Daniel Andy

If i was far enough along to start weaving stuff i would be trying to buy foxfibre organic cotton. Sally fox may not be selling to levis anymore but she still sells it direct from her farm shop. Probably not cheap but its one of the best fibers I know of:

https://www.goodyarnbadknits.com/articles/foxfibre-the-yarn-that-almost-saved-the-world

https://www.vreseis.com/

Dian Green wrote:I've been trying to figure out the best greenhouse for us as well. ( also Southern Ontario)

One thing I had been considering  was to go with a passive solar type. South facing is all windows but insulated walls on the sides and north. I was thinking of a partial roof, to reduce overheating in the high summer, and giving it big overhangs. Then pack straw bales around on the north and sides. They should really up the insulation but won't be inside the envelope and would be converted to mulch every few years. ( where we plan to locate the greenhouse also means they would be super easy to get placed too)

I need to do more research.

That is exactly the design I had in mind as well. It sounds like people are saying that the moisture in a tropical greenhouse is not a good idea...

A composting bale wall actually does sound interesting i could build an outside wall of something like rammed earth or compressed earth blocks, put the windows in that, and then line the inside of it with sacrificial strawbales. Those would both be intended to compost and function as insulation until they were too far gone, then spread outside and replaced.

Could be done.

However having a wall you dont have to replace every 2 years seems nice. Id like to opt for less maintenance any time i realistically can.

Perhaps a wall filled with foam glass could do. I was assuming it would need to be unreasonably thick, but I might rerun the numbers.

I wanted to share this youtube channel called Wilson Forest Lands ... which is a guy kind of drifting naturally into a permaculture mindset without realizing it. I doubt he would describe himself as such.

But in trying to optimize for working less, he has seemingly accidentally fallen into food foresting, ecological forestry, and low impact living.

I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

I'd like to be able to grow some tropical trees in south-central canada. In a greenhouse.  I've seen it done with styrafoam, but I want to do that in a natural building context.

I want to build a greenhouse to do that and use strawbale around timber structure for it straw's insulation properties.

I am concerned about high humidity (a result of warm temperatures and frequent top-watering on wet soil in sun) and its effects on a strawbale wall system.

As it's canada and cold/dry...a significant amount of condensation on the windows is to be expected, even if they are doubled.

I could do a lot of drip-sill installation under each window to ensure condensation coming off it doesn't go onto the walls below, but is that even approaching enough? There will be plenty of moisture in the air, and watering, wet leaves, and air flow is sure to throw additional liquid onto the walls as well.

I am concerned that a high humidity greenhouse with lots of condensation seems like it might be a poor fit for strawbale, and I should look for less water-sensitive wall compositions. Is that right?

I'd like to stick within natural building but I'm not sure i have the years required or the team of people I would need to build a cob wall of sufficient thickness for a greenhouse. I'm not sure what other natural building approaches I can take that combine insulation with water resistance.

I don't understand why someone would spend 10 years of blood/sweat/tears building this thing to sell it 10 years later!  Must be something really important pulling you away.

I wish you the best and I hope you find someone who will respect the labor of love this site clearly is.

I think the most important thing is minimizing the worst case scenario.

We can do all we can to prevent it from happening but there is always a bigger earthquake

Dont have that heavy art object over your bed. Dont hang the mirror where broken glass would block the only way out of the bathroom. Dont put that large ceramic on a shelf over your office chair.

As long as its a broken mirror and not a broken head, its manageable.

Personally i will be hanging all my art on chains or wires from the wooden bonding beam at the top of the wall, and intending to use 2 chains each.

I remember a short video tutorial about taking moss, some moss feed of some kind, putting it all in a blender together, and then using a stencil to paint it onto concrete and then watering it. It resulted in pictures made of moss.

Pearl Sutton wrote:I wonder what drill it was made for? I have a press like that, but I also have old drills.
Wonder if you could find a drill that fits it on ebay or something?
Any idea what drill it was made for?

If I were trying to make a mount for it, I have different skills than you, I'd not be 3d printing things, but weaving wire into an open net basket the right shape. But that's how I roll.

I have never seen a drill that looks like it was made for this. I bought a vintage 80s drill. It wasn't old enough.

Solving a hardware problem with metal weaving sounds wonderfully zen. I wish I had those skills!

Wouldnt the basket need to be attached to the drill somehow?

Jay Angler wrote:Daniel Andy wrote:

There *is* an adaptor for dremels, which is straight forward, because dremels have a threaded outer casing that makes them easy to firmly and straightly attach them to something.

OK, so my thought is how do your get the outer casing of the drill 'threaded'?
Caution, potentially crazy ideas ahead - but they might result in you getting a good, not-crazy idea.
1. open up the drill case and see if there's any spot you could epoxy on some sort of a nut or bolt so that a hole made in the case will give you what the dremel has?
2. make some sort of metal band that can be fastened to the outside of the drill that has bolts or nuts securely fastened to it. Ideally these will have slots so that you can use them to adjust for vertical?
3. I suspect all the modern drills are mostly plastic, so suggesting you find someone to spot weld to it won't work. My dad had 2 genuine metal bodied drills, but we're looking at over 60 years ago and they finally died.

I do feel your pain. Hubby has a wonderful drill press and it's one of my favorite toys tools. There are things I can do with it that I simply could never do with a hand drill, as my hands are on the small size and don't fit around many tools safely.

1) This is probably the best approach but I'm scared of the potential for electric shock and / or shattering the drill casing, or both.

2) I like the "giant pipe clamp" idea. I guess it would still have to have some threaded mounts put on that? I can't weld :/  Definitely on the more involved side of things but also has serious potential.

3) Melting some mountings into the plastic would probably work. I'd be afraid of going back to #1 and electrocuting myself with them...but it could work.

One of the approaches I considered was epoxying 4 dowels onto the drill in the four directions and then mounting onto the dowels with shims. I rejected that mostly because what if I do all this custom chassis work on the drill only to have the drill motor kick the bucket a week later?  Then I'm committed to doing all that work over!

Ideally it would be something that I could use with various drills, or re-do for a new drill, fairly easily.

I wonder if I could clamp it in a box between two sandbags...