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[Eagleon]

I like this idea in principle, but if conventional industry became distributed on a local level it'd be almost impossible to scientifically regulate and predict CO2 emissions and chemical contaminants. You'd have no way of policing on the corporate level the refineries and power generation that still produces some of the worst pollution and human-rights violations. For instance, imagine everyone has a power cube, to power their fashionable widgets, or multiple power cubes for more widgets. Now imagine everyone realizes it has aspects to it that are maybe not as efficient as it could be, that they're spending too much on hay for their gasifier. Someone makes a change to the design that 'improves' its power, and everyone scrambles to follow their blueprints so that they can use their widgets for less. You now have hundreds of millions of generators you have no way of checking for emissions levels, and no way of knowing to. Also the hay farmers start using wage-slaves to keep up with the increased demand :<

I don't know, maybe it's alarmist, but I don't think it's unreasonable to see it at the very least as possibly less efficient than simply being smarter about what you buy/who you support and keeping conventional industry as it is.

[Aqizzar]

I... honestly am not following you.

What I'm saying is, is that the "reduction" in capital equipment costs being touting is based entirely in the fact that you're not paying anyone else to work.  You're just acquiring the components and doing all the work yourself.  And the whole reason we have Division of Labor economics is because paying someone else to do work, especially with the economy of scale, is often cheaper than spending all your own time doing something versus what else you could be spending your time on.

Think of it this way.  You can get a chair by getting some wood and making the chair, or you can go to a store and pay money for a completed chair.  If the material cost was like $20 versus the finished chair in the store of like $100, you've saved money in the hard terms.  But if you Truean spent the time building that chair when you could have been out being paid to lawyer, have you actually saved any money?

If there are any genuine, overall savings it's only because, for instance, shipping the individual parts of a bulldozer is cheaper than shipping a whole bulldozer, and if you're assembling on your own property, you're saving the cost a producer would have spent on factory floorspace and such.

[Truean]

Got ya. Opportunity costs of DIY v. paying someone else. The savings aren't material based, technique based, or fuel based, it's solely or at least primarily from self labor, no shipping costs, etc. Agreed.

Although, you could say there might be some raw material savings cost if you're building out of dirt brick, which you already paid for with the property, instead of buying lumber. Similar argument for the scrap metal salvage stuff with the Induction furnace and all. Though even then, you're going to have to root around for scrap metal, which in and of itself takes time.

All in all, yeah, I'm gonna sign on with you on this one and overwhelmingly agree now that I get it.

Even so, I think it's a brilliant idea, especially for places where you've got a ton of people but no industry or practical industrial access. If you could somehow make this a reality in extremely poor places, then you could actually build a ton of things. Rural India and Africa could change their society with this.

[darkrider2]

If that thing he has has a lower maintenance cost than a regular tractor, then it could save not just in capital investment, but could also reduce costs in the long run to perform the tasks it does.

[Il Palazzo]

No, they're not factoring in labor.

Low-Cost - The cost of making or buying our machines are, on average, 8x cheaper than buying from an Industrial Manufacturer, including an average labor cost of hour for a GVCS fabricator.

I think they mean per hour? Anyway, they do factor in the labour cost, somehow.

If the material cost was like $20 versus the finished chair in the store of like $100, you've saved money in the hard terms.  But if you Truean spent the time building that chair when you could have been out being paid to lawyer, have you actually saved any money?

That is assuming the party interested in using GVCS has an option of exchanging their time for money on the job market, and that the exchange rate is favourable. In other words, do you have a job that can pay for a new, factory-produced tractor/whatever or not? I don't think this project is aimed at those who do.

I like this idea in principle, but if conventional industry became distributed on a local level it'd be almost impossible to scientifically regulate and predict CO2 emissions and chemical contaminants.

The project states ecological qualities of the designs as one of their desired specifications.
Sure, some guys somewhere might go ahead and build a hay-guzzling, CO2-sprouting monstrosity, but they can already do so. This project, however, is very hippie and eco-friendly.

Got ya. Opportunity costs of DIY v. paying someone else. The savings aren't material based, technique based, or fuel based, it's solely or at least primarily from self labor, no shipping costs, etc. Agreed.

They state that the simplicity of the designs is the main cost-lowering factor. No unnecessary features means simple fabrication and maintenance, which coupled with the modularity as well and recyclability of parts and materials keeps the costs low.

ed: tags

[PTTG??]

