Babington Burner Trial One
Today we started to put together our Babington burner. This burner is important because it is a versatile source of heat for: space heating, metal melting, glassworks, pottery, steam engines for remote power, heat engines for mobile power in cars and...
Hexayurt Construction
Hexayurt building went well – a 7/16″ Oriented Strand Board (OSB) structure with 4 inch wide, 32 gage galvanized flashing as the ‘tape’ to hold it together. Being familiar with standard construction methods, I had my doubts concerning...
Progress
Ecology and technology. The tractor is borne of plants and rock – transformed to rubber and steel. It’s munching up the soil – with the tiller. It is site preparation for the first Hexayurt – in minutes as opposed to 2 days with...
Crowdsource Funding
We finally kicked off our crowdsource funding yesterday – or online donations. You can chip in to our project here. We are migrating towards full direct support by such small online donations. The bottom line is – with the collected resources,...
Factor e Live – Episode 9 – Rototiller, More Solar Panels, Biodiesel Reactor + Crowdsource Funding
Here is the continuing saga with the open source tractor. We built a quick attach plate for rapid interchanging of implements. We built an open source rototiller as the first such implement. Now we can switch readily between the tiller and loader bucket...
Clarifying OSE Vision
Vinay published his vision for Global Swadeshi recently – a movement where individuals take personal responsibility for global issues. Key among these issues is oppression – whether it’s the oppression of the weak or funding one’s...
CEB Stabilization Questions
We are getting much closer to full-scale building with the CEB – with September 15 as our starting date. Another collaborator will arrive here around that date, Alex Rollin – which is extremely exciting becuase he is also an information architect,...
The Bell Tolls for PV
– Guest post by Benjamin Gatti from our Solar Turbine Google Group. This post features an eye-opening perspective on photovoltaic (PV) panels. The claim is: it is very unlikely that PV will ever be cheap. Personally, I’ve been following PV...
LifeTrac Prototype I
Here is the evolution of LifeTrac (see wiki work page) from design, possibly the most simple implementation of tractor-loader functions: to steel frame: to wheels and motor, and to bucket: I completed the quick attach plate yesterday, from design: to...
Solar Turbine – Commentary on Results
Friends, the latest developments on the Solar Turbine project, outside of the documentation clips in Factor e Live 6 and Factor e Live 7, are ambitious. We are presently leaning to mirrors and a modern, high-recirculation ratio uniflow steam engine as...
