Hol, awesome! We definitely need more expertise in the area of hydraulics. And good links too, thanks to both of ye. I was lurking the OSE forums a bit the other day. I found something that scared me a bit: http://forum.opensourceecology.org/discussion/1004/why-is-ose-so-quiet-late… Some quotes: *Yoonseo, OSE team* *Just want to clear things up with the facts about what's happening with OSE. First and foremost, everyone on-site left OSE after the huge conflict year-end 2012 between the team and Marcin.* * * * Brianna, OSE team * * Lies about the quality of the products. The brick press produced shit for bricks. They didn't have one flat surface on them. I personally built 4 of these, which were all shipped out without proper testing. One was shipped out a year after it was supposed to be. The power cube worked for a week AT THE LONGEST * * Ryan, random dude. * * I have a collective of makers that just received a space grant in upstate NY that are making a list of first projects to focus on, and the OSE Liberator and CEB press are near the top of the list. Hearing that the Powercube design doesn't hold up to use and the CEB press being almost useless scare the heck out of us though. Does anyone on here know who purchased these preorders, or anyone that is using actively any iterations of these pieces? I'd love to hear about their experiences. * * Yoonseo, OSE team: Hey Ryan, it's actually not so bad. OSE has been doing subpar builds primarily due to haste and lack of care from Marcin, but the general mechanisms (at least for the ceb press and powercube) are sound- we couldn't have done the hablab/workshop without it. To be clear- the CEB Press and Powercube work. Now the only issue is that you have to use good materials and produce them properly (instead of the bad stuff that broke on us over and over). The inexpensive surplus engines for the Powercube have frequently caused problems due to breaking magnetos; a bunch of the solenoids broke too. Shoddy commercial parts! So on the powercube side, as long as you get engines with reliable accessories, and long-life solenoids, everything should be fine. Remember to seal the threaded hydraulic connections and tighten sufficiently- hydraulic leaks are bad! Also, I think the most difficult part of the powercube production for you will be sealing and installing the ports on the gasoline and hydraulic fluid reservoirs. Make sure you get this done right else you'll get gas/hyd fluid leaks all over the place. When I was at FeF there's mostly been problems with hydraulic fluid leaking due to improperly sealed connections. No explosions though, heh. Now the CEB Press can easily have issues surrounding its compression chamber. If you do not use thick enough steel and insufficiently reinforce the compression walls, you will get bending and that will get you curved bricks. No good. Also the second thing was that the ejection surface must be parallel or subsequent surfaces must be scaled in the proper direction. Otherwise you will get the bottom of your bricks sliced by about 1/4" as it gets ejected. Also make sure that the primary cylinder is high enough so that the pressing surface can actually get to the ejection surface (otherwise you gonna get some more bottom-slicing action). I think those were the major issues. Make sure you put a pressure relief valve on there eh. Hope that helps! -Yoonseo * My conclusions: * I predict OSE wont last much longer, and will ta some point stop being the center of a lot of this open hardware infrastructure stuff. Groups will fork it and improve upon the designs. * hence thre is no need for us to associate ourselves closely with and limit ourselves by, OSE. In terms of how we build and what we build. Instead, it makes more sense for me to think of us as forking OSE. * The CEB press can work if we use common sense and confirm the design and do it very properly. If not, it wont work as well. We should not trust the OSE plans and recommendations too much. Make a great day, Morten H. D. Fuglsang US: +1 415 799 6931 // skype: FlyvendeHest On Thu, Apr 18, 2013 at 11:35 AM, Anthony Di Franco <di.franco(a)gmail.com>wrote;wrote:

I have always viewed things much as you are presenting them now. Even though I flew Marcin out here to give a talk and put him up in my apt. a few years ago, I never thought OSE would be a monolithic effort but more of an agenda to spark widespread development along many lines by many different groups with different backgrounds and approaches towards a clearly-articulated common goal. And, I am personally more interested in directly working on a simple, efficient, safe, performant vehicle I can drive around in every day than a tractor or CEB press which I will probably not use for the next 5-10 years if ever. And I am interested in Ivan Illich's and Tony Foale's visions for what such a vehicle should be like. Windmills might be cool too if we can focus on a design that is both simple to build and useful and of high quality once built. I also agree that we should be able to have more than one project going at once. On Thu, Apr 18, 2013 at 1:33 PM, Morten H. D. Fuglsang <vallebo(a)gmail.com>wrote;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.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

Lots of good words there, mr. Gaskill. I agree with most of what you said, and you're right, OSE seems to have an eye for heavy metal :) Tom, Jehan, Eric, Nigel -- what are your thoughts? Make a great day, Morten H. D. Fuglsang US: +1 415 799 6931 // skype: FlyvendeHest On Thu, Apr 18, 2013 at 5:08 PM, Anthony Di Franco <di.franco(a)gmail.com>wrote;wrote:

Actually, I'm pretty certain the grate is not meant for sifting rocks at all. up beforehand, to ensure you get the right clay/silt/sand composition. Make a great day, Morten H. D. Fuglsang US: +1 415 799 6931 // skype: FlyvendeHest On Thu, Apr 18, 2013 at 9:02 PM, Nigel Guest <info(a)avalon-enviro.com> wrote:

i have worked in the lab that processes embankment material and concrete aggregate from all highway construction projects in the 9 county bay area. we use tiny gauge wire mesh grates at a high duty cycle and replacing them has never been on my radar in 2.5 years of half-ass involvement. this is all hard rock (okay, some shitty rock that we reject), not compressible dirt. I will look into life cycle info for the grates next week when i visit again. i have fixed enough stuff there that i might be able to fennagle some surplus 1-1/2" grates "for science" as a lightweight backup for those interested in continuing work on the ceb press. i always respect durability if the additional cost is backed up by numbers. Apr 18, 2013 09:12:06 PM, info(a)avalon-enviro.com wrote: Then Hol's right! Nigel On 4/18/2013 9:07 PM, Morten H. D. Fuglsang wrote: Actually, I'm pretty certain the grate is not meant for sifting rocks at all. From accounts of CEB production that Ive read, all soil is sifted and mixed up beforehand, to ensure you get the right clay/silt/sand composition. Make a great day, Morten H. D. Fuglsang US: +1 415 799 6931 // skype: FlyvendeHest On Thu, Apr 18, 2013 at 9:02 PM, Nigel Guest info(a)avalon-enviro.com wrote: Hol I come from the other end of the spectrum - I've been around mining machinery a lot, so the grate looks pretty lightweight to me. I assume OSE planned for the occasional rock or hard clay lump. I agree with you though, that I doubt that much calculation went into the design! Nigel On 4/18/2013 4:28 PM, Hol Gaskill 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.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 o f   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 a re    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 solvin g 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 _______________________________________________ omi mailing list omi(a)lists.sudoroom.org http://lists.sudoroom.org/listinfo/omi _______________________________________________ omi mailing list omi(a)lists.sudoroom.org http://lists.sudoroom.org/listinfo/omi

Hi Folks, I'll be at sudo room in about an hour trying to figure out how to do sheet metal design in solidworks. If you're curious about solidworks and happen to be downtown come on by. The application is for stainless steel homebrewing vats. Cheers, Hol