The whole set of machines looks like something China's ministry of agriculture would have come up with around 1980 or so. There are some standard items widely used in rural China and India, manufactured by many manufacturers. Here's a small Diesel engine.[1] This thing is brutally simple - one cylinder, non-recirculating water cooled (you have to add water when you add fuel), hand crank start, no emission controls. Costs about US$300. There's someone who has a YouTube channel of fixing discarded engines of this type. There seem to be a lot of them lying around, all very similar but from different manufacturers. It's the AK-47 of Diesel engines - it's crude, it Just Works, and it can be fixed. It's mass-produced, because making metal parts in quantity is very efficient, while one-offs are too labor intensive.
Here's a basic tractor, the Wuzheng TS, costing around $6,000. "Mature technology", the maker says. There are hundreds of thousands of those things in the Third World.
That's how this gets done in the real world. Mass produced machines of similar design that's proved itself. That's how the US did it, back when the Fordson tractor [3] was popular. Ford produced low-end tractors until 1964.
You can still buy low-end farm equipment cheaply. It's not cost effective for a commercial farm, but it's still available. Sometimes it's all you need.
[1] https://toppower.en.made-in-china.com/product/kmtRnxhrTvpB/C...
[2] https://chinawuzheng.en.made-in-china.com/product/ovGERBPVaa...
Diesel engine design is non-trivial. It takes a lot of compression to get the heat necessary for ignition. It takes strong structures to handle that pressure. The fuel injector has to be able to overcome the pressure of compression and spray fuel into the cylinder. You need to get more energy out than you spend on compression and injection. The thermodynamics are complicated. That all gets built into the dimensions of the metal parts, and it all looks simple, but it's not. Those little engines doesn't even need a glow plug to get started. Or even much cranking. They just work. Cheaply.
For what it's worth, the AK-47 design is not "right", it's "good enough" and cheap. Some of the other militaries that copied the basic shape to share the ammunition significantly improved the design. For example, https://www.firearmsnews.com/editorial/best-ak47-rifle/39474...
It's rare to see common sense on Hacker News.
1.4 billion people who get things done verse fat nerds in basements talking stuff and can't even get their theory right. Open sourcing an X they have never actually used.
What is of interest is why China and not Africa or India or Brazil (BRICS+) so much, this is where the discussion is at.
Perhaps, could the fat nerds work with China and do things? This is controversial, NEETs can't even do advanced high school math anymore. They have given up.
I wonder what the purpose of this website is. I suppose if someone wants to start a community or a larger homestead they could use a starter pack, a complete set of all or part of this equipment in a handy storage solution, like a standard container. Wild guess, but I bet you can get a homestead starter kit like that (minus house / building materials) for $100K. (and you probably wouldn't need an aluminium extruder)
[0] https://yongkun1.en.made-in-china.com/product/KTGREaUuorhp/C...
I like that it focuses on repairability. Seems like these might be fun to experiment with. Or as a kit for a “homestead” in remote Alaskan wilderness, where you’d like to be able to repair yourself without having to deal with long travel time and expensive shipping.
That's the most damning criticism one could make towards a project like this!
https://projectkamp.com/mission.html
The OP seems like the academic approach to what project kamp is learning by doing: They're attempting to build a community that's eventually completely self sufficient on a fairly limited land space, and documenting the whole process.
They tend to have what are essentially interns do a bit of “research” and then piece together a solution. That said, I do applaud their efforts. It’s very entertaining to watch, and they seem to be hiring people lately who are more knowledgeable in their fields.
So, I very much appreciate this open-source-ecology “academic approach.”
If people want to optimize for self sufficiency they will need to hoard more stuff, they will need to produce and duplicate a lot, use more land and for sure they won't have any good stuff like doctors with a surgery room.
If you think you don’t need that petroleum distributor, you won’t put any effort into preventing its destruction. Not my problem, right?
Oops, but I forgot that even though I’m self sufficient in energy (maybe I have solar panels and batteries) it turns out I still need plastic! I guess I did need that distributor after all. Shame I didn’t realize that before it burned down.
> If global shipping failed today, how long would it take for other nations to run out of food and pharmacological needs and silicon?
I don’t think it’s worth worrying about “what happens if the hand of god comes down tomorrow and deletes all ocean vessels and doesn’t touch anything else.” There isn’t a plausible scenario where global shipping—and nothing else—fails. You might as well start making contingency plans for if the sun gets turned into green cheese.
To your point about the pandemic: the experiment we did was “what happens when you turn off labor in all sectors at once?” We would have had exactly the same result even if every country were self sufficient.
