15 ms·

Open Source Tractor

887 points by vincent_s 5y ago

postfacto 5y ago
Dovetails nicely with the whole Right To Repair shit that farmers are currently having to go through with John Deere.
marcin_ose 5y ago
Recent build is here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oY00KwaBbY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oY00KwaBbY. We're just getting started.
engineer_22 5y ago
I wonder why it's articulated. Edit: drive shaft wear. It just seems to be an extra complication and harder to steer if not hydraulic assisted.
- pwr-electronics 5y ago
  > the articulated joint that was present in LifeTrac I - to allow long-life on the shafts - which experience much less wear compared to skid steering
- jcims 5y ago
  Given they are using hydraulic motors on the wheels it could be easily converted to skid steer. The current configuration has very high ground pressure but low wear characteristics. Skid steer has high ground wear but supports the use of tracks which could reduce ground pressure and increase traction.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Cthulhu_ 5y ago
I wonder why the frame is made out of bolted beams with holes in them, are bolts and holed beams easy to find or something? I mean I can imagine that if you have the tools to build those, you'd have a welder as well. Granted, welding might be a bit more challenging than cutting beams and drilling holes.
- Ardon 5y ago
  From what I remember from back when I first read up on this project: The goal is for as much of the construction to be done with simple tools and materials that can be stored long-term. If you need to, hypothetically, bury your society-bootstrapping supplies, your wrenches and hole bar will probably survive. But a welder may not.
  - Cthulhu_ 5y ago
    Fair enough, without electricity you might still be able to drill holes in things, it just takes a good while. Mind you, I've seen some... interesting welders cobbled together, I saw one that was a load of wire wrapped around a rubber inner tyre. Here [1] is one made from a microwave transformer. [1] https://www.instructables.com/Build-a-Microwave-Transformer-Homemade-Welder/ https://www.instructables.com/Build-a-Microwave-Transformer-...
  - HeyLaughingBoy 5y ago
    It's really, really, really difficult for me to imagine a "society-bootstrapping" event where conveniently dimensioned steel, diesel/gasoline engines and fasteners are readily available but thousands of old, easily repairable tractors are not.
- stagger87 5y ago
  Punched metal tubing is very common and cheap.
- intrepidhero 5y ago
  Perforated steel tube is a readily available material and a ratchet is a cheaper and much lower skill tool than a welder. Also seems like customization is one of the project goals. I would imagine that if wanted to weld it instead the design would also work for you.
  - Gracana 5y ago
    Where do you get 1/4 wall perforated tube? It sounds expensive compared to regular box tube straight from the mill. And each bolted connection made with graded fasteners is going to cost several dollars, which adds up very quickly. A circular saw, a mag drill, and a stick welder could take you a long way on a project like this, and you could use regular steel plate, tube, angle bars, etc. I think a lot of cost and weight is being sacrificed in the name of "modularity", for questionable benefit.
nimbius 5y ago
i work on heavy equipment such as tractors, diesel trucks and excavators in the USA. this is an excellent start, but its a long way from a tractor. some of the pitfalls that need to be addressed: "Modular Power Unit" is undefined. can i run it on white gas? diesel? kerosene? what is the engine displacement? air cooled or liquid? If we mean to say this tractor is all-electric, keep in mind most small farms arent equipped to charge anything more advanced than a cordless drill or flashlight. Cab frame has no safety glass or panels, so the operator enjoys every rock and every tree branch :(. a shade canopy is a nice add as well. no lights. this is a nonstarter for every farmer that wakes up at 4 am. quick hoses are nice, but I cant find a PTO knuckle so its restricted to things like lifting and towing (and maybe ripping). this is okay, but for an un-weatherized vehicle ill need to use barn real-estate to store, its certainly lacking.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- fineIllregister 5y ago
  It's been a while since I have read up on Open Source Ecology, but my memory is that modular power unit is a stand in for several options. One option is the power cube, which is a gas engine: https://opensourceecology.dozuki.com/c/PowerCube https://opensourceecology.dozuki.com/c/PowerCube I believe that the creator of the project uses these, and has said that there are alternatives in case gas is not available.
  - stooliepidgin 5y ago
    Marcin Jakubowski realized earlier than most that open source hardware is a deeper solution that even generous right-to-repair (R2R) protections cannot necessarily deliver.
- sixothree 5y ago
  Is there an issue tracker for this project? Sounds like it might need one along with your advice.
- srmatto 5y ago
intrepidhero 5y ago
Is there more information on what the "power cube" is? I poked around the site and couldn't find details.
- afranchuk 5y ago
  I'm assuming you found the page on the site but want more detailed prose on it? It's the second linked category on the homepage. https://opensourceecology.dozuki.com/c/PowerCube https://opensourceecology.dozuki.com/c/PowerCube
  - intrepidhero 5y ago
    Yeah. Every link on that page is a stub. I was wondering if they listed the engine they've been using in the prototypes anywhere.
- bri3d 5y ago
  https://wiki.opensourceecology.org/wiki/Power_Cube_Design_Rationale https://wiki.opensourceecology.org/wiki/Power_Cube_Design_Ra... https://wiki.opensourceecology.org/wiki/Main_Page https://wiki.opensourceecology.org/wiki/Main_Page Their current design revolves around a Briggs and Stratton Professional 28hp gas engine. 49M777 I think is the designation.
dejv 5y ago
This brings back memories. I grew up around smallholding farming during comunist regime when time was plentyful, but it was near to impossible to buy tractor for personal use. Almost every familly owned DIY home-grown tractor built from some old diesel motor donated from who knows where and scrap metal.
marcodiego 5y ago
Looks like it is made out of life-size meccano parts.
- aasasd 5y ago
  Yep: Meccano clones of my childhood weren't brightly colored, unlike what I see in search now—so I almost nostalgia'd all over myself from seeing that thing. E.g.: https://rc-today.ru/UserFiles/Image/89/87/konstruktor_metallicheskii_avtoran_340_det_2_modeli_00301_5a25317ee20fe_1218_big.png https://rc-today.ru/UserFiles/Image/89/87/konstruktor_metall...
