November Progress Report

With the roof on the CEB workshop addition – we can relax our pace and document progress. Our wireless internet is down – is works intermittently in winter – so we are in the process of installing a land line.

It is useful to summarize both October and November here – which focused on building our new CEB flexible fabrication workshop addition. We collected about $5k in the two months – and met our funding needs very well. As in October, there was only a small number of donations – 15 for November.

We can now report on the overall materials cost of the addition – $3.8k for materials for a 1100 square foot covered space. That is about $4/square foot materials cost – a ridiculously low price achieved by use of local earth as a building material. The walls are 1 foot thick, and the trusses are engineered to support a living roof. Comparable industrial structures – post barns covered by sheet metal – cost at least $10k for a structure that has a 20 year life span, significantly weaker structure, and no insulating value.

Here is the bill of materials for the CEB addition:

Here is a video of the addition nearing completion:

In terms of the the building – we have successfully demonstrated a low-cost, lifetime design structure. Just as anything at Factor e Farm – this is only a beginning. When we produce our sawmill, we will reduce the material cost by over $2k – by producing our own lumber for the trusses and roof. This reduces the cost to $1500, or about $1.5 per square foot. Moreover, since $500 of the bill is insulation, the cost goes down to $1k if we develop insulating compressed bricks, or under a dollar per square foot for lifetime-design buildings in the temperate climate. If the above building costs are eliminated as said, we will have demonstrated an important contribution to an economy of abundance.

As you have seen, the work was grueling because we used manual soil loading into the CEB hopper. We will address this by using the tractor loader next time – to obtain 3000 brick per day production rates instead of our typical 400 bricks – with 2 people in both cases. Had we known how difficult it is to load the machine with buckets – we would have gone to the front-end loader immediately – probably saving ourselves 1-2 weeks of CEB pressing time.

People: Right now we have Marcin, Nick, and Jeremy. Bob never did return to work on the sawmill, so Jeremy is taking up the project leadership. Nick is working on the steam engine for the solar turbine. Brittany left, as she discussed on her post. Presently, 3 Global Village Construction Set projects are being engaged actively in parallel.

Future Work: We are taking the project to the next level by deploying the 1000 True Fans – 1000 Global Villages campaign to support our work – the 1000 Squared Campaign. We are looking for a 1000 true fans – like Kevin Kelly’s concept – to put their money where their mouth is in terms of support for the Global Village Construction Set (GVCS) – by committing to $10 per month for the next 2 years.

Moreover, we will be holding the First World Conference on Open Source Ecology in late summer/early fall of 2009, at Factor e Farm. This will be a working conference where people come on a per-project basis based on well-developed implementation proposals – to deploy as many of the GVCS technologies as possible in the shortest time period. This is our crash program for the GVCS at Factor e Farm. The request for proposals is forthcoming.

More information on these two topics is forthcoming, once we catch up with organizational work. We have a backlog of documentation. I will be focusing now to kick off the 1000 Squared campaign for the next week or two. Once the campaign is begun, I’ll return to XYZ table development for digital fabrication of the CEB press, as Nick builds the steam engine prototype, and Jeremy builds the sawmill.