not...
Secrets are no fun.
Biodiesel has returned to the back burner at Factor E Farm. The potential collaborator has not yet responded. Apparently, he does not understand that biodiesel is one of numerous pursuits and without a little lubercation (ie. cash), we cannot simply drop...
Freedom Funk
Freedom Funk became considerably more pungent this weekend after a grueling day of piling logs for the new addition. Freedom Funk is the smell of the sweat that seeps from one who is working toward personal or societal evolution. To the ordinary olfactory...
Solar Turbine Update
Yesterday I talked to Dan Granett of Granett Engineering. He made a boundary layer turbine successfully, and has performance data (please let me know if you know others). This turbine is an external combustion engine, and is a cheaper, simpler, and more...
Logs and Thoughts
I have been cutting lumber for my new little house almost for two weeks now. It is hard and extremely slow. Every few days we have to change a chain or the whole chainsaw all together. Look at this picture: Isn’t it beautiful? This house is being...
Definition of Open Source
It is not open source to go to the car shop three times in one day only to finally realize that the part you really need is obsolete. That happened to me today.
CEB Day 11 and Update
Quick update. On CEB, I am hoping to spit out the first brick by this week. The flexible fabrication front is hot. Deep in the fiery Iceland underground, Smari and his Fab Lab team are working on an open source, computer controlled XYZ table for acetylene...