- OneLeggedCat 5y ago
  Huh. In the US, we had a copy of Meccano called Erector (which is what this project reminded me of). In 2000, Mecanno bought the Erector brand. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meccano https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meccano
raintrees 5y ago
cool - looks like legos...
timschmidt 5y ago
We build similarly at https://wiki.replimat.org/wiki/Main_Page https://wiki.replimat.org/wiki/Main_Page where we are working to document each of the building techniques involved as well as some of the most useful things which can be built this way.
syedkarim 5y ago
Isn't this really a skid steer/wheel loader, rather than a tractor?
- jjmellon 5y ago
  Yes it is. Even if it had a PTO, this vehicle won't do much agricultural field work, it will bog down. Tractors typically have much larger back wheels, usually weighted, and a larger engine.
- saalweachter 5y ago
  The core of the modern tractor is the "traction engine", an engine for pulling. By itself you could pull plows, disks, rakes, planters, etc, with the inconvenience of raising and lowering the implements manually. Traction engines were not the first engines on the farm: prior to that, you could find steam engines on wheels that would be pulled by horses to different areas of the farm and fields to run belt-driven machines such as bailers or threshers, which were stationary -- you'd load hay into a baler with a pitchfork, and the machine would compact it into a bale. Tractors absorbed this function with their own belt wheels or the PTO on modern tractors, which is used to power machines stationary or moving (modern bailers move around the field, but tractors will still be used to power a stationary grain elevator). They also added three point hitches and hydraulics to automatically raise and lower equipment. But as long as it pulls, it's a tractor.
mastax 5y ago
Man I remember reading about this in 2011 or so. I'm glad they're still doing well. It's an interesting project at the intersection of philanthropic eco-hippies and mechanical engineers which doesn't seem very common to me. Of course, being older and wiser now I'm less excited about the fantasy of using my brains and grit to rebuild society after the coming apocalypse. And if you are a villager of some description trying to use machinery to improve your prospects you're probably better off buying something old and used, or cheap and Chinese. Over the last 10 years the number of (mostly Chinese) companies making okay-quality cheap industrial equipment of all types has grown massively, and I've seen this equipment being used more and more in the developing world. Cheap is relative, of course, and many places do not make it easy to buy anything due to payment infrastructure, shipping, and customs costs. So on the one hand it's a bit silly for some guy in Missouri to even consider designing his own bakery oven when you can get them on Alibaba for $500. On the other, it's very cool and interesting, there's a lot to learn from the attempt, and there's a lot of actually useful designs already for certain situations. I wonder how much success they've had getting this information out to people who it could actually help?
- turminal 5y ago
  I don't think the makers of this machine believe this is a viable solution for farmers right now, but they realize that "buy it cheap from China" is becoming more and more of a problem in the long run and something that needs to be fixed. We'll have to give up on the "if it dies, just buy a new one, it's cheap anyway" philosophy sooner or later. I see this project more as an experiment on how to make a functional and durable machine that is fixable when it breaks.
  - bshipp 5y ago
    As someone who has worked in agriculture their entire life, there is nothing cheap about farming equipment. Every year it gets more and more prohibitively expensive and experiences more and more vendor lock-in. While this solution appears fairly rudimentary, I think there's a real demand for more simplistic, compatible, and capable farm machinery when combines are a million a piece and tractors are a quarter that.
wly_cdgr 5y ago
This is probably the coolest project I've seen in the two and a half years I've been compulsively reading every thread on this site
swader999 5y ago
What would be the ballpark price of the materials for this?
atoav 5y ago
Ahh I was thinking about traktor the DJ software. The open source alternative for this would be mixxx: https://mixxx.org/ https://mixxx.org/
soheil 5y ago
I genuinely wonder how it can compete against any existing tractors. You can order a brand new tractor for 5 grand [1]. Is this going to cost less or come with more capabilities? [1] https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/4wd-wheel-farm-agriculture-tractor-100hp_62505050568.html https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/4wd-wheel-farm-agricu...
- namdnay 5y ago
  Not only can you get a very cheap new one, but your village mechanic will know how to repair it because they’ll already have worked on dozens. I know this project is really cool as an engineer, but engines and vehicles in all forms are pretty much a solved problem in the third world. Those guys can squeeze 50 extra years out of a van that we would take to the scrap, building new open source models really isn’t a priority
- voakbasda 5y ago
  I started looking at this class of imported machines recently. What is the shipping cost/time on such units? What about availability of spare parts? Or the quality of the service/parts manuals? These questions are not easily answered on Alibaba, but a properly-done open source design that uses off-the-shelf parts should make them almost entirely moot.
hinkley 5y ago
I went looking for specialty equipment for moving logs a few years ago while researching a restoration project. That equipment is super expensive, so I went looking for a DIY solution, expecting to find something along the lines of the construction philosophy of the OST project. I know my way around a wrench and bolting something together is no problem for me. Especially if I can take it apart again to store it, since I'll need this thing about .75 times a year. I didn't find it. What I found was a handful of farmer types who had welded up their own solutions, who stopped mid-how-to to espouse the liberating power of learning to weld mild steel on your own. Paying someone to weld for you is super expensive, and alarmingly so if you live far out of town. We know from CivE disaster/case studies that bolts through square tubing - especially through the ends of square tubing - have failure modes that are not obvious even to construction workers, let alone you or I. Might be that the OST project should be considering welding as a base skill for assembling a tractor by hand. Especially if anyone is going to make it earn its living by dragging around heavy, high-friction things like dirt.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- AngryData 5y ago
