IPFS News Link • Science, Medicine and Technology
You Built What?!: A Tractor For The Apocalypse
• Clay Dillow via PopSci.comTo Jakubowski, the tractor seemed designed to fail. Why should he sink more money into fixing it or buy a replacement? He wanted a simple and useful machine, and one he could repair and upgrade on the fly. “It boiled down to lower cost in the long run,” he says.
Jakubowski built the first LifeTrac, as he calls his DIY tractor, in three months for $6,000—about $30,000 less than a comparable mass-produced model. Seeing room for improvement, he built a second prototype in just six days. He posted his progress on the tractor and other machines to an online wiki, which attracted followers, who suggested their own design tweaks. Some even visited in person to help with builds—and Open Source Ecology took off.