TechShop Collaboration

Hi Mark,

Marcin from Open Source Ecology here again - I'd like to follow up on your membership offer to Open Source Ecology at Tech Shop that you made personally to me at TED Long Beach.

We are now doing final documentation for our open source brick press. Over a year ago, we have succeeded in optimizing production - such that it takes only a single day to build one of the machines - as we show in this video - http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/December_18.

Our blueprints are completely open source, and we believe that the machine is now ready for potentially widespread replication. Last year, we have shown seamless integration of the Brick Press, open source Tractor, and Soil Pulverizer in building a prototype microhouse - http://blog.opensourceecology.org/2013/10/architecture-lead-joins-the-ose-team/. We are doing final improvements to the Brick Press now, and publishing the results in a comprehensive manual.

I would like to ask if you are still offering the free membership to me and Open Source Ecology. I would like to explore if we could use the TechShop CNC Torch Table for cutting of brick press parts from 1/2" 4'x8' sheet. Would that be possible in the Detroit location? If so, I would like to make plans for a Detroit visit as soon as possible - Detroit is only 2 hours from me by air. We are planning our first workshop at Factor e Farm on April 25.

TechHhop could benefit from workshop opportunities if these could be held at TechShop to drive traffic to TechShop. We are currently organizing 3 day immersion training workshops, in which one of the days is a complete build of a machine. I'm not sure Techshop would be set up for this - 6-8 200A MIG welders are required for a parallel, 1-day build, and the most favorable workshop participation number is 18 people. However, we could consider modifying the work flow so that only half as many welding machines are required, but it is likely to take longer time, and we have not experimented with 3-4 welder ergonomics. The outcome would be that TechShop becomes a prototyping/production location for our brick press - as a start.

Please let me know about the possibility of CNC Torch cutting our machines at TechShop and the membership issue.

Thanks, Marcin