  They should definitely look into welding, they will need it at some point anyways for repairs. And a stick welder is both cheap and perfect use case for welding heavy metal frames. It could even be powered off the engine to be used in the tractor.
  - hinkley 5y ago
    Refresh my memory. A stick welder is an electric arc welder that uses a thin rod of metal as the contact point and the rod gets consumed to make the bead, right? That sounds pretty reasonable.
    - AngryData 5y ago
      Yes, it is very easy to use and you don't need bottled gas, just the welding sticks. The only real downside to it is it doesn't work as well with thin metal, but for an equipment frame that isn't a problem.
efitz 5y ago
Patents expire after 20 years or so. Why not just take a 25 year old tractor, 3d model it, make your small improvements and updates, and then start working on value adds like parts pipelines, data & gps driven agriculture, etc
- scrooched_moose 5y ago
  Modeling a tractor in CAD isn't the issue. Manufacturing it is. A 25 year old tractor design (probably out to 75+ year old tractors even) still has hundreds of millions of dollars in infrastructure and tooling behind it. Molds or dies for a single part can easily reach into 6 figures, without taking into account the $10 million injection molding machine. The simplifications you could do would be limited, as every design decision affects the placement and access to a dozen other parts. Take a part like this, which is for a Deere 750 (small tractor) released in 1989: https://www.compactractorparts.com/tractor-parts/john-deere/lh-steering-arm-4wd-tractors https://www.compactractorparts.com/tractor-parts/john-deere/... I could model that in CAD in under an hour. Lining up manufacturing is a minimum 12 month process with preexisting relationships, and would take upwards of $250k to get in the door. This also doesn't take into account the "societal collapse" angle - post-apocalypse there's no way to make that yourself, and manufacturers in China would presumably no longer be an option.
  - jcims 5y ago
    An open source foundry might be an interesting project.
  - efitz 5y ago
    Then I’m unsure what problem the project is trying to solve. We have a real problem today with affordability and right to repair. My wife’s family are rice farmers from rural Thailand. My father in law had tears in his eyes when I bought him a $25k basic Kubota tractor; his individual productivity went through the roof while the amount of backbreaking work he had to do fell. Small time agriculture does not pay enough for such folks to make such a purchase on their own, and a major repair could still be out of reach. I thought this project was trying to address these problems. I don’t see such people as having to tooling or time to build their own tractor. As for “post apocalyptic”- I will band with others with guns and tractors and use our guns to protect our tractors; I’m not interested in building a road warrior tractor; I’m interested in easy to repair.
rmason 5y ago
This project is terrific. People are critical of what it doesn't do, I'm in awe of what it does do. You're going to have little two man shops in Africa and Asia cranking these out and changing agriculture in their part of the world. This demonstrates the power of open source. These engineers are to be commended.
- ivm 5y ago
  "Their part of the world" has had manufacturing since forever, it's not middle ages outside of the Global North: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tractor_manufacturers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tractor_manufacturers
- namdnay 5y ago
  I doubt that IP of tractor designs is a major factor in third world poverty. I’m sure there are factories in Asia pumping out cheap tractors already
  - beckman466 5y ago
    > I doubt that IP of tractor designs is a major factor in third world poverty. what's your logic here? the intellectual property system is the way the global north propertied class dominates the global south; i.e. renting out the commoditized blueprints/designs and charging insane royalties [1] [1] Vijay Prashad, https://mronline.org/2019/09/29/iphone-workers-today-are-25-times-more-exploited-than-textile-workers-in-19th-century-england/ https://mronline.org/2019/09/29/iphone-workers-today-are-25-...
    - namdnay 5y ago
      Do you think cheap tractor makers in china or India give a fig about IP?
      - beckman466 5y ago
        the west is literally trying to provoke a huge war with china because china is no longer dependent on the west's intellectual property. your framing seems ignorant to me. Vijay Prashad: What's the Left to Do in a World on Fire? | China and the Left, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vd8w3ONjv6Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vd8w3ONjv6Y Vijay Prashad: No Cold War with China, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tj1ggllXmws https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tj1ggllXmws
antattack 5y ago
Sorry, I don't see it. This tractor is too wide, has low ground clearance, too complex, hard to rustproof, seems to be hard to maneuver.
- einpoklum 5y ago
  > This tractor is... too complex Quite the opposite: It is incredibly _simple_, in that regular tractors need huge complex specialized infrastructure to manufacture, and this doesn't. > too wide, has low ground clearance etc. The shortcomings are due to this still being a prototype: The 6th iteration. And it's this way because it was easier and cheap to design and produce it the way that it is. Now, let's say the current shortcomings are deal-breakers for 80% of potential users. Then you already have a tractor usable for 10% of people. In iteration 7 they'll address a few other issues, and still more in iteration 8 and you'll have something worthy of mass-production for a large fraction of users. *Edit:* Well, apparently LifeTrac 6 is from 11 years ago! And there are newer iterations of it.
- inciampati 5y ago
  The ground clearance here is absurdly low. That seems like such a basic problem that it makes me wonder how practical this is.
airoftime 5y ago
This is truly mind blowing. For some odd reason my mind kept the "Open Source" limited to digital tech spaces, but it's not!
- chayleaf 5y ago
