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re: going off-grid and our pal nick
12 jun 2000
jerry chase wrote of:
>...the fervor he attaches to the use of found objects...
found tires are nice, since they don't rot, and the owner gives
the finder $1-2 to take each one away. the more you can use
in a structure (eg a compost furnace with 12 tires tied flat
in a circle on the ground, another 12 above that, and so on
up to 6'), the cheaper it is to build :-)
some dangers of using found objects is that designs will end up
inefficient, too labor-intensive or unreproducible. fortunately,
there's no shortage of tires.
nick
is the cube as they say "dead," or is it instead another type of
life form that with its characteristic rectilinear grid is slowly
taking over the planet like some kind of galactic impetigo? is my
discussion already hopelessly compromised, lying as it does on
rectangular sheets of paper? i can not answer these questions...
these are instructions on how to almost break out of prison. the
prison is the paucity of shapes to which we have in the past confined
ourselves because of our technology-industry-education-economy...
make the faces stiff enough so that you can jump up and down anywhere
on any one of them without it giving...
car tops are a good building material. they are cheap, strong, have
an excellent paint job and are available almost everywhere... most tops
taken off a car with an axe will be between 45 and 52 inches wide and
50 to 70 inches long; a station wagon will give as much as 8 feet and
a van or mini-bus even more. an experienced man with a good axe can easily
chop 5 or 6 tops an hour, and when the cars are packed close together
so you don't have to touch ground you can go faster than this... power
saws with carborundum blades, electric unishears, electric nibblers,
acetylene torches, pneumatic chisels, all of these will take tops off.
the advantage of using an axe is that it's cheap and after some practice
it can become a real pleasure to chop the top out of a car.
chop along the sides first then the front and back. throw open the
doors--one foot on an open door and one foot on the car is a good
stance for chopping the sides...
recently mandel bell and i rented an air compressor, marked off the
shapes we needed right on the cars and then cut them out easily with
a pneumatic chisel. cutting the trimmed shapes right out of the junk
yard eliminated at least two thirds of the work in the previous routine.
it also meant we could haul twice as many tops in a load...
at drop city we couldn't get the second-to-last pentagon in. we
took a day off. during this day a very strong chinook wind blew.
the continual working of the building in this strong wind must have
cooked the whole structure because the next morning the pentagon
dropped right into place...
from steve baer's 40 page dome cookbook, 5th edition, 1996,
available from trial and error/p o box 1327/corrales, nm 87048.
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