Days 13-15
The second week of Factor e Farm’s Summer of Extreme Design-Build ended with final preparations for the upcoming CEB Press workshop in Wisconsin Rapids, Wis., and continued work on several other projects.
As usual, Founding Director Marcin Jakubowski and the interns used Friday’s morning meeting to review progress from the day before and discuss issues they had.
The next part of the morning was spent finishing up CEB Press modules, which some interns also spent the afternoon and part of the weekend doing.
Following lunch, the interns split off into groups and continued work on different projects.
Jeff Adams, Graham Coffman, Sam Turner, Brenna Fitzpatrick and Guillaume Coudray almost finished installing the side-panelling on the sides of the Solar Hut. Sam also continued planting trees outside the MicroHouse with Katerina, Marcin’s wife.
Emily Dixon, Stephen Whiting, barried the bottom part of the pool frame, snagging the people from side-panel installation to help.
3D-printing Emily, Juan Bennazar, Moriah Baltz, and Greg Buckland continued working with the 3D-printers.
Though still smoothing out some of the same problems they’ve been dealing with all week, they managed to print out one male bushing holder large enough to use for the CEB Press they’re building at this week’s workshop.
Anthony Douglas, continued his work with the CNC Torch Table, which will soon be used to cut out custom-made parts for various OSE machines.
Marcin took the interns to the workshop for a welding lesson at the end of the day on Friday. A lot of the interns found their first time welding surprisingly easy.
Interns pose for a picture with their welding masks on in the workshop before learning how to weld. Photo by Marcin Jakubowski
“It was much more straightforward than I thought it would be,” Graham said.
The interns will be using what they learned from the welding lesson this week, while helping those attending the workshop assemble version 6 of OSE’s CEB Press.
Weekend adventure
On Saturday several interns went on a trip that Emily organized to the Dancing Rabbit, an ecovillage in Missouri about three hours east of Factor e Farm. At 1 p.m. they partook in a workshop titled “Intro to Natural Building.”
All the houses at the Dancing Rabbit are built from straw bale and plaster.
“We stepped in cow manure, mixed it with clay and sand,” Guillaime said. “It was funny. And then we put it on the walls.”
Victor Macul also arrived Saturday from Brazil and will be staying as an intern through October. As a masters student at Universidade de São Paulo in product development management.
He is writing a thesis on “how to help people to understand the design process in the context of open source collaboration that we use here,” using OSE as a case study.