  another related term is Free Culture, in analogy to Free Software
qq4 5y ago
Hell yeah! I have often thought about open source in the agriculture world. I would love to contribute to this space.
roland35 5y ago
Is there something equivalent to a small robot? An open source platform for an all terrain outdoor robotic platform would be pretty useful as well
napier 5y ago
We need more projects like this.
ris 5y ago
The Open Source Ecology designs have always struck me as a great way of losing a limb.
- kortex 5y ago
  I mean, that's industrial/ag equipment in general. The guards and warning labels tend to come later, after many, many injuries.
AngryData 5y ago
Awesome! It has always been my firm belief that the biggest and best improvement you can provide to poor communities is tractors and tools. It frees up tons of labor from excavation, farming, transport, and can be used as a power plant for many other uses be it through driven shaft or hydraulics or potentially pneumatic. You can use it to drill a well, or dig a foundation, endless amounts of human labor replaced by one man and relatively simple machine for our age.
Animats 5y ago
If you go back in the Internet Archive to this site from 2016, it's much the same.[1] This project seems to have stalled before they published the design documents. Here are their videos on Vimeo.[2] Most of the activity was 7-10 years ago. If you want a cheap tractor, look on Alibaba. There are decent offerings around US$2000. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20161207230929/http://opensourceecology.dozuki.com/c/LifeTrac https://web.archive.org/web/20161207230929/http://opensource... [2] https://vimeo.com/search?q=open%20source%20ecology https://vimeo.com/search?q=open%20source%20ecology
honksillet 5y ago
How stagnant is this project? The videos I find on YouTube are 8 years old.
- marcin_ose 5y ago
  Pretty recent. See a more recent build from a few days ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oY00KwaBbY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oY00KwaBbY
mod 5y ago
I'm sorry, maybe it's just me--but none or almost none of these projects have actual plans to build them! Everything is a wiki stub. Almost all the topics have unanswered questions going back to 2013. Some have a nice top-level "blueprint" looking infographic, and then absolutely zero details about building them. I'm not sure how to use this project, although given my 40 acres and great desire to DIY, I should be a prime candidate. Most of the stubs don't even have a summary yet! Let alone details. If that stuff is there and I missed it, then the website UI is desperately broken. As a for-instance, can someone find plans to build the LifeTrac6 Cab Frame? That's the very tractor linked here, and I can't see any real details. The linked page and its descendants seem to be a list of ideas that have absolutely no detail expressed.
- bri3d 5y ago
  This is pretty much the wrong website. You want this: https://wiki.opensourceecology.org/wiki/Civilization_Starter_Kit_DVD_v0.01 https://wiki.opensourceecology.org/wiki/Civilization_Starter...
  - mod 5y ago
    Many thanks! I felt certain I had to be missing something. I wish it was easier to find this wiki from the site originally linked.
SMAAART 5y ago
This is a trend, not a fad. A megatrend!
ncmncm 5y ago
It is great that they can make this thing work. It is, at the same time, a serious indictment of modern industrial society that they want to. Industrial manufacturing economics ought to be supplying tractors cheaply enough that there is no temptation to this.
qualudeheart 5y ago
Who will implement self driving features?
User23 5y ago
This is very cool. I wish I were more mechanically inclined. One of my fantasies is buying an end-of-lifed helicopter turbine and building a tractor around it, but I wouldn't even know where to begin.
- mod 5y ago
  I don't know enough to guess why this turbine is of particular interest to you--can you explain? Is it highly powerful or something?
  - User23 5y ago
    The power density is good, but the main appeal to me is the mechanical simplicity and that it can use just about anything that burns as a fuel.
userbinator 5y ago
IMHO "open source" is not the right term for this because, besides sounding like it was created by people with a software-centric view, it legitimises the application of Imaginary Property laws to physical objects --- something that is a relatively recent phenomenon and one that I think should not continue. Perhaps "open design" or similar would be more representative of the intent. For example, the automotive aftermarket is so prolific and complete that you can build an entire stereotypical mid-century car with entirely aftermarket parts, but I wouldn't call that "open source". People have also been making tractors out of car parts for a long time (there are some old magazines with plans for such), as well as fixing heavy equipment by making their own parts --- look at various YouTube channels for examples; and I don't think any of this is comparable, nor should it be, to the quagmire of IP laws that the software world is subjected to. tl;dr: Good intent, bad naming and perhaps some ignorance of how the physical hardware world operates.
- saalweachter 5y ago
  This exists for mid-century tractors as well; eg Steiner sells new parts for old tractors.
- kortex 5y ago
  It's not just that, it's a deliberate dig against the current trend of farm equipment mired in opaque binaries, DRM, and OEM sensors, that require an OEM service tech to fix. Not for any mechanical reason, but because they restrict the diagnostic software.
jacquesm 5y ago
Fantastic project, I can't make up my mind about whether I'm looking at a thing from the past or from the future.
kumarvvr 5y ago
I hope to see a day when the essentials of human survival and living well are completely open sourced, and companies compete on producing the products from open sourced designs and processess. Perhaps that will bring in the elusive utopia.
mjfl 5y ago
I remember being introduced to opensourceecology 10 years ago. At first I was very enthusiastic. However, it seems to have had a rocky trajectory, with many people coming, then leaving, and progress being very slow. And some critical thinking skills being missing in my opinion. For instance, instead of making a tractor from scratch, why not reverse engineer an existing tractor design, with all it's optimizations, and then re-optimize it for open source, repairability? Seems like nothing significant has happened on this project for the past 10 years. Edit: this article itself is from 2013.
jhoechtl 5y ago
No Diesel engine - fail. This will mot succeed in Africa or Asia for quite some time.

