The Liberator Compressed Earth Brick Press

About this project

We're a Kickstarter Staff Pick!

AjarTech is kicking off its first big project, and we need your help. We want to bring Compressed Earth Brick Presses (CEBs) to the masses as they should be: Open source! The Liberator CEB allows you to take clay and dirt dug for foundation and compress it into bricks for a house, a factory, a wall...anything! It's an exciting project and we can't wait to bring you on board.

AjarTech is an open source social and procedural company that aims to connect people to capital and resources using our extensive open-source network to bring open source projects into fruition.

At the helm of AjarTech is Peter Scheyer, a serial entrepreneur and military veteran. While in the Air Force, Peter became interested in emergency management and resilient societies, which led him to discover the Global Village Construction Set. Marcin Jakubowski, PhD and TED speaker, has designed fifty machines that he believes could provide the core of a functional society: the Global Village Construction Set (GVCS). He wants to promote an entire 'ecology' of open source machines, blueprints, and instruction manuals that could be used by anyone interested in a $5,000 tractor, or extracting aluminum from clay.

The Global Village Construction Set

We think this is insanely rad.

While working with Marcin’s company, Open Source Ecology (OSE), Peter discovered that the OSE community wished that more was being done on all of the GVCS machines. We love to get things started, so we knew we could get involved in addressing the community’s wants and needs by tackling some of these projects and taking them to completion.

We've come up with a campaign to get professional-grade CAD designs completed for all 50 machines. They're incredible-- and the work is almost done.

We need your support to take the existing CAD designs for The Liberator Compressed Earth Brick Press, or CEB, and make them into a single document that anyone can download, modify, and go to a hardware store and buy the parts for. We're working with [CAD firm], a local Chicago design group, to make sure that the designs are professional, functional, and immediately useful to anyone. The Liberator is ecologically sound, and allows you to make do with what you have around you.

Using the funds raised from this Kickstarter, we'll develop CAD files for the CEB in [professional CAD program], which can be opened in Google Sketchup and other open-source design software, a bill of materials for the project, and a set of instructions on how to put the CEB together. We'll publish these files under the CC-SA-BY license that ensures they'll be open forever.

We're also making some physical models of the CEB for this Kickstarter as fun rewards to put together with your kids or save for yourself if you're a discerning and mature adult. The real-deal is giant dirt LEGOs, guys. And they're bulletproof.

This is really cool. Help make it happen!

$25k- CEB Manufacturer Friendly Version of schematics will be released.

$27.5k- CEB 3d printer friendly versions of schematics will be released.

$30k- CEB Store will be opened, offering 3D printed low-rez model kits, and physical copies of schematics for sale.

$70k- The possibilities are endless! We have ideas! Tons of ideas! Founding a new factor-E farm near Chicago, offering memberships, workshops, prototypes and much, much more!

Risks and challenges

Our biggest concern is that our plans might be too open for interpretation. We're confident that our team can give you clear and concise plans, and with your help we'll be able to beta test everything to make sure these open source plans can be understood by any and all who read them.

Ultimately, though, this is a risk free investment. We have the staff, the plans, now we just need the funds to make it all happen!

If we don't make our goal, we won't be able to afford to continue through all fifty projects associated with The Global Village Construction Set- and that would be a MAJOR bummer. We want to bring these open source plans to the world, and we can only do so with your support!