Well received.
I'm all for working on the best designs we can think of while informed by
others' designs rather than semi-mindlessly copying others' designs.
And for working intelligently to build critical mass around good ideas.
On Thu, Apr 18, 2013 at 4:28 PM, Hol Gaskill <hol(a)gaskill.com> wrote:
OK so to touch on the OSE design philosophy, it
seems to be heavy heavy
heavy. My first thought when i saw the design for the hopper was that the
whole assembly looks about 10X the weight required. For soil testing
shakers that see hard rock shaken through them day after day for years, we
use essentially no more than 10 gauge wire mesh. For the hopper my first
suggestion was to do it out of plywood with bent sheet metal joints just
for ease of construction and transport. The other parts that are taking
heavy loads all make sense to build from heavy sections, but i get the
feeling these were not engineered using stress calculations. I could be
wrong of course. I have some experience fabricating very lightweight yet
high strength structures and learned how to weld during fabrication of this
little guy
http://fsel.engr.utexas.edu/news/2008/images/steelbridge.jpgwho could be
picked up by one person yet could support over 2500 pounds
over a 20 foot span. I think given the cost of
steel (not to mention the design philosophy of trying to do more with
less in general) and the desire to build things that will be used and
therefore that need to be transported, i would prefer working on
lighter-weight projects; a bike-transportable windmill would be awesome. I
think if we scrub the press, we can still re-use most of the stock.
Personally I can't think of much of a use for these bricks, as there are a
number of lighter and more watertight options available.
I think having a number of projects that people can get excited about is
critical. we will not all be unified by one goal. i think the best way to
synergize is to establish/refine a framework for having open source
compatible parts that can be mass produced, that build on eachother
incrementally, and that are relevant to our immediate needs in order to get
off the ground and get some use, possibly generate some feedback for
further iterations of the design. forking open source ecology is good - i
like the way they lay out their different components. i think of our
struggle as being sort of like a tech tree in games like civ, age of
empires, rise of nations, etc. you add technologies in completely
different fields slowly, and each one pushes your production frontier out
further and frees you to devote more attention to the areas of your system
that are lacking but not worth occupying more than a small fraction of your
effort. to me the most critical thrust areas for humanity are
energy, water, food, housing, exploration, education, and manufacturing
to enable the other 5, just off the top of my head not an established set
of categories. the CEB press would fall under the housing category to me,
and there are superior alternatives that require lower startup capital and
lower unit cost of individual finished housing units. they have the right
idea of using native materials, but what is involved in finishing out one
of these dirt brick houses? quite a bit more effort than needed to provide
housing in my opinion, and still imported materials are required to
complete. myself for this area i would prefer a mobile sawmill and some
equipment to make hemp-reinforced lime stabilized mud walls. since we are
situated in the center of a sprawling metropolitan area, why not choose
more immediately useful things to build with the materials, and more
critically the time, available to us? All of our time is valuable and the
sooner we get a return on our investment of
time via improvements in our lives and the subsequent freeing up of
more time to tackle common problems, the more likely we are to actually
afford to continue creating a built environment that suits our needs and
not the needs of those selling equipment designed with maximizing
cumulative user cost in mind. To this end, i propose brainstorming and
opening up the discussion to determine which of the lowest hanging fruits
could benefit us and our neighbors in the near future. Of equal or greater
importance is determining which ones have a viable pool of people with the
interest, expertise, and available personal effort bandwidth to actually
carry out the given project to completion. This could be assisted via some
sort of database and i know we have people that can put together some sort
of system once our planning efforts outgrow paper and pencil and
coordination of build groups becomes the limiting thrust area of our
operation. Where we have an established idea with a pretty cl
ear gameplan but are lacking in interest or expertise from the immediate
circle of people, it shouldn't be hard to find from the larger community
people with the technical skills and/or enough interest to do alot of the
organizing and troubleshooting that will inevitably be required. And we
can actively increase each of our expertise on various manufacturing or
design skills through maintaining a strong training component in our
operation. There's nothing I enjoy more than seeing people who are
interested in how to do something get a chance to work on that type of
project with someone who is more experienced, and walk away with the
ability to pass that knowledge on to others who are very interested but not
yet able to (or don't realize they are already able to!) do it themselves.
I think if we come up with a good framework of design philosophies and
thrust areas, we can not just attract people that are already interested or
skilled, but through promoting a group problem solving a
pproach in tackling common problems we can both inspire people to become
interested, and in the process of carrying out our plans pass the specific
bits of lower-level technical knowledge that are required to carry out our
visions and of which we as open mechanics seem resolved to take both
personal ownership and responsibility for dissemination.
Anyways, if you made it this far, let's build a fucking
bike-transportable windmill or something else economical and useful. I'm
used to juggling many projects and having varying degrees of control and am
happy to work, teach, learn, follow, lead, or even drink beer and barbeque
in the vicinity of any project that promises to return near-term value to
our community in long-term thrust areas.
hol
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