887 points by vincent_s 5y ago

Dovetails nicely with the whole Right To Repair shit that farmers are currently having to go through with John Deere.

Recent build is here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oY00KwaBbY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oY00KwaBbY. We're just getting started.

engineer_22 5y ago

I wonder why it's articulated. Edit: drive shaft wear. It just seems to be an extra complication and harder to steer if not hydraulic assisted.

pwr-electronics 5y ago
> the articulated joint that was present in LifeTrac I - to allow long-life on the shafts - which experience much less wear compared to skid steering
jcims 5y ago
Given they are using hydraulic motors on the wheels it could be easily converted to skid steer. The current configuration has very high ground pressure but low wear characteristics. Skid steer has high ground wear but supports the use of tracks which could reduce ground pressure and increase traction.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

Cthulhu_ 5y ago

I wonder why the frame is made out of bolted beams with holes in them, are bolts and holed beams easy to find or something? I mean I can imagine that if you have the tools to build those, you'd have a welder as well. Granted, welding might be a bit more challenging than cutting beams and drilling holes.

Ardon 5y ago
From what I remember from back when I first read up on this project: The goal is for as much of the construction to be done with simple tools and materials that can be stored long-term. If you need to, hypothetically, bury your society-bootstrapping supplies, your wrenches and hole bar will probably survive. But a welder may not.
- Cthulhu_ 5y ago
  Fair enough, without electricity you might still be able to drill holes in things, it just takes a good while. Mind you, I've seen some... interesting welders cobbled together, I saw one that was a load of wire wrapped around a rubber inner tyre. Here [1] is one made from a microwave transformer. [1] https://www.instructables.com/Build-a-Microwave-Transformer-Homemade-Welder/ https://www.instructables.com/Build-a-Microwave-Transformer-...
- HeyLaughingBoy 5y ago
  It's really, really, really difficult for me to imagine a "society-bootstrapping" event where conveniently dimensioned steel, diesel/gasoline engines and fasteners are readily available but thousands of old, easily repairable tractors are not.
stagger87 5y ago
Punched metal tubing is very common and cheap.
intrepidhero 5y ago
Perforated steel tube is a readily available material and a ratchet is a cheaper and much lower skill tool than a welder. Also seems like customization is one of the project goals. I would imagine that if wanted to weld it instead the design would also work for you.
- Gracana 5y ago
  Where do you get 1/4 wall perforated tube? It sounds expensive compared to regular box tube straight from the mill. And each bolted connection made with graded fasteners is going to cost several dollars, which adds up very quickly. A circular saw, a mag drill, and a stick welder could take you a long way on a project like this, and you could use regular steel plate, tube, angle bars, etc. I think a lot of cost and weight is being sacrificed in the name of "modularity", for questionable benefit.

nimbius 5y ago

i work on heavy equipment such as tractors, diesel trucks and excavators in the USA. this is an excellent start, but its a long way from a tractor. some of the pitfalls that need to be addressed: "Modular Power Unit" is undefined. can i run it on white gas? diesel? kerosene? what is the engine displacement? air cooled or liquid? If we mean to say this tractor is all-electric, keep in mind most small farms arent equipped to charge anything more advanced than a cordless drill or flashlight. Cab frame has no safety glass or panels, so the operator enjoys every rock and every tree branch :(. a shade canopy is a nice add as well. no lights. this is a nonstarter for every farmer that wakes up at 4 am. quick hoses are nice, but I cant find a PTO knuckle so its restricted to things like lifting and towing (and maybe ripping). this is okay, but for an un-weatherized vehicle ill need to use barn real-estate to store, its certainly lacking.

deleted 5y ago
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fineIllregister 5y ago
It's been a while since I have read up on Open Source Ecology, but my memory is that modular power unit is a stand in for several options. One option is the power cube, which is a gas engine: https://opensourceecology.dozuki.com/c/PowerCube https://opensourceecology.dozuki.com/c/PowerCube I believe that the creator of the project uses these, and has said that there are alternatives in case gas is not available.
- stooliepidgin 5y ago
  Marcin Jakubowski realized earlier than most that open source hardware is a deeper solution that even generous right-to-repair (R2R) protections cannot necessarily deliver.
sixothree 5y ago
Is there an issue tracker for this project? Sounds like it might need one along with your advice.
srmatto 5y ago

intrepidhero 5y ago

Is there more information on what the "power cube" is? I poked around the site and couldn't find details.

afranchuk 5y ago
I'm assuming you found the page on the site but want more detailed prose on it? It's the second linked category on the homepage. https://opensourceecology.dozuki.com/c/PowerCube https://opensourceecology.dozuki.com/c/PowerCube
- intrepidhero 5y ago
  Yeah. Every link on that page is a stub. I was wondering if they listed the engine they've been using in the prototypes anywhere.
bri3d 5y ago
https://wiki.opensourceecology.org/wiki/Power_Cube_Design_Rationale https://wiki.opensourceecology.org/wiki/Power_Cube_Design_Ra... https://wiki.opensourceecology.org/wiki/Main_Page https://wiki.opensourceecology.org/wiki/Main_Page Their current design revolves around a Briggs and Stratton Professional 28hp gas engine. 49M777 I think is the designation.

dejv 5y ago

This brings back memories. I grew up around smallholding farming during comunist regime when time was plentyful, but it was near to impossible to buy tractor for personal use. Almost every familly owned DIY home-grown tractor built from some old diesel motor donated from who knows where and scrap metal.

