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....
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...
Factor e Live Distillations – Part 3 – Towards an Open Source Tractor
I apologize for not posting the next video sooner, but a flurry of conversations following the debut of the 1000 True Fans – 1000 Global Villages campaign kept us busy. We already have 12 subscribers. Who will be next? To support our work, you can...
5000 Bricks and Counting
We pressed 5000 CEB bricks by now. We have enough for 3 of 4 walls for our living-roofed flexible fabrication workshop addition. At present, we collected funds to complete the roof, but not for any insulation or windows/doors. Please consider a donation...
CEB Field Testing – Factor e Live – Episode 10
We are finally in the phase of field testing of the CEB press. We ran the CEB press successfully with our open source tractor, which we showed in Episode 8 of Factor e Live. Now it’s production time – pressing about eight thousand bricks –...
