Bulldozer
Main > Food and Agriculture > Farm equipment
From Proposal 2012 Outline:
Definition – A bulldozer is a high-traction, earth-moving machine indispensible to building ponds, berms, or other earth-moving tasks such as building roads or clearing land.
Problem Statement – A bulldozer is an expensive and specialized machine. Few permaculturists have access to such machines, thereby not being able to perform constructive terraforming activities for improving the ecology of landscapes or for mitigating erosion. Renting a bulldozer costs $500 per day plus transport. Access to a bulldozer allows any community to reduce its infrastructure cost significantly.
Solution – The GVCS involves a ready modification of LifeTrac to make it suitable for bulldozing duty. LifeTrac has already been built with high-traction, metal wheel tracks. To allow LifeTrac to have 4-10,000 lbs of pushing force, the drive on LifeTrac must be geared down significantly (3-10 times). The flexible design of LifeTrac allows for an easy retrofit of gearing chain drive, which allows LifeTrac to be converted into a bulldozer at a cost of about $1k, as opposed to $15k for the smallest available commercial bulldozer.
Further Information – See Wikipedia - Bulldozer
Development Status and Needs – The LifeTrac platform is at the Prototype II stage of development, which is sufficient for testing the bulldozer-duty retrofit. We are ready for the design stage of the bulldozer with LifeTrac as the base platform for this development.
Links
- From How Things are Made - madehow.com - [1]