I'm sitting in a shipping container stuffed full of bespoke 3d printers, refurbished computers, and bins full of drone parts. I'm designing the solar thermal collector box in Blender. When I finish figuring out how to export to 2d vector format, Joao will run the CNC machine to cut the parts out. (Also, he’ll vlog it.)
@strawhatz.adventures warming up the CNC
In the shipping container above me, a woman from the Netherlands is in a bodged-together cleanroom inoculating mycelium spores in preparation to teach a workshop on growing structures with mushrooms.
Outside, Lucio and Jean are figuring out how to make the 80 year old jointer router attachment work so they can cut grooves to affix plastic sheeting in the pieces for the new geodesic dome.
Philipp mentions he is on sabbatical from an electric vehicle company. Lucio lights up. "Oh! Good! Maybe we can electrify the Land Rover!" Maybe… but first Philipp has to help figure out if the gearbox can be rebuilt or if we need to drop in a whole new unit.
It's exciting to be here. These are my kind of people. When 'carbon footprint' comes up in conversation, everyone has a couple of interesting critical points about how to think about it to contribute and then we agree on good-enough immediate practical methods for reducing it in our lives, and then move on to talking about how to build cool shit out of stuff we find in dumpsters.
I need a tool to make clean bends in copper pipe for the solar thermal collector. I looked up a tool online and told Lucio the price - €176 - and he grimaced. "Forget that - let's just print one." An hour later I'm hitting print on a 3d model I just whipped up, and the tabletop printer behind me starts to whirr.
I have a lot of good to say about this place, but of course it's not perfect. To be honest some days it feels like roiling chaos kept going in one basic direction by virtue of Lucio's energy and the stigmergic guidance of shared values.
Whoever built the kitchen had loftier ideas than abilities. The roof ends inside the walls, so when it rains it rains inside. My inner carpenter is offended every time I look at it.
At 0100 this morning a new leak in the treehouse roof sprang and it started dripping on the cat, which normally I wouldn’t mind but the cat happened to be sleeping on my feet so my bed was getting wet as well.
There's a leak in the bathroom roof that lands on your shoulder when you're sitting on the john. The walls of the bathroom are generously spaced bamboo, so in a good breeze the shower curtain blows and sticks to your skin. If the wind gusts hard enough the pilot in the gas water heater goes out and so does the hot water. (My solar thermal system should end that.)
Sharing workshop space with a rotating crew of ten other people means you can never learn where every tool actually belongs, where the boxes of screws are, why there aren't any rubbish bins next to the table saw, and which extension cords work.
And yet…
…and yet I’ll take it. It’s fine. This place attracts good people, people full of energy, creativity, and interesting experiences. I can handle any kind of rough living arrangement if the people are good, and these people are first rate. (Conversely, I wouldn't care to share one night in a luxury resort with awful people.)
It feels like the people here are working out v0.9 of one branch of the multivariate future we actually want. It’s got bugs, and the desired feature list is much longer than the implemented feature list, but the vision is so compelling that somehow a tremendous amount of stuff gets done every week.
The basic idea is to mix high and low tech, to ‘farm with the help of tech, or maybe to tech with the help of farm’, and build an off-grid space that any kind of makers or tinkerers can come to experiment, prototype, build, share, hack, bodge, improve…
There is a sort of joy baked in to the work happening here.