JacobCoffinWrites

I posted awhile back after making a home for solitary bees, sharing that it had gotten some use. Its important to replace the sticks annually to prevent parasites from being passed from bee to bee as holes are reused.

Thanks to some winter storms, we had lots of downed branches to clear, so I had no shortage of sticks available for use as future bee housing:

(One pile of many)

The holes need to be between 5" and 6" deep, so I started cutting the sticks into 6.5"-ish lengths.

This doesn't look like much but it took a lot of eight-foot branches to make these piles.

The next step was drilling holes. Different size bees need different diameter holes, so I read a few guides and picked out a range of drill bits between a metric #2 and a full half-inch (I don't think solitary bees care about unit standardization) to make sure any potential tenants can find a cozy caliber to call home.

I used the drill press to start the holes then used a set of extra long metric bits in a screwgun to get the full length the bees need

This didn't always go perfectly. I didn't break any bits, but sometimes the holes were crooked enough to punch through the side of the stick and I'd set them aside.

Then I just had to bag up what I'd made and replace the sticks in the bee house:

(Background omitted because it's easier than tidying the shop.)

I'd thought I'd made enough sticks for two years, but it took almost all of them to fill the bee house. Glad I prepared as many as I did.

I think I'd call that move-in ready.

I've been riding the same Gary Fisher Hoo Koo E Koo Mountain Bike since my uncle found it in a sandpit and gave it to me to ride while away on my first internship. It was in somewhat rough shape back then, and it's kind of the bicycle of Thesius at this point as parts failed and I found ways to replace them.

I was replacing the front tire and realized I'd like to make this thing into a cargo bike (I currently use it to scout for furniture to restore on trash days, but usually have to ride home and return on foot to grab anything I find, plus I could get groceries). I'm not sure what level of standardization this bike follows and I have no familiarity with cargo bike parts, but I was thinking I'd like to add a Rear Pannier Carrier Cargo Rack and perhaps a large basket on top of that - in fact, I happen to have this homemade welded steel basket I pulled out of a dumpster a couple years ago:

It's 23" long, 12" tall, and 16" wide. I could weld on whatever mounting hardware it needs.

So basically I'm looking for advice on layout and things to add, specific parts if you have any recommendations, is that basket a horrible idea, etc. What traits make for a useful cargo bike, what would work well with this old mountain bike? And thank you for any ideas!!

This is one I’ve had on my list for months now, and I finally decided to just go ahead and make it. Back when I was researching solar cookers, solar concentrator, and solar furnaces, I ran into a few really interesting ideas around fresnel lenses. Look them up on youtube and you can find all kinds videos of people melting glass or burning skillsaw blades in half, but the ones that kind of showed me how useful a really-concentrated point of heat could be was this 3D printer for sintering sand into glass objects and this solar rig for smelting zinc or aluminum. Both used fresnel lenses, but were limited by the size of their portable builds.

So here’s my take on something bigger and more permanent, though hopefully still flexible enough to do multiple jobs using concentrated sunlight. The building’s tower houses an observatory-style dome with an irising shutter around a very large fresnel lens. This lens is meant to gather light, but deliberately doesn’t focus it too much, just directs it to another lens, which aims the light straight down. There, on a motorized rig which allows for some adjustment up and down, is the third lens which actually brings it to a searing focal point.

With that focal point reliable and known, the people at the workshop could move several different tools underneath it as necessary, from a crucible for smelting, to a firepot for solar forging, perhaps a glassblowing oven, a 3D sinterer, or the large CNC plasma cutter-style rig shown in the scene.

A set of computers would be set up with light sensors and control over the rotation of the dome, to allow it to track the sun, and the width of the aperture in the shutters, to allow it to regulate the amount of light. The upper limit on the light would be based on how bright the day is, but if they need anything less than full sun, then the opening and closing of the shutters should help with providing consistency. If it starts around half open in full sun and a cloud moves in front of the dome, it might open all the way, then close partially as the cloud leaves. With many minute adjustments, the overall amount of light could remain very consistent down on the ground.

As for the level of focus, I suspect the kerf while cutting would almost definitely be wider than with a modern plasma cutter, but like I said before, people have cut through skillsaw blades with just a lens from a rear-projection TV. So it's possible a larger lens could concentrate even more heat, allowing it to burn through much faster, with less damage to the surrounding material. The tightness of the point would mostly come down to the quality of the lens, as far as I know.

