Ecotechnology Buying Club

It’s time to take our open source product development to the next level.

The next on the Compressed Earth Block (CEB) press prototype development is a computer controlled XYZ table for automating acetylene torch cutting of the metal. You may see the fabrication procedure here to see metal cutting requirements. We have experienced about 140 hours of labor for the first prototype. Now we are testing and refining the prototype, and expect about 40 hours to build the next one. We want to use the XYZ table to optimize fabrication, so it will reduce fabrication time down to 20 hours for production runs. The point is, you can lay the raw metal on the torch table, hit return on your computer, and the table cuts out all the metal, including bolt holes.

We have a year-long plan for the CEB, such that we aim for production runs in October. It is part of a larger product development program, shown here.

We are beginning to test an innovative way to fund the developments. Step one is to gather a Core Team for each of the development projects. Step two is to deploy our funding strategy, which we call the Ecotechnology Buying Club. Basically, a large number of stakeholders micro-funds product development, up to the building of a fabrication facility. Sounds impossible, but we are proposing a concrete set of steps to do this. The set of steps is basically a product development cycle, with the twist that stakeholders fund the development. We are just developing products like anyone else, but attempting to optimize the process. Optimization (lowest cost) is the same thing that traditional businesses promise, but always fail to deliver, because if they delivered, they’d go out of business. This is where we step in. Stay tuned.