Daniel Andy

Well that explains it all perfectly, thank you!

Would be interested in talking with you if nothing else. Sounds similar to what we intended to do.

Swindler is an interesting forum name choice...

Thanks, John. Sorry, but I guess I'm not enough of a woodworker to understand your reply. I don't understand what centres and dogs mean in this context. I'm used to dogs being pegs in a work table concept but I have no idea how to apply that to a lathe in my head. Centres is totally new to me.

The perfect homestead vehicle is the Slate EV truck. Thats my honest opinion. Its simple, its repairable, it charges off your solar array, it can be reconfigured for changing needs, its only $27000 brand new.

Honest opinion, its perfect, and i wasnt paid by them in any way to say this. I have my cars settled just about for life so i shouldn't be able to buy one.

So im building a treadle lathe, which will also function as a disk sander by sticking a 9inch sanding disk on it.

Only thing i cant figure out is work holding. I can buy a machined chuck for a lathe of course but then it costs $100 which i figure is almost half what i could buy a used lathe for.

Is there a DIY alternative or should i look for a parts lathe to grab the chuck from?

Here is a related digital offgrid archive project like the one I had in mind that might be good to mix with a permies snapshot in digital archive form.

offthegridvault.com/blog

I will join Samantha's youtube live that sounds good!

But its not really about intentional communities at that point its just general global permies community.

I agree with others that intentional community is mostly local.

HOWEVER, that said, no intentional community is going to survive long without a plan to attract more people. That means reaching people who might move to join you...some advertising is fundamentally required and this would be a good way to connect communities to new blood and also share best practices.

So i think actually an intentional communities group where a different community talks about themselves each month would be very valuable.

To do that would mean a serious amount of setup and networking on the part of the host to get people signed up to present each week. In my business we call that a boundary organization. Someone who does the work of connecting otherwise separate groups for the benefit of all. If anyone wants to sign up for 10-20hours of prep each month you could certainly do a monthly show and tell. Again it seems like youtube live is a better application for this than zoom.

Absolutely right and no one would be able to read that much or even find what they wanted in it...even if you handwave the problems with owning multiple cargo containers of paper for it.

It's either the top 0.01% of the site, or it's a digital archive. Either one is probably monetizable in some way, but the paper "best of permies" approach probably wouldnt be quite what everyone wanted.

Personally I would suggest the digital archive option, as there are others doing digital archives of wikipedia and ifixit and such. It could fit with those nicely.

It seems like the worst elements of this mess come from not controlling what goes into the sewage system and using it as a trash can.

If you're offgrid you can control what goes into your sewage system, so you don't need to worry about chemical contaminants.

Why not use an indian deenbandhu small scale biogas plant and make biochar out of the slurry output if you can't compost it for long enough to neutralize any health concerns before returning it to the soil?



Ideally I would either make compost out of the output, or burn it as the heat source in a Stirling Engine Combined Heat and Power generator.  I have made other posts about the stirling and the biogas and compost both would be good fuel sources for it...

...and thats if you don't want to just compost, right?

The bigger issue, to me, is that biogas is like 25x more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, and a bunch of home biogas plants are sure to leak it in ways that are impossible to regulate. So aerobic decomposition seems like it has a significant edge in being better for the environment from a realistic perspective.

Guadagno Attilio-Cesare wrote:could we not be getting away from all lithium and lead type batteries… on favor of the old orginal superpower:  Nickel-iron?  (a.k.a. “the edison battery”)

My understanding is that the nickel in them makes them cost a lot more than the alternatives?  Be happy to be wrong though.