I’ve tried to include a number of controls, caution markings, and red emergency stop buttons, but the one thing I really don’t like about the design as drawn is that it’s not obviously fail-safe. I think ideally there’d be some kind of hanging weight or other mechanism so that when power is lost (not just to the building, as that probably happens fairly often on a less-reliable grid, but to the system’s control unit) the shutters or another light-blocking mechanism slams into place.

Other notes about the scene, I’ve tried to include a diversity of ways to use the sun, the photovoltaic panels for powering the electronics and perhaps some of the tools, a set of fiberoptic solar daylighting systems, which track the sun and pipe light down to the shop floor, along with the simplest version, large windows. This emphasis on daylight should help avoid the risk of electric lights strobing in sync with moving items (such as on a lathe or milling machine) which can cause them to appear stationary and safe to grab onto, though they likely have two sources of light on each just in case. I’ve also included a water wheel, either for power generation, or for the direct motion, to be connected to certain tools or machinery via axles and belts.

Houses require maintenance. How much and how often depends on the design and its surroundings. They also require occupants - in my brief experience at least, they degrade much faster when they’re left cold and empty than when someone lives there, even if that someone doesn’t fix things. Weather, encroaching water, mold, ice, and animals can all cause compounding damage surprisingly fast.

I think of the solarpunk society I've been depicting as being post-postapoclyptic. They’ve been through the worst of the climate crisis, wars, plagues, and all kinds of shortages, and they’re trying to rebuild better. In some of my previous postcards, I’ve tried to imagine what the rural communities I grew up in would look like transformed into a modern version of how they looked a hundred years ago, with denser villages, trains, and wide stretches of forests and farmland in between. They were set up this way back when because it was practical for people who walked or relied on horse carts to get around day-to-day, and who traveled to use a boat or a steam train for a longer trip. A solarpunk society that doesn’t want to rebuild the infrastructure(s) to produce and maintain personal vehicles, fuel them, and to drive them on, might have to look pretty similar out here.

But what happens to the houses and developments spattered across the land between those villages? Every road with a house a quarter mile from its nearest neighbor, now miles from those hubs of public transit? In a society where public transit is effective, and cars are rare, I think a lot of roads will degrade pretty quickly. They already need tons of maintenance, and that’s with people using them every day, totally dependent on them, grudgingly agreeing to pay for it. It’s not uncommon to live thirty minutes or an hour from your grocery store today, but on badly broken roads, that kind of travel is going to be more difficult and costly. Some people will do it, heck, some will have held out through all the bad times and will stay no matter what else changes. But I suspect a lot of houses will have been abandoned a long time ago.

There’s tons of embodied carbon stored in those structures. In their carefully-refined materials, their transportation, and in the act of construction. Some of those materials might be very difficult to produce for a society that carefully watches its externalities and seeks to do as little harm as possible. And the longer they’re left abandoned, the more they’ll degrade. The structures will become unsafe, the materials will rot or break, or become inaccessible, and in some cases, they’ll pose environmental risks as fuel tanks rust out, chemicals escape their storage, or damaged structures catch fire (even with the powerlines cut upstream, abandoned solar panels or poorly-isolated generators backfeeding into the grid might allow for damage to an abandoned house to cause a fire). This is especially true with modern buildings, particularly the kind of McMansion featured in the scene, with their heavy reliance on petro-products like “structural” foam columns and facades, which will go up like a struck match in the next wildfire.

In some cases, old buildings could be put back into use. Perhaps they’re nearby something the rebuilding society needs. Maybe one development will make for a good farming community, and another the barracks of a logging camp. Maybe one near a river can support trade or fishing. But there will be others that are simply not very useful. They were practical enough for semi-suburban life when gas was cheap, cars were plentiful, and roads were maintained. But in a world where most people have other priorities, live in closer communities, use public transportation, and aren’t interested in rebuilding a car-centric world, these houses don’t make sense. And of course there's the ones in unsafe locations (flood plain, unstable/eroding cliff, etc) where they won’t last no matter what. To that society, deconstruction might be a very practical answer to both the long term threat posed by these structures and to their own building material needs.

Deconstruction is an alternative to home demolition. It means carefully dismantling the constructed components of a house so the materials can be salvaged and reused. Materials are typically removed in the opposite order in which they were installed, to maximize reuse.

By carefully disassembling these structures and hauling the materials back to their communities, they can build and expand for a much lower overall cost (both environmentally and in resources harvested from the world) while removing potential toxin or fire threats. And by filling in their cellarholes and replanting, they can rewild developed land, build better habitats, and restore their local ecosystems.

On top of that, even buildings picked over by looters may be full of usable stuff - furniture, dishes, cooking tools, hardware - which a society with an interconnected library economy could use to meet its needs without producing new items.