marcodiego 5y ago

Looks like it is made out of life-size meccano parts.

aasasd 5y ago
Yep: Meccano clones of my childhood weren't brightly colored, unlike what I see in search now—so I almost nostalgia'd all over myself from seeing that thing. E.g.: https://rc-today.ru/UserFiles/Image/89/87/konstruktor_metallicheskii_avtoran_340_det_2_modeli_00301_5a25317ee20fe_1218_big.png https://rc-today.ru/UserFiles/Image/89/87/konstruktor_metall...
OneLeggedCat 5y ago
Huh. In the US, we had a copy of Meccano called Erector (which is what this project reminded me of). In 2000, Mecanno bought the Erector brand. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meccano https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meccano

raintrees 5y ago

cool - looks like legos...

timschmidt 5y ago

We build similarly at https://wiki.replimat.org/wiki/Main_Page https://wiki.replimat.org/wiki/Main_Page where we are working to document each of the building techniques involved as well as some of the most useful things which can be built this way.

syedkarim 5y ago

Isn't this really a skid steer/wheel loader, rather than a tractor?

jjmellon 5y ago
Yes it is. Even if it had a PTO, this vehicle won't do much agricultural field work, it will bog down. Tractors typically have much larger back wheels, usually weighted, and a larger engine.
saalweachter 5y ago
The core of the modern tractor is the "traction engine", an engine for pulling. By itself you could pull plows, disks, rakes, planters, etc, with the inconvenience of raising and lowering the implements manually. Traction engines were not the first engines on the farm: prior to that, you could find steam engines on wheels that would be pulled by horses to different areas of the farm and fields to run belt-driven machines such as bailers or threshers, which were stationary -- you'd load hay into a baler with a pitchfork, and the machine would compact it into a bale. Tractors absorbed this function with their own belt wheels or the PTO on modern tractors, which is used to power machines stationary or moving (modern bailers move around the field, but tractors will still be used to power a stationary grain elevator). They also added three point hitches and hydraulics to automatically raise and lower equipment. But as long as it pulls, it's a tractor.

mastax 5y ago

Man I remember reading about this in 2011 or so. I'm glad they're still doing well. It's an interesting project at the intersection of philanthropic eco-hippies and mechanical engineers which doesn't seem very common to me. Of course, being older and wiser now I'm less excited about the fantasy of using my brains and grit to rebuild society after the coming apocalypse. And if you are a villager of some description trying to use machinery to improve your prospects you're probably better off buying something old and used, or cheap and Chinese. Over the last 10 years the number of (mostly Chinese) companies making okay-quality cheap industrial equipment of all types has grown massively, and I've seen this equipment being used more and more in the developing world. Cheap is relative, of course, and many places do not make it easy to buy anything due to payment infrastructure, shipping, and customs costs. So on the one hand it's a bit silly for some guy in Missouri to even consider designing his own bakery oven when you can get them on Alibaba for $500. On the other, it's very cool and interesting, there's a lot to learn from the attempt, and there's a lot of actually useful designs already for certain situations. I wonder how much success they've had getting this information out to people who it could actually help?

turminal 5y ago
I don't think the makers of this machine believe this is a viable solution for farmers right now, but they realize that "buy it cheap from China" is becoming more and more of a problem in the long run and something that needs to be fixed. We'll have to give up on the "if it dies, just buy a new one, it's cheap anyway" philosophy sooner or later. I see this project more as an experiment on how to make a functional and durable machine that is fixable when it breaks.
- bshipp 5y ago
  As someone who has worked in agriculture their entire life, there is nothing cheap about farming equipment. Every year it gets more and more prohibitively expensive and experiences more and more vendor lock-in. While this solution appears fairly rudimentary, I think there's a real demand for more simplistic, compatible, and capable farm machinery when combines are a million a piece and tractors are a quarter that.

wly_cdgr 5y ago

This is probably the coolest project I've seen in the two and a half years I've been compulsively reading every thread on this site

swader999 5y ago

What would be the ballpark price of the materials for this?

atoav 5y ago

Ahh I was thinking about traktor the DJ software. The open source alternative for this would be mixxx: https://mixxx.org/ https://mixxx.org/

soheil 5y ago

I genuinely wonder how it can compete against any existing tractors. You can order a brand new tractor for 5 grand [1]. Is this going to cost less or come with more capabilities? [1] https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/4wd-wheel-farm-agriculture-tractor-100hp_62505050568.html https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/4wd-wheel-farm-agricu...

namdnay 5y ago
Not only can you get a very cheap new one, but your village mechanic will know how to repair it because they’ll already have worked on dozens. I know this project is really cool as an engineer, but engines and vehicles in all forms are pretty much a solved problem in the third world. Those guys can squeeze 50 extra years out of a van that we would take to the scrap, building new open source models really isn’t a priority
voakbasda 5y ago
I started looking at this class of imported machines recently. What is the shipping cost/time on such units? What about availability of spare parts? Or the quality of the service/parts manuals? These questions are not easily answered on Alibaba, but a properly-done open source design that uses off-the-shelf parts should make them almost entirely moot.

hinkley 5y ago

I went looking for specialty equipment for moving logs a few years ago while researching a restoration project. That equipment is super expensive, so I went looking for a DIY solution, expecting to find something along the lines of the construction philosophy of the OST project. I know my way around a wrench and bolting something together is no problem for me. Especially if I can take it apart again to store it, since I'll need this thing about .75 times a year. I didn't find it. What I found was a handful of farmer types who had welded up their own solutions, who stopped mid-how-to to espouse the liberating power of learning to weld mild steel on your own. Paying someone to weld for you is super expensive, and alarmingly so if you live far out of town. We know from CivE disaster/case studies that bolts through square tubing - especially through the ends of square tubing - have failure modes that are not obvious even to construction workers, let alone you or I. Might be that the OST project should be considering welding as a base skill for assembling a tractor by hand. Especially if anyone is going to make it earn its living by dragging around heavy, high-friction things like dirt.

