J.D. Ray

I'm unclear how successful you'll be using this forum as a dating site (though a successful result would be interesting, for sure), but if you're unfamiliar with Oregon, specifically the Willamette Valley, you'll find that Linn County provides rich soil at relatively low prices.

Perusing this forum, I think one of the most important things to determine up front is how you're going to do conflict resolution.  People problems appear to be the biggest issue, particularly in areas like maintaining a sense of personal empowerment, surviving as an introvert, and maintaining equality.

Beyond that, infrastructure established up front will make or break your ability to succeed.

I've been chewing on the idea of a framework for implementing communities, and writing some bits down.  Along the way, I discovered three Israeli models, the kibbutz, the moshav ovdim (commonly shortened to just moshav), and the moshav shitufi.  They vary primarily by level of Communism, from a kibbutz, where everyone shares everything, to a moshav ovdim where it's really a collection of individual productive households (e.g. they have their own land, livestock, and infrastructure) that share resource acquisition (buyers groups) and marketing.  In the middle is the moshav shitufi, where production is shared, both in feeding the community and producing things for sale, and resources are shared, but things like consumption management are left to individual households.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibbutz
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moshav
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moshav_shitufi

Importing AutoCAD files into SketchUp requires SketchUp Pro.  The good news is that Pro has a trial version that works for (I think) 30 days.  After that, you're relegated to Make, the free version.  The good news is that SketchUp Make is a very capable piece of software.

https://help.sketchup.com/en/article/3000165

Put as much as you can into video production. Hire a professional; they're worth every penny.  And again, good luck.  If there's anything on the analytic or technology front I can help with, PM me.  Also, I do pretty well with SketchUp.

JD

More power to you, and good luck.

I'm very interested in buying a well-made ceramic core so long as it doesn't cost a huge amount of money.  I have no idea what your expected production costs are, but (for me) two or three hundred bucks for a core and riser seems about the upper limit of what I could justify.  The $36 riser linked above in the group-buy situation seemed almost inordinately cheap; I'd happily pay double that for a riser.

Cheers.

JD

...a woodlot grows 1 cord of wood per acre per year perpetually.

Thank you for that.  I honestly understand completely the need for an efficient use of resources.  I was, however, just trying to get to something that I could use to project feed rate. It's not just about keeping a house warm; my mom's farm, which is 174 acres with over 100 in mature forest has plenty of wood.  I'm interested to know how much wood can come off of that farm sustainably to drive the energy needs of what I hope becomes a small scale industrial operation.  The farm came with a steam boiler that's sized large enough to drive quite a bit of machinery and develop electricity as a secondary function.  Waste heat can be used to keep things warm in the winter.

So, with the question of "one cord per acre" answered, I can use the Engineering Toolbox to figure out how many BTUs per cord, and from there figure determine a heat rate for the boiler and how much useful energy can be developed, working back from that to figure out how many acres of woodlot we'll have to reserve for keeping the boiler fired.

Cheers.

JD

With the understanding that there is a large "unknown quantity" factor in this question, how does one go about estimating and planning for a consumption and re-growth rate for a sustainable woodlot?  I realize that the "unknown quantity" of the consumption rate will be the driving factor, but there are other factors that should be knowable, and those factors can be plugged into the planning function.

Let's use the Pacific Northwest as the location for starters (which is relevant to climate, wood species, etc.).  Here are some sample questions (feel free to add your own):

Are softwoods (fir, pine, hemlock, etc.) better to plan with than hardwoods (maple, oak, alder)?  They seem to grow faster, but do you get more energy out of the hardwoods, and therefore they are the better ones?

What about coppicing?  Maple can be coppiced well.  Is it a good forestry management technique?

If I harvest an acre of 40-year-old trees, do I get more than twice as much wood as I do from 20-year old trees? If so, that would seem to mean that I need to plan for either twice as much acreage of woodlot or half the consumption rate.  Or something.

If coppicing is used, how much wood can be harvested year-over-year per acre?

I realize that every answer here will have an "-ish" factor to it, and I'm really posting this here as a discussion topic rather than looking for a true answer.  Still, it seems worth discussing.

I designed a two-piece core that's meant to be castable.  If the single-piece core thing turns out to be too expensive, perhaps a two-piece would be less so, even if an extra mold is needed.  I had an idea that I could turn my design into a cottage business, but the reality is that I have too many things on my plate to get there.  So PM me if you're interested in what I've got.

No, really, it's a building material.  Or at least an attempt at one.

http://newatlas.com/mushroom-sausages-building/50134/