So that’s what I’ve tried to depict here, a deconstruction crew carefully disassembling old world structures so that everything, from the windows to the metal roof panels, to the cabinets to the stick framing itself, can be reused elsewhere rather than produced new.

They’ve been working from left to right in this scene, taking each house apart in reverse order to how it was built. Much as with construction, this would require different crews of specialists: inspectors, roofers, carpenters, electricians, plumbers, and others who can safely remove resources without doing unnecessary damage. Once a crew finishes their part of a building, they’d hopefully be able to move on to another one nearby.

They’re also replanting/rewilding the old backfilled foundations, something that would certainly help with breaking up the concrete (eventually). Roots are great at that.

I’m not sure if it’d be worthwhile to use concrete saws to cut at least some of the concrete foundations into construction blocks. It’d certainly help with restoring the site quicker, and it’d be a low-ish carbon source for concrete blocks, but the tradeoffs in labor, transportation, and power for the saw might not be worth it. In that case, they’d probably crack it up with a jackhammer before filling it back in.

There’s a lot of vehicles in this scene, so I should emphasize that these aren’t daily drivers. These are equipment used to haul work crews and construction materials on fairly short trips.

All the big trucks in the scene are old internal combustion engine vehicles converted to run on woodgas. I imagine they burn a lot of the wooden construction debris which were otherwise too small or damaged to be worth salvaging. Perhaps some trucks are even set up with plastic de-refineries and are able to use astroturf lawns, broken plastic siding, or “structural” foam facades as fuel on their trips. This isn’t perfect: it still produces pollution and releases CO2, but if the goal is to salvage as much material as possible, and to prevent it from burning pointlessly in the next wildfire, I could still see an aspirational society accepting that use of it.

As a bonus, woodgas vehicles are often used as generators, so they may be able to serve that role part-time on-site, powering lights and air pumps for confined spaces like basements, and even certain tools. Otherwise they’d probably use portable solar panels.

The other (smaller) vehicles are electric minitrucks and rickshaws.

I imagine that the workers are a mix of specialized crews brought in by the larger community for the scheduled deconstruction, and local volunteers who are working for trade in recovered materials. I imagine a lot of the cargo bikes, Chinese wheelbarrows, rickshaws, and minitrucks belong to them. I figure in place of real roads, the really small villages and isolated homesteads maintain a surprisingly dense web of rough trails suitable for mountain bikes or snowmobiles, which connect to all their neighbors.

Last art thoughts: I have another scene of a golf course and its surrounding McMansions turned into a solarpunk intentional community that I’d like to do, but the scope on that one is big enough it’ll be awhile before I can get to it. At this point, I’m confident I’ll make it though. McMansions, with their pointless, wasteful scale, their cheap construction, their reliance on petro-product materials, and their often vain attempt to spend their way to classiness, seem kind of like the antithesis of solarpunk design to me. Golf courses with their endless, expensive-to-maintain grass monocrop hold a similar, though less severe place in my mind.

If you read all that, thank you! And if you’re a person who owns a building in real life, and you’re thinking about doing some renovations, please consider reaching out to your local chapter of Habitat for Humanity or another group who will do deconstruction, rather than just smashing everything up and throwing it away.

This might be a bit of a reach but I’m wondering if anyone here knows enough about concrete production to help me plan the layout of my next photobash. I’d like to do a scene of a solar-thermal concrete factory – there are several supposedly in the works, like Synhelion’s new partnership with Cemex, funded by the US DoE, or the french company Solpart (whose prototype involved a rotary kiln), or Heliogen. Unfortunately I’ve had a lot of trouble finding decent photos of their setups, and even though Synhelion is apparently working on a pilot industrial-scale solar concrete plant, I haven’t found any plans to work from.

I’ve been doing some reading about existing concrete factories, and plan to keep as much as possible the same, while mostly modifying the kiln to include at least one structure similar to a solar falling particle receiver, and adding some onsite algae farms or greenhouses for capturing CO2 released by the burning of the lime, and a trainyard (either electric trains or fireless steam locomotives, given that it’s a solar plant) for moving material into and out of the plant.

I’ll say upfront I know very little about concrete production, and I’m struggling to come up with a kiln design that’ll hit the required temps for long enough, without burning the lime and messing it up.. Originally I’d pictured basically a rotating kiln feeding into a falling particle receiver, linked up so heat from the sunlight hitting the falling concrete could still travel up the tube and eventually up into the cyclones where the mix is dried. But it seems like the concrete needs a longer, slower firing time than whatever heat it gets wafting up from the aperture, and then a blast of light and heat as it goes past. The diagrams I could find seems to just be a rotary kiln with sunlight being blasted into the open lower end, but I’m not sure if that’s just the design they went with because it was a proof of concept prototype.