It turns out that effectively no human has been self sufficient for millennia. American settlers on the Great Plains needed iron nails and barbed wire from back east. Native Americans traded furs for guns with Europeans because it was mutually beneficial. All over the world people lived in groups because specialization and trading (even if they didn’t call it that) enabled a higher quality of living than gathering berries all alone.
> If you think you don’t need that petroleum distributor, you won’t put any effort into preventing its destruction. Not my problem, right?
Your argument exclusively rests on the assertion that the converse is true - that if individuals and organizations will invest substantial amounts of effort into making sure that their upstream suppliers will continue to exist if they are dependent on them.
Not only is there no empirical evidence to support this claim, but there is ample evidence to support the fact that it's false - such as COVID, which you literally mention later in your comment, where despite the fact that we live in a highly interdependent global economy, there's very little effort invested into making sure that your suppliers continue to exist, and the devastating supply chain issues prove that conclusively.
In addition to the empirical evidence, this is just false based on human nature. If confronted with the fact that "oh, something might happen to an entity that supplies me with things", humans and organizations overwhelmingly choose to increase their internal resilience, not the system resilience. As a trivial example of this - in response to supply chain shocks that hit lean manufacturers like car manufacturers particularly hard, those manufacturers overwhelmingly chose to stock up on parts - internal resiliency - and not to invest in the upstream supply chain, which is what you're claiming they would do.
Your claim is just rooted in an false anthropology that has massive amounts of evidence refuting it.
> I don’t think it’s worth worrying about “what happens if the hand of god comes down tomorrow and deletes all ocean vessels and doesn’t touch anything else.”
That's an irrelevant strawman. Nothing in their comment was specifically predicated on exactly that scenario happening - they were arguing for general resiliency, which is effective even in more realistic and broad scenarios.
> To your point about the pandemic: the experiment we did was “what happens when you turn off labor in all sectors at once?” We would have had exactly the same result even if every country were self sufficient.
First of all, that claim about the experiment is false. All labor in all sectors did not turn off at once.
Second, that's yet another strawman, because individuals overwhelmingly prefer to engage in tasks for the sake of self-preservation than the preservation of others. If the economy and individuals have resilient practices, they will invest substantially more effort in those practices that directly lead to their survival than if the system is not resilient and they're highly interdependent, because again, of human nature, which prioritizes the immediate.
> It turns out that effectively no human has been self sufficient for millennia.
Yet another strawman. Self-sufficiency is not binary. You can decrease your reliance on others without eliminating it entirely, and history's plentiful examples of system distruptions show that it is an extremely good idea to do so.
It's telling that you have to repeatedly make fallacies, false statements, and misunderstand human nature in an attempt to defend such an absurd point like "making individuals less resilient makes the system more resilient". Factually, it is exactly the opposite - systems with resilient components are objectively less fragile.
Did we go through the same covid? No country on earth had food shortages while majority of people were stuck at home. COVID was a perfect demonstration of resiliency of trade and JIT systems. But you ate up the news the media put out that were basically china-boogeymen, to force government to create the huge CHIPs act.
Nothing I said is specifically related to food, and there's ample documentation of numerous kinds of shortages during covid:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shortages_related_to_the_COVID...
The bogeyman exists - there were factually shortages in hundreds of different kinds of goods. You're just stupid because you can't do a 5-second Google search.
Depends how big the project/village is.
Also the basic idea is to be as self sufficient as possible. Not as a dogma.
And the benefit once it runs is, you don't have to go make war around the globe, because your economy is threatened. You can just stay at home minding your own buisness.
Also you will breed a population of "nationalists" (at whatever size this is applied to) after a few generations if nobody is involved in trade.
Of course it does. Many remote mountain villages preserved their culture this way.
"Also you will breed a population of "nationalists" "
I think you have never been to such a self sustainable project?
They are usually living a culture of internationalists and there are frequent guests from all around the world.
What you means are cults. They also exist, true. But those operating in the open are mostly .. open.
Also the basic idea is to establish a network of trading and sharing in general. Specialisation is useful after all. But for the basic needs, I like the idea to be independent here.
And yes, ideally also have a competent doctor you can just wake up from next door in the middle of the night in a case of emergency and not hope a ambulance is avaiable in time.
They are usually living a culture of internationalists and there are frequent guests from all around the world.
You're taking about who thinks it's cool to try to do this kind of thing. The post your replying to is trying to predict how things might evolve over a (very) long time in case of actual success.
