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.
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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.
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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