I also know that temperature changes are bad for lining of rotary kilns, which are normally run pretty constantly IRL, so it seems like they’d need some changes anyways to cope with the day night cycle?

In case you’re reading this and wondering why make concrete this way, the concrete industry is a huge portion of human CO2 production (around 8% total), due both to the release of CO2 from the chemical process of baking the limestone, and from the tremendous amounts of heat necessary for doing that. A more solarpunk society would hopefully use much less concrete overall, especially with changes in building design and priorities that allow for weaker materials like hempcrete and mycocrete, but for some things we’re still going to need modern concrete. Solar furnaces can hit temps well above what a rotary kiln uses, and heliostat systems aren’t far behind, and it’s a pretty direct use of heat from the sun, which would minimize conversion losses. It’s not a great fit for every current concrete plant, but it seems like it could help.

Scrappy Capy Distro has released the first issue of Harbour, an anarchist literary journal. It has 7 pieces from 6 authors, poets, and artists. You can download it for free online, or get it on paper if you happen to live in Berlin and know the anarchist scene there.

Full Disclosure: one of those authors is me! My story Fair Game is the first prose story in this edition (on page 3 on both versions of the PDF). I'm very excited that they accepted it, especially because that means I can start posting a related comic/art project I’ve been working on in the background for several months.

In the beginning of the journal the editors say this on the subject of fiction:

Traveling to some anarchist book fairs, we noticed that most of the tables were filled with theory and there was very little fiction. This edition, and future ones, is an attempt to remedy this.

Theory is often placed above fiction as more important and serious, but we believe that fiction deserves just as much space. Not all critique of the world has to offer a complete or even partial alternative to the existent, but when we fail to tell a narrative of what possible anarchist futures could look like, it can be very hard to entice others away from the pull of capitalism.

If there ever were some collapse or successful insurrection, ideologies whose ideas were most digestible or had been most widely spread would win out. Following such change, we don’t want things to return to the way they were. We want anarchist ideas to ripple out across the populace, for them to be something easy for others to play with and understand. Stories are one way to do this.

We want to make a space — a space to imagine, a space to vent, where ideas from many different places can come together, a place where we can then leave with these ideas, to pass them on.

A harbour is a place from which to venture out.

I think there's a ton of overlap between that and solarpunk in general, and the ability to show positive, attainable futures, and to demonstrate the lived experience of those better worlds, how they work, is a big part of what draws me to the genre. Hopefully I'll have a more solarpunk story for them in the future.

Speaking of which, if you have a vision of the future you want to share, they're already planning for their Fall 2024 (Issue 2). Submissions will be open from September 1st to 30th: https://en.scrappycapydistro.info/submissions

One of my goals for my postcard series is to show a rebuilding society that prioritizes reducing waste and externalities, and examining what weird technologies might appeal to them because of those goals/limitations. So I've been wanting to do a scene of a caustic soda locomotive ever since I first heard about them.

Soda locomotives were a type of fireless steam locomotive that barely made it out of the prototype phase, where the boiler is surrounded by a tank of ‘caustic soda’ (usually one of several possible chemicals), which generates heat when mixed with water. The heat produces steam in the boiler, which is used to drive the pistons, but instead of being released, its condensed and added to the soda to create more heat. This goes on until the soda gets too dilute to produce more heat, but it can be 'recharged' by drying it out again.

These never really took off because it took more coal to dry the soda at the station than to just run a conventional steam locomotive, and electric trains quickly came into their own and filled the niche of quiet, low-pollution trains for inside cities and tunnels.

But I feel like these could pair well with solar steam generators (another late-1800’s design) stationed along the tracks, to create analogue, solar-powered trains. These could run on existing unpowered tracks, without requiring any new electrical infrastructure, just the isolated drying stations.

The train crew would just exchange wet soda for dry and start again (looks like that took about 45 minutes). The cool thing is that this arrangement could be asyncronous - the station can dry out the caustic soda, then store it for when the train shows up. The train can run on cloudy days or at night, as long as they get enough sunny days to dry out big batches of soda at the stops along the way. And the solar concentrators can be huge and optimized for their location because they don’t have to move.

The focus of these postcards isn’t on technological utopias so much as on societies that are reexamining how to do things as they rebuild, anachronistically combining all kinds of tech. So trains and solar concentrators built with 1800’s technology seem like an easier starting place.