But all the other self sustainable projects that I know, are far from the idea of wanting to shut themself of the world.
The main idea is just to not be so dependent on the crazyness of this world. But still be connected to the world. Trade, travel, exchange, ..
We should maximize cooperation between communities, not restrict it. It's the best way to avoid war long term.
Decoupling (the kind of self-sufficiency you are envisioning) is only a distant goal for interplanetary colonization. Loose coupling is fine as baby steps. As long as within their community they are tightly cohesive, they will do fine.
The intent is sustainable resiliency baked into our systems.
It shouldn’t be about isolationism / anarchy, but about limiting the blast radius for any given disaster.
Finally it also serves as a center for rehab, starting from scratch, and community service. The ultimate social safety net.
For the few that live, I suppose. But this is like an almost-worst-case scenario where the people are some of the few (1%) to survive. Most disasters, even all-out war like in Ukraine or Gaza have relatively few casualties, but they all have needs. The program in Denmark where they start up emergency stores (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45216805) makes a lot more sense in that regard.
People should always have emergency supplies to last up to three days for the fairly common scenario of power outages, supply chain disruptions and extreme weather events. If you live in a disaster prone area, a week's worth of supplies should still be manageable. Anything worse than that and it's probably best to evacuate. Only the rich have the space, time and means to dig in for longer, think people with bomb shelters, storage basements, and a lifestyle of living on preserved foods (because you need to rotate things on a regular basis).
I think you forget that the alternative hides a ton of externalities. For example those massive agri corporations are vaaaastly more efficient than me or my grandpa working our own gardens. But we aren't spraying or the like to contribute to insect population collapse. We're being rather damn space efficient, yet we don't use any fertilisers from gas and mining. We don't compact the soil or lose topsoil. and what we do produce is less deficient in micronutrients.
And as someone else already said. It really just means more self-sufficient.
You lose those effects if every hundred acres needs to produce all of needs of a human family. Self sufficient is less efficient.
You can bring back some of those effects with co-ops, but now it starts looking like a single large business with many owners again.
You don't get those things when being a lot more sustainable. You're not being more efficient with resources like time, labour, etc.
But I'm not pumping up gas for it, making the insect populations go into freefall as much, etc Am I being more efficient in my use of those?
Is this something that has since been abandoned and being shown here for historical purposes? An example of another panacea idea that just lost internet steam?
An internal combustion engine requires that, plus ceramics and an alloy suited to high temperatures (for the spark plugs) as well as copper or aluminum for wiring.
A good book which covers this is:
Also precision boring to produce tight-fitting cylinders. James Watt spent nearly a decade trying to build a viable steam engine, but only succeeded after John Wilkinson invented a machine to bore cannon barrels in 1774. It turns out that making a hole that is straight, deep and round is fiendishly difficult without specialist equipment and expertise.
Which is what the GP's referenced book, The Perfectionists, is all about. There's an entire chapter on Watt and Wilkinson.
Newcomen's steam-engine, the first commercially successful one, was 01712. James Watt's steam engine was 01776. Trevithick's high-pressure engine patent, which is the point at which steam-engines started needing pressure vessels as opposed to vacuum vessels, was 01802. Trevithick's first steam-powered train was 01804. The Bessemer process was 01856, after the end of the steam-engine-driven First Industrial Revolution. But steel was still not in wide use for pressure vessels until I think about 01880, but I'm less sure of that.
Diesel engines are internal combustion engines that do not require spark plugs or wiring.
Ceramics are from about 12000 years ago, and copper is from about 8500 years ago. The hard part about wires is more the insulation than the wire itself.
Did you get your errors from Winchester's book? I usually think of him as more reliable than that.
That said, some mechanisms can (and have) feasibly been used in e.g. Roman times; the Antikythera mechanism and other such archeological discoveries showed they (or the Greeks) had the skills, materials, ability etc to do cogs, gear ratios, etc. It's not a stretch to put that knowledge to work to e.g. do mass production. Actually they had mechanised sawmills for wood and rock as early as the 3rd century insofar as historians have been able to find evidence thereof, it's not a stretch that they could have built those 500 years prior.
About the churn: "By February, 2013, all the O.S.E. collaborators had left the farm."
Or so I'm told.
https://github.com/civboot/civboot https://github.com/civboot/civboot/tree/main/blog
Honestly, I wished this is something like a Colin Furze or Watch Wes Work would take on to bring projects over the finish line.
The problem with this is not about making the machines but the human intervention to make use of them effectively. You really need end-to-end automation to solve this.
