[omi] design rant

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.jpg who 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 clear 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 approach 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