Open Source
Ecology,
The Global Village Construction Set
& the role of
the Compressed Earth Brick Press

The Open Source Ecology (OSE) group is a collaborative association
of a growing number of people with a variety of experience, expertise
and talent for the skills necessary to develop and publish, under an
open source license, an interoperable group of machines called the
Global Village Construction Set (GVCS). The goal of OSE in
developing the GVCS is to create a complete set tools to enable
anyone to build replicable, open source, modern, off-grid resilient
communities.

Open Source is an idea that has evolved over time. The term
itself originated in 1998 from a group of free software developers
with a revolutionary approach for creating software: Instead of a
corporation hiring a group of computer programmers to create closed
source software (whose code is proprietary and legally protected from
being looked at or modified by anyone not specifically authorized by
the corporation), open source software programmers write software to
fulfill needs and make the full original source code available to
anyone. In that way, other computer programmers can bring their
expertise and differing perspectives to bear on the software,
improving its base code, and over time open source software grows as
every user with programming knowledge may look at the code and can
improve it.

Over time, especially as the Internet has become more commonplace
in far-flung parts of the world, a huge variety of information is
freely given by their creators: cooking recipes, strategy and
tactics for specific industries, custom modifications to cars and
even blueprints for entire machines, enabling people to cook those
recipes, adopt those strategies, modify their cars or even build an
entire machine from scratch using that freely-made information
without owing any royalties to the original creator.

The GVCS is an organized iteration of this, open source hardware
design for a system of machines designed to enable a group of 200
individuals to live completely independently, producing everything
needed for a comfortable modern life (everything from the basics of
food, shelter and clothing to fuel and even 1990s technology-level
computers!) without needing the increasingly high capital to pay
someone else to produce those things they need.

The Global Village Construction Set Compressed Earth Block Press
(GVCS CEB Press) is a machine developed by the OSE as part of the
GVCS. The GVCS CEB Press takes raw earth/dirt/soil, and with the
great compressive strength of hydraulic power, compresses it to
produce solid blocks useful for building. Compressed earth blocks
have many advantages as a building material:

• Eliminate the cost of transporting bricks or blocks from
  offsite

  
  

• High strength and strong insulation against heat and sound

  
  

• Material needed to produce CEBs is, literally, dirt-cheap!

  
  

Because the GVCS CEB Press is open source technology and this
document is protected under the GNU Free Document License, you are
completely free to legally download, print and make unlimited copies
of this document and build the machine yourself, with no fees nor
royalties owed to the Open Source Ecology group. You further have
the right, under the open source license this machine is developed
under and this document written, to sell any machine you make based
on the instructions and blueprints found in this document for
whatever price you wish, and retain the full amount for yourself.

The process of building a functional power machine such as the
GVCS CEB Press may sound intimidating, but this document developed by
the OSE community was made to break the process down to every single
step. Every tool and every bit of material used to build this
machine are fully detailed in the forthcoming pages, followed by the
actual build instructions complete with blueprints and diagrams
designed to enable anyone, with the necessary skills (also listed) to
be able to build this machine.

With a completed GVCS CEB Press, two people can build a 6 foot
(1.83 meter)-high round wall 20 feet (6.1 meters) in diameter and 1
foot (30 centimeters) thick in one 8-hour workday, though
construction time will vary based on preparation time, available
equipment (such as a tractor to prepare the ground and move the
finished blocks produced by the press to where they need to go). The
bigger the block size, the faster a wall can be erected, but bigger
blocks weigh more and are a strain to work with. The version of the
GVCS CEB Press described in this document produce blocks weighing an
average of 25 pounds (11.3 kilograms).

The GVCS Torch Table, planned as part of the GVCS but not yet
ready with full documentation instructions at the time this document
was written (20 September 2011), will automate the GVCS CEB Press
manufacturing process, reducing the time to build the machine by 20
hours. The Open Source Ecology group has set an ambitious goal to
completely develop the full Global Village Construction Set by the
end of 2012; the GVCS Torch Table will likely be available before
this.

For more information on the Open Source Ecology group, the Global
Village Construction Set and the other machines part of this set, and
to ensure you have the most recent build instructions for the CEB
Press, please visit the Open Source Ecology website at:
http://www.opensourceecology.org