Frank welcomes appropriate technology enthusiast and humanitarian Robert Fairchild, also known as Solar Bob. Bob shares his decades-long journey in the realm of appropriate technology, including the genesis of the movement during the oil crunch of the 1970’s and the now growing interest in all things AT in the Age of Internet. Bob addresses the role appropriate technology can play for the suburbanite in contemporary America who is looking for an alternative lifestyle. He also asserts that appropriate technology has been open source since the beginning, and shares some views from his experiences in Haiti and central Asia.
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5 responses to “Episode #153: Appropriate Technology at Home and Abroad”
Around the 36 minute mark, Bob talks a bit about appropriate technology having always been “open source”. He may not know the distinction, or based on the rest of this interview, he doesn’t seem to appreciate the level of detailed documentation, build iterations, reproducibility, and continuity with future builds that is implied by the term “open source”. The appropriate technology from the 1970s and 80s has considerably less documentation, and many fewer documented builds, than modern open source software lineages.
Furthermore, the work that a lot of open source hardware people are doing is a matter of bringing public domain but functionally forgotten technology out of the badly documented past and into the digital present. The fact that a clever engineer can still design and build you an internal combustion engine or a water pump or an arc welder on the spot from scrap is great, but the fact is that there still isn’t a 20HP or 100HP open source engine in the year 2014, and that’s a sorry state of affairs. For the billions of people who don’t have those decades of mechanical and chemical experience necessary to do what modern industry considers trivial, there’s no consolation: we need to repackage that technology for local production by amateurs, post haste.
He’s quite right about Jakubowski’s hype machine, though doesn’t appear to have grasped actual mechanical and organizational problems with OSE. That fine grained critique is necessary to avoid OSE’s mistake in future open source hardware collectives. Bob says he doesn’t know what a CNC machine shop costs to outfit, and appears to not foresee the efficiency of small production runs of custom machinery using cheap digital production techniques.
This is a persistent problem: experienced engineers are not migrating into the OSAT hardware realm, they’re not bringing the designs languishing behind paywalls in industry into the public domain, and there appears to be a cultural or generational gap: a small group of enthustiastic but inadequately skilled people see that the old closed-source model is fundamentally cruel and inadequate, and the people with the knowledge don’t see this or are getting paid well enough at their day jobs to ignore the urgency. Jakubowski is a nuclear physicist, not a mechanical engineer. Solar Bob does not appear to have passed on his expertise to the internet in any lasting way. We need dozens of mechanical and chemical engineers to flesh out the GVCS and document it digitally. It looks like a lot of little groups are doing good work outside of OSE but no major technologies (car, battery, passive house, wet distillation, pyrolysis, smelting, machining, DC motor, even many simple machines like pumps and winches) have been fully open sourced yet, though some aspect of everything is partly in the public domain.
I am well aware that the internet has made it easier to share designs, but I think when it comes to appropriate technology, it is a difference in degree not kind. Software is different from mechanical hardware, in the ease of modification and iteration. I think true “open source” mechanical hardware is much more an idea than a reality.
I doubt any clever engineer can “build you an internal combustion engine.. on the spot”
I’ve followed OSE with some interest. I’m well aware of their mechanical and organizational problems. I heard Marcin speak at a local college and attended the presentations of two students who spent the summer there. Unfortunately his hype and other problems, when/if they become better known, will be bad for the OSAT movement. ( FYI, According to their IRS 990’s, OSE took in and spent in excess of $500,000 from 2102-2013.)
You can 3d print plastic. To fabricate from metal requires lathes, milling machines, welders, etc. CNC machine tools are very expensive. As Frank has pointed out, there are economies of scale.
http://agroinnovations.com/blog/2014/08/20/understanding-economies-of-scale/
I doubt that there is much, if any, cost benefit to be gained from open source technologies, if you include costs of labor, land, and capital. I’m skeptical of “ the efficiency of small production runs of custom machinery using cheap digital production techniques”. Where’s the evidence?
My father was an engineer at a ball bearing manufacturing company. To be clear, a ball bearing consists of an inner ring, an outer ring, the bearing balls (often mis-called ball bearings), often a retainer for the balls, and sometimes grease seals and other features. They are a fairly high precision product. The balls in aircraft bearings are round to within several millionths of an inch. I worked three summers in that factory during college, two running large ring grinding machines, and one as an engineering intern. The grinding machines for the rings are the size of small cars and require a different setup for every different ring. (and the finish grinding is only the final steps (all surfaces are ground) in a process which might also include cutting tubing, forging, rough machining, finish machining, heat treating, and rough grinding. They are not amenable to small scale production. A blueprint of a ball bearing is fairly simple. The manufacturing is
not.
Of course “experienced engineers are not migrating into the OSAT hardware realm”. It’s a time consuming and doubtful way to make a living. In addition most engineers sign over to their employer the rights to any inventions in their field ever and sign confidentiality/non-disclosure agreements (I had to do this as a college student engineering intern at the ball bearing factory!).