If i don’t remember wrongly all this started due to john deere implementing DRM in their equipment. this is a political problem because the issue can be resolved by just buying chinese equivalents and changing patent/ip law.
still cool. still something i want to see in the world. but not super dynamic.
I wonder how "Hay rake" got on the same list as "CNC precision multimachine" for example? If you asked me the former is probably more useful than the latter.
The "hay rake" in question is supposed to be something comparable to https://www.greenmarkequipment.com/new-equipment/agriculture..., which is a large and complex machine that requires a tractor to tow it. It involves parts such as tires, bearings, nuts, bolts, chains, and wiring, and its main structural frame is rectangular structural framing welded together. You aren't going to be able to make anything comparable by lashing together bamboo. You need a machine shop.
Which is the hay rake I used in the past to collect hay...
As others have pointed out, the idea is really cool, but the implementation was never there.
> Like Spock, from “Star Trek,” Jakubowski has deliberate diction, closely shorn dark hair, and hooded eyes. He also has a Vulcan’s unwavering high-mindedness. His paternal grandfather fought in the Polish underground during the Second World War, helping to derail Nazi trains. A grandmother spent time in a concentration camp. Hearing their stories, Jakubowski concluded that the brutality of war was often a result of privation—an inability to secure the means of survival. His family left Poland when he was ten, in order to escape martial law, and moved to Paterson, New Jersey. The contrast between the abundance in American supermarkets and the empty shelves back home shocked him. “I never forgot about material scarcity,” he told me.
In addition to bringing about greater freedom and community empowerment the project would benefit from being explicit on how it limits or seeks (even through principals) to limit excessive plantary resource extraction.
There’s a plastics project that illustrates what I mean, they help people make machines that recover and recycle plastic. Circular resource use, make that part of your front and center.
None of these machines are cost-effective in the current day world. Actual resource extraction operations are going to use massive machines made by big manufacturers. Small scale hobby miners and such will just order equipment from AliExpress or refurbish old equipment. There is literally zero risk of this project accelerating global resource extraction.
leads to: Small scale hobby miners and such will just order equipment from AliExpress
good to know that AliExpress will have the staying power to survive the collapse of civilization. we can all sleep easier knowing that while food/water/fuel will be available to those that can take it, your cheap shit from far away lands will still be a web order away. /s
You can't meaningfully address that at a grassroots level because of the tragedy of the commons.
You have to engage with that problem at a higher level of organization. (National/Transnational).
Not really. You are correctly citing the enclosure acts as a historic example, but that was not beginning or the end of history. It was just a recent, location-specific historic moment when big English landlords won in the millenia-old power struggle between peasant and landlord.
Control of the commons - land and the resources buried in it - has been a point of contention and bloodshed for as long as recorded human history. It's a pendulum that swung back and forth, but has always had bad actors making personally-profitable, socially-impoverishing decisions.
For an alternative example of how things have gone in other places, look at the blood feuds between ranchers and farmers[1] in the American west, concerns over upstream and rainfall water rights in literally any part of the world that relies on irrigation, or, the varied situations where existing landlords politically won the struggle... Or lost it in the 20th century.
As for well-established[2]...
---
[1] The enclosure acts echo this farmer/rancher dichotomy, actually. Feudal lord/serf relationships have the lords derive wealth from having ever more serfs doing ever more labour-intensive agriculture on their land. The enclosure acts, however, were intended to drive the peasants from their land, because in the case of England, the lords figured out that they can derive way more wealth from turning over their land to low-labour grazelands for sheep. And the way they could do that was to use the law as a cudgel to drive out their tenants at sword and gunpoint.
[2] They were only well-established for particular points in history. Prior to William the Conqueror arriving in England, and stealing all the land in it for himself and his mercenaries, there were also 'well-established' land use norms - that greatly limited the power and ownership-of-land granted to lords and petty kings. The Norman conquest turned all that over - into a different 'well-established' equilibrium - that was then, again, turned over into a 'well-established' equilibrium after the passage of the enclosure acts.
A few decent folks try to start up a great idea. More join. Some dont share the ideals.
More join, less ideals shared.
More join. Cool, free shit! (Not really, but this is when the commons is shit on and good will starts being lost.)
Group starts cracking at the scenes. Factions form. Badness sets in. Thefts spike. Abuse and vandalization of equipment is the norm.
I left my local makerspace for these above reasons. And I made my own. Cost more, but my equipment works and is right there.
But I'm happy to help, either by me going there or the friend bringing his stuff to my workshop.