deleted 5y ago
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AngryData 5y ago
They should definitely look into welding, they will need it at some point anyways for repairs. And a stick welder is both cheap and perfect use case for welding heavy metal frames. It could even be powered off the engine to be used in the tractor.
- hinkley 5y ago
  Refresh my memory. A stick welder is an electric arc welder that uses a thin rod of metal as the contact point and the rod gets consumed to make the bead, right? That sounds pretty reasonable.
  - AngryData 5y ago
    Yes, it is very easy to use and you don't need bottled gas, just the welding sticks. The only real downside to it is it doesn't work as well with thin metal, but for an equipment frame that isn't a problem.

efitz 5y ago

Patents expire after 20 years or so. Why not just take a 25 year old tractor, 3d model it, make your small improvements and updates, and then start working on value adds like parts pipelines, data & gps driven agriculture, etc

scrooched_moose 5y ago
Modeling a tractor in CAD isn't the issue. Manufacturing it is. A 25 year old tractor design (probably out to 75+ year old tractors even) still has hundreds of millions of dollars in infrastructure and tooling behind it. Molds or dies for a single part can easily reach into 6 figures, without taking into account the $10 million injection molding machine. The simplifications you could do would be limited, as every design decision affects the placement and access to a dozen other parts. Take a part like this, which is for a Deere 750 (small tractor) released in 1989: https://www.compactractorparts.com/tractor-parts/john-deere/lh-steering-arm-4wd-tractors https://www.compactractorparts.com/tractor-parts/john-deere/... I could model that in CAD in under an hour. Lining up manufacturing is a minimum 12 month process with preexisting relationships, and would take upwards of $250k to get in the door. This also doesn't take into account the "societal collapse" angle - post-apocalypse there's no way to make that yourself, and manufacturers in China would presumably no longer be an option.
- jcims 5y ago
  An open source foundry might be an interesting project.
- efitz 5y ago
  Then I’m unsure what problem the project is trying to solve. We have a real problem today with affordability and right to repair. My wife’s family are rice farmers from rural Thailand. My father in law had tears in his eyes when I bought him a $25k basic Kubota tractor; his individual productivity went through the roof while the amount of backbreaking work he had to do fell. Small time agriculture does not pay enough for such folks to make such a purchase on their own, and a major repair could still be out of reach. I thought this project was trying to address these problems. I don’t see such people as having to tooling or time to build their own tractor. As for “post apocalyptic”- I will band with others with guns and tractors and use our guns to protect our tractors; I’m not interested in building a road warrior tractor; I’m interested in easy to repair.

rmason 5y ago

This project is terrific. People are critical of what it doesn't do, I'm in awe of what it does do. You're going to have little two man shops in Africa and Asia cranking these out and changing agriculture in their part of the world. This demonstrates the power of open source. These engineers are to be commended.

ivm 5y ago
"Their part of the world" has had manufacturing since forever, it's not middle ages outside of the Global North: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tractor_manufacturers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tractor_manufacturers
namdnay 5y ago
I doubt that IP of tractor designs is a major factor in third world poverty. I’m sure there are factories in Asia pumping out cheap tractors already
- beckman466 5y ago
  > I doubt that IP of tractor designs is a major factor in third world poverty. what's your logic here? the intellectual property system is the way the global north propertied class dominates the global south; i.e. renting out the commoditized blueprints/designs and charging insane royalties [1] [1] Vijay Prashad, https://mronline.org/2019/09/29/iphone-workers-today-are-25-times-more-exploited-than-textile-workers-in-19th-century-england/ https://mronline.org/2019/09/29/iphone-workers-today-are-25-...
  - namdnay 5y ago
    Do you think cheap tractor makers in china or India give a fig about IP?
    - beckman466 5y ago
      the west is literally trying to provoke a huge war with china because china is no longer dependent on the west's intellectual property. your framing seems ignorant to me. Vijay Prashad: What's the Left to Do in a World on Fire? | China and the Left, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vd8w3ONjv6Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vd8w3ONjv6Y Vijay Prashad: No Cold War with China, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tj1ggllXmws https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tj1ggllXmws

antattack 5y ago

Sorry, I don't see it. This tractor is too wide, has low ground clearance, too complex, hard to rustproof, seems to be hard to maneuver.

einpoklum 5y ago
> This tractor is... too complex Quite the opposite: It is incredibly _simple_, in that regular tractors need huge complex specialized infrastructure to manufacture, and this doesn't. > too wide, has low ground clearance etc. The shortcomings are due to this still being a prototype: The 6th iteration. And it's this way because it was easier and cheap to design and produce it the way that it is. Now, let's say the current shortcomings are deal-breakers for 80% of potential users. Then you already have a tractor usable for 10% of people. In iteration 7 they'll address a few other issues, and still more in iteration 8 and you'll have something worthy of mass-production for a large fraction of users. *Edit:* Well, apparently LifeTrac 6 is from 11 years ago! And there are newer iterations of it.
inciampati 5y ago
The ground clearance here is absurdly low. That seems like such a basic problem that it makes me wonder how practical this is.

airoftime 5y ago

This is truly mind blowing. For some odd reason my mind kept the "Open Source" limited to digital tech spaces, but it's not!

chayleaf 5y ago
another related term is Free Culture, in analogy to Free Software

qq4 5y ago

Hell yeah! I have often thought about open source in the agriculture world. I would love to contribute to this space.

roland35 5y ago

Is there something equivalent to a small robot? An open source platform for an all terrain outdoor robotic platform would be pretty useful as well

napier 5y ago

We need more projects like this.

ris 5y ago

The Open Source Ecology designs have always struck me as a great way of losing a limb.

kortex 5y ago
I mean, that's industrial/ag equipment in general. The guards and warning labels tend to come later, after many, many injuries.

