They've been mentioned before. They've been at this since at least 2012, and they've only built a few prototype machines. Productivity seems low.

The whole set of machines looks like something China's ministry of agriculture would have come up with around 1980 or so. There are some standard items widely used in rural China and India, manufactured by many manufacturers. Here's a small Diesel engine.[1] This thing is brutally simple - one cylinder, non-recirculating water cooled (you have to add water when you add fuel), hand crank start, no emission controls. Costs about US$300. There's someone who has a YouTube channel of fixing discarded engines of this type. There seem to be a lot of them lying around, all very similar but from different manufacturers. It's the AK-47 of Diesel engines - it's crude, it Just Works, and it can be fixed. It's mass-produced, because making metal parts in quantity is very efficient, while one-offs are too labor intensive.

Here's a basic tractor, the Wuzheng TS, costing around $6,000. "Mature technology", the maker says. There are hundreds of thousands of those things in the Third World.

That's how this gets done in the real world. Mass produced machines of similar design that's proved itself. That's how the US did it, back when the Fordson tractor [3] was popular. Ford produced low-end tractors until 1964.

You can still buy low-end farm equipment cheaply. It's not cost effective for a commercial farm, but it's still available. Sometimes it's all you need.

[1] https://toppower.en.made-in-china.com/product/kmtRnxhrTvpB/C...

[2] https://chinawuzheng.en.made-in-china.com/product/ovGERBPVaa...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fordson

If you find the OP interesting, you might find Project Kamp more interesting:

https://projectkamp.com/mission.html

The OP seems like the academic approach to what project kamp is learning by doing: They're attempting to build a community that's eventually completely self sufficient on a fairly limited land space, and documenting the whole process.

Lots of link rot in their list of stuff. Starting at the top of the list for the 3D printer goes to an Amazon 404. The John Deere twine baler redirects to Deere's home page.

Is this something that has since been abandoned and being shown here for historical purposes? An example of another panacea idea that just lost internet steam?

New Yorker covered the organisational issues in 2013: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/12/23/the-civilizati...

About the churn: "By February, 2013, all the O.S.E. collaborators had left the farm."

This is a somewhat similar project, a very small project in early stages, but interesting.

https://github.com/civboot/civboot https://github.com/civboot/civboot/tree/main/blog

Comments here are a bit rough. Marcin does plenty of work for OSE and the community is still active but most of it is in-person/offline -- hard for a lot of us to believe, I know, but there is human activity that takes place outside the internet.

Or so I'm told.

I’m from the self-replicating self-reconfigurable systems side.

The problem with this is not about making the machines but the human intervention to make use of them effectively. You really need end-to-end automation to solve this.

If i don’t remember wrongly all this started due to john deere implementing DRM in their equipment. this is a political problem because the issue can be resolved by just buying chinese equivalents and changing patent/ip law.

In Dan Wang’s recent “Breakneck” he makes the case that process knowledge is what really drives technological cultures, not the creation of tools or blueprints. He questions whether blueprints of any specificity, sent back to Roman times, would be enough to build something like an automobile or combine.

From the New Yorker article in 02013 at https://archive.fo/l0jfL:

> Like Spock, from “Star Trek,” Jakubowski has deliberate diction, closely shorn dark hair, and hooded eyes. He also has a Vulcan’s unwavering high-mindedness. His paternal grandfather fought in the Polish underground during the Second World War, helping to derail Nazi trains. A grandmother spent time in a concentration camp. Hearing their stories, Jakubowski concluded that the brutality of war was often a result of privation—an inability to secure the means of survival. His family left Poland when he was ten, in order to escape martial law, and moved to Paterson, New Jersey. The contrast between the abundance in American supermarkets and the empty shelves back home shocked him. “I never forgot about material scarcity,” he told me.

This is exactly the type of information you want loaded on a HDD tucked away in case of calamity. You won't be able to find all the parts but the ideas would be invaluable.

Hydraulic motor, but no hoses or compressor?

3D printer, but no filament?

It says the design of the 3D printer is done. But on the 3D printer page, there's nothing, no design documents, just a picture.

As seen in a 2011 TED talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/marcin_jakubowski_open_sourced_blu...

Honestly, I wished this is something like a Colin Furze or Watch Wes Work would take on to bring projects over the finish line.

this gave me a lot of faith in humanity. back in ~2014.

still cool. still something i want to see in the world. but not super dynamic.

It would be cool to see this project re-done with modern tools and a new generation of engineering talent.

As others have pointed out, the idea is really cool, but the implementation was never there.

Color me disappointed, I was hoping for a Lego set based on the works of Marshall McLuhan

So that's what G.E.C.K. would look like!

What exactly was the process to choose the 50 machines?

I wonder how "Hay rake" got on the same list as "CNC precision multimachine" for example? If you asked me the former is probably more useful than the latter.

I’m conflicted. Firstly really like this project and its open source and community empowerment ideals. My concern is around how these tools essentially accelerate planetary resource extraction, with from what I can see no discussion or attempt to addesss this potential impact/dynamic.

In addition to bringing about greater freedom and community empowerment the project would benefit from being explicit on how it limits or seeks (even through principals) to limit excessive plantary resource extraction.

There’s a plastics project that illustrates what I mean, they help people make machines that recover and recycle plastic. Circular resource use, make that part of your front and center.