evan's ant village log

Love the video sharla and evan! More more more!

Day 187

Those berms along the driveway and around the parking lot at basecamp are finally ~12 ft tall. They're doing a decent job of blocking noise from the road too.

And the raspberry leg of Volcano Road is done too! Many rocks were broken, and a few excavator teeth as well, but now there's just one leg to go!

Kai made some sweet seed balls! Thanks Kai! These will come in handy for planting parts of berms that are particularly hard to reach.

Day 188

More road-building. It's slow-going climbing up the north slope of the volcano. There was a patch of finer, mostly rock-free dirt on the flatter part but the slope itself is quite rocky.

I saw this neat little flower at the top of the volcano that I don't think I've seen before. The plants I've already taken pictures of but haven't identified are starting to blur together a bit. One more for the database, maybe? Either way it's a purty one.

Day 189

Encountered a road block of sorts towards the top of the volcano. Coming around the bend, taking material from above and putting it below to make a gently-sloping terrace-ish road, I ran out of material to continue. Even grabbing from further uphill wasn't enough. As I could see the final destination of the road just a hundred feet ahead, this was quite frustrating.

After much deliberation with Paul, we decided to take a wider curve around the bend, making the road wider and a bit less steep, and also to improve the rest of the road enough to get the dump truck up there.

Meanwhile, the innovator's event is in full swing, and some really amazing pyrological devices are coming together. There's a rocket-powered kiln being built! I wish I could be around to participate or even just have more time to pick the brains of these masters of fire science, but alas, the road must be built so that Rex can go back up to the lab.

Day 190

'Twas a beautiful misty dawn, the deer were grazing, the turkeys were gobbling, and then the peaceful silence of the morning was shattered by the roar of the great Sabretooth Rex!

I managed to widen, lower, and unsteepen the road around the bend at the top of the volcano, and then proceeded to climb back down and widen a few other spots that might otherwise give the Millennium Falcon trouble. Jesse used the tractor to start grading the road too.

I keep on excavating, Jesse keeps on grading, and the innovators just keep on innovating. There's a 4-inch batch box inside of a giant barrel thingy that Peter built and has dubbed the Fat Rabbit Heater. I'm considering building a 4-inch system for Siesta, so I'm particularly interested in seeing how the Fat Rabbit fares.

Day 191

Widened the road a bit more, all the way down to the bottom of the submarine leg. Then I helped Jesse back the trailer down the hill. A couple of the wheels weren't turning properly, so Tim Barker took a look. Apparently the air brakes were malfunctioning but Tim managed to disable them for now so the wheels would turn. Tim is a mechanical mastermind. No machine known to man is beyond his expertise.

The innovation continues! Ernie Wisner built a rocket stove with a semi-transparent quartz bell! It was quite a sight to see the glow of swirling flames belching out of the top of the heat riser!

Day 192

Still down at basecamp excavating away. Josh drove the Millennium Falcon all the way up Volcano Road. Considering the controls on this thing, that was no small feat.

I loaded up the dump bed with road material and Josh dumped it at the end of the road, slowly extending the caldera leg out into the abyss. Before we could even dump a second load the Millennium Falcon broke down. The drive shaft broke clean off. Yep...

Lasse, one of the innovators, built a really awesome rockety masonry stove/oven/mass-heater! I think it's a particularly beautiful example of rocket stove technology and the brick aesthetic is quite appealing.

Loving that RM stove.

I'm hoping the millennium falcon is at least not visible from the that neighbor's perspective? It sounds like it will be there for a while.

Anybody know where we can find more information about that stove?

How does it "rocket" without a barrel?