Solar Village 2010
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...
Dedicated Project Visits Continued
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...
Happy New Year!
From post-scarcity communities, open business models, open source tractors, land stewardship, to starting some serious building this year – here’s the latest: If you are liking what you heard in the video, don’t forget to subscribe to...
Zero Turn MicroTrac
MicroTrac achieved zero turn motion. If one walks around rapidly, one can turn the walk-behind tractor around in place. MicroTrac is turning out to be a beautiful freak: Play this freak show. To do this, we added two small, freely-turning wheels to MicroTrac....
LifeTrac in MAKE Magazine
LifeTrac, our open source tractor, was recently featured in MAKE Magazine. Thank you to Abe Connally of Vela Creations, who wrote the article. Look Inside >> Volume 18
LifeTrac Loader Arms Adjustment
As we’re getting ready to change the world in the 2009 season – we had to modify the open source tractor slightly for better weight distribution. I torched off the loader arms and welded them closer to the LifeTrac body. Now the back wheels...
Open Source Tractor Walkthrough
Here is a walkthrough for LifeTrac. We cover the basic structure and hydraulics design. This is for those of you who want to study the design more closely, or may be replicating this in the future. Keep in mind that this is the first prototype, and several...
Heavy Duty Lathes, Chickens, Heavy Hoes, MicroTracs, and Soil Pulverizers
Any good village should not go without the above. The heavy duty, 12″ chuck, 20 hp, open source lathe design is complete. Yes, 20 hp from LifeTrac. It’s $360 in parts – which is awesome because because these things sell for thousands....
Second Prototypes: LifeTrac, CEB – Plus MicroTrac
Lots of progress here. On the ground, we’re completing Hexacube 2 today for interim housing, with our friend O.R.. On the technology development pipeline, we published specifications for the steam engine, pyrolysis oil production, flash steam generator,...
LifeTrac 3D
Bram DeVries, who does visualization support for Demotech, just sent us some excellent visualizations for LifeTrac, showing its simple box-with-wheels construction: This brings up the point on our LifeTrac developments – which is to build MicroTrac...
