free 7-day natural building workshop May 25-31

We would like to offer a free 7-day natural building workshop here at the Laboratory May 25-31.

You will have the opportunity to:

1. Help prepare materials for the wofati. This will include learning various ways of peeling and preparing logs from a woodlot. Learn to use a drawknife, spud, log arch, and timber carrying tools.

2. Learn to maintain, sharpen and use gasless tools in forestry practices. You will learn to maintain sharp 2-person crosscut saws, axes, electric chainsaws and other hand tools used in felling and preparing logs for building projects. You may also have the opportunity to fell a tree with a two-person crosscut saw.

You may have the opportunity to:

3. Learn to operate a portable sawmill.

4. Help with completing the RMH cob bench in the tipi. There will be some structural and finish cob to complete, using materials found on the land.

5. Possibly help construct some hugelkultur beds and plant seeds.

The majority of the time will be spent preparing materials for the wofati, but we should be able to cover most other topics as well.

We ask that everyone arrive in the afternoon/evening of Sunday, May 25 and stay the full week, through Saturday May 31.

You will be offered meals, and camping options will be available.

There will be a cap of 24 participants.

In addition, if some people are interested in working through the month of June, you will have the opportunity to exchange Wofati preparation work for participation in the Wofati workshop in July.

If you are interested, please email: workshop@richsoil.com for more information.

Another possibility: re-build our compost heated showers using copper pipe instead of pex.

Somebody asked about how this compares to the gapper stuff.

For a gapper, you can arrange to come out any day and we will pick you up at the airport or the bus station. We will arrange for you to have a bunk - we might supply a tent, or a tipi or an indoor bunk. You will probably eat at my table, literally. And when you arrive, you will be "the new person" for that day, getting a personal tour and getting set up with fun projects.

For this free workshop stuff, we will see to it that food is provided, but you must get here on your own power and you need to bring your own tent. And you MUST arrive on saturday before it gets too late and be fully ready to start everything on sunday morning.

Portable Sawmill


Skidding logs.

More things we might do

paul wheaton wrote:Another possibility: re-build our compost heated showers using copper pipe instead of pex.

For easier recovery of heat collector and protection of the {expensive} copper tube.

consider suspending the copper coil inside of a 35 or 50gal drum and filing it with fluid{3\4 fluid 1\4 air for fluid expansion}

drum should be Stainless steel, if the pile is large enough chain 2 or more in parallel.

mineral oil has a lower expansion and will not corrode the drum like water.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mineral_oil is available in food grade

Here is a picture of a more finished wofati.

We answer many questions in our workshop FAQs thread.

Gosh, what cool people came out to join us for this. Linda brought the most amazing goat milk and goat meat from her place in Oregon. I worked in the office for most of it, but joined in on the final campfire and snapped a few pics.

This is our back parking lot which we plan to excavate further, so it was not seeded this spring. Very. sandy.

Now the night-time pics. Isn't that the best time for a camp fire? We discussed animal systems, extended milking, wofatis, and wish I could remember some of the other topics.

Unfortunately, I was hasty and didn't always capture folks' best side. Here, starting at this post in the RMH in a tipi thread, are more flattering pics of workshop folks.

there was also a discussion on treehouses and ziplines!