WEEK 2: thecobdance

There is nothing like the feel of a good 

batch of cob between your bare toes. With intuition as your only meter bare feet are mandatory for regulating the mixture of clay sand and straw. Jump in on the cob dance... and learn how we plan to use this ancient technology to sing to today's needs.

Cob(noun) -A mixture of clay and straw used as a building material. (http://www.thefreedictionary.com/)


Part 1: Making Blades and Cutting with Fire


Divide and conquer was the first part of today's game plan. We split up into two teams; one cutting out the turbine blades for the windmill and the other fabricating a mold for the base of our new Cob Sawdust Stove design. Both teams needed a section of 6" PVC pipe which we, luckily, found behind a shed. Sawzaws, hand saws and blow torches were use to cut or melt our pipe into the desired shapes.

Making Blades:

 Caleb and Paul cut the blades out. Don't they look great... the turbine blades that is

Cutting With Fire: Randall, Adam, and Kacy burnt a hole for the Cob Sawdust Stove base mold.

-A blow torch was used because in the developing world you might not have a nice drill bit to cut a hole out... and we didn't have one either. :-/

(Randall tells us what he is doing)

Part 2: Cob Dance and the Power of Hotness.

As the afternoon sun slid closer to the western horizon our attentions moved east... and to the kitchen.

Cob Dance: All of the crew except Paul headed to "Africa" (a East African style village built at HUT). The process of refining the clay and sand for use as Cob is simple. Our hands became a shade of rust red as we rubbed the chunks of clay through the sifter. Pure sand is procured similarly. We collected some semi-dry straw from a near by field and were ready to mix it up. All at zero cost.

(Kacy, Adam and Caleb do the Cob... uhhh... choreography)

After the cob is well mixed we slap, prod, and mould it into a cylinder for our stove.  It takes time to dry out and harden so we are doing half of the stove this week and finishing next week.    

Watch Adam and Randall sculpt this work of earthen art:

 

The Power of Hotness: or "The Solar Story and The Project of the Peltier Junctions (pardon my french)."

Keeping a smoky dark cooking hut well-lit is hard enough without electricity and only an open fire. But now these new fangled stoves have to go and be so efficient that they don't even give enough light to work by. Paul Elliott is cooking up a solution using Peltier (pronounced PEL-tee-ay) Junctions. These nifty little contraptions create electricity from a heat differential or, in every day talk, one hot source and one colder source. If hooked up to the exhaust from your Cob Sawdust Stove it could produce enough electricity to power, say, a light bulb (or a bunch of LEDs...) !

Here Paul is playing with the P.J.s... up to 2.2 Volts and .31 Amps with two P.J.s together, thats enough to power two Regular LED flashlights!  

The cup of water is for keeping one side of the junctions cool while it is sitting on the stove... you can see that it produces about half the power without the cup of water.

We might have trouble storing the power created by our new P.J.s but not to fear!  Paul disected a solar charger flashlight Macgyver style and thinks we can reverse engineer its charging mechanism... He is like Rodny from Stargate Atlantis!

"The name is Paul... Paul Elliott"

Never fear Blog readers!  The Rocket-stove Boys will be back next week with new adventures and exciting ways to play in the mud!  Stay tuned... we will be right back!

P.S.  On the journey back to Harding and homework we caught a beautiful sunset and a gorgious terantula... God is the ultimate engineer and artist!

This is one big Spider!  Good eye Paul.

He made it off the road safe and sound:

WEEK 1: thelayoftheland

The air is crisp and clean as we

 pull into the HUT parking lot almost giddy with excitement.  We have anticipated this day for weeks, in some ways years, and now it is reality.  

That is how it began. Our plan was simple this weekend; get a lay of the land regarding three of our main projects. 

But first we came across some struggling HUT survivors and helped them resurrect their refugee tent. (Paul Elliott[R] helping Johnathan Striclyn [L] Johnathan is a co-conspirator in this DLG thing)

With the tent up we were back on the trail.  Our plan was to test the hill top above "Africa" for a good location for a Windmill generator.  A long, and somewhat wobbly, PVC poll, with lovely pink and black ribbon attached, served as our wind gauge.  Below, you can watch Paul fail at keeping the poll still.  Finally we did get the wily pipe to stay and, as we suspected, there was a sufficient wind current... Windmill here we come! 

      

Our other two projects both involve water.  We talked to Mr. Oneal Tankersly (struggling HUT survivor ;-) about where we should dig our Tilapia fish pond and a plot was chosen where it can be easily maintained as well as easily seen by visitors... visitors like, say, you?  Maybe, we hope.     

 

For our third project we let out towards the creek; climbing over rocks, scouting through brush, and under lodged logs in search of that elusive beast... white water.  It took some scrapes and bruises and a couple of snake encounters (non poisonous don't worry) before we found our ideal spot... at least the most ideal one we could find (Pictured below).  We need a good height change to create water pressure that we will harness using a hydro ram pump.  Our plan is to use this hydro ram pump to deliver water up to the garden and our fish pond-to-be in "Africa" 300ft up.  It could get hairy but we have some tricky ideas up our sleeves.

 This is a video clip of Caleb Meeks saying something about the spot we found... not as educational as he had planed I am sure. "I will have to work on that." :-) -Caleb

Tired, hungry, thirsty, sweaty, and generally spent from a day of exploration and bushwhacking we headed for the cookin' fire to rustle up some vittles.  The menu was: soup of the day (Caf. takeout-hodgepodge, Ramen noodle, and seasoning salt stew) , semi stale chips, Hot (burnt) potatoes, Caleb's fire brewed Chai (TM...jk), and water.

Here we are a brewin' the stew:                            

Yummm:  (Randal Likes the Stew)

To finish off the day we took a dip in the creek.... it was very very cold.

(Randal Gabriel, Caleb Meeks, Paul Elliott)

The rest of the evening we spent stoking the fire and fending off mosquitoes while dreaming, scheming and planning for what we will do next week. 

 Let me just say, it is going to be great!

And to end things off with a bang we had a little fire works show:

Come Back next week for more adventures with the D.L.G.!

P.S. Silly Running Video: