Anthony douglas log

Sun Mar 9, 2014

• Pulverizer and mixer design session in the morning.
• Afternoon work included cutting plywood sheets w/ table saw with Coltan, painting the boards, then helped mud up the cracks in the micro house, moving some scrap metal and helping with the dishes. One interesting thing was the difficulty of stuffing the mud into cracks and against the wall due to it's failure to stick well, then the discovery later in the day that mud near the fire was far stickier and would have been a great labor saver. It shows the importance of a brief practical exploration period. Another thing that made a huge difference, which I expected probably existed, was the technique Marcin showed us to get the mud in the walls; take a trowel with mud piled on it and force it against the wall with another, with the first trowel held underneath.

Monday, March 10

We made good progress in the design of the pulverizer/mixer, essentially settling on the high level design and finishing the 3d sketchup model. Going out to see the stuff was a great aid, and seemed to inspire and catalyze thinking in the group. In the afternoon I and some others focused on finishing the microhouse interior walls, with the chicken wire and plaster/pearlite mix. I returned in the evening and did another batch, timing myself it took 28 minutes to mix and apply a batch of the plaster mixture, we will certainly be done the lower layer tomorrow, then there is a final finish layer. I am going to bed now immediately after this, entering the log entry and eating, I think, as I have been getting increasingly sleep deprived over the past week. Yesterday and today I tried to remove the ton of malware on this computer with avg free, malwarebytes and the online trendmicro software, which have helped, but there is still something interfering with the browser severely.

Tuesday, March 11

Morning design. Eric and I measure the tines modules and the more critical rotor dimensions, so he can model it in scad. I document the process itself, in Process used march11 2013 to model an object for concept sketch in scad [1]. My abilities in Inventor are too limited for now to do this in a reasonable time frame, I think, but I will download a copy now so I can try to draw things tonight. I decided to focus on other things until now, since there are others in the group who can draw well, to be the most effective team player I can. I still need to get the pictures I have taken up non trovebox, I was hoping to do so this morning, but the internet connection was down.

This afternoon I spent mostly on preparing the exterior wall of the hab lab, then limewashing it, and painting the interior with the yellow.

March 12

Got an error message when trying to install the 32 bit version of Inventor, which took since yesterday to download. The 32 bit version won't run on windows 8, so I need to download the 64 bit, back to square one. The importance of having your means of production with you or handy. Andrew had a similar problem, not having his SolidWorks with him. Probably because he never used his laptop to with it.

The morning was spent progressing on the fabrication plan for the soil mixer/pulverizer. This is particularly helpful as it helps iron out some off the design details, such as the manner in which the tine modules interface to the rotor shaft etc. They can be found linked to on the wiki through Dozuki under "build instructions" for the overall and also for the rotor module. I would greatly prefer to add some images, but the feature to add images to the wiki of the existing pulverizer to make things more clear to the reader, and also for Dozuki was not functional at the time, though it seems to be working now for the wiki, so I may revisit this later.

The afternoon was spent moving the swimming pool (parts), limewashing, cleaning at the microhouse, moving lumber and other small tasks that add up.

Very interesting discussion around the fire last night, as you might hope when people who are interested in a project like this come together.

March 13

Last day for most of us present here. Yesterday Andrew, Marcin, Catarina, Chris and I talked about continuing to volunteer here longer, because Andrew and I do not need to return to school as the others do. The plan is for the two of us to continue to accomplish things here on the same schedule, of CEB press in the morning, and infrastructure expansion in the afternoon, until the end of April, which is absolutely great. I was uncertain and didn't want to seem clingy, probably I went too far with that, but it is a fascinating, incredibly worthwhile and rich project here, and I was very much hoping I would find there were opportunities to continue helping to advance it, and all the learning by doing that goes along with that.

todo: Finish the pulverizer/mixer fabrication instructions for the overall and rotor, this includes adding some pics and the note regarding the relative position on the tines on the tine modules and a few other things (if the tine modules are identical, then the tines will all line up, which is not really what we want.) Doing this gives me a head start on doing the other parts, so I have that on my personal todo list and hope I won't have to jettison it, due to things on the list that I have committed explicitly to doing. Also included herein, is to get the drawings done thus far up on Dozuki. Inventor is done downloading, so I may be able to do something useful with that, too.

The afternoon will probably be lime washing and painting, and progress on the microhouse.

links or list for documents I have added to thus far, to be linked to for easy locating later, for now these are place holdersj: The dozuki fab instructions guides and the wiki pages that are linked to from the master development board/spreadsheets for the soil pulverizer/mixer tool. http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/Soil_Mixer_Design_Rationale

I've got most of the parts exported to dxf, and will do the modified ones tomorrow. I am taking a moment to note here, though:

March 14

Something has malfunctioned with this wiki page, as my definitely saved entries for today have gone missing. I will have a look at the history later to figure it out. Anyway, in summary, we spent till about 2 on domestic labor, including cleaning and buying food, and taking a break to say goodbye. The afternoon was spent on whitewashing, painting, removing tape adhesive and other infrastructure stuff. Then we did a final design review of the latest soil mixer/pulverizer prototype. The slated changes are still slated, but I have gone ahead and extracted dxf files from the sketchup file for the parts that will not change. I will then go and export the changed parts, it shouldn't take long to change things and export them. Then we proceed with the dimensioning, to produce a set of drawings for fabrication here on the farm. The drawings will not be super fly, as it is for use here in the prototyping process, mostly. For example, even the plate parts should have edge views, but that would take twice as long to export the files, and it took me about 2 hours just now, and there is very, very little use for drawings of the side of a part made from a plate of uniform thickness when you have the face drawing and thickness.

Announcement to all others at OSE: Just know that my voice seems to be giving out. I'm pretty sure it is from all the talking, and near shouting. I noticed we tend to have to speak loudly due to background noise. I have probably put out more sound energy in the last week than any week of my life, I think! I seem to remember that it is very important to rest your voice when this happens, or you risk permanent damage. So I absolutely must talk less. When I do speak I will have to speak more quietly, too. Also I will try to use signals and gestures instead. I noticed I make the gesture for "I can't hear" a lot, the hand by the ear...:)

march 15

Turns out I actually have a cold, I realized last night, probably accounting for the voice and unusual level of tiredness recently. Great timing. From prior reading on the subject, apparently one of the only known orally consumed things that helps is 500 to 1000 mg vitamin C, if taken within 3 days of the onset of the cold, which going by the onset of the voice symptoms, is already passed. Normally I take 500 mg per day of Vitamin C for that very reason; so that the times that I do get a cold, I have been taking it, before it is too late, not having known whatever was wrong with me was a cold. The other thing is zinc nasal spray, but it has the side effect of a relatively high risk of destroying your sense of smell, permanently. Echinacea, the other preparations in the pharmacy, don't actually help address the tiredness, actual viral infection etc. I went into the pharmacy once and looked up the ingredients on the labels of all the nostrums. I suppose a cough suppressant might reduce transmissibility. I am coughing very little anyway, though. They usually resolve in seven to ten days but some can last for up to three weeks.[12] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_cold#Management