Open Source Ecology Open Source Ecology Distillations, 16 Jan 2009

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From YouTube: The CEB Story - To Build a Village - Open Source Ecology

Description

Here we describe our adventures with building to date, as we are developing open source equipment for all the tasks. This is towards creating the world's first replicable, post-industrial village.

http://openfarmtech.org/weblog/?p=485

We are looking for people who are interested in building the world's first replicable open source self-sufficient decentralized permaculture village - to transcend survival and evolve to freedom.

Read more at http://www.OpenFarmTech.org

Visit our myspace page: http://www.myspace.com/OpenSourceEcology

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Here's a little story of our building adventures at factory farm, which leads up to the present work. With a CB press, we started with Roland Bert built an earth bag structure. Two years ago we built the cordwood Edition a year after that turns out earth bag building and cordwood building is both difficult work. All along I've been thinking that compressed earth, brick Saar the best they're strong, they're, fast to build with and they're 100% natural.

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What more could I ask for so here came the CB press, the compressed earth block press I took some metal from the custom fab, a bunch of drilled holes and a tad of welding plug this into the tractor, fired it up and pressed the first brick. We moved on to test the CB press in the field. You build ourselves an open-source tractor first, because we weren't satisfied with the industrial tractors just kept breaking so with our new tractor, which we call the life-giving lifetime design life track. We began to build.

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We started to build an addition right behind a stick frame greenhouse, so the greenhouse would not be blown over by winds that huff and puff quite strongly around. Here we started to clear off the area, but the front end loader was not much good and a hard clay soil. We tried some disking, but the disking did not go too deep either. We then sampled the soil which we tilled with our rototiller contesta. If it would work for bricks, it has to have sufficient clay to stick together, but not too much to make it crack.

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The soil was go. The tiller was not our best friend either, so we needed something that would really sink its teeth into the ground, so he built the world's first open-source tooth bar design, rationale included.

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This worked well, we were able to mount a pile after pile of good soil, our gold for CB, brick pressing. We covered the pile diligently with plastic sheeting when the weather was foul.

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In the meantime, we built some trusses for the addition to buy for lumber was put together into 32 foot long trusses 2 feet high, with oriented strand board connecting plates trusts like this cost us $50 a pop and materials.

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We also got the gravel truck in for the addition foundation. We've entered a test run to see how many bricks we could press in a sample run last minute. Justments, we were ready to go, remove the machine into position. We tilled we mixed in a little sand. We raked it fine, and then we pressed for per minute 52 bricks in 13 minutes with manual loading with five-gallon buckets. hmm We could do that the whole day. We would press about 2,000 bricks.

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In all reality, it takes 15 people to load the machine as as fast as the machine could produce bricks. The back-breaking work is shoveling dirt into buckets and lifting lifting them to feed the machine.

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We continued for 14 days of this, mostly with two or three people. The hard labor required separates big people from sucklings. We learned that such hard labour puts parties involved at severe risk of destroying friendships or even families.

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No honesty. The version of the machine with a manually loaded hopper is not so useful because it's impossible to gather 15 people so you're running the machine way under its capacity with two people. We made 500 bricks per day. On average, one can load enough soil for 250 bricks on a sustainable basis. That's the bottleneck.

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According to soil block, presses a publication from 1988. The production rates of manual presses, claim symbol, similar figures to what we did in practice with The Liberator our machine.

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In our particular case for the number of people we had, we could almost do what we did with a manual press, that's hard to admit, but it's the reality see the YouTube example linked in a blog for what looks like an effective manual press. The point: is our machine displays its rated performance where we think it could get eight bricks per minute. Only when we have a large hopper that we can load with a front-end loader, that's interesting.

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This makes me think that any mechanized press on the market with a small hopper like ours, is really being oversold any of UCB Builders out there. What do you think so? We will be building the big, hopper and testing the performance done. That's how we will sell the basic machine with a big hopper. So anyway, we pumped out almost 6,000 bricks in total and started to build our Edition.

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We started by digging a shallow insulated foundation insulated with 2-inch R, 10, pink foam. We used the backhoe, which was very effective. It moves from side to side by articulation of the tractor.

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Next we put in the battery bank and stove into place before the walls were built. We leveled the foundation tarred the bottom course of bricks and started. Laying walls went up rather quickly, except when frost made it hard to get the bricks off our piles as they stuck to each other. Our soil mortar froze too, and a section of wall fell down when a mortar, defrosted and shifted.

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We reinforced the walls with posts and started to use regular cement, mortar mix. We then put on the top plate stuck rebar down three feet into the wall through it and started to install the trusses.

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We then laid the side walls put OSB panels on the roof and basically have the structure closed off. On the inside. We cut out cut out windows on the back of the greenhouse and started installing some of these windows. That's where we are now what needs to be done still finishing details more straw on the roof.

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We are using polyethylene and the carpet to line the roof. Then straw. This should last 50 years. We will then put up another wall on the inside for a kitchen and utility space with stove lined with bricks on the outside, then we'll park, the tractor inside and start on. The second prototype of the CB with torch table fabrication included, will actually dig inside the building, both to test the new CB press, the Liberator 2, and to dig ourselves a deeper workspace.

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That may perhaps be converted to a basement, not the usual way to do it, but it will probably work well. This is our field report on CB building so far open source equipment. Some local resources makes for a healthy start. Now we almost have a good workshop space finished, so some real action can begin. If we're going to house 30 people soon, we've got to move crash course on open source, product development and engineering will be included.