It's definitely "different" from conventional manufacturing. In many cases it's better, and in quite a few ways it's worse. I would see the beta village as among other things, a way to see exactly how much you'd need to get externally in order to bootstrap yourself. It's a given that starting out you'd need to buy tools, food, windows, maybe even lumber and stuff.

Buying scrap for smelting is also something I could see. Maybe we could wait for scrap trucks to drive by, then run out and offer them handcrafted stone mugs for all the random metal trinkets they'll give us... but seriously, that makes a great deal more sense than expecting to mine everything.

I think we'd need to find an area where logging would be acceptable, because that's something that we could definitely do locally. Aluminum is pretty omnipresent too, so wherever we don't need steel/copper we'd probably do with Al.

[Truean]

See, the fun thing is, those things look somewhat portable, most of them anyhow. Rather, you could haul that crap around on a trailer with the right permits and a CDL, etc. Point being, it could conceivably lead to a portable fabrication concept.

I wonder if this would be possible to integrate into an existing construction company or similar
It would be an entirely different type of construction company. I know from the ones I've helped with that moving and purchasing the raw material alone is significant expense. So, if you could bring in a few portable units to manufacture bricks on site, then you'd theoretically get a brick home (usually more expensive to produce) in a new and potentially less expensive way.

I do wonder about the quality of the bricks though. I'm not seeing as they are fired in any way, unless I'm missing that. I also wonder about the strength of a wall composed of these bricks and what mortar if any would be used. The industrially manufactured bricks I've seen are rather strong overall, especially when worked into a wall and mortared. If they could match that quality and strength pound per pound, then it would be a legit option.

I do wonder how local building and general codified ordinances in various cities would deal with the use and on site manufacturing of these component bricks.

[PTTG??]

Well, they tend to dissolve in even minor earthquakes... and rain.

They are OK for dry areas, but no, not most urban areas.

[Eagleon]

The project states ecological qualities of the designs as one of their desired specifications.
Sure, some guys somewhere might go ahead and build a hay-guzzling, CO2-sprouting monstrosity, but they can already do so. This project, however, is very hippie and eco-friendly.

Oh, of course. As it is it's harmless, even green. I'm saying that if the idea of more distributed manufacturing and power generation becomes widespread, the problem would become much greater and far more difficult to handle. I don't think the interest is there to source all industry to local shops and the like - cars are one thing that people don't like to compromise on, at the very least for safety purposes, for instance - but it's something to be careful of.

[Truean]

Well, they tend to dissolve in even minor earthquakes... and rain.

They are OK for dry areas, but no, not most urban areas.

Yeah, goes without saying then that this is a major problem. Dissolve? Like your house melts? I dunno what they need to do to get around this major concern, but they need to do it. There has to be a way to manage this, even if it's not a strictly from the ground up sort of solution. There's gotta be something they can add to the bricks that industrially produced bricks have to make them harder and able to survive. I mean, I think what they're doing is neat, but it ... really should be sustainable and not dissolve.  That makes me wonder what type of insulation factor these bricks would have.

You know, I've heart of Cob houses which are constructed of a sort of clay/soil plaster. I wonder how those hold up comparatively.

[Carnes]

Google says that CEB (Compressed Earth Bricks) are earthquake resistant, withstand 1k-2k psi untreated, and are usually finished with a sealant to protect against weathering.

[DJ]

I'd wager there's a reason why bricks are traditionally made out of clay rather than soil.

[Eagleon]

Bricks look great, and there's lots of great historical buildings built with it, but for a house there's no practical reason to use them when you have something cheaper with better insulation, i.e pretty much every other building material we have. There's a reason you don't see many new houses (or buildings in general) with anything more than brick accents - it does nothing to insulate and it's expensive as hell, both for labor and materials. Soil, on the other hand, beats it on both counts because it beats it so easily in cost.

[Max White]

I like the look of the compressed dirt bricks a lot more than those bright clay ones. They just look so much more... earthy.

[darkrider2]

So, portable manufacturing for off-world and compact construction?

Yeah, bricks aren't the best way to go when you can make a suitable house out of timber, though I'm not sure if any of the machines in that set can produce siding, or in-wall insulation, unless we're talking about log cabins, but that's a ton of timber comparatively.