AngryData 5y ago

Awesome! It has always been my firm belief that the biggest and best improvement you can provide to poor communities is tractors and tools. It frees up tons of labor from excavation, farming, transport, and can be used as a power plant for many other uses be it through driven shaft or hydraulics or potentially pneumatic. You can use it to drill a well, or dig a foundation, endless amounts of human labor replaced by one man and relatively simple machine for our age.

Animats 5y ago

If you go back in the Internet Archive to this site from 2016, it's much the same.[1] This project seems to have stalled before they published the design documents. Here are their videos on Vimeo.[2] Most of the activity was 7-10 years ago. If you want a cheap tractor, look on Alibaba. There are decent offerings around US$2000. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20161207230929/http://opensourceecology.dozuki.com/c/LifeTrac https://web.archive.org/web/20161207230929/http://opensource... [2] https://vimeo.com/search?q=open%20source%20ecology https://vimeo.com/search?q=open%20source%20ecology

honksillet 5y ago

How stagnant is this project? The videos I find on YouTube are 8 years old.

marcin_ose 5y ago
Pretty recent. See a more recent build from a few days ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oY00KwaBbY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oY00KwaBbY

mod 5y ago

I'm sorry, maybe it's just me--but none or almost none of these projects have actual plans to build them! Everything is a wiki stub. Almost all the topics have unanswered questions going back to 2013. Some have a nice top-level "blueprint" looking infographic, and then absolutely zero details about building them. I'm not sure how to use this project, although given my 40 acres and great desire to DIY, I should be a prime candidate. Most of the stubs don't even have a summary yet! Let alone details. If that stuff is there and I missed it, then the website UI is desperately broken. As a for-instance, can someone find plans to build the LifeTrac6 Cab Frame? That's the very tractor linked here, and I can't see any real details. The linked page and its descendants seem to be a list of ideas that have absolutely no detail expressed.

bri3d 5y ago
This is pretty much the wrong website. You want this: https://wiki.opensourceecology.org/wiki/Civilization_Starter_Kit_DVD_v0.01 https://wiki.opensourceecology.org/wiki/Civilization_Starter...
- mod 5y ago
  Many thanks! I felt certain I had to be missing something. I wish it was easier to find this wiki from the site originally linked.

SMAAART 5y ago

This is a trend, not a fad. A megatrend!

ncmncm 5y ago

It is great that they can make this thing work. It is, at the same time, a serious indictment of modern industrial society that they want to. Industrial manufacturing economics ought to be supplying tractors cheaply enough that there is no temptation to this.

qualudeheart 5y ago

Who will implement self driving features?

User23 5y ago

This is very cool. I wish I were more mechanically inclined. One of my fantasies is buying an end-of-lifed helicopter turbine and building a tractor around it, but I wouldn't even know where to begin.

mod 5y ago
I don't know enough to guess why this turbine is of particular interest to you--can you explain? Is it highly powerful or something?
- User23 5y ago
  The power density is good, but the main appeal to me is the mechanical simplicity and that it can use just about anything that burns as a fuel.

userbinator 5y ago

IMHO "open source" is not the right term for this because, besides sounding like it was created by people with a software-centric view, it legitimises the application of Imaginary Property laws to physical objects --- something that is a relatively recent phenomenon and one that I think should not continue. Perhaps "open design" or similar would be more representative of the intent. For example, the automotive aftermarket is so prolific and complete that you can build an entire stereotypical mid-century car with entirely aftermarket parts, but I wouldn't call that "open source". People have also been making tractors out of car parts for a long time (there are some old magazines with plans for such), as well as fixing heavy equipment by making their own parts --- look at various YouTube channels for examples; and I don't think any of this is comparable, nor should it be, to the quagmire of IP laws that the software world is subjected to. tl;dr: Good intent, bad naming and perhaps some ignorance of how the physical hardware world operates.

saalweachter 5y ago
This exists for mid-century tractors as well; eg Steiner sells new parts for old tractors.
kortex 5y ago
It's not just that, it's a deliberate dig against the current trend of farm equipment mired in opaque binaries, DRM, and OEM sensors, that require an OEM service tech to fix. Not for any mechanical reason, but because they restrict the diagnostic software.

jacquesm 5y ago

Fantastic project, I can't make up my mind about whether I'm looking at a thing from the past or from the future.

kumarvvr 5y ago

I hope to see a day when the essentials of human survival and living well are completely open sourced, and companies compete on producing the products from open sourced designs and processess. Perhaps that will bring in the elusive utopia.

mjfl 5y ago

I remember being introduced to opensourceecology 10 years ago. At first I was very enthusiastic. However, it seems to have had a rocky trajectory, with many people coming, then leaving, and progress being very slow. And some critical thinking skills being missing in my opinion. For instance, instead of making a tractor from scratch, why not reverse engineer an existing tractor design, with all it's optimizations, and then re-optimize it for open source, repairability? Seems like nothing significant has happened on this project for the past 10 years. Edit: this article itself is from 2013.

jhoechtl 5y ago

No Diesel engine - fail. This will mot succeed in Africa or Asia for quite some time.