Dear True Fans: Beginning Construction

.
.
.
Dear True Fans and Supporters – here’s an update from September 25, 2011 at Factor e Farm. Construction is beginning. There are delays as normal. Absolute cutoff for finishing housing is November 15 before the weather gets absolutely foul. The excavation did not happen – the contractor’s bulldozer transmission went out. The sawmill blade wasn’t ordered – the sawmill manufacturers are afraid to sell us their blades. Bricks weren’t pressed – we are having delays mounting the power cubes on tractors. We did get the 2 soil pulverizers built, we did get foundation rebar and forms, the rebar foundations are cut and bent, and the power cubes are well on their way to being mounted.

Here’s the remedy. Monday – the excavation should happen. Concrete pour should happen later in the week – foundations for 36 columns. We hope to have 1000 square bales pressed by this week. We are also shipping tractors and ceb presses, and pressing sample bricks. We are busy.

We’ll be out of cash by this week – $20k will have been eaten up with excavation, gravel, foundation rebar, concrete pour, and equipment costs. This time, we have a good plan.

Tomorrow, our Kickstarter is going online. The offering is for $40k – for Going the Last Mile with the powerful construction Toolkit that we started. The video for that is prepared, and we’re connected to some powerful marketing channels through the OSE network. Tomorrow I’m posting that online – and we’ll run it for 20 days – as we need further cash as soon as possible, and it takes 10 days after kickstarter end to receive the funds. At the same time, we are going for $1/2M in investment – it’s time to get the money part out of the equation – and get the GVCS 50 built. We’re committed to bootstrap funding, true fans, and crowd support.

Our team here includes myself, Thad, Shonda on construction – and Ian on documentation (see his Power Cube instructional under Overview), while Yoonseo and Tom Branford are joining us for construction. For further documentation, Rebecca and Andrew are also coming. So in the height of construction – we will have 6 people on the construction, plus 3 documentors, and with Kickstarter funds, if we need a huge work crew to finish, we shall do that. The construction will put us well on our way to an open source, distributive enterprise community – 12 prototypers/fabricators here on site- part time in production, prototyping, and developing powerful distributive enterprise business models.

Thanks for your support, and I’ll report in a week, hopefully after foundations are poured and bricks are starting to get laid.