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Open Source Tractor

opensourceecology.dozuki.com

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Re: Open Source Tractor

#111

Post by Symbiote »

voakbasda wrote: post #103
dbrgn wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If we mean to say this tractor is all-electric, keep in mind most small farms arent equipped to charge anything more advanced than a cordless drill or flashlight. Are you sure? In Switzerland, most farms I know have at least one dusty three-phase power outlet somewhere in a shed. Sometimes just 16A, but that should be sufficient for many use cases.

In the US, three phase power seems to be completely unavailable in rural areas, except in small pockets of industry.

Doesn't a farm count as a small pocket of industry?

(Writing from Denmark, where my small apartment has three phase power. It's standard, I don't know why.)

Re: Open Source Tractor

#112

Post by Animats »

If you go back in the Internet Archive to this site from 2016, it's much the same.[1] This project seems to have stalled before they published the design documents.

Here are their videos on Vimeo.[2] Most of the activity was 7-10 years ago.

If you want a cheap tractor, look on Alibaba. There are decent offerings around US$2000.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20161207230929/http://opensource...

[2] https://vimeo.com/search?q=open%20source%20ecology

Re: Open Source Tractor

#113

Post by einpoklum »

antattack wrote: post #58

Sorry, I don't see it. This tractor is too wide, has low ground clearance, too complex, hard to rustproof, seems to be hard to maneuver.

> This tractor is... too complex

Quite the opposite: It is incredibly _simple_, in that regular tractors need huge complex specialized infrastructure to manufacture, and this doesn't.

> too wide, has low ground clearance etc.

The shortcomings are due to this still being a prototype: The 6th iteration. And it's this way because it was easier and cheap to design and produce it the way that it is.

Now, let's say the current shortcomings are deal-breakers for 80% of potential users. Then you already have a tractor usable for 10% of people. In iteration 7 they'll address a few other issues, and still more in iteration 8 and you'll have something worthy of mass-production for a large fraction of users.

*Edit:* Well, apparently LifeTrac 6 is from 11 years ago! And there are newer iterations of it.

Re: Open Source Tractor

#114

Post by bshipp »

freeopinion wrote: post #107
bshipp wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who has worked in agriculture their entire life, there is nothing cheap about farming equipment. Every year it gets more and more prohibitively expensive and experiences more and more vendor lock-in. While this solution appears fairly rudimentary, I think there's a real demand for more simplistic, compatible, and capable farm machinery when combines are a million a piece and tractors are a quarter that.

A 28hp tractor tamed the world once upon a time. Back when a family could work their hearts out on a 100 acre farm. A single family with a 28hp tractor cannot farm 1000 acres effectively. It's hard to find 10 families each with a 28hp tractor willing to go all-in to farm 1000 acres. And if you could, they'd get wiped out by the conglomerate that uses a stable of million dollar combines to farm 20,000 acres. A Califor…

I agree wholeheartedly. Without the support of a dozen offspring helping out with 'chores' around the farm the lack of labour is a real constraint in rural areas. I absolutely agree that a 28hp motor is simply too small to be helpful on a commercial scale, but I was thinking more about the 3-4 pod versions that offered a bit more grunt.

Regardless, most of the engines on a farm are sitting idle for vast portions of the year (i.e. combines, forage harvesters, swathers, sprayers, etc.) so a modular unit that maximized year-round utility could reduce maintenance and downtime caused by corrosion and other problems inherent in idle machinery.

Diesel engines hate sitting for long periods without running, as well as dislike running under excessively light loads for their horsepower. Being able to spin up multiple pods to match a load is an interesting solution.

Re: Open Source Tractor

#115

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

einpoklum wrote: post #109
voakbasda wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US, three phase power seems to be completely unavailable in rural areas, except in small pockets of industry.

So how do the power companies run electricity to those areas? They don't use DC, do they? Or do you mean individual houses are typically wired with just one of the phases?

Correct. It can be prohibitively expensive to have 3-phase power run to your house. Most consumers who need it, e.g., hobbyists, will use a phase converter.

The only person I know who actually had 3-phase power run to his house was using it for a ceramic kiln.

Re: Open Source Tractor

#116

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

Ardon wrote: post #6
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #5

I wonder why the frame is made out of bolted beams with holes in them, are bolts and holed beams easy to find or something? I mean I can imagine that if you have the tools to build those, you'd have a welder as well. Granted, welding might be a bit more challenging than cutting beams and drilling holes.

From what I remember from back when I first read up on this project: The goal is for as much of the construction to be done with simple tools and materials that can be stored long-term. If you need to, hypothetically, bury your society-bootstrapping supplies, your wrenches and hole bar will probably survive. But a welder may not.

It's really, really, really difficult for me to imagine a "society-bootstrapping" event where conveniently dimensioned steel, diesel/gasoline engines and fasteners are readily available but thousands of old, easily repairable tractors are not.

Re: Open Source Tractor

#118

Post by honksillet »

mastax wrote: post #33

Man I remember reading about this in 2011 or so. I'm glad they're still doing well. It's an interesting project at the intersection of philanthropic eco-hippies and mechanical engineers which doesn't seem very common to me. Of course, being older and wiser now I'm less excited about the fantasy of using my brains and grit to rebuild society after the coming apocalypse. And if you are a villager of some description tr…

And what if all this Ali ovens are stuck offshore the port of Long Beach?

Re: Open Source Tractor

#119

Post by mod »

I'm sorry, maybe it's just me--but none or almost none of these projects have actual plans to build them!

Everything is a wiki stub. Almost all the topics have unanswered questions going back to 2013. Some have a nice top-level "blueprint" looking infographic, and then absolutely zero details about building them.

I'm not sure how to use this project, although given my 40 acres and great desire to DIY, I should be a prime candidate.

Most of the stubs don't even have a summary yet! Let alone details.

If that stuff is there and I missed it, then the website UI is desperately broken.

As a for-instance, can someone find plans to build the LifeTrac6 Cab Frame? That's the very tractor linked here, and I can't see any real details. The linked page and its descendants seem to be a list of ideas that have absolutely no detail expressed.

Re: Open Source Tractor

#120

Post by jcims »

beckman466 wrote: post #108
jcims wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re making oblique references and (I guess?) assuming that some conclusion is obvious. A more direct statement of your point might help here.

> A more direct statement of your point might help here. abolish Silicon Valley. [1] [1] Wendy Liu, https://tribunemag.co.uk/2019/01/abolish-silicon-valley

shoot your shot buddy!
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