The concentrators require fairly simple materials (mirrors or polished metal) and math to make (plus some simple mechanical timing or basic motors/electronics to get them to follow the sun without a human turning a crank).

Most of the descriptions I've seen of drying the caustic soda mention pumping superheated steam through the dilute mix from another (coal) boiler, so it seems like you could use almost any design from the earliest solar steam generators to something like these modern ones depending on the society’s manufacturing capabilities. The solar concentrator/boiler I referenced for the art is a design from 1901.

(The most common modern design for solar steam generation I've seen is that sort of mirrored-trough-and-vaccum-lined-tube system. I mostly went with the big round reflector because I was worried the trough design wouldn't read as distinct from photovoltaic panels in this art style.)

The trains could run with minimal pollution using these simple technologies, and even if their range is lower, or they're not as fast, that might be a trade off this society would accept.

Ideally they would use existing tracks and passenger or freight cars, and only need new infrastructure around whatever station fueled them up on their route (or at a destination). I think this applies to the compressed air locomotives just as well as the caustic soda ones.

(If you don’t like the idea of caustic soda locomotives, but you still want this idea to work, another option with a shorter range is compressed air locomotives. Instead of drying the soda, the station would be using a solar steam engine or windmill or water wheel to run an air compressor, steadily filling a tank which would be used to top up locomotives on their route. This would still allow for isolated infrastructure to power a train along unpowered rails. IRL these mostly saw use in mines.)

The locomotive in the scene is based on a real-life fireless locomotive. They’re similar, but filled with super-hot steam by external sources. They seemed like a good reference for what a caustic soda locomotive might have looked like had the concept reached a more polished, production format. But they don’t really fit my goal for tolerating intermittency as they’d need the heat source to be going when they stopped for a refill.

Apologies if this doesn't fit the community

I've been helping my neighbor replace his lawn with a garden - last summer our project was building a terraced raised bed thing with secondhand soil and secondhand cinder blocks, and some new pavers in the front. I'd very much like to set up a water feature on that raised bed. He spends most days sitting on his porch, reading scifi novels and talking to folks walking by, so he could hear it while he's out there. I know it's kind of a silly luxury so I'm trying to use used components and I'd really like to set it up using a solar panel to power the pump.

I can handle the wiring and electronics with some guidance, but I know very little about pumps and solar panels for finding something that'll fit our use case. I think ideally it'd be a secondhand panel a few feet in size and a pump that can handle a varying amount of power based on the time of day. I'd like to move more than a trickle of water, and I'll make sure there's some shade plants so we don't lose much water to evaporation, though we don't get many droughts where we are.

I love systems that turn a problem into an asset. It's the kind of balanced improvement we're almost taught is impossible. So cities capturing storm water, effectively turning floodwater into drinking water they can use by allowing it to filter back down into the aquifer, seems like a great move. Especially when it comes with green areas that improve city life, lower daytime temperatures, and reduce the heat island effect.

I'm not sure if this is a good fit for this community, but I've read enough to know there are some very knowledgeable folks here, so I thought I'd give it a shot. Feel free to remove if it's off topic/too specific.

This umbrella pine has been here for around 60 years, and recently started having some trouble. I know a certain amount of yellowing and seasonal needle drop is common, but it seems like this one's been hit especially hard, and there's a companion tree on the other side of the house, same age, which is still deep green. I'd really really love to keep it going, and I'm hoping it's not too late.

We had a bad summer, unusually wet, and I think it stressed this tree - the other one is on top of a hill so it must get better drainage. There was also some construction somewhat nearby, and uphill, which might be causing more water to enter the yard - the basement flooded for the first time in awhile. Also a road crew cut some trees that might have been shading it occasionally, I'm not sure. They might have been too far away to make any difference.

I'm planning to improve on a drainage ditch which runs along the driveway between this tree and the wettest areas, hopefully before snowmelt. I guess my questions are is there anything else I can/should do? Soil test in case it needs something? Can this tree be saved? It's yellowing but it still has some deep green in places (mostly on the shady side).

I have some closeups too if that would help.

I honestly have no idea if this is practical, the closest I ever came to utility cycling was riding with small furniture in a handlebar basket. I am working on a photobash where a salvage co-op is recovering technology from overgrown buildings, and I wanted to put some kind of vehicle out front. My first instinct was a wagon with tires/suspension from a car, but I thought this might be an opportunity to show off alternatives to horse or oxen, - is there some kind of larger-than-average contraption you'd like to see here?