By Joel_BC on

Hi. I'm up above Idaho & Washington, on a bit over eight acres of land, graowing lots of things, and have been at it for years.

I'm interested in how common things - junkyard/garage-sale items, used machinery, used materials, components, etc - can be designed into and recombined to make useful structures & equipment.The sort of equipment or structures that might be used on small farms and homesteads, and in serious urban food gardens.

I've searched and searched online, and found only the very occasional web site, and a small but hopeful number of illustrated projects, along this line. So about a year ago I started a thread on a fairly obscure web site called SufficientSelf.com Scroll down thru the pages. http://www.sufficientself.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=11875

I'm please that (even on a fairly obscure web site) the thread has had nearly 15,000 views so far. I believe there could be widespread interest, if people contributed to threads like this, or actually got some websites going.

You people at Farm Hack seem to have interests related to my own. I like what you've put up online so far. What are the chances that you will actually publish plans and/or photo or diagram illustrated discussions of the technicalities of some of your "tools"?

Please comment. It'd be great to have some discussion here.

Forums
Farm Hack Talk
Forum comment

Great to see your comments. The projected goal for "tools" postings is to get each one documented to the point that enough information is shared that the tool can be fabricated/reproduced by farmers where ever they are. The tool wikis should also contain whatever documentation that is needed to communicate how to effectively use the tool. This, of course, is a trajectory, but the power of the wiki is that it can be a repository and accumulate the documentation as goal of complete documentation is worked towards. You will notice that each tool also has related forums attached to it - please jump in with your comments, ideas, suggestions, requests for more documentation etc. Please also send along suggestions about how to make the web site easier to use etc. You can find the tool template for submitting your own tools here http://farmhack.org/tools/tool-template and a web posting instructional section here http://farmhack.org/tools/farmhacknet
Forum comment

Dorn, thank you... very welcoming and informative. I particularly resonate with this Farm Hack design principle: "Use of “off the shelf” or commonly available components, or components that are or can be repurposed – can a more easily sourced part do the job as well?" Please add something on that thread (on SufficientSelf) that I included the link for in my OP, above. I want more input over there, too. I'll contribute what I can here. This is exciting!
Forum comment

Re: my OP, above... I'll just add that the thread I mentioned (from Do-It-Yourself forum, in SufficientSelf.com open forums) has attracted over 24,000 views now (and still climbing). Please consider posting something about your relevant projects there. Include pics.