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. said: “… everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.” and I would add “or documentation”. And what is appropriate documentation for appropriate technologies? Can a Haitian villager use CAD drawings? I would argue that the most important thing for an appropriate technology is to understand the principles, then to see some sketches or photographs of some representative examples. Detailed drawings are only useful where you have access to materials used. In Ladakh in 1984 we wanted to build some solar water heaters. Detailed drawings of a solar water heating panel wouldn’t have done us much good. No copper pipe, no fiberglass insulation, …. You need to do local adaptation, with locally available materials.
I don’t recall claiming to be an OSAT guy and feel no obligation to pass on my “expertise to the internet.” I don’t think expertise can be passed on that way. As for documentation available online of my recent work see:
http://www.drtlud.com/2012/08/02/tchar-tech-paper-series/
http://www.vrac.iastate.edu/ethos/files/ethos2012/SatPM/Fairchild_TChar%20stoves.pdf
http://haitireconstruction.ning.com/photo/album/listForOwner?screenName=1vpsb9v40w69p
http://stoves.bioenergylists.org/taxonomy/term/1815
I design things all the time. I probably average a couple of paper sketches a week. Say 100 per year. Few get past that stage. When they do, I do more detailed sketches and photos of construction/assembly. They are often the first of several prototypes. Full documentation is cumbersome and the design is soon oboleted by an improved version. I do have plans for better documentation, but it’s not like people are clambering for more details. I’ve never gotten an email that says “I need more details/better documentation” or from anyone who wants to collaborate. I have sold a few dozen sets of paper plans for a composting toilet design over the past 25 years.
What does it take to build a bicycle? (I designed and built/assembled a recumbent bicycle one summer during college. I bought stock 4130 chrome-moly tubing and conventional bicycle components and worked with a local bicycle frame builder)
MATERIALS:
steel tubing (usually several different sizes)
lugs (to connect the tubing)
forks
rims
spokes
inner tubes
tires
bearings
cranks
chainrings
freewheel
roller chain
seat
handlebars
brakes
cables
derailleurs
…
How many of these could be manufactured efficiently as small scale production runs in a modest digital machine shop?
Few people that need/want a shovel have the interest and capacity to make the steel, let alone the shovel.
Bob, thanks for the response. There’s probably no quick way for me to respond in turn. We appear to be on opposite sides of a deep cultural divide. Mutual understanding between us may be impractical.
I work in a machine shop. I’m not unfamiliar with this territory. I know how ball bearings are made! You think that can’t be open sourced, scaled down, and digitized… you lack vision man! Surely you know how they were made in the 1890s.
You say:
> I don’t recall claiming to be an OSAT guy
> and feel no obligation to pass on my
> “expertise to the internet.” I don’t
> think expertise can be passed on that way.
I’ve absorbed a considerable amount of useful information via the internet. I’ve built and repaired many things and saved a lot of money and natural resources that way. I assume you self-identify as an “appropriate technology guy”, open source or otherwise. But if you don’t feel an obligation, or consider it possible, to preserve your work digitally, then I can’t hope to talk to you via text.
This work is my number one obligation in life. I’m failing at it but that doesn’t stop me from trying. My big project right now is an open source lead-acid battery. I hope to build several iterations during 2015. Lucky for me, the only reason there isn’t an open source battery is laziness. All the science and engineering have already been done by others who were much more clever than me. I now have to put together the scattered pieces.
AJ,
I don’t think ball bearings (among numerous other components/materials/products) can be produced on a small scale at competitive cost/price.
For an amusing case in point see:
http://www.thetoasterproject.org/
http://www.thomasthwaites.com/the-toaster-project/
A lot of my “expertise” was gained through 4 years of formal education in engineering. Much of the rest was gained through thirty years of “life”. It can’t be distilled down to a few drawings and some text. (Just my notes, tests, and textbooks from college would fill a file cabinet!) and I don’t think any such attempt would be worth my time. I reserve the right to choose how I spend my time.
Since I guess you missed my subtle attempt at humor, part of the point I was making was the important distinction between “passing on information to people through the internet” and “passing on my expertise to the internet.” 😉
For a little bit of my accumulated knowledge see:
http://www.i4at.org/stovecamp/HEAT.pptx
It doesn’t render properly for me on Firefox in Linux. See also:
http://www.docstoc.com/docs/171184434/HEAT
Though this probably doesn’t qualify as “open source” since I was paid to present.
What do the other guys in the machine shop think of your open source “philosophy”?
I’m not interested in arguing my side of this in this comment thread. If the immense virtue, potential, and immanent reality of open source hardware and of open sourcing all production methods, especially everything that existed prior to WWII, is not obvious to you — then that’s surprising to me, but I’m not the guy to discuss it in depth here. I don’t understand your humor. What you’re writing is coming off as sarcastic. The toaster project is performance art, not an honest attempt at bootstrap manufacturing. Dave Hakkens’ “precious plastic” is a much more instructive case for me.
http://www.preciousplastic.com/
Most of the people I work with don’t care about “open source” or “appropriate technology”, they get paid to make closed source items for projects with first-world budgets. They just want work in exchange for a paycheck. Some people I work with have tried to start businesses manufacturing their own products. I know two of them have patents which produce small incomes. At least two other people I work with have designed and make an income from building public domain hardware and have invested years in open source software and hardware.