December 08, 2005
Guatemala Bound

From Lyle Estill:
http://www.biofuels.coop/blog/archives/000349.html


The wood shed is full of wood. The house sitter/dog caretaker is booked. The well pump is fixed. The homework is under way. Time to leave for Guatemala.

I got the boys "jungle ready" with a couple of booster shots to ward of tropical diseases. That was fun. And we are working on multiple digit multiplication these days, which means I spend most of my time looking for either my glasses or a calculator.

Our well pump, which was surging to 28 amps and staying high the entire time it was pumping, has been replaced by a working model that draws 15 at startup and immediately falls back to 12.

On Saturday we fly to Guatemala City. There will be seven of us in tow-all headed for Pedro's wedding in Antigua. Matt Rudolph and a friend set out a while ago on straight vegetable oil. They decided to drive it. We hope to see them there.

I wonder if the wedding guests will find it strange to see a handful of English speaking Americans crashing their party out of a fondness for Pedro. He used to use flavor as an indicator of fuel quality. And he used to play hard with the boys. The night he elected to take in a Motley Crue concert, instead of attending biofuels class, ticked Rachel off immensely, but just the same she will be seated in the cathedral on the groom's side of the idle. It doesn't really matter if the mass is in Spanish or Latin, since I don't speak a lick of either.

The last time I departed for a "Third World Top Up" was immediately after receiving an award from Jim Fain, North Carolina's Secretary of Commerce. Mr. Fain gathered all sorts of business leaders and award winners together, and offered them some speakers from China, who spent hours explaining how manufacturing opportunities could be exploited there.

It was such a depressing display of globalization gone awry that Tami and I decided to head to Nicaragua to plant some trees on a Richard and Lonna's sustainable coffee plantation. We had been offered a free trip, which we gave to Scott when he indicated a desire to join us. And I think he then gave the trip to Laura, who passed it along to Rachel-or something like that. A bunch of us went to Nicaragua, and our project went up a notch as a result.

I again crossed paths with Jim Fain recently at the Sustainable NC awards. He moderated a mind numbing panel discussion about sustainable profits, sustainable workforces, sustainable investment, and sustainable money grubbing without a single mention of sustaining our relationship to planet earth. I think he might be the guy they send in whenever our reclusive governor is unavailable-which I believe includes any time there is a NASCAR race on television down at the Governor's mansion.

I intend to load the backpack with books, and binoculars, and head for the Mayan ruins of Guatemala. No notebook. No cell phone. No Internet. My last toucan sighting was circumspect, and I am hoping that Guatemala is not too far north of their range. I'm going to let the blogspam accumulate and not worry about it for a time.

These days the robin migration is passing through North Carolina. Hundreds of birds stop here for cedar berries on their journey. The aged cedars around the place become so filled with birds that they startle you with the noise of their wings when they take flight.
They will cover a car with droppings in a single night. The juncos arrived a month ago. I was so immersed in work at the plant that I barely noticed them-slate colored harbingers of gray and cold.

This time of year when my own spirits tend to sag--may be the perfect time to dust off the old backpack and head to Guatemala.

Pedro is working on a biodiesel project there. So is Matt. My own interest in biodiesel in the developing world can be comfortably housed in a thimble. Why? Because we have enough work to do here in Moncure.

Oneas recently fired up an opportunity for us to head to Zimbabwe for a project, and I said the same thing to him. I offered the opportunity to David, one of our current interns, and suggested that my own ecological footprint is probably the size of 150 Zimbabweans, and perhaps I should go to work right here at home.

If we brush with biodiesel in Guatemala, that will be fine. I wanted to take Pedro one of Bill Knighton's stainless steel KOH baskets as a wedding gift, but never got around to ordering it. I was confident that delivering a key component to a methoxide maker would be sufficiently romantic, but time got away from me.


Posted by Lyle at December 8, 2005 09:00 PM

I've enjoyed reading other people's blogs and wish I had time to read them more. It's also made me realized that I haven't been taking time to write much in my own blog.
Today's entry was confessions; the truth about Dreamer Propulsion, detailing some of our less proud moments...
http://kalanu.blogspot.com/2005/12/confessions.html

12/21/2005
Recents
http://www.girlmark.com/blog/index.php?p=68

I had a whirlwind month so far. Last month ended with a flurry of phone calls to farmers for a commercial biodiesel plant project I want to ‘incite’. I’m really shaking the tree trying to see what falls out about a particular business idea I’ve had for a few years. The process has brought me a really interesting education in farm economics and oilseed practicalities.

and, it’s meant meetings, phone calls, email, phone calls, brainstorming, and more phone calls. It’s still at the very rudimentary brainstorm stage, and I’m doing it all absolutely glued to a notebook- it’s too much information to keep straight- and it’s given me a renewed appreciation for what those people go through to grow your and my damn food. It’s interesting, it’s challenging, it feels important, and I’m generally just extremely happy to be spending early winter working on interesting projects.

The last round was meeting up with an interested electrical engineer who currently works in the aerospace industry on spaceflight controls, and having a fun afternoon at a cafe brainstorming about automation. We’ll see where that goes. At the very least he’ll automate a homebrew-type small-farm plant, for fun. Through him I also found a possible interesting location to try the CSA end of things, on a small CSA in the valley.

I"m starting to realize there’s a pair of markets for on-farm production- a commercial-type facility geared towards 100,000 gallons a year fleets or farms, and also a much smaller one that we started calling the ‘CSA plant’- a small unit barely bigger than homebrewing (about the size of what I’ve done at Machine Shop with rudimentary equipment, actually), geared toward large biodiesel coops or the needs of an entity such as a small CSA farm with one tractor and a few delivery trucks . I think there are a number of people currently furiously trying to crack the ‘CSA plant design’ dilemma.

Enough about that cause there’s a whole nother entry written already that I’ll post sometime .. later.

***************************
I had a list of long-term goals- this particular list was about major purchases- and they’ve all come around for much less than expected and much quicker than expected. The van, now a GC, hopefuly next a welder, and that’s just the blog-worthy stuff. I’ve blazed through a lot of minor but necessary tasks and feel quite happy about where it’s been going, despite my injury sidelining me completely off of my original plan for this fall.
*********************************
ALso somewheres ’round a month ago, one of my workshop students, a chemist, told me about a sale on old gas chromatographs he knew about.

!More phone calls!, emails to people around the world trying to identify if these were equipped like I wanted, phone calls to the lab to set up a meeting date, logistics, more email and phone calls to two other interested parties to figure out if we could each walk away with one. I drove to Santa Cruz, my friend who’d told me about the instrument sale took the afternoon to help me, and we took a look at the instruments at the lab. So far it looks great- Piedmont Biofuels is getting one and another, non-biodiesel, worthy cause is receiving the third. I spent a week chewing my nails waiting for the proper person at the lab to be ready to meet with us. My friend Hugh_D from the Ford forum was absolutely stellar through all this in setting this project up and dealing with all our phone calls, research, questions, logistics, emails… you get the picture. During this time he threw a little barbeque gathering one Monday night with a few biodiesel/diesel-owning friends down there, and we had a great time boring/scaring the teenage kids that they’d brought along, as we talked up biodiesel and Petromax lanterns and Mercedii and cloud point. One of the guests was Jorah, owner of the feed store in Ben Lomond (currently the only biodiesel pump in Santa Cruz area)- he’s a jovial person who seems to get along with everybody. The teens misheard his name and later asked Hugh ‘what’s up with that, a woman named Mark and a guy named Dorah’.
Jorah says that he gets firemen and country folk coming in to the feed store asking about the picturesque biodiesel tank (his pump is solar-powered and he uses an antique gas pump dispenser to hang the nozzle on). He is such a genial person that he manages to talk them out of their initial ‘why would you want to pay SO MUCH’ reaction , by invoking farm and national security issues, and they walk away with a tankful despite initial scepticism. Wow. Oh yeah, he loses money on the deal. HE’s just selling biodiesel because of his missionary zeal about the stuff.

Well, all the phone calls got settled, I had checks in hand from various people, and last Friday I drove down to Santa Cruz and loaded my van with gas chromatographs, the autosamplers, interfaces, computers, and spare parts, then topped it off by loading up the roof rack with pallet racking from a Craigslist deal. That’s the 16-foot tall warehouse shelving. My new shop has nice tall ceilings and I"m ecstatic about fitting my assorted crap onto pallet racks. I’ve really missed having a functional shop and it’s been chaotic with all my tools and supplies in various bins scattered all over.

Last week I went into the beehive and there obvious Varroa mite problems- common to surface at this time of year here. Yes, bees get PMS- Parasitic Mite Syndrome, a combination of blood-sucking mite infestation and viruses that hitchike around in the process. My strategy for dealing with them is really complicated and I spent a few days on the internet reading up the latest nonchemical management advances, which have really moved forward since I last kept bees three or four years ago. MOre on this later I think.

My weekend vaporized… into what? oh yeah, I had a couple of 9-hour days at the computer answering email, mostly about the tour, and doing tour promotion stuff. During the weekend I figured out my hand was the worst it’s been since I injured it in September. The typing is now officially part of the problem. My injury had gotten a lot better in late November but now it was back to excruciating. Damn! I of course have no morning times available to go to the hospital again for a follow-up for several days to come. Ick!

monday was a sort of low point- staring at my new shop accessories and thinking about injuries, and freaking out a little about my deteriorating vehicles and my inability to handle a wrench to fix them. I’ve literally never taken any vehicles to the shop for anything other than alignment or tires - I do all my work and have no idea how the process works for normal people- and I was going through this funny anxiety wondering how to select a mechanic so I don’t get ripped off.

The answer suddenly came to me- believe it or not, I actually know a real, live mechanic- and a big cloud lifted when I realized that yes, there is in fact a solution to this unsolvable problem. the VW now in his hands with instructions to both fix the switch that turns on the electric fan (something that’s ALWAYS burning up on these cars- in fact it had just been done three months ago), and a request that he also wire up a permanently-mounted manual switch on the dash that I can use to turn it on and off the NEXT time it burns up. Every VW should have this feature.

I laid off the typing on Sunday and Monday (I think) and sat around reading and doing similar ‘doing nothing’ tasks- that made me think about all the different Web and book projects I was just starting to work on last week and how frustrating it was to have to take it easy with the injury. Arghhh…. Then two days off typing and the hand feels great. I should leave the typing alone for a while, but at least I can use tools again.

It pretty much had to get better- I had a pair of workdays scheduled this week, where I’d hired a friend to assemble Appleseed processor parts for me and to help set up the shop. I’m making a few ‘full system’ processors for sale to pay for my GC setup costs (which dont’ come about for a few weeks, so I’m doing fine with it). The last couple of days I installed the pallet racking with the employee’s help, plopped all my shop possessions onto it, created a really nice work surface, and installed the employee at the tedious task of assembling ’sticks’ of plumbing. I gotta say it’s really unpleasant just ’standing around’ and watching other people work or lift things for me. However, my new shop is making me extremely happy (as long as my injury lets me at least use SOMETHING in it). There’s a great group of people there whom I really enjoy socializing with, a nice kitchen, and lots of light… such a contrast to the old shop.

Three of us at the shop have been talking about buying a TIG for months. Tonight the need for a TIG in my life got poundingly loud when I started working on the wash tank that my employee had prepped and realized I can’t keep borrowing welders.

I think we’re ordering a lightweight inverter-based TIG tomorrow, and I"ll be looking for a wirefeed accessory for it to set it up for MIG when I need to.

There’ve been way too many exciting new expensive-ish possessions and projects in my life lately, but it’s working out so far as long as my hand lets it.

Next month is GC setup…

Mark

Dear Mark,

Glad to hear of all the exciting new developments/toys, I mean, ummmmm, investments! I recently treated myself to a "high end" Chinese plasma cutter. I hardly ever fire up the cutting torch any more. For my wife's birthday, I made her a card "written" on 3/16" cold rolled steel plate about 8.5" x 11".

On the typing/injury issue, you know some of the voice recognition programs are actually not terrible to use now. Not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but maybe something to try. Many have free demo versions, or inexpensive basic sets that might fill a need. Just looking outside the box for a minute...

Finest regards,

troy

some photos:
Here's a few gas chromatographs and gas chromatograph parts (I got a couple of partly-gutted ones out of the deal, too), along with some familiar equipment:




and here's the van with the rest of the load. Mmmmm , I really like my van...:

Why would we want a gas chromatograph instead of a liquid chromatograph? Eveyone keeps saying this is the way to go so I figured I'd share my ignorance. Would a mass spectrometer work as well?

The ASTM method specifies GC. I've been led to understand that it's due to the industry experience with analyzing diesel- it's the method they were most comfortable with when originally writing the European standards. There are also some wet chemistry methods which allegedly are better but they're not recognized yet.

I dropped off the GC's at Concrete Community College (well its not really called that, but I like to fictionalise stuff in the blog a little) yesterday. I'm pretty excited about their lab (they were excited about the GC deal as well). They've got an analytical balance which means I could probably talk them into trying the wet chemistry total and free glycerol tests also, which I"d like to learn, in order to assess whether they're practical for small producers (likely).

Mark

Here's an article by Goerhardt Knoethe, which provides an overview of HPLC and GC for biodiesel analysis, along with other methods:

http://www.biodiesel.org/resources/reportsdatabase/repo...20010101_gen-344.pdf

Mark

TIG!!!
http://www.girlmark.com/blog/index.php

so this morning we got a TIG - a used Miller Dynasty 200DX.

We is me and the boyfriend and a third person from our shop. Twice yesterday I almost bit the bullet and picked up a cheap used MIG (there were several on the local Craigslist- it’s a good week for welder prices, I guess people are selling everythign trying to pay for Christmas spending?).

A ‘1/3′ share in that awesome Dynasty welder isn’t much more than I’d have shelled out for a MIG that wasn’t quite right for me.

My ‘major purchases’ wish list is pretty much down to zero. Well, there is a little matter of wanting to get a Sprinter van next year, somehow, but having the great hauling van makes that a little less pressing of an issue. maybe an analytical balance is also still on the list...

Mark

I find that the trick with TIG welders is to get one with HF start. Scratch start ,like the one I have at home, never seem as good as the HF start I used at work.
What with a TIg, a MIG, ARC and Gas, the world is your (welded) oyster.
regards
dva

well...

http://www.girlmark.com/blog/index.php?p=71
...and a MIG


I jumped at one of the Craigslist MIG welders in addition to the fantastic TIG we’re buying. It’s a gigantic old brick of copper windings on wheels- the Idealarc Sp-200, and it set me back all of $450, which I couldn’t resist.

It’s got a decent duty cycle and gives us yet another machine in the shop. The shop currently has somethign like 6 little Lincoln portable wirefeeds belonging to other shopmates, so this one will do some mid-range jobs. We’re splitting theTIG three ways so the additional MIG also gives us a backup for when one of us is using that and the other wants to work.

This machine has the ’stitch’ function, which I"ve always wanted to try out, and a couple of similar features- ’spot weld’ (how different is that from stitch?)

I’ll have to wait till after Christmas to get the gas and start playing.

Our shop’s now putting the feelers out for a CNC machining center…

Mark

quote:

This machine has the ’stitch’ function, which I"ve always wanted to try out, and a couple of similar features- ’spot weld’ (how different is that from stitch?)

Girl Mark,

If I am correct, the stitch will give you a short duration of seam weld then stop allowing you to move along a bit before the next 'stitch' in the weld. The spot weld is a timed weld over one spot .
regards
dva

I have a 20 x 30 CNC that will be for sale in three months. What sort of price range are you looking at. For that matter, the entire shop will be for sale at that time.

The group of us are looking for something in the $10-$13K range for a machining center type CNC, less for a knee mill obviously...

Mark

Girl Mark, if you have some friends who are computer savvy, here is an open source software program that you can use to build a multi axis machining center controlled by a PC. People use it for many things.

http://www.linuxcnc.org/

im cureous.. what will the cnc mill be used for? just cureous.


my shop at school has a cnc machine thats basicly a glorified router.. i want a real cnc machine since we have a real rapid prototyper

well, my boyfriend (who's not an engineer) designed the book imager for Internet Archive/Open Content Alliance, and much of the original prototyping work was done at our shop. Boy was it hard to maintain radio silence (it's a damn cool project, and consumed all my shopmates full-time for a number of months) while the project was in progress...:

http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB1131119878036884...61109.html?mod=blogs

a blog from Lyle:
http://www.biofuels.coop/blog/archives/000353.html

December 22, 2005
Incremental Steps

Our 2K grid-tied solar array is ready to go. It's been permitted by Chatham Government, tied in by Central Electric, wired up by Honey Electric, and it's all ready to push some renewable electrons onto the grid.

And it is sitting idle. If we wish to qualify for federal tax credits, we won't turn this puppy on until January 1st, 2006. To make it live, we need to push a couple of buttons on the wall in the kitchen. But we can't make it live until then.

So let's say we have a party-a switch throwing party-and we turn this unit on at 12:01 a.m. on January 1. Nothing will happen. The system won't do diddily squat until the sun shines. Which means it might kick in the next day, if the sun is up.

The sun shone brightly today. This would have been a great day to have thrown the switch. But today we were grid-tied. All we did with our huge investment today was fill some unused batteries and shed electrons.

Because we are dependent on the Policy Layer to recoup our investment, we need to abide by the Policy Layer's rules. And if the Government says that active solar only qualifies in the middle of the night when the sun is not shining, then so be it.

It's hard not to think of Bill Knighton, and Susan Hogarth, who perpetually remind us that our government is idiotic, and evil, and not on the side of sustainability.

Because when it comes to installing photovoltaics in America, it's not about producing electrons. It's about claiming the tax credits. Which is an incremental step.

The other day Bonnie Raitt played Chapel Hill. She's powered by a non-profit that likes to run on biodiesel, and Tami had them all lined up for a fill. It's been awhile since we did our "fuel attendants to the stars" gig, and we were excited to have Bonnie Raitt in the sights. We were all ready to "give them something to talk about..."

But when the word of our impending fill got out into the world, it was squashed. Apparently on this leg of the tour Bonnie was to fill up in Knoxville, where she was to be greeted by the mayor, and the NBB, and it was to be a big deal.

We wouldn't want Chapel Hill to steal the pre-arranged thunder. Never mind the fact that her tour is going to burn some fuel to travel from Chapel Hill to Knoxville.

But it's not about the fuel. It's about the publicity for the fuel. It's an incremental step.

Sometimes I find our incremental steps toward sustainability maddening. Sometimes I find them absurd. Often I find them laughable.

One of our members, Sally, has a bumpersticker with reads "Where are we going? And why are we in this handbasket?"

For those of us who buy the fact that we are on our way to hell in a handbasket, it's frustrating to sit around and watch the incremental steps. If we can get ten days of kilowatts from the sun, let's not wait to qualify for some Byzantine tax code. And if we can clean up the emissions on a tour between Chapel Hill and Knoxville, let's not wait for the perfect press opportunity.

On the other hand, incremental steps are better than no steps, which leaves me in my usual state: part wanting to scream aloud and part wanting to hold my tongue...

quote:

Originally posted by girl mark:
well, my boyfriend (who's not an engineer) designed the book imager for Internet Archive/Open Content Alliance, and much of the original prototyping work was done at our shop. Boy was it hard to maintain radio silence (it's a damn cool project, and consumed all my shopmates full-time for a number of months) while the project was in progress...:

http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB1131119878036884...61109.html?mod=blogs

Hi Mark.

Could a small scale version of this be built for home use? My son uses a school supplied computer for his school work to compmesate for his learning disabilities and scanning the text in is one of the bigger headaches.

Also, would this be affordable for an elmentary school?

Dropout,

A huge part of this system is the software to handle all the scans. It's probably pretty easy to build a similar physical box to hold books flat while photographing the pages, but I think you're probably better off with whatever you're currently doing.

I had a friend with severe learning disabilities who managed to get a sympathetic doctor to certify her as being blind, which made her elibible for some kind of good books on tape program/library that was normally only available to the blind (she was able to learn that way more readily). I know that may not be helpful to people with different disabilities than she had, but it was an interesting way of getting at the resources.

Mark