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....
Fruit Tree Grafting and Raspberry Root Cuttings Details
The plant propagation workshop of last weekend did not offer a chance for good documentation of the process details, so here’s another take. We propagated 200 raspberries and about 50 peaches and apricots. We’ll need to feed a village.
Perspectives on Local Economic Power
Here’s something to think about regarding our recent refocus on locally produced fuel and steam engines at Factor e Farm. Energy is slave labor without the slaves. At Factor e Farm, doomsday peak oil scenarios are not particularly threatening because...
Basic Bookbinding
For the record, we keep log books/journals at Factor e Farm. Anyone visiting for more than one week is required to make a notebook for records, data, pictures, numbers, etc. This is useful for keeping track of Factor e Farm history, passing on work to...
Hexacube 2
Today our work was mentioned in The Guardian, on building the world with open source. The article began with Vinay’s Hexayurt. While on the topic of hexagonal structures, here is our second Hexacube. It took 2 days to build with 3 people, but the...
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...
Fruit Propagation Workshop
Yesterday we held the Plant Propagation Workshop. It snowed the same day, but inside the greenhouse, we propagated raspberries from root cuttings, and grafted apple and peach trees. We used a grafting tool to do the latter: Here